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  Then I heard a vehicle coming down the drive, and Jason’s black truck with its pink and aqua blazons pulled up to within a yard of my feet.

  Jason climbed down—did I mention the truck sports those high tires?—to stalk toward me. He was wearing his usual work clothes, a khaki shirt and pants, and he had his sheathed knife clipped to his belt, like most of the county road workers did. Just by the way he walked, I knew he was in a huff.

  I put my dark glasses on.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you beat up the Rattrays last night?” My brother threw himself into the aluminum yard chair by my chaise. “Where’s Gran?” he asked belatedly.

  “Hanging out the laundry,” I said. Gran used the dryer in a pinch, but she really liked hanging the wet clothes out in the sun. Of course the clothesline was in the backyard, where clotheslines should be. “She’s fixing country-fried steak and sweet potatoes and green beans she put up last year, for lunch,” I added, knowing that would distract Jason a little bit. I hoped Gran stayed out back. I didn’t want her to hear this conversation. “Keep your voice low,” I reminded him.

  “Rene Lenier couldn’t wait till I got to work this morning to tell me all about it. He was over to the Rattrays’ trailer last night to buy him some weed, and Denise drove up like she wanted to kill someone. Rene said he liked to have gotten killed, she was so mad. It took both Rene and Denise to get Mack into the trailer, and then they took him to the hospital in Monroe.” Jason glared at me accusingly.

  “Did Rene tell you that Mack came after me with a knife?” I asked, deciding attacking was the best way of handling this. I could tell Jason’s pique was due in large part to the fact that he had heard about this from someone else.

  “If Denise told Rene, he didn’t mention it to me,” Jason said slowly, and I saw his handsome face darken with rage. “He came after you with a knife?”

  “So I had to defend myself,” I said, as if it were matter-of-fact. “And he took your chain.” This was all true, if a little skewed.

  “I came in to tell you,” I continued, “but by the time I got back in the bar, you were gone with DeeAnne, and since I was fine, it just didn’t seem worth tracking you down. I knew you’d feel obliged to go after him if I told you about the knife,” I added diplomatically. There was a lot more truth in that, since Jason dearly loves a fight.

  “What the hell were you doing out there anyway?” he asked, but he had relaxed, and I knew he was accepting this.

  “Did you know that, in addition to selling drugs, the Rats are vampire drainers?”

  Now he was fascinated. “No . . . so?”

  “Well, one of my customers last night was a vampire, and they were draining him out in Merlotte’s parking lot! I couldn’t have that.”

  “There’s a vampire here in Bon Temps?”

  “Yep. Even if you don’t want a vampire for your best friend, you can’t let trash like the Rats drain them. It’s not like siphoning gas out of a car. And they would have left him out in the woods to die.” Though the Rats hadn’t told me their intentions, that was my bet. Even if they’d put him under cover so he could survive the day, a drained vampire took at least twenty years to recover, at least that’s what one had said on Oprah. And that’s if another vampire took care of him.

  “The vampire was in the bar when I was there?” Jason asked, dazzled.

  “Uh-huh. The dark-haired guy sitting with the Rats.”

  Jason grinned at my epithet for the Rattrays. But he hadn’t let go of the night before, yet. “How’d you know he was a vampire?” he asked, but when he looked at me, I could tell he was wishing he had bitten his tongue.

  “I just knew,” I said in my flattest voice.

  “Right.” And we shared a whole unspoken conversation.

  “Homulka doesn’t have a vampire,” Jason said thoughtfully. He tilted his face back to catch the sun, and I knew we were off dangerous ground.

  “True,” I agreed. Homulka was the town Bon Temps loved to hate. We’d been rivals in football, basketball, and historical significance for generations.

  “Neither does Roedale,” Gran said from behind us, and Jason and I both jumped. I give Jason credit, he jumps up and gives Gran a hug everytime he sees her.

  “Gran, you got enough food in the oven for me?”

  “You and two others,” Gran said. Our grandmother smiled up at Jason. She was not blind to his faults (or mine), but she loved him. “I just got a phone call from Everlee Mason. She was telling me you hooked up with DeeAnne last night.”

