Dead Reckoning

by Harris, Charlaine

  “I didn’t know him,” Sam said. “But it’s sure a nice box with a big bow. Maybe you have a secret admirer.” Sam emphasized those words, but not in an obvious way.

  “I think I know who that might be,” I said, putting a smile into my voice. “Sure, Sam, I’ll come. Oh, wait! Could you bring it out here? I’m still cleaning up from the party.” Out here would be a lot quieter.

  “Let me check,” Sam said. There was a silence while he covered the receiver with his hand. I could hear a little muffled conversation, nothing specific. “That’ll be great,” he said, sounding like it would be anything but. “We’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  “Super,” I said, genuinely pleased. That gave me a bit of time to plan a welcome. “See you then.” After I hung up, I stood for a second organizing my thoughts before I sped to the front closet to retrieve my shotgun. I checked it out to make sure it was ready. Hoping I’d gain an element of surprise, I decided to hide in the woods. I laced up some running shoes and was out the back door, glad I’d put on a dark-colored tank.

  It wasn’t Sam’s truck that came up the driveway, it was Jannalynn’s little car. Jannalynn was driving, Sam was in the front seat passenger, and someone else was in the rear seat.

  Jannalynn got out first and looked around. She could smell me, knew I was nearby. She could probably smell the gun, too. She smiled, and it was an awful smile. She was hoping I would shoot the person who’d forced them to come out here, shoot her dead.

  Of course, the person holding a gun on them, the person in the backseat, was Sandra Pelt. Sandra got out with a rifle in her hand and pointed it at the car, standing a careful distance away. Then Sam emerged. He was mad as hell; I could tell by the set of his shoulders.

  Sandra looked older, thinner, and crazier than she had only days before. She’d dyed her hair black, and her fingernails matched. If she’d been anyone else, I’d have pitied her—parents dead, sister dead, mental troubles. But my pity stopped when someone held a rifle on people I cared about.

  “Come out, Sookie!” Sandra sang out. “Come out! I got you now, you piece of shit!”

  Sam moved unobtrusively to Sandra’s right, trying to turn to face her. Jannalynn, too, began moving around the car. Sandra, afraid she was losing control of the situation, began to scream at them. “Stay still, don’t move, or I’ll shoot the hell out of you! You, bitch! You don’t want to see his head shot off, do you? Your little doggie lover-boy?”

  Jannalynn shook her head. She was wearing shorts, too, and a Hair of the Dog T-shirt. Her hands had flour on them. She and Sam had been cooking.

  I could let this escalate, or I could take action. I was too far away, but I had to risk it. Without responding to Sandra at all, I stepped out of the woods and fired.

  The roar of the Benelli from an unexpected direction took everyone by surprise. I saw red blotches appear on Sandra’s left arm and cheek, and she staggered for a moment in shock. But that wouldn’t stop a Pelt, no it wouldn’t. Sandra swung up her rifle and aimed at me. Sam leaped for her, but Jannalynn got there first. Jannalynn caught hold of the rifle, wrenched it from Sandra’s hands, and flung it away, and then the battle was on. I’d never seen two people fight each other as hard, and given my recent experiences that was saying something.

  I couldn’t find a way to shoot Sandra again, not with Jannalynn struggling with her hand-to-hand. The two women were much the same size, short and sinewy, but Jannalynn was born to battle while Sandra was more used to quick brawls. Sam and I both circled them as they punched and bit and pulled hair and did everything to each other they could possibly do. Real damage was inflicted on both sides, and after a few seconds Jannalynn’s side was stained red, and the flow from Sandra’s shotgun wounds had accelerated. Sam reached into the struggling duo—it was like putting your hand in a fan—to grasp Sandra’s hair and yank, and she screamed like a banshee and spared a fist to punch Sam in the face. He kept his grip on her hair, though I thought she’d broken his nose.

  I felt obliged to do my share—after all, this was my fault—so I waited my turn. It was oddly like waiting to jump into the turning rope when I was on the playground in elementary school. When I saw my moment, I surged into the fight zone and gripped the first thing that came to my hands, Sandra’s upper left arm. Her momentum seized, she couldn’t deliver the punch she was aiming to throw at Jannalynn’s face. Instead, Jannalynn cocked one of her own hard little fists and knocked the consciousness right out of Sandra Pelt.

