Deadlocked (14 page)

Bill didn’t have time to get back to Bon Temps, so he was going to take one of the fiberglass “guest” pods that Eric kept in the second upstairs bedroom. He headed toward the back of the house immediately, leaving Eric and me by ourselves. I looked around me in a dazed way. The kitchen had an array of dirty bottles and glasses by the sink, but I noticed that the garbage bag was gone. The police must have taken it.

I told Eric, “Mustapha had that door open when I came in,” and I pointed to the door onto the backyard patio. Without a word, Eric went over to the door. It was unlocked. He took care of that while I started across the living room. It wasn’t too disordered since Felipe, Horst, and Angie had neatened it, but still its disheveled state disturbed me. I began straightening chairs and gathering up the few remaining bottles and glasses to take to the kitchen.

“Leave it be, Sookie,” Eric said.

I froze. “I know this isn’t my house,” I said, “but this mess just looks so nasty. I’d hate to get up to face this.”

“The issue is not ownership of the house. The issue is that you are exhausted and yet you feel compelled to do the maids’ job. I hope you’re spending the rest of the night? I would feel uneasy if you drove back, as tired as you must be.”

“I guess I’ll stay,” I said, though I was still far from satisfied with the way things stood between us. If I’d been strong enough, I would have left. But it would be very foolish to start driving home and risk having a wreck.

Eric was suddenly right in front of me, and he put his arms around me. I started to pull away. “Sookie,” he said. “Let’s make this right. I have enemies on every side, and I don’t want to have one here at home.” I made myself hold still. I reviewed everything I’d told myself while I’d been taking my time-out in the bathroom. That seemed to have been a week ago, instead of hours.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Okay. I know that I should be totally all right with what you did with that woman. I know if people are willing, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take a sip from them, especially since she was actually booby-trapped. I think you could have held out if you’d really wanted to. I know my reaction is emotional, not logical. But it’s the reaction I’m having. I also know, in my head, that I love you. I’m just not feeling it at this moment. Oh, by the way, I have something to confess to you, too, regarding another man.”

Ha! That sharpened him up. Eric’s eyebrows flew up and he stepped back a little, looking down at me and very nearly scowling. “What?” he said, biting the word out as if it tasted bad. I felt more cheerful.

“Remember, I told you I was going to Hooligans to see Claude strip?” I said. “There were other guys, too, mostly fae, who did, well, almost the full monty.” I raised one eyebrow and tried to look inscrutable.

Eric’s mouth quirked in what was very nearly a smile. “Claude is a beautiful man. How do I stack up against the fairy?” he asked.

“Hmmm. The fairy was stacked all right,” I said, looking off in another direction ostentatiously.

Eric squeezed me. “Sookie?”

“Eric! You know that you look pretty good naked.”

“Pretty good?”

“That’s right, fish for compliments,” I said.

“That’s not all I’m fishing for,” he whispered. He picked me up by sliding his hands under my rear, and suddenly I was at just the right height to kiss him.

So an evening that had held so much that was bad ended in something good, after all, and for fifteen minutes I utterly forgot that I was in the same bed he’d sat on while he took blood from someone else … which may have been the target Eric was aiming for. He hit it, dead center.

He got downstairs in the nick of time.

Chapter 5

I didn’t roll out of bed until noon. I had slept very heavily, and I’d
had bad dreams. I woke up groggy, and I didn’t feel refreshed at all. It didn’t occur to me to check my cell phone until I heard it buzzing in my purse—but that wasn’t until I’d drunk some coffee, showered and put on the change of clothes I kept in the closet, and (no matter what Eric had said) gathered up all the dirty “service items,” as flight attendants call them.

By the time I’d dropped my hairbrush, opened my purse, and groped inside to extricate the phone, my caller had hung up. Frustrating. I checked the number, and to my astonishment I found that Mustapha Khan had been trying to get in touch with me. I called the number back as quickly as I could press the right buttons, but no one answered.

Crap. Well, if he wasn’t picking up, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But I had other messages: one from Dermot, one from Alcide, and one from Tara.

Dermot’s voice said, “Sookie? Where are you? You didn’t come home last night. Everything okay?”

Alcide Herveaux said, “Sookie, we need to talk. Call me when you can.”

