Club Dead - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,44

me. I laughed, and he said, “Don’t read my mind, that would be cheating.”

“Of course I wouldn’t do any such thing,” I said demurely, and he scowled at me.

I lost—but only by twelve points. After a pleasantly quarrelsome rehash of the game, Alcide got up and took our glasses over to the kitchen. He put them down and began to search through the cabinets, while I stored the game pieces and replaced the lid.

“Where you want me to put this?” I asked.

“Oh, in the closet by the door. There are a couple of shelves in there.”

I tucked the box under one arm and went to the closet. The smell I’d noticed earlier seemed to be stronger.

“You know, Alcide,” I said, hoping I wasn’t being tacky, “there’s something that smells almost rotten, right around here.”

“I’d noticed it, too. That’s why I’m over here looking through the cabinets. Maybe there’s a dead mouse?”

As I spoke, I was turning the doorknob.

I discovered the source of the smell.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh,nononono .”

“Don’t tell me a rat got in there and died,” Alcide said.

“Not a rat,” I said. “A werewolf.”

The closet had a shelf above a hanging bar, and it was a small closet, intended only for visitors’ coats. Now it was filled by the swarthy man from Club Dead, the man who’d grabbed me by the shoulder. He was really dead. He’d been dead for several hours.

I didn’t seem to be able to look away.

Alcide’s presence at my back was an unexpected comfort. He stared over my head, his hands gripping my shoulders.

“No blood,” I said in a jittery voice.

“His neck.” Alcide was at least as shaken as I was.

His head really was resting on his shoulder, while still attached to his body. Ick, ick, ick. I gulped hard. “We should call the police,” I said, not sounding very positive about the process. I noted the way the body had been stuffed into the closet. The dead man was almost standing up. I figured he’d been shoved in, and then whoever had done the shoving had forced the door closed. He’d sort of hardened in position.

“But if we call the police . . .” Alcide’s voice trailed off. He took a deep breath. “They’ll never believe we didn’t do it. They’ll interview his friends, and his friends will tell them he was at Club Dead last night, and they’ll check it out. They’ll find out he got into trouble for bothering you. No one will believe we didn’t have a hand in killing him.”

“On the other hand,” I said slowly, thinking out loud, “do you think they’d mention a word about Club Dead?”

Alcide pondered that. He ran his thumb over his mouth while he thought. “You may be right. And if they couldn’t bring up Club Dead, how could they describe the, uh, confrontation? You know what they’d do? They’d want to take care of the problem themselves.”

That was anexcellent point. I was sold: no police. “Then we need to dispose of him,” I said, getting down to brass tacks. “How are we gonna do that?”

Alcide was a practical man. He was used to solving problems, starting with the biggest.

“We need to take him out to the country somewhere. To do that, we have to get him down to the garage,” he said after a few moments’ thought. “To do that, we have to wrap him up.”

“The shower curtain,” I suggested, nodding my head in the direction of the bathroom I’d used. “Um, can we close the closet and go somewhere else while we work this out?”

“Sure,” Alcide said, suddenly as anxious as I was to stop looking at the gruesome sight before us.

So we stood in the middle of the living room and had a planning session. The first thing I did was turn off the heat in the apartment altogether, and open all the windows. The body had not made its presence known earlier only because Alcide liked the temperature kept cool, and because the closet door fit well. Now we had to disperse the faint but pervasive smell.

“It’s five flights down, and I don’t think I can carry him that far,” Alcide said. “He needs to go at least some of the distance in the elevator. That’s the most dangerous part.”

We kept discussing and refining, until we felt we had a workable procedure. Alcide asked me twice if I was okay, and I reassured him both times; it finally dawned on me that he was thinking I might break into