  Suddenly I was holding the shoulder of a woman who’d gone completely limp. I let go, and she fell to the ground. Her head sagged oddly. Jannalynn had broken her neck. I didn’t know if Sandra was dead or alive.

  “Fuck,” Jannalynn said pleasantly. “Fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck.”

  “Amen,” Sam said.

  I burst into tears. Jannalynn looked disgusted. “I know, I know,” I said despairingly, “but I saw a lot of people get killed last night, and this is just one person too many! I’m sorry, y’all.” I think Sam would have hugged me if Jannalynn hadn’t been right there. I know he thought about it. That was the important thing.

  “She isn’t completely gone,” Jannalynn said after a moment’s concentration on the inert Sandra, and before Sam or I could say or do one thing, she knelt by Sandra, clenched her fists, and brought them down on Sandra’s skull.

  And that was that.

  Sam looked across the corpse at me. I didn’t know what to say or do. I’m sure my face reflected that helplessness.

  “Well,” said Jannalynn brightly, dusting her hands together with the air of one who’s finally completed an unpleasant job, “what shall we do with the body?”

  Maybe I should install a crematorium in my backyard. “Should we call the sheriff?” I asked, since I felt obliged to at least suggest it.

  Sam looked troubled. “More bad news for the bar,” he said. “I’m sorry to think about that, but I have to.”

  “She took you all hostage,” I said.

  “We say.”

  I got Sam’s point.

  Jannalynn said, “I don’t think anyone saw us leaving the bar with her. She was sitting low in the backseat.”

  “Her car’s still at my place,” Sam said.

  “I know somewhere she’ll never be found,” I heard myself saying, to my own complete surprise.

  “Where would that be?” Jannalynn asked. She looked up at me, and I could tell that we were never going to be best friends or paint each other’s nails. Aww.

  “We’ll throw her in the portal,” I said.

  “What?” Sam was still staring down at the body, looking sick.

  “We’ll throw her in the fairy portal.”

  Jannalynn gaped at me. “There are fairies here?”

  “Not at the moment. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve got a portal in my woods.”

  “You’re quite the . . .” She couldn’t seem to think how to end the sentence. “Quite the surprise,” she said finally.

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  Since Jannalynn was still bleeding, I stooped over to get Sandra’s feet. Sam got her shoulders. He seemed to have gotten over the worst of the shock. He was breathing through his mouth, since his broken nose was clogged. “Where we headed?” he said.

  “Okay, it’s about a quarter mile that way.” I jerked my head in the right direction, since my hands were occupied.

  So off we went, slowly and awkwardly. The blood had quit dripping, and she was light, and it went as well as carrying a body through the woods can go. I said, “I think instead of calling this the Stackhouse place, I’ll just call it the Body Farm.”

  “Like that place in Tennessee?” Jannalynn said, to my surprise.

  “Right.”

  “Patricia Cornwell wrote a book called that, didn’t she?” Sam said, and I almost smiled. This was a very civilized discussion to be having under the circumstances. Maybe I was still a little numb from the night before, or maybe I was continuing my process of hardening u
p to survive the world around me, but I found I simply didn’t care much about Sandra. The Pelts had had a personal vendetta against me for no very good reason for a very long time, and now it was over.

  I finally understood something about the mayhem of the night before. It wasn’t the individual deaths I found so appalling but the level of violence, the sheer horror of seeing so much dealt out and received. . . . Just as I found Jannalynn’s execution of Sandra the most disturbing thing about today’s encounter. Unless I was mistaken, Sam did, too.

  We reached the small open space in the trees. I was glad to see the little distortion in the air that betrayed the portal into Faery. I pointed silently, as if the fae could hear me (and for all I knew, they could). After a second or two, Jannalynn and Sam spotted what I was trying to show them. They eyed it curiously, and Jannalynn went so far as to stick her finger in it. Her finger vanished from sight, and with a yelp, she pulled her hand back. She was definitely relieved to see that the finger was still attached.

