Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

weren’t exactly buddies anymore. We weren’t exactly enemies, either. But we could never seem to be happy with each other at the same time.
    “Sookie,” Alcide said in his deep voice. “How you doing?”
    “I’m okay. I don’t know if you’ve heard what happened here at Eric’s last night …”
    “Yeah, I heard something about it.”
    No surprise there. Who needed the Internet, when you had the supes around? “Then you know Mustapha is missing.”
    “Too bad he’s not pack. We’d find him.”
    Pointed, much? “After all, he’s a werewolf,” I said briskly. “And the police do want him. I know he could explain everything if he’d just come in to talk to them. So maybe if someone in the pack sees him somewhere, you could let me know? He called me—or at least someone using his phone did. I missed the call, and I’m really worried about him.”
    “I’ll let you know if I find out anything,” Alcide promised. “I need to talk to you about something else, though.”
    I waited to hear what he had in mind.
    “Sookie, you still there?”
    “Yes, I’m just waiting.”
    “I’m hearing a complete lack of enthusiasm.”
    “Well, considering last time.” I didn’t even need to finish the sentence. Finding Alcide naked in my bed had not endeared him to me. There was a lot to like about the werewolf, but his timing had never matched mine and he’d taken some bad advice.
    “Okay, I was wrong there. We had a good result from you acting as our shaman, but I was wrong to ask you to do it, and I freely acknowledge that.” Alcide said that kind of proudly.
    Had he joined Werewolf Manipulators Anonymous? I looked at myself in the mirror and widened my eyes, to let my reflection know what I thought about the conversation.
    “Good to hear that,” I said. “What’s up?”
    Rueful chuckle. Charming rueful chuckle. “Well, you’re right, Sookie, I do have a favor to ask you.”
    I showed myself Amazed in the mirror. “Do tell,” I said politely.
    “You know my pack enforcer has been going out with your boss for a while.”
    “I know that.” Cut to the chase.
    “Well, she wants you to help her out with something, and since you two have had your differences … for whatever reason … she asked me if I’d call you.”
    Sneaky Jannalynn. This was like a double … fake something. It was true I liked Jannalynn much less than I did Alcide. It was also true (though perhaps Alcide didn’t know this) that Jannalynn suspected my relationship with Sam was far more than it should be between an employee and her boss. If this were the fifties, she’d be checking Sam’s collars for lipstick stains. (Did people do that anymore? Why did women kiss collars, anyway? Besides, Sam almost always wore T-shirts.)
    “What does she want me to help her with?” I asked, hoping my voice was suitably neutral.
    “She’s going to propose to Sam, and she wants you to help her set the stage.”
    I sat down on the end of the bed. I didn’t want to make faces in the mirror anymore. “She wants me to help her ask Sam to marry her?” I said slowly. I’d helped Andy Bellefleur propose to Halleigh, but I couldn’t imagine Jannalynn wanting me to hide an engagement ring in a basket of French fries.
    “She wants you to get Sam to drive down to Mimosa Lake,” Alcide said. “She’s borrowed a cottage down there, and she wants to surpriseSam with a dinner, kind of romantic, you know. I guess she’d spring the question there.” Alcide sounded oddly unenthusiastic or perhaps unconvinced that he should be relaying this request.
    “No,” I said immediately. “I won’t do it. She’ll have to get Sam there on her own.” I could just envision Sam imagining that I wanted him to go out to the lake with me, only to be confronted by Jannalynn and whatever she thought of as a romantic dinner—live rabbits they could chase together, maybe. The whole scenario made me acutely uncomfortable. I could feel a flush of anger creeping up my neck.
    Alcide said, “Sookie, that’s not …”
    “Not helpful or obliging? I don’t want to be, Alcide. There’s just too much room for disaster in that plan. Plus, I don’t think you understand Jannalynn too well.” What I wanted to say was, “I think she’s trying to get me somewhere alone to kill me, or to stage some scene to make me look guilty.” But I didn’t.
    There was a long silence.
    “I guess Jannalynn was right,” he said, letting his dismay into his voice. “You do