He stood facing me for a moment, not speaking. I thought he was gathering his courage, or his hopelessness. If ever I saw death riding on a man’s shoulder, it was on Todd Donati’s.
“My boss is trying to interest your boss in hooking up,” he said abruptly. If I’d imagined how he’d open our conversation, it had never included that line.
“Yeah, now that she’s a widow, she’s attracting quite a lot of interest,” I said.
“He’s an old-fashioned guy in a lot of ways,” Todd Donati said. “Comes from an old family, doesn’t like modern thinking.”
“Um-hum,” I said, trying to sound neutral but encouraging.
“He don’t believe in women making up their own minds, being able to fend for themselves,” the security chief said.
I couldn’t look like I understood what Donati was talking about, because I sure didn’t.
“Even vampire women,” he said, and looked at me squarely and directly.
“Okay,” I said.
“Think about it,” Donati said. “Get your queen to ask him where the security tape is that shows that area in front of her room.”
“I will,” I said, having no idea why I was agreeing. Then the ailing man spun on his heel and walked away with an air of having discharged his duty.
Then the car came around, Barry hurried out of the elevator and came over to join me, and any thinking I might have done about the encounter faded in my fear of driving in the city. I don’t think Eric ever considered how hard it would be for me to drive in Rhodes, because he just didn’t think about stuff like that. If I hadn’t had Barry with me, it would have been nearly impossible. I could cope with the driving, or I could look at the map the parking attendant loaned us, but not both.
I didn’t do too bad, though the traffic was heavy and the weather was cold and raining. I hadn’t been out of the hotel since we’d arrived, and it was kind of refreshing to see the outside world. Also, this was probably the only glimpse of the rest of the city I would get. I did as much looking as I could. Who knew if I’d ever come back? And this was so far north.
Barry plotted our course, and we began our archery tour of Rhodes.
We started with the farthest business, called Straight Arrow. It was a long, narrow place on a very busy avenue. It was gleaming, well-lit—and had qualified instructors behind the counter who were heavily armed. I knew this, because a big sign said so. The men there were not impressed by Barry’s southern accent. They thought it made him sound stupid. Though when I talked, they thought I was cute. Okay, how insulting is that? The subtext, which I read very clearly from their minds, was: women sound stupid anyway, so a southern accent just enhances that adorable dimness. Men are supposed to sound crisp and direct, so southern men sound stupid and weak.
Anyway, aside from their built-in prejudices, these men were not helpful. They’d never seen Kyle Perkins at any of their night classes, and they didn’t think he’d ever rented time to practice at their place.
Barry was fuming at the disrespect he’d endured, and he didn’t even want to go in the second place. I trotted in by myself with the picture, and the one guy at work at the second archery supply store, which had no range, said, “No,” immediately. He didn’t discuss the picture, ask me why I wanted to know about Kyle Perkins, or wish me a nice day. He didn’t have a sign to tell me how formidable he was. I figured he just ruded people to death.
The third place, housed in a building that I thought might at one time have been a bowling alley, had a few cars in the parking lot and a heavy opaque door. STOP AND BE IDENTIFIED a sign said. Barry and I could read it from the car. It seemed a little ominous.
“I’m tired of being in the car anyway,” he said gallantly, and got out with me. We stood where we could be seen, and I alerted Barry when I spotted the camera above our heads. Barry and I both looked as pleasant as we could. (In Barry’s case, that was pretty pleasant. He just had a way about him.) After a few seconds, we heard a loud click, and the door unlocked. I glanced at Barry, and he pulled open the heavy door while I stepped inside the room and to one side so he could enter, too.
We were faced with a long counter extending the length of the opposite wall. There was a woman about my age behind the counter, with coppery hair and skin, the product of an interesting racial blend. She’d dyed her eyebrows black, which added a touch of the bizarre to the whole uni-color effect.
She looked us over just as carefully in person as she had over the camera, and I could read the thought that she was much happier to see Barry than she was to see me. I told Barry, You better take this one.
Yeah, I’m getting the idea, he answered, and while I laid Kyle’s picture on the counter, he said, “Could you tell us if this guy ever came in here to buy arrows or to practice?”
She didn’t even ask why we wanted to know. She bent over to look at the picture, maybe a little farther than necessary to give Barry the benefit of her neckline. She scanned Kyle’s picture and immediately made a face. “Yeah, he came in here right after dark yesterday,” she said. “We’d never had a vampire customer, and I didn’t really want to serve him, but what are you gonna do? He had the money, and the law says we can’t discriminate.” She was a woman who was ready and willing to discriminate, no doubt about it.
“Was anyone with him?” Barry asked.
“Oh, let me think.” She posed, her head thrown back, for Barry’s benefit. She didn’t think his southern accent sounded stupid. She thought it was adorable and sexy. “I just can’t remember. Listen, I’ll tell ya what I’ll do. I’ll get the security tape for last night; we’ve still got it. And I’ll let you have a look at it, okay?”
“Can we do that right now?” I asked, smiling sweetly.
