Dead and Gone

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