Dead as a doornail - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,36

a higher probability of sarcasm here.) I entered the house, shut the door on his startled face, and locked it just to be on the safe side. I marched across the living room so he could hear my steps, but then I stopped in the hall and waited to listen while he got back in the Lincoln. I listened to the big car rocket down the driveway, probably putting ruts in my beautiful gravel.

As I shed Tara’s suit and bundled it up to drop at the dry cleaner’s, I confess I was mopey. They say when one door shuts, another one opens. But they haven’t been living at my house.

Most of the doors I open seem to have something scary crouched behind them, anyway.

7

SAM WAS IN the bar that night, seated at a corner table like a visiting king, his leg propped up on another chair cushioned with pillows. He was keeping one eye on Charles, one eye on the clientele’s reaction to a vampire bartender.

People would stop by, drop down in the chair across from him, visit for a few minutes, and then vacate the chair. I knew Sam was in pain. I can always read the preoccupation of people who are hurting. But he was glad to be seeing other people, glad to be back in the bar, pleased with Charles’s work.

All this I could tell, and yet when it came to the question of who had shot him, I didn’t have a clue. Someone was gunning for the two-natured, someone who’d killed quite a few and wounded even more. Discovering the identity of the shooter was imperative. The police didn’t suspect Jason, but his own people did. If Calvin Norris’s people decided to take matters into their own hands, they could easily find a chance to take out Jason. They didn’t know there were more victims than those in Bon Temps.

I probed into minds, I tried to catch people in unguarded moments, I even tried to think of the most promising candidates for the role of assassin so I wouldn’t waste time listening to (for example) Liz Baldwin’s worries about her oldest granddaughter.

I assumed the shooter was almost certainly a guy. I knew plenty of women who went hunting and plenty more with access to rifles. But weren’t snipers always men? The police were baffled by this sniper’s selection of targets, because they didn’t know the true nature of all the victims. The two-natured were hampered in their search because they were looking only at local suspects.

“Sookie,” Sam said as I passed close to him. “Kneel down here a minute.”

I sank to one knee right by his chair so he could speak in a low voice.

“Sookie, I hate to ask you again, but the closet in the storeroom isn’t working out for Charles.” The cleaning supplies closet in the storeroom was not exactly built to be light tight, but it was inaccessible to daylight, which was good enough. After all, the closet had no windows, and it was inside a room with no windows.

It took me a minute to switch my train of thought to another track. “You can’t tell me he’s not able to sleep,” I said incredulously. Vampires could sleep in the daytime under any circumstances. “And I’m sure you put a lock on the inside of the door, too.”

“Yes, but he has to kind of huddle on the floor, and he says it smells like old mops.”

“Well, we did keep the cleaning stuff in there.”

“What I’m saying is, would it be so bad for him to stay at your place?”

“Why do you really want me to have him at the house?” I asked. “There’s got to be a reason more than a strange vampire’s comfort during the day, when he’s dead, anyway.”

“Haven’t we been friends a long time, Sookie?”

I smelled something big and rotten.

“Yes,” I admitted, standing so that he would have to look up at me. “And?”

“I hear through the grapevine that the Hotshot community has hired a Were bodyguard for Calvin’s hospital room.”

“Yeah, I think that’s kind of strange, too.” I acknowledged his unspoken concern. “So I guess you heard what they suspect.”

Sam nodded. His bright blue eyes caught mine. “You have to take this seriously, Sookie.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“You refused Charles.”

“I don’t see what telling him he couldn’t sleep in my house has to do with worrying about Jason.”

“I think he’d help you protect Jason, if it came to that. I’m down with this leg, or I’d . .