“Well, I can’t leave the counter right now. There’s no one else here to watch the store if I have to go to the back. But if you’ll come to look tonight after my replacement gets here”—she cast a very pointed glance at Barry, to make sure I realized I need not come—“I’ll let you have a peek.”
“What time?” Barry said, rather reluctantly.
“Shall we say seven? I get off right after that.”
Barry didn’t touch the hint, but he agreed to be back at seven.
“Thanks, Barry,” I said as we buckled up again. “You’re really helping me out.” I called the hotel and left a message for the queen and Andre, explaining where I was and what I was doing, so they wouldn’t get mad when I wasn’t at their disposal the moment they woke, which should be very soon. After all, I was following Eric’s orders.
“You gotta come in with me,” Barry said. “I’m not seeing that woman by myself. She’ll eat me alive. That was the War of Northern Aggression, for sure.”
“Okay. I’ll stay out in the car, and you can yell to me from your head if she climbs on top of you.”
“It’s a deal.”
To fill the time, we had a cup of coffee and some cake at a bakery. It was great. My grandmother had always believed that northern women couldn’t cook. It was delightful to find out exactly how untrue that conviction had been. My appetite was also delightful. It was a continuing relief to find that I was just as hungry as I normally was. Nothing vampy about me, no sir!
After we filled up the tank and checked our route back to the Pyramid, it was finally time to return to the archery range to talk to Copper. The sky was full dark, and the city glowed with light. I felt sort of urban and glamorous, driving around such a large and famous city. And I’d been given a task and performed it successfully. No country mouse, me.
My feeling of happiness and superiority didn’t last long.
Our first clue that all was not well at the Monteagle Archery Company was the heavy metal door hanging askew.
“Shit,” said Barry, which summed up my feelings in a nutshell.
We got out—very reluctantly—and, with many glances from side to side, we went up to the door to examine it.
“Blown or ripped?” I said.
Barry knelt on
the gravel to have a closer look.
“I’m no 007,” he said, “but I think this was ripped off.”
I looked at the door doubtfully. But when I bent over to look more closely, I saw the twisted metal of the hinges. Chalk one up for Barry.
“Okay,” I said. Here’s the part where we actually have to go in.
Barry’s jaw tightened. Yeah, he said, but he didn’t sound too sure. Barry was definitely not into violence or confrontations. Barry was into money, and he had the best-paying employer. Right now, he was wondering if any amount of money would be enough to compensate for this, and he was thinking if he weren’t with a woman, he’d just get in the car and drive away.
Sometimes male pride can be a good thing. I sure didn’t want to do this by myself.
I shoved the door, which responded in a spectacular way by falling off its hinges and crashing to the gravel.
“Hi, we’re here,” Barry said weakly. “Anyone who didn’t know before . . .”
After the noise had stopped and nothing had leaped out of the building to eat us, Barry and I straightened up from our instinctive crouching positions. I took a deep breath. This was my task, since this had been my errand. I stepped into the stream of light coming from the empty doorway. I took one big step forward over the threshold of the building. A quick scan hadn’t given me a brain signal, so I pretty much figured what I was going to find.
Oh, yeah, Copper was dead. She was on top of the counter, laid out in a sprawl of limbs, her head canting off to one side. There was a knife protruding from her chest. Someone had been sick about a yard to the left of my foot—not blood—so there’d been at least one human on-site. I heard Barry step into the building and pause, just as I had.
I’d noted two doors from the room on our earlier visit. There was a door to the right, outside the counter, that would admit customers to the range. There was a door behind the counter that would allow employees to duck back for breaks and to attend customers in the range area. I was sure the tape we’d come to watch had been back there, because that would be the natural place for the security equipment. Whether it was still back there, that was the big question.
I wanted to turn around and leave without a backward glance, and I was scared out of my mind, but she’d died because of that tape, I figured, and it seemed like I’d be discarding her unwilling sacrifice if I discarded the tape. That didn’t really make much sense, but that was how I felt.
I’m not finding anyone else in the area, Barry told me.
Me, either, I said, after I’d performed my second, more thorough, scan.
Barry, of course, knew exactly what I planned to do, and he said, Do you want me to come with you?
No, I want you to wait outside. I’ll call you if I need you. In truth, it would have been nice to have him closer, but it smelled too bad in the room for anyone to stand around for more than a minute, and our minute was up.
Without protesting, Barry went back outside, and I crept down the counter to a clear area. It felt indescribably creepy to scramble over, avoiding Copper’s body. I was glad her sightless eyes were not aimed in my direction as I used a tissue to wipe the area my hands had gripped.
On the employee side of the counter, there was evidence of a considerable struggle. She’d fought hard. There were smears of blood here and there, and paperwork had gotten knocked to the floor. There was a panic button clearly visible, below the top of the counter, but I guess she hadn’t had time to punch it.
The lights were on in the office behind the counter, too, as I could see through the partially open door. I pushed it with my foot, and it swung away from me with a little creak. Again, nothing leaped out at me. I took a deep breath and stepped through.