  “Boy oh boy, can’t do anything in this town without getting caught,” Jason said, but he wasn’t really angry.

  “That DeeAnne,” Gran said warningly as we all started into the house, “she’s been pregnant one time I know of. You just take care she doesn’t have one of yours, you’ll be paying the rest of your life. Course, that may be the only way I get great-grandchildren!”

  Gran had the food ready on the table, so after Jason hung up his hat we sat down and said grace. Then Gran and Jason began gossiping with each other (though they called it “catching up”) about people in our little town and parish. My brother worked for the state, supervising road crews. It seemed to me like Jason’s day consisted of driving around in a state pickup, clocking off work, and then driving around all night in his own pickup. Rene was on one of the work crews Jason oversaw, and they’d been to high school together. They hung around with Hoyt Fortenberry a lot.

  “Sookie, I had to replace the hot water heater in the house,” Jason said suddenly. He lives in my parents’ old house, the one we’d been living in when they died in a flash flood. We lived with Gran after that, but when Jason got through his two years of college and went to work for the state, he moved back into the house, which on paper is half mine.

  “You need any money on that?” I asked.

  “Naw, I got it.”

  We both make salaries, but we also have a little income from a fund established when an oil well was sunk on my parents’ property. It played out in a few years, but my parents and then Gran made sure the money was invested. It saved Jason and me a lot of struggle, that padding. I don’t know how Gran could have raised us if it hadn’t been for that money. She was determined not to sell any land, but her own income is not much more than social security. That’s one reason I don’t get an apartment. If I get groceries when I’m living with her, that’s reasonable, to her; but if I buy groceries and bring them to her house and leave them on her table and go home to my house, that’s charity and that makes her mad.

  “What kind did you get?” I asked, just to show interest.

  He was dying to tell me; Jason’s an appliance freak, and he wanted to describe his comparison shopping for a new water heater in detail. I listened with as much attention as I could muster.

  And then he interrupted himself. “Hey Sook, you remember Maudette Pickens?”

  “Sure,” I said, surprised. “We graduated in the same class.”

  “Somebody killed Maudette in her apartment last night.” Gran and I were riveted. “When?” Grand asked, puzzled that she hadn’t heard already.

  “They just found her this very morning in her bedroom. Her boss tried to call her to find out why she hadn’t shown up for work yesterday and today and got no answer, so he rode over and got the manager up, and they unlocked the place. You know she had the apartment across from Dee-Anne’s?” Bon Temps had only one bona fide apartment complex, a three-building, two-story U-shaped grouping, so we knew exactly where he meant.

  “She got killed there?” I felt ill. I remembered Maudette clearly. Maudette had had a heavy jaw and a square bottom, pretty black hair and husky shoulders. Maudette had been a plodder, never bright or ambitious. I thought I recalled her working at the Grabbit Kwik, a gas station/convenience store.

  “Yeah, she’d been working there for at least a year, I guess,” Jason confirmed.

  “How was it done?” My grandmother had that squnched, give-it-to-me-quick look with which n
ice people ask for bad news.

  “She had some vampire bites on her—uh—inner thighs,” my brother said, looking down at his plate. “But that wasn’t what killed her. She was strangled. DeeAnne told me Maudette liked to go to that vampire bar in Shreveport when she had a couple of days off, so maybe that’s where she got the bites. Might not have been Sookie’s vampire.”

  “Maudette was a fang-banger?” I felt queasy, imagining slow, chunky Maudette draped in the exotic black dresses fang-bangers affected.

  “What’s that?” asked Gran. She must have missed Sally-Jessy the day the phenomenon was explored.

  “Men and women that hang around with vampires and enjoy being bitten. Vampire groupies. They don’t last too long, I think, because they want to be bitten too much, and sooner or later they get that one bite too many.”

  “But a bite didn’t kill Maudette.” Gran wanted to be sure she had it straight.

  “Nope, strangling.” Jason had begun finishing his lunch.

  “Don’t you always get gas at the Grabbit?” I asked.

