Dead as a Doornail

behind me, fumbled for the handle that would open that door. He wouldn’t kill me in front of all those people, would he? Then I remembered the night Eric and Bill had polished off a roomful of men in my house. I remembered it had taken them only three or four minutes. I remembered what the men had looked like afterward.
    “Yes. It was a stroke of luck when you caught the cook, and she confessed. But she didn’t confess to shooting Sam, did she?”
    “No, she didn’t,” I said numbly. “All the others, but not Sam, and the bullet didn’t match.”
    My fingers found the knob. If I turned it, I might live. But I might not. How much did Charles value his own life?
    “You wanted the job here,” I said.
    “I thought there was a good chance I’d come in handy when Sam was out of the picture.”
    “How’d you know I’d go to Eric for help?”
    “I didn’t. But I knew someone would tell him the bar was in trouble. Since that would mean helping you, he would do it. I was the logical one to send.”
    “Why are you doing all this?”
    “Eric owes a debt.”
    He was moving closer, though not very quickly. Maybe he was reluctant to do the deed. Maybe he was hoping for a more advantageous moment, when he could carry me off in silence.
    “It looks like Eric’s found out I’m not from the Jackson nest, as I’d said.”
    “Yeah. You picked the wrong one.”
    “Why? It seemed ideal to me. Many men there; you wouldn’t have seen them all. No one can remember all the men who’ve passed through that mansion.”
    “But they’ve heard Bubba sing,” I said softly. “He sang for them one night. You’d never have forgotten that. I don’t know how Eric found out, but I knew as soon as you said you’d never—”
    He sprang.
    I was on my back on the floor in a split second, but my hand was already in my pocket, and he opened his mouth to bite. He was supporting himself on his arms, courteously trying not to actually lie on top of me. His fangs were fully out, and they glistened in the light.
    “I have to do this,” he said. “I’m sworn. I’m sorry.”
    “I’m not,” I said, and thrust the silver chain into his mouth, using the heel of my hand to snap his jaw shut.
    He screamed and hit at me, and I felt a rib go, and smoke was coming out of his mouth. I scrambled away and did a little yelling of my own. The door flew open, and a flood of bar patrons thundered into the little hallway. Sam shot out of the door of his office like he’d been fired from a cannon, moving very well for a man with a broken leg, and to my amazement he had a stake in his hand. By that time, the screaming vampire was weighted down by so many beefy men in jeans you couldn’t even see him. Charles was trying to bite whoever he could, but his burned mouth was so painful his efforts were weak.
    Catfish Hunter seemed to be on the bottom of the pile, in direct contact. “You pass me that stake here, boy!” he called back to Sam. Sam passed it to Hoyt Fortenberry, who passed it to Dago Guglielmi, who transferred it to Catfish’s hairy hand.
    “We gonna wait for the vampire police, or we gonna take care of this ourselves?” Catfish asked. “Sookie?”
    After a horrified second of temptation, I opened my mouth to say, “Call the police.” The Shreveport police had a squad of vampire policemen, as well as the necessary special transportation vehicle and special jail cells.
    “End it,” said Charles, somewhere below the heaving pile of men. “I failed in my mission, and I can’t abide jails.”
    “Okeydokey,” Catfish said, and staked him.
    After it was over and the body had disintegrated, the men went back into the bar and settled down at the tables where they’d been before they heard the fight going on in the hall. It was beyond strange. There wasn’t much laughing, and there wasn’t much smiling, and no one who’d stayed in the bar asked anyone who’d left what had happened.
    Of course, it was tempting to think this was an echo of the terrible old days, when black men had been lynched if there was even a rumor they’d winked at a white woman.
    But, you know, the simile just didn’t hold. Charles was a different race, true. But he’d been guilty as hell of trying to kill me. I would have been a dead woman in thirty more seconds, despite my diversionary tactic, if the men of Bon Temps hadn’t intervened.
    We were lucky in a lot of ways. There was not one law enforcement person in the bar that night. Not five