  “Count of three,” I said, and Sam nodded. He moved from the end of Sandra’s body to the side, and as smoothly as if we had practiced it, we fed the corpse into the magical hole. It wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t been so small.

  Then we waited.

  The corpse didn’t get spat back out. No one leaped out with a sword to demand our lives for desecrating the land of the fae. Instead, we heard a snarling and a yapping, and we all stood frozen, our eyes wide and our arms tense, waiting for something to issue from the portal, something that we had to fight.

  But nothing came out. The noises continued, and they were graphic enough: rending and tearing, more snarling, and then after some sounds so disturbing I won’t even try to describe them, there was silence. I figured there wasn’t any Sandra left.

  We trudged back through the woods to the car. Its doors were standing open, and the first thing Sam did was shut them to stop the dinging. There were splotches of blood on the ground. I unrolled the garden hose and turned it on. Sam watered down the bloody spots and gave Jannalynn’s car a nice rinse while he was at it. In a gut-wrenching moment—another gut-wrenching moment—Jannalynn set Sam’s broken nose straight, and though he yelled and tears sprang to his eyes, I knew that the nose would heal well.

  Sandra’s rifle was more of a problem than the body had been. I was not going to use the portal as a garbage disposal, and that was what throwing the rifle in after the body felt like. After some argument, Jannalynn and Sam decided they’d throw it into the woods on their way back to Sam’s trailer, and I guess that was what they did.

  I was left in my house alone after a truly amazing and horrible two days. Horribly amazing? Amazingly horrible? Both.

  I sat in my kitchen, a book open on the table before me. The sun was still lighting up the yard, but the shadows were growing long. I thought of the cluviel dor, which I hadn’t had a chance to use in the encounter in the backyard. Should I carry it around with me every minute of the day? I wondered if the gray things after Mr. Cataliades had caught up with him yet, and I wondered if I’d feel sad if they did. I wondered if the vampires had gotten Fangtasia cleaned up by opening time, and I wondered if I would call the bar to find out. There’d be humans there to answer the phone: Mustapha Khan, maybe his buddy Warren.

  I wondered if Eric had talked to Felipe yet about the disappearance of the Regent of Louisiana. I wondered if Eric had written to the Queen of Oklahoma.

  Maybe the phone would ring when darkness fell. Maybe it wouldn’t. I couldn’t decide which I wanted.

  What I did want to do was something completely normal.

  I walked barefoot into the living room with a big icy glass of tea. Time to watch some of my recorded episodes of Jeopardy!

  Dangerous Creatures for two hundred, anyone?

  Ace Books by Charlaine Harris

  The Sookie Stackhouse Novels

  DEAD UNTIL DARK

  LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS

  CLUB DEAD

  DEAD TO THE WORLD

  DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

  DEFINITELY DEAD

  ALL TOGETHER DEAD

  FROM DEAD TO WORSE

  DEAD AND GONE

  DEAD IN THE FAMILY

  DEAD RECKONING

  A TOUCH OF DEAD: SOOKIE STACKHOUSE,

  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES

  Ace Anthologies Edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

  MANY BLOODY RETURNS

  WOLFSBANE AND MISTLETOE

  DEATH’S EXCELLENT VACATION

  Berkley Prime Crime Books by Charlaine Harris

  SWEET AND DEADLY

  A SECRET RAGE

  The Harper Connelly Mysteries

  GRAVE SIGHT

  GRAVE SURPRISE

  AN ICE COLD GRAVE

  GRAVE SECRET

  The Lily Bard Mysteries

  SHAKESPEARE’S LANDLORD

  SHAKESPEARE’S CHAMPION

  SHAKESPEARE’S CHRISTMAS

  SHAKESPEARE’S TROLLOP

  SHAKESPEARE’S COUNSELOR

  The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries

  REAL MURDERS

  A BONE TO PICK

  THREE BEDROOMS, ONE CORPSE

  THE JULIUS HOUSE

  DEAD OVER HEELS

  A FOOL AND HIS HONEY

  LAST SCENE ALIVE

  POPPY DONE TO DEATH

  Berkley Prime Crime Anthologies Edited by Charlaine Harris

  CRIMES BY MOONLIGHT