Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

have it in for her. What, you don’t think she’s good enough for Sam?”
    “No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. Tell her I …” I automatically started to say I was sorry I couldn’t oblige her, and then I realized that would be a big fat lie. “I’m just … unable to be of assistance. She can do her own proposing. Good-bye, Alcide.” Without waiting to hear his response, I hung up.
    Had his enforcer wrapped Alcide around her little finger, or what?
    “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I meant Alcide or Jannalynn or both of them.
    I fumed as I gathered my few things together. Help that bitch propose to Sam? When Hell froze over. When pigs flew! Plus, as I’dtold Alcide, if I’d been fool enough to go out to Mimosa Lake, she’d have staged some drama, for sure.
    As I locked Eric’s kitchen door behind me and stomped out to my car in my now-painful high heels, I said words that had seldom crossed my lips before. I slammed my car door shut behind me, earning a sharp look from a sleek, well-groomed neighbor of Eric’s who was weeding the flower bed around her mailbox.
    “Next people will be asking me to be a surrogate mom for their babies, cause it would be inconvenient for them to carry their own,” I said, sneering in an unattractive way into my rearview mirror. That reminded me of Tara, and I tried her number again, but with no better result.
    I pulled in behind my house about two o’clock. Dermot’s car was still there. When I saw home, it was like I gave myself permission to run into a wall of weariness. It felt good that my great-uncle would be waiting for me. I grabbed my little bag of dirty clothes and my purse and trudged to the back door.
    Tossing the clothes bag on the top of the washer on the back porch, I put my hand on the knob of the kitchen door, registering as I did so that two people were waiting inside.
    Maybe Claude was back? Maybe all the problems in Faery had been solved, and everyone at Hooligans would be returning to the wonderful world of the fae. How many problems would that leave me with? Maybe only three or four big ones.
    I was feeling honestly optimistic when I pushed the door open and registered the identity of the two men seated at the table.
    Definitely an OSM. One man was Dermot, whom I’d expected. The other was Mustapha, whom I hadn’t.
    “Geez Louise, where have you been?” I thought I was going to yell, but it came out as a startled wheeze.
    “Sookie,” he said, in his deep voice.
    “We thought you were dead! We were scared sick about you! What happened?”
    “Take a deep breath,” Mustapha said. “Sit down and just … take a breath. I got some things to tell you. I can’t give you a full answer. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s really a life or a death.”
    His statement cut off the next seven questions poised to pour off my tongue. Tossing my purse on the counter, I pulled out a chair, sat, and took a deep breath as he’d advised me. I gave him all my attention. For the first time, I absorbed his ragged appearance. Mustapha’s grooming had always been meticulous. It was a shock to see him rumpled, his precise haircut uneven, his boots scuffed. “Did you see who killed that girl?” I asked. I had to.
    He looked at me, looked hard. He didn’t answer.
    “Did you kill that girl?” I tried again.
    “I did not.”
    “And because of this situation you referred to, you can’t tell me who did.”
    Silence.
    I was sickeningly afraid that Mustapha was trying to tell me, without spelling it out, that Eric had killed her—had ducked out of the house after I’d shut myself in the bathroom. Eric could have lost his temper, projected his anger with himself onto Kym Rowe, and tried to make things right between him and me by snapping her neck. No matter how many times during the previous night I’d told myself such a premise was ridiculous—Eric had great control and was veryintelligent, he was simply too aware of his neighbors and the police to do such a lawless thing, and such an act would simply be irrational—I’d never been able to tell myself that Eric wouldn’t have killed her simply because doing so was wrong.
    This afternoon, all those bad thoughts I had entertained came crashing back as I stared at Mustapha.
    If Mustapha had not been a Were, I would have sat on his chest until I read the answer in his brain. As it was, I could only get an impression of the turmoil in his head, and