Dead Reckoning

for Victor.
    And that was why Miriam was sitting in the club tonight. I tried to get inside her head. When I carefully felt around the edges, I met with a sort of white fog. She was drugged, though I didn’t know what sort of drug she’d taken or whether she’d been willing or coerced.
    “Yes, of course,” Victor said, and I pulled myself back into the here and now with a jerk. While I’d zoned out in Miriam’s head, the vampires had stayed on the topic of Red Rita. “While she’s settling in next door, I thought it would be appropriate to build up the area of Louisiana that abuts her territory. I opened the human place, and this one.” Victor was practically purring.
    “You own Vic’s Redneck Roadhouse,” I said numbly. Of course! I should have known. Was Victor compiling reasons for me to want him dead? Naturally, economics should have nothing to do with life and death, but all too often the two were definitely linked.
    “Yes,” Victor said, grinning at me. He was just as merry as a department store Santa. “You’ve been by?” He replaced his glass on the table.
    “Nope, too busy,” I said.
    “But I heard business at Merlotte’s has fallen off?” Victor tried a look of faux concern on for size, discarded it. “If you need a job, Sookie, I’ll put in a good word with my manager at the Redneck Roadhouse . . . unless you’d prefer to work here? Wouldn’t that be fun!”
    I had to take a deep breath. There was a long moment’s silence. For that moment, everything hung in the balance.
    With an amazing control, Eric spackled his rage away behind a wall, at least temporarily. He said, “Sookie is well suited where she works now, Victor. If she were not, she would come to live with me and perhaps work at Fangtasia. She is a modern American woman and used to supporting herself.” Eric said this as if he were proud of my independence, though I knew that wasn’t the case. He really couldn’t understand why I persisted in keeping my job. “While I’m discussing my female associates, Pam tells me that you disciplined her. It’s not customary to discipline a sheriff’s second. Surely that should be left for her master to do.” Eric allowed his voice to have a slight edge.
    “You weren’t here,” Victor protested smoothly. “And she showed my doormen great disrespect by insisting she should come inside before you did for a security check, as if we would permit anything in our club to threaten our most powerful sheriff.”
    “Did you have business you wanted to discuss?” Eric said. “Not that it isn’t wonderful seeing what you’ve done here. However . . .” He let his voice trail off, as if he were simply too polite to say, “I have better fish to fry.”
    “Of course, thanks for reminding me,” Victor said. He leaned forward to pick up the smoky gray stemmed glass, refilled by a server so that it was brimming with dark red liquid. “I’m sorry, I haven’t offered you a drink yet. Some blood for you, Eric, Pam?”
    Pam had taken advantage of their conversation to glance at Miriam, who looked as though she were going to keel over any second . . . and maybe not get up again. Pam pulled her eyes away from the young woman and concentrated on Victor. She shook her head mutely.
    “Thank you for the offer, Victor,” Eric began, “but . . .”
    “I know you’ll raise a glass with me. The law prevents me from offering you a drink from Mindy or Mark since they’re not registered donors, and I’m all about being law-abiding.” He smiled at Mindy and Mark, who grinned back. Idiots. “Sookie, what will you have?”
    Eric and Pam were obliged to accept the offer of synthetic blood, but because I was only a human, I was allowed to insist I wasn’t thirsty. If he’d offered me country-fried steak and fried green tomatoes, I would’ve said I wasn’t hungry.
    Luis beckoned to one of the servers, and the man vanished to reappear with some TrueBlood. The bottles were on a large tray, along with the dark, fancy stemware matching Victor’s. “I’m sure the bottles don’t appeal to your aesthetic sense,” Victor said. “They offend me.”
    Like all the servers, the man who brought the drinks was human, a handsome guy in a leather loincloth (even smaller than Luis’s leather shorts) and high boots. A sort of rosette pinned to his loincloth read “Colton.” His eyes were a startling gray. When he placed the tray on the table and unloaded it, he was thinking about someone named