Dead as a doornail - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,12
on business,” I said, and I put my business face on.
“What can I do for you, my Sookie?” he asked.
“Sam wants to ask you for something,” I said.
“And he sends you to ask for it. Is he very clever or very stupid?” Eric asked himself out loud.
“Neither,” I said, trying not to sound snippy. “He’s very leg-broken. That is to say, he got his leg broken last night. He got shot.”
“How did this come about?” Eric’s attention sharpened.
I explained. I shivered a little when I told him Sam and I had been alone, how silent the night had been.
“Arlene was just out of the parking lot. She went on home without knowing a thing. The new cook, Sweetie—she’d just left, too. Someone shot him from the trees north of the parking lot.” I shivered again, this time with fear.
“How close were you?”
“Oh,” I said, and my voice shook. “I was real close. I’d just turned to . . . then he was . . . There was blood all over.”
Eric’s face looked hard as marble. “What did you do?”
“Sam had his cell phone in his pocket, thank God, and I held one hand over the hole in his leg and I dialed nine-one-one with the other.”
“How is he?”
“Well.” I took a deep breath and tried to make myself still. “He’s pretty good, all things considered.” I’d put that quite calmly. I was proud. “But of course, he’s down for a while, and so much . . . so many odd things have been happening at the bar lately. . . . Our substitute bartender, he just can’t handle it for more than a couple of nights. Terry’s kind of damaged.”
“So what’s Sam’s request?”
“Sam wants to borrow a bartender from you until his leg heals.”
“Why’s he making this request of me, instead of the packmaster of Shreveport?” Shifters seldom got organized, but the city werewolves had. Eric was right: It would have been far more logical for Sam to make the request of Colonel Flood.
I looked down at my hands wrapped around the ginger ale glass. “Someone’s gunning for the shifters and Weres in Bon Temps,” I said. I kept my voice very low. I knew he would hear me through the music and the talk of the bar.
Just then a man lurched up to the booth, a young serviceman from Barksdale Air Force Base, which is a part of the Shreveport area. (I pigeonholed him instantly from his haircut, fitness, and his running buddies, who were more or less clones.) He rocked on his heels for a long moment, looking from me to Eric.
“Hey, you,” the young man said to me, poking my shoulder. I looked up at him, resigned to the inevitable. Some people court their own disaster, especially when they drink. This young man, with his buzz haircut and sturdy build, was far from home and determined to prove himself.
There’s not much I dislike more than being addressed as “Hey, you” and being poked with a finger. But I tried to present a pleasant face to the young man. He had a round face and round dark eyes, a small mouth and thick brown brows. He was wearing a clean knit shirt and pressed khakis. He was also primed for a confrontation.
“I don’t believe I know you,” I said gently, trying to defuse the situation.
“You shouldn’t be sitting with a vamp,” he said. “Human girls shouldn’t go with dead guys.”
How often had I heard that? I’d gotten an earful of this kind of crap when I’d been dating Bill Compton.
“You should go back over there to your friends, Dave. You don’t want your mama to get a phone call about you being killed in a bar fight in Louisiana. Especially not in a vampire bar, right?”
“How’d you know my name?” he asked slowly.
“Doesn’t make any difference, does it?”
From the corner of my eye, I could see that Eric was shaking his head. Mild deflection was not his way of dealing with intrusion.
Abruptly, Dave began to simmer down.
“How’d you know about me?” he asked in a calmer voice.
“I have x-ray vision,” I said solemnly. “I can read your driver’s license in your pants.”
He began to smile. “Hey, can you see other stuff through my pants?”
I smiled back at him. “You’re a lucky man, Dave,” I said ambiguously. “Now, I’m actually here to talk business with this guy, so if you’d excuse us . . .”