Dead and Gone

I kept my mental ears open that night, so it was a hard evening for me. After years of practice and some help from Bill, I'd learned to block out most of the thoughts of the humans around me. But tonight was just like the bad old days, when I'd smiled all the time to cover the confusion in my head caused by the constant bombardment of mental mutterings.



When I walked past the table where Bud Dearborn and his ancient crony Sid Matt Lancaster were having chicken baskets and beers, I heard,Crystal's no great loss, but no one gets crucified in Renard Parish... . We gotta solve that case, and Got me some genuine werewolves for clients. I wish Elva Deane had lived to see this; she woulda loved it . But mostly Sid Matt was thinking about his hemorrhoids and his spreading cancer.



Oh, gosh, I hadn't known. My next pass by his table, I patted the venerable lawyer on the shoulder. "Let me know if you need anything," I said, and met his turtle like stare with a blank face. He could take it any way he chose, as long as he knew I was willing to help.



When you throw out your net that wide, you come up with a lot of trash. I found out over the course of the evening that Tanya thought she might be settling down permanently with Calvin, that Jane Bodehouse thought she had chlamydia and wondered who was responsible, and that Kevin and Kenya, police officers who always requested the same shift, were actually living together now. Since Kenya was black and Kevin couldn't be whiter, this was causing Kevin's folks some problems, but he was standing firm. Kenya's brother wasn't too happy about her living situation, either, but he wasn't going to beat up Kevin or anything like that. I gave them a big smile when I brought them bourbon and Cokes, and they smiled back. It was so rare to see Kenya crack a grin that I almost laughed. She looked about five years younger when she smiled.



Andy Bellefleur came in with his new wife, Halleigh. I liked Halleigh, and we hugged each other. Halleigh was thinking she might be pregnant, and it would be mighty early in the marriage for them to start a family, but Andy was quite a bit older than her. This maybe-pregnancy hadn't been planned, so she was pretty worried about how Andy would take the news. Since I was laying myself out there tonight, I tried something new. I sent my extra sense down into Halleigh's belly. If she really was pregnant, it was too soon for the little brain to be registering.



Andy was thinking Halleigh had been quiet the past couple of days, and he was worried something was wrong with her. He was also worried about the investigation of Crystal's death, and when he felt Bud Dearborn's eyes on him, he wished he'd picked any other place in Bon Temps for his evening out. The gunfight at Arlene's trailer was haunting his dreams.



Other people in the bar were thinking about typical stuff.



What are the all-time most popular thoughts? Well, they're really, really boring.



Most people think about their money problems, what they need from the store, what housework they have to do, how their jobs are going. They worry about their kids ... a lot. They brood over issues with their bosses and their spouses and their coworkers and other members of their churches.



On the whole, 95 percent of what I hear is nothing anybody'd want to write down in her diary.



Every now and then the guys (less often, the women) think about sex with someone they see in the bar - but honestly, that's so common I can brush it aside, unless they're thinking about me. That's pretty disgusting. The sex ideas multiply with the drinks consumed; no surprise there.



The people thinking about Crystal and her death were the law enforcement people charged with finding out who'd killed her. If one of the culprits was in the bar, he was simply not thinking about what he'd done. And there had to be more than a single person involved. Setting up a cross was not something a man on his own could handle; at least not without a lot of preparation and some elaborate arrangement of pulleys. You'd have to be some kind of supernatural to pull it off by yourself.



This was Andy Bellefleur's train of thought while he waited for his crispy chicken salad.



I had to agree with him. I'd bet Calvin had already considered that scenario. Calvin had sniffed the body, and he hadn't said he'd smelled another wereanimal of any kind. But then I recalled that one of the two men who'd been wheeling the body out had been a supe.



As far as learning anything new, I was drawing a blank until Mel came in. Mel, who lived in one of Sam's rental duplexes, looked like a reject from the cast of Robin Hood, the Musical tonight. His longish light brown hair, neat mustache and beard, and tight pants gave him a theatrical air.



Mel surprised me by giving me a half hug before he sat down, as if I were a good buddy of his.



If this behavior was because he and my brother were both panthers ... but that still didn't make a lot of sense. None of the other werepanthers got cozy with me because of Jason - far from it. The Hotshot community had been a lot warmer toward me when Calvin Norris had been thinking of asking me to be his mate. Did Mel have a secret yearning to go out with me? That would be ... unpleasant and unwelcome.