Tara said, “Sookie, I think the babies are going to come pretty soon. I’m effacing and I’m starting to dilate. Get ready to become an aunt!” She sounded giddy with excitement.

I called her back first, but she didn’t pick up.

Then I called Dermot, who actually answered. I gave him a condensed version of the night before. He asked me to come home immediately, but he didn’t offer an explanation. I told him I’d start back within the hour unless the police arrived to delay me. What if they wanted to come into Eric’s house? They couldn’t just come in, right? They had to have a warrant. But the house was a crime scene. I was worried about them trying to get into Eric’s downstairs bedroom, and I remembered that Bill was in the bedroom across the hall in a guest pod. What if the cops decided to open it? I needed a set of those “DO NOT ENTER VAMPIRE AT REST” coffin hangers I’d seen advertised in Eric’s copy of
American Vampire
.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I told Dermot. I hung up feeling a bit worried about Dermot’s insistence that I return. What was happening at my house?

With great reluctance, I returned Alcide’s call. He’d only try to get in touch about something pretty important, since we weren’t exactly buddies anymore. We weren’t exactly enemies, either. But we could never seem to be happy with each other at the same time.

“Sookie,” Alcide said in his deep voice. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay. I don’t know if you’ve heard what happened here at Eric’s last night …”

“Yeah, I heard something about it.”

No surprise there. Who needed the Internet, when you had the supes around? “Then you know Mustapha is missing.”

“Too bad he’s not pack. We’d find him.”

Pointed, much? “After all, he’s a werewolf,” I said briskly. “And the police do want him. I know he could explain everything if he’d just come in to talk to them. So maybe if someone in the pack sees him somewhere, you could let me know? He called me—or at least someone using his phone did. I missed the call, and I’m really worried about him.”

“I’ll let you know if I find out anything,” Alcide promised. “I need to talk to you about something else, though.”

I waited to hear what he had in mind.

“Sookie, you still there?”

“Yes, I’m just waiting.”

“I’m hearing a complete lack of enthusiasm.”

“Well, considering last time.” I didn’t even need to finish the sentence. Finding Alcide naked in my bed had not endeared him to me. There was a lot to like about the werewolf, but his timing had never matched mine and he’d taken some bad advice.

“Okay, I was wrong there. We had a good result from you acting as our shaman, but I was wrong to ask you to do it, and I freely acknowledge that.” Alcide said that kind of proudly.

Had he joined Werewolf Manipulators Anonymous? I looked at myself in the mirror and widened my eyes, to let my reflection know what I thought about the conversation.

“Good to hear that,” I said. “What’s up?”

Rueful chuckle.
Charming
rueful chuckle. “Well, you’re right, Sookie, I do have a favor to ask you.”

I showed myself Amazed in the mirror. “Do tell,” I said politely.

“You know my pack enforcer has been going out with your boss for a while.”

“I know that.” Cut to the chase.

“Well, she wants you to help her out with something, and since you two have had your differences … for whatever reason … she asked me if I’d call you.”

Sneaky Jannalynn. This was like a double … fake something. It was true I liked Jannalynn much less than I did Alcide. It was also true (though perhaps Alcide didn’t know this) that Jannalynn suspected my relationship with Sam was far more than it should be between an employee and her boss. If this were the fifties, she’d be checking Sam’s collars for lipstick stains. (Did people do that anymore? Why did women kiss collars, anyway? Besides, Sam almost always wore T-shirts.)

“What does she want me to help her with?” I asked, hoping my voice was suitably neutral.

“She’s going to propose to Sam, and she wants you to help her set the stage.”

I sat down on the end of the bed. I didn’t want to make faces in the mirror anymore. “She wants
me
to help
her
ask Sam to marry her?” I said slowly. I’d helped Andy Bellefleur propose to Halleigh, but I couldn’t imagine Jannalynn wanting me to hide an engagement ring in a basket of French fries.

“She wants you to get Sam to drive down to Mimosa Lake,” Alcide said. “She’s borrowed a cottage down there, and she wants to surprise Sam with a dinner, kind of romantic, you know. I guess she’d spring the question there.” Alcide sounded oddly unenthusiastic or perhaps unconvinced that he should be relaying this request.

