Dead as a Doornail (Sookie Stackhouse #5)(4)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"You could stop this," I said furiously to Mickey as I hurried past his and Tara’s table on my way to try to make peace.

He sat back in his chair and sipped his drink. "Not my job," he said calmly.

I got that, but it didn’t endear the vampire to me, especially when the student whirled and took a swing at me as I approached him from behind. He missed, and I hit him over the head with my tray. He staggered to one side, maybe bleeding a little, and Terry was able to subdue Jeff LaBeff, who was looking for an excuse to quit.

Incidents like this had been happening with more frequency, especially when Sam was gone. It was evident to me that we needed a bouncer, at least on weekend nights… and full-moon nights.

The student threatened to sue.

"What’s your name?" I asked.

"Mark Duffy," the young man said, clutching his head.

"Mark, where you from?"

"Minden."

I did a quick evaluation of his clothes, his demeanor, and the contents of his head. "I’m gonna enjoy calling your mama and telling her you took a swing at a woman," I said. He blanched and said no more about suing, and he and his buds left soon after. It always helps to know the most effective threat.

We made Jeff leave, too.

Terry resumed his place behind the bar and began dispensing drinks, but he was limping slightly and had a strained look in his face, which worried me. Terry’s war experiences hadn’t left him real stable. I’d had enough trouble for one night.

But of course the night wasn’t over yet.

About an hour after the fight, a woman came into Merlotte’s. She was plain and plainly dressed in old jeans and a camo coat. She had on boots that had been wonderful when they’d been new, but that had been a long time ago. She didn’t carry a purse, and she had her hands thrust into her pockets.

There were several indicators that made my mental antennae twitch. First of all, this gal didn’t look right. A local woman might dress like that if she were going hunting or doing farm work, but not to come to Merlotte’s. For an evening out at the bar, most women fixed themselves up. So this woman was in a working mode; but she wasn’t a whore by the same reasoning.

That meant drugs.

To protect the bar in Sam’s absence, I tuned in to her thoughts. People don’t think in complete sentences, of course, and I’m smoothing it out, but what was running through her head was along the order of: Three vials left getting old losing power gotta sell it tonight so I can get back to Baton Rouge and buy some more. Vampire in the bar if he catches me with vamp blood I’m dead. This town is a dump. Back to the city first chance I get.

She was a Drainer, or maybe she was just a distributor. Vampire blood was the most intoxicating drug on the market, but of course vamps didn’t give it up willingly. Draining a vampire was a hazardous occupation, boosting prices of the tiny vials of blood to amazing sums.

What did the drug user get for parting with a lot of money? Depending on the age of the blood – that is, the time since it’d been removed from its owner – and the age of the vampire from whom the blood had been removed, and the individual chemistry of the drug user, it could be quite a lot. There was the feeling of omnipotence, the increased strength, acute vision, and hearing. And most important of all for Americans, an enhanced physical appearance.

Still, only an idiot would drink black-market vampire blood. For one thing, the results were notoriously unpredictable. Not only did the effects vary, but those effects could last anywhere from two weeks to two months. For another thing, some people simply went mad when the blood hit their system – sometimes homicidally mad. I’d heard of dealers who sold gullible users pig’s blood or contaminated human blood. But the most important reason to avoid the black market in vamp blood was this: Vampires hated Drainers, and they hated the users of the drained blood (commonly known as bloodheads). You just don’t want a vampire pissed off at you.

There weren’t any off-duty police officers in Merlotte’s that night. Sam was out wagging his tail somewhere. I hated to tip off Terry, because I didn’t know how he’d react. I had to do something about this woman.

Truly, I try not to intervene in events when my only connection comes through my telepathy. If I stuck my oar in every time I learned something that would affect the lives around me (like knowing the parish clerk was embezzling, or that one of the local detectives took bribes), I wouldn’t be able to live in Bon Temps, and it was my home. But I couldn’t permit this scraggy woman to sell her poison in Sam’s bar.

She perched on an empty barstool and ordered a beer from Terry. His gaze lingered on her. Terry, too, realized something was wrong about the stranger.

I came to pick up my next order and stood by her. She needed a bath, and she’d been in a house heated by a wood fireplace. I made myself touch her, which always improved my reception. Where was the blood? It was in her coat pocket. Good.

Without further ado, I dumped a glass of wine down her front.

"Dammit!" she said, jumping off the stool and patting ineffectually at her chest. "You are the clumsiest-ass woman I ever saw!"

" ‘Scuse me," I said abjectly, putting my tray on the bar and meeting Terry’s eyes briefly. "Let me put some soda on that." Without waiting for her permission, I pulled her coat down her arms. By the time she understood what I was doing and began to struggle, I had taken charge of the coat. I tossed it over the bar to Terry. "Put some soda on that, please," I said. "Make sure the stuff in her pockets didn’t get wet, too." I’d used this ploy before. I was lucky it was cold weather and she’d had the stuff in her coat, not in her jeans pocket. That would have taxed my inventiveness.

Under the coat, the woman was wearing a very old Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. She began shivering, and I wondered if she’d been sampling more conventional drugs. Terry made a show of patting soda on the wine stain. Following my hint, he delved into the pockets. He looked down at his hand with disgust, and I heard a clink as he threw the vials in the trash can behind the bar. He returned everything else to her pockets.

She’d opened her mouth to shriek at Terry when she realized she really couldn’t. Terry stared directly at her, daring her to mention the blood. The people around us watched with interest. They knew something was up, but not what, because the whole thing had gone down very quickly. When Terry was sure she wasn’t going to start yelling, he handed me the coat. As I held it so she could slide her arms in, Terry told her, "Don’t you come back here no more."

If we kept throwing people out at this rate, we wouldn’t have many customers.

"You redneck son of a bitch," she said. The crowd around us drew in a collective breath. (Terry was almost as unpredictable as a bloodhead.)