Dead as a Doornail

minutes after everyone resumed his table, Dennis Pettibone, the arson investigator, came in to have a visit with Arlene. (The busboy was still mopping the hall, in fact.) Sam had bound my ribs with some Ace bandages in his office, and I walked out, slowly and carefully, to ask Dennis what he wanted to drink.
    We were lucky that there weren’t any outsiders. No college guys from Ruston, no truckers from Shreveport, no relatives who’d dropped in for a beer with a cousin or an uncle.
    We were lucky there weren’t many women. I don’t know why, but I imagined a woman would be more likely to get squeamish about Charles’s execution. In fact, I felt pretty squeamish about it, when I wasn’t counting my lucky stars I was still alive.
    And Eric was lucky when he dashed into the bar about thirty minutes later, because Sam didn’t have any more stakes handy. As jittery as everyone was, some foolhardy soul would have volunteered to take out Eric: but he wouldn’t have come out of it relatively unscathed, as those who’d tackled Charles had.
    And Eric was also lucky that the first words out of his mouth were “Sookie, are you all right?” In his anxiety, he grabbed me, one hand on either side of my waist, and I cried out.
    “You’re hurt,” he said, and then realized five or six men had jumped to their feet.
    “I’m just sore,” I said, making a huge effort to look okay. “Everything’s fine. This here’s my friend Eric,” I said a little loudly. “He’s been trying to get in touch with me, and now I know why it was so urgent.” I met the eyes of each man, and one by one, they dropped back into their seats.
    “Let’s us go sit and talk,” I said very quietly.
    “Where is he? I will stake the bastard myself, no matter what Hot Rain sends against me.” Eric was furious.
    “It’s been taken care of,” I hissed. “Will you chill ?”
    With Sam’s permission, we went to his office, the only place in the building that offered both chairs and privacy. Sam was back behind the bar, perched on a high stool with his leg on a lower stool, managing the bartending himself.
    “Bill searched his database,” Eric said proudly. “The bastard told me he came from Mississippi, so I wrote him down as one of Russell’s discarded pretty boys. I had even called Russell, to ask him if Twining had worked well for him. Russell said he had so many new vampires in the mansion, he had only the vaguest recollection of Twining. But Russell, as I observed at Josephine’s Bar, is not the kind of manager I am.”
    I managed a smile. That was definitely true.
    “So when I found myself wondering, I asked Bill to go towork, and Bill traced Twining from his birth as a vampire to his pledge to Hot Rain.”
    “This Hot Rain was the one who made him a vampire?”
    “No, no,” Eric said impatiently. “Hot Rain made the pirate’s sire a vampire. And when Charles’s sire was killed during the French and Indian War, Charles pledged himself to Hot Rain. When Hot Rain was dissatisfied with Long Shadow’s death, he sent Charles to exact payment for the debt he felt was owed.”
    “Why would killing me cancel the debt?”
    “Because he decided after listening to gossip and much reconnoitering that you were important to me, and that your death would wound me the way Long Shadow’s had him.”
    “Ah.” I could not think of one thing to say. Not one thing.
    At last I asked, “So Hot Rain and Long Shadow were doing the deed, once upon a time?”
    Eric said, “Yes, but it wasn’t the sexual connection, it was the . . . the affection. That was the valuable part of the bond.”
    “So because this Hot Rain decided the fine you paid him for Long Shadow’s death just didn’t give him closure, he sent Charles to do something equally painful to you.”
    “Yes.”
    “And Charles got to Shreveport, kept his ears open, found out about me, decided my death would fill the bill.”
    “Apparently.”
    “So he heard about the shootings, knew Sam is a shifter, and shot Sam so there’d be a good reason for him to come to Bon Temps.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s real, real complicated. Why didn’t Charles just jump me some night?”
    “Because he wanted it to look like an accident. He didn’t want blame attached to a vampire at all, because not onlydid he not want to get caught, he didn’t want Hot Rain to incur any penalty.”
    I closed my eyes. “He set fire to my house,” I said. “Not that poor Marriot guy. I bet Charles