  “Sure. So do a lot of people.”

  “And didn’t you hang around with Maudette some?” Gran asked.

  “Well, in a way of speaking,” Jason said cautiously.

  I took that to mean he’d bedded Maudette when he couldn’t find anyone else.

  “I hope the sheriff doesn’t want to talk to you,” Gran said, shaking her head as if indicating “no” would make it less likely.

  “What?” Jason was turning red, looking defensive.

  “You see Maudette in the store all the time when you get your gas, you so-to-speak date her, then she winds up dead in an apartment you’re familiar with,” I summarized. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and there were so few mysterious homicides in Bon Temps that I thought every stone would be turned in its investigation.

  “I ain’t the only one who fills the bill. Plenty of other guys get their gas there, and all of them know Maudette.”

  “Yeah, but in what sense?” Gran asked bluntly. “She wasn’t a prostitute, was she? So she will have talked about who she saw.”

  “She just liked to have a good time, she wasn’t a pro.” It was good of Jason to defend Maudette, considering what I knew of his selfish character. I began to think a little better of my big brother. “She was kinda lonely, I guess,” he added.

  Jason looked at both of us, then, and saw we were surprised and touched.

  “Speaking of prostitutes,” he said hastily, “there’s one in Monroe specializes in vampires. She keeps a guy standing by with a stake in case one gets carried away. She drinks synthetic blood to keep her blood supply up.”

  That was a pretty definite change of subject, so Gran and I tried to think of a question we could ask without being indecent.

  “Wonder how much she charges?” I ventured, and when Jason told us the figure he’d heard, we both gasped.

  Once we got off the topic of Maudette’s murder, lunch went about as usual, with Jason looking at his watch and exclaiming that he had to leave just when it was time to do the dishes.

  But Gran’s mind was still running on vampires, I found out. She came into my room later, when I was putting on my makeup to go to work.

  “How old you reckon the vampire is, the one you met?”

  “I have no idea, Gran.” I was putting on my mascara, looking wide-eyed and trying to hold still so I wouldn’t poke myself in the eye, so my voice came out funny, as if I was trying out for a horror movie.

  “Do you suppose . . . he might remember the War?”

  I didn’t need to ask which war. After all, Gran was a charter member of the Descendants of the Glorious Dead.

  “Could be,” I said, turning my face from side to side to make sure my blush was even.

  “You think he might come to talk to us about it? We could have a special meeting.”

  “At night,” I reminded her.

  “Oh. Yes, it’d have to be.” The Descendants usually met at noon at the library and brought a bag lunch.

  I thought about it. It would be plain rude to suggest to the vampire that he ought to speak to Gran’s club because I’d saved his blood from Drainers, but maybe he would offer if I gave a little hint? I didn’t like to, but I’d do it for Gran. “I’ll ask him the next time he comes in,” I promised.

  “At least he could come talk to me and maybe I could tape his recollections?” Gran said. I could hear her mind clicking as she thought of what a coup that would be for her. “It would be so interesting to the other club members,” she said piously.

  I stifled an impulse to laugh. “I’ll suggest it to him,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  When I left, Gran was clearly counting her chickens.

  I HADN’T THOUGHT of Rene Lenier going to Sam with the story of the parking lot fight. Rene’d been a busy bee, though. When I got to work that afternoon, I assumed the agitation I felt in the air was due to Maudette’s murder. I found out different.

  Sam hustled me into the storeroom the minute I came in. He was hopping with anger. He reamed me up one side and down the other.

  Sam had never been mad with me before, and soon I was on the edge of tears.

  “And if you think a customer isn’t safe, you tell me, and I’ll deal with it, not you,” he was saying for the sixth time, when I finally realized that Sam had been scared for me.

  I caught that rolling off him before I clamped down firmly on “hearing” Sam. Listening in to your boss led to disaster.

  It had never occurred to me to ask Sam—or anyone else—for help.

  “And if you think someone is being harmed in our parking lot, your next move is to call the police, not step out there yourself like a vigilante,” Sam huffed. His fair complection, always ruddy, was redder than ever, and his wiry golden hair looked as if he hadn’t combed it.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and my eyes wide open so the tears wouldn’t roll out. “Are you gonna fire me?”