The room was a combination security room/office/break-room. There were counters built around the walls with rolling chairs pulled up to them, and there were computers and a microwave and a little refrigerator: the usual stuff. And there were the security tapes, heaped in a pile on the floor and smoldering. All the other smells in the outer room had been so bad we simply hadn’t gotten around to this one. There was another door leading out; I didn’t go check to see where it led to, because there was a body blocking it. It was a man’s body, and it was lying facedown, which was a blessing. I didn’t need to go over to check to see if he was dead. He was surely dead. Copper’s replacement, I assumed.
“Well, crap,” I said out loud. And then I thought, Thank God I can get the hell out of here. One thing about the security tapes having been burned: any record of our earlier visit was gone, too.
On my way, I pressed the panic button with my elbow. I hoped it was ringing somewhere at a police station, and that they’d get here soon.
Barry was waiting for me outside, as I’d been 99 percent sure he would be. Though I confess I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if he’d left. “Let’s book! I set off the alarm,” I said, and we jumped into the car and got the hell out of there.
I was driving, because Barry was looking green. We had to pull over once (and in Rhodes traffic that wasn’t easy) for him to be sick. I didn’t blame him one little bit. What we’d seen was awful. But I’ve been blessed with a strong stomach, and I’d seen worse.
We got back to the hotel in time for the judicial session. Barry looked at me with gaping astonishment when I commented that I’d better get ready for it. He hadn’t had an inkling what I’d been thinking, so I knew he was really feeling bad.
“How can you think of going?” he said. “We have to tell someone what happened.”
“I called the police, or at least a security company who’ll report it,” I said. “What else can we do?” We were in the elevator rising from the parking garage to the lobby.
“We have to talk to them.”
“Why?” The doors opened and we stepped out into the hotel lobby.
“To tell them.”
“What?”
“That someone tried to kill you last night here by . . . okay, throwing an arrow at you.” He fell silent.
“Right. See?” I was getting his thoughts now, and he’d come to the correct conclusion. “Would it help solve her murder? Probably not, because the guy is dead and the tapes are destroyed. And they’d come here asking questions of the master vampires of a third of the United States. Who would thank me for that? No one, that’s who.”
“We can’t stand by and do nothing.”
“This isn’t perfect. I know that. But it’s realistic. And practical.”
“Oh, so now you’re practical?” Barry was getting shrieky.
“And you’re yelling at my—at Sookie,” said Eric, earning another shriek (this one wordless) from Barry. By that time, Barry didn’t care if he ever saw me again in his life. Though I didn’t feel quite that drastic, I didn’t think we were going to become pen pals, either.
If Eric didn’t know how to pick a term for what I was to him, I was equally stumped. “Do you need something?” I asked him in a voice that warned him I wasn’t in the mood for any double entendres.
“What did you find out today?” he asked, all business, and the starch ran out of me in a stream.
“You go on,” I told Barry, who didn’t need telling twice.
Eric looked around for a safe place to talk, didn’t see one. The lobby was busy with vampires who were going to the judicial proceedings, or chatting, or flirting. “Come,” he said, not as rudely as it sounds, and we went to the elevators and up to his room. Eric was on the ninth floor, which covered a much larger area than the queen’s. There were twenty rooms on nine, at least. There was a lot more traffic, too; we passed quite a few vamps on the way to Eric’s room, which he told me he was sharing with Pam.
I was a little curious about seeing a regular vampire room, since I’d seen only the living room of the queen’s suite. I was disappointed to find that aside from the traveling coffins, it looked quite ordinary. Of course, that was kind of a big “aside.” Pam’s and Eric’s coffins were resting on fancy trestles covered with
fake hieroglyphics in gilt on black-painted wood, which gave them a neat atmospheric touch. There were two double beds, too, and a very compact bathroom. Both towels were hung up, which I could see because the door was open. Eric had never hung up his towels when he lived with me, so I was willing to bet that Pam had folded them and hung them on the rack. It seemed oddly domestic. Pam had probably picked up for Eric for over a century. Good God. I hadn’t even managed two weeks.
What with the coffins and the beds, the room was a bit crowded, and I wondered what the lower echelon vamps had to put up with, say, on floor twelve. Could you arrange coffins in a bunk configuration? But I was just waffling, trying not to think about being alone with Eric. We sat down, Eric on one bed and I on another, and he leaned forward. “Tell me,” he said.
“Well, it’s not good,” I said, just to put him on the right track.
His face darkened, the blond brows drawing in to meet, his mouth turning down.
“We did find an archery range that Kyle Perkins visited. You were right about that. Barry went with me to be nice, and I really appreciated it,” I said, getting my opening credits in. “To condense the whole afternoon, we found the right range at our third stop, and the gal behind the counter said we could look at the security tape from the night Kyle visited. I thought we might see someone we knew coming in with him. But she wanted us to come back at the end of her shift, seven o’clock.” I paused to take a deep breath. Eric’s face didn’t change at all. “We came back at the appointed time, and she was dead, murdered, in the store. I went past her to look in the office, and the tapes had been burned.”
“Killed how?”
“She’d been stabbed, and the knife was left in her chest, and the killer or someone with him had thrown up food. Also, a guy who worked at the store was killed, but I didn’t check him out to see how.”
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