I took a little trip into Mel's head, where I saw no lusty thoughts about me. If he'd been attracted, he'd have been thinking them, since I was right in front of him. Mel was thinking about the things Catfish Hennessy, Jason's boss, had been saying about Jason in Bon Temps Auto Parts that day. Catfish's tolerance balloon had burst, and he'd told Mel he was thinking about firing Jason.



Mel was plenty worried about my brother, bless his heart. I'd wondered my whole life how someone as selfish as my brother could attract such faithful friends. My great-grandfather had told me that people with a trace of fairy blood were more attractive to other humans, so maybe that explained it.



I went behind the bar to pour some more tea for Jane Bodehouse, who was trying to be sober today because she was trying to compile a list of the guys who might have given her chlamydia. A bar is a bad place to start a sobriety program - but Jane had hardly any chance of succeeding, anyway. I put a slice of lemon in the tea and carried it to Jane, watched her hands shake as she picked up the glass and drank from it.



"You want something to eat?" I asked, keeping my voice low and quiet. Just because I'd never seen a drunk reform in a bar, that didn't mean it couldn't happen.



Jane shook her head silently. Her dyed brown hair was already escaping the clip that held it back, and her heavy black sweater was covered with bits of this and that. Her makeup had been applied with a shaky hand. I could see the lipstick caked in the creases in her lips. Most of the area alcoholics might stop in Merlotte's every now and then, but they based themselves at the Bayou. Jane was our only "resident" alkie since old Willie Chenier had died. When Jane was in the bar, she always sat on the same stool. Hoyt had made a label for it when he'd had too much to drink one night, but Sam had made him take it off.



I looked in Jane's head for an awful minute or two, and I watched the slow shifting of thoughts behind her eyes, noticed the broken veins in her cheeks. The thought of becoming like Jane was enough to scare almost anyone sober.



I turned away to find Mel standing beside me. He was on his way to the men's room, because that's what was in his head when I looked.



"You know what they do in Hotshot with people like that?" he asked quietly, nodding his head toward Jane as if she couldn't see or hear him. (Actually, I thought he was right about that. Jane was turned so inward that she didn't seem to be acknowledging the world much today.)



"No," I said, startled.



"They let them die," he said. "They don't offer them food or water or shelter, if the person can't seek it for himself or herself."



I'm sure my horror showed on my face.



"It's kindest in the end," he said. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Hotshot has its ways of getting rid of the weak."



He went on his way, his back stiff.



I patted Jane on the shoulder, but I'm afraid I wasn't really thinking about her. I was wondering what Mel had done to deserve his exile to a duplex in Bon Temps. If it had been me, I would have been happy to be rid of the multiple ties of kinship and the microscopic hierarchy of the little cluster of houses huddled around the old crossroads, but I could tell that wasn't the way Mel felt about it.



Mel's ex-wife had a margarita in Merlotte's from time to time. I thought I might do a little research on my brother's new buddy the next time Ginjer dropped by.



Sam asked me a couple of times if I was okay, and I was surprised by the strength of my desire to talk to him about everything that had happened lately. I was astonished to realize how often I confided in Sam, how much he knew about my secret life. But I knew that Sam had enough on his plate right now. He was on the phone with his sister and his brother several times during the evening, which was really unusual for him. He looked harassed and worried, and it would be selfish to add to that load of worry.



The cell phone in my apron pocket vibrated a couple of times, and when I had a free moment, I ducked into the ladies' room and checked my text messages. One from Eric. "Protection coming," it said. That was good. There was another message, and this one was from Alcide Herveaux, the Shreveport pack leader. "Tray called. Trouble Ur way?" it read. "We owe U."



My chances of survival had risen considerably, and I felt much more cheerful as I finished out my shift.



It was good to have stockpiled favors with both vampires and werewolves. Maybe all the shit I'd gone through last fall would prove to have been worth it after all.



All in all, though, I had to say my project for the evening had been a washout. Sure, after asking Sam for permission, I'd filled both the plastic water guns with juice from the lemons in the refrigerator (intended for iced tea). I thought maybe real lemons would somehow be more potent than the bottled lemon juice at home. So I felt a little safer, but the sum total of my knowledge about the death of Crystal had not increased by one fact. Either the murderers hadn't come in the bar, weren't fretting over the evil thing they'd done, or weren't thinking about it at the moment I was looking inside their heads.Or, I thought,all of the above .