“No,” I said immediately. “I won’t do it. She’ll have to get Sam there on her own.” I could just envision Sam imagining that I wanted him to go out to the lake with me, only to be confronted by Jannalynn and whatever she thought of as a romantic dinner—live rabbits they could chase together, maybe. The whole scenario made me acutely uncomfortable. I could feel a flush of anger creeping up my neck.

Alcide said, “Sookie, that’s not …”

“Not helpful or obliging? I don’t want to be, Alcide. There’s just too much room for disaster in that plan. Plus, I don’t think you understand Jannalynn too well.” What I wanted to say was, “I think she’s trying to get me somewhere alone to kill me, or to stage some scene to make me look guilty.” But I didn’t.

There was a long silence.

“I guess Jannalynn was right,” he said, letting his dismay into his voice. “You do have it in for her. What, you don’t think she’s good enough for Sam?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. Tell her I …” I automatically started to say I was sorry I couldn’t oblige her, and then I realized that would be a big fat lie. “I’m just … unable to be of assistance. She can do her own proposing. Good-bye, Alcide.” Without waiting to hear his response, I hung up.

Had his enforcer wrapped Alcide around her little finger, or what?

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I meant Alcide or Jannalynn or both of them.

I fumed as I gathered my few things together. Help that bitch propose to Sam? When Hell froze over. When pigs flew! Plus, as I’d told Alcide, if I’d been fool enough to go out to Mimosa Lake, she’d have staged some drama, for sure.

As I locked Eric’s kitchen door behind me and stomped out to my car in my now-painful high heels, I said words that had seldom crossed my lips before. I slammed my car door shut behind me, earning a sharp look from a sleek, well-groomed neighbor of Eric’s who was weeding the flower bed around her mailbox.

“Next people will be asking me to be a surrogate mom for their babies, cause it would be
inconvenient
for them to carry their own,” I said, sneering in an unattractive way into my rearview mirror. That reminded me of Tara, and I tried her number again, but with no better result.

I pulled in behind my house about two o’clock. Dermot’s car was still there. When I saw home, it was like I gave myself permission to run into a wall of weariness. It felt good that my great-uncle would be waiting for me. I grabbed my little bag of dirty clothes and my purse and trudged to the back door.

Tossing the clothes bag on the top of the washer on the back porch, I put my hand on the knob of the kitchen door, registering as I did so that two people were waiting inside.

Maybe Claude was back? Maybe all the problems in Faery had been solved, and everyone at Hooligans would be returning to the wonderful world of the fae. How many problems would that leave me with? Maybe only three or four big ones.

I was feeling honestly optimistic when I pushed the door open and registered the identity of the two men seated at the table.

Definitely an OSM. One man was Dermot, whom I’d expected. The other was Mustapha, whom I hadn’t.

“Geez Louise, where have you been?” I thought I was going to yell, but it came out as a startled wheeze.

“Sookie,” he said, in his deep voice.

“We thought you were dead! We were scared sick about you! What happened?”

“Take a deep breath,” Mustapha said. “Sit down and just … take a breath. I got some things to tell you. I can’t give you a full answer. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s really a life or a death.”

His statement cut off the next seven questions poised to pour off my tongue. Tossing my purse on the counter, I pulled out a chair, sat, and took a deep breath as he’d advised me. I gave him all my attention. For the first time, I absorbed his ragged appearance. Mustapha’s grooming had always been meticulous. It was a shock to see him rumpled, his precise haircut uneven, his boots scuffed. “Did you see who killed that girl?” I asked. I had to.

He looked at me, looked hard. He didn’t answer.

“Did you kill that girl?” I tried again.

“I did not.”

“And because of this situation you referred to, you can’t tell me who did.”

Silence.

I was sickeningly afraid that Mustapha was trying to tell me, without spelling it out, that Eric had killed her—had ducked out of the house after I’d shut myself in the bathroom. Eric could have lost his temper, projected his anger with himself onto Kym Rowe, and tried to make things right between him and me by snapping her neck. No matter how many times during the previous night I’d told myself such a premise was ridiculous—Eric had great control and was very intelligent, he was simply too aware of his neighbors and the police to do such a lawless thing, and such an act would simply be irrational—I’d never been able to tell myself that Eric wouldn’t have killed her simply because doing so was wrong.