  “No! No!” he exclaimed, apparently even angrier. “I don’t want to lose you!” He gripped my shoulders and gave me a little shake. Then he stood looking at me with wide, crackling blue eyes, and I felt a surge of heat rushing out from him. Touching accelerates my disability, makes it imperative that I hear the person touching. I stared right into his eyes for a long moment, then I remembered myself, and I jumped back as his hands dropped away.

  I whirled and left the storeroom, spooked.

  I’d learned a couple of disconcerting things. Sam desired me; and I couldn’t hear his thoughts as clearly as I could other people’s. I’d had waves of impressions of how he was feeling, but not thoughts. More like wearing a mood ring than getting a fax.

  So, what did I do about either piece of information? Absolutely nothing.

  I’d never looked on Sam as a beddable man before—or at least not beddable by me—for a lot of reasons. But the simplest one was that I never looked at anyone that way, not because I don’t have hormones—boy, do I have hormones—but they are constantly tamped down because sex, for me, is a disaster. Can you imagine knowing everything your sex partner is thinking? Right. Along the order of “Gosh, look at that mole . . . her butt is a little big . . . wish she’d move to the right a little . . . why doesn’t she take the hint and . . . ?” You get the idea. It’s chilling to the emotions, believe me. And during sex, there is simply no way to keep a mental guard up.

  Another reason is that I like Sam for a boss, and I like my job, which gets me out and keeps me active and earning so I won’t turn into the recluse my grandmother fears I’ll become. Working in an office is hard for me, and college was simply impossible because of the grim concentration necessary. It just drained me.

  So, right now, I wanted to mull over the rush of desire I’d felt from him. It wasn’t like he’d made me a verbal proposition or thrown me down on the storeroom floor. I’d felt his feelings, and I could ignore them if I chose. I appreciated the delicacy of this, and wondered if Sam had touched m
e on purpose, if he actually knew what I was.

  I took care not be alone with him, but I have to admit I was pretty shaken that night.

  THE NEXT TWO nights were better. We fell back into our comfortable relationship. I was relieved. I was disappointed. I was also run off my feet since Maudette’s murder sparked a business boom at Merlotte’s. All sorts of rumors were buzzing around Bon Temps, and the Shreveport news team did a little piece on Maudette Picken’s grisly death. Though I didn’t attend her funeral, my grandmother did, and she said the church was jam-packed. Poor lumpy Maudette, with her bitten thighs, was more interesting in death than she’d ever been in life.

  I was about to have two days off, and I was worried I’d miss connecting with the vampire, Bill. I needed to relay my grandmother’s request. He hadn’t returned to the bar, and I began to wonder if he would.

  Mack and Denise hadn’t been back in Merlotte’s either, but Rene Lenier and Hoyt Fortenberry made sure I knew they’d threatened me with horrible things. I can’t say I was seriously alarmed. Criminal trash like the Rats roamed the highways and trailer parks of America, not smart enough or moral enough to settle down to productive living. They never made a positive mark on the world, or amounted to a hill of beans, to my way of thinking. I shrugged off Rene’s warnings.

  But he sure enjoyed relaying them. Rene Lenier was small like Sam, but where Sam was ruddy and blond, Rene was swarthy and had a bushy headful of rough, black hair threaded with gray. Rene often came by the bar to drink a beer and visit with Arlene because (as he was fond of telling anyone in the bar) she was his favorite ex-wife. He had three. Hoyt Fortenberry was more of a cipher than Rene. He was neither dark nor fair, neither big nor little. He always seemed cheerful and always tipped decent. He admired my brother Jason far beyond what Jason deserved, in my opinion.

  I was glad Rene and Hoyt weren’t there the night the vampire returned.

  He sat at the same table.

  Now that the vampire was actually in front of me, I felt a little shy. I found I’d forgotten the almost imperceptible glow of his skin. I’d exaggerated his height and the clear-cut lines of his mouth.