Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

So Bill and I came out with the hostage and we were gonna drive off, when this group of four Weres comes up, and the leader, Van—whom I’d seen here, by the way, so I thought he was okay—Van tells us you sent them to get me and I need to come with them, because they’ve found Warren’s body and they want me to verify that it’s really Warren.”
    Alcide turned his back and shook his head from side to side. Mustapha looked down at the floor, his face a map of complex emotions.
    “So Bill headed to the—away, with the hostage, and I got in the car with Van and them, and I realized pretty quick that they were rogues because you wouldn’t have ’em. That Van …” And then I just didn’t want to talk about him anymore.
    “He hit you, huh?” Alcide said, turning back to eye my face. There was a moment of fraught silence. “He rape you?”
    “Didn’t have time,” I said, glad to get that out of the way. “I don’t know where they were taking me, but Mustapha shot the driver and got me out of the car, and here I am. So. Thank you, Mustapha.”
    He bobbed his head, still involved in his own thoughts, his own worry for his friend.
    “Was there a woman with them, kind of quiet, about thirty?”
    “Pixie haircut?”
    Both the men looked blank. “Real short hair, light brown, tall woman?”
    Alcide nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s her! She okay?”
    “Yeah. She was sitting in the passenger front. Who is she?”
    “She’s my undercover,” Alcide said.
    “You have undercover agents?”
    “Yeah, of course. Her name’s Kandace. Kandace Moffett.”
    “Can you please explain all this?” I hated to sound stupid. Telepaths get used to knowing stuff, I guess.
    “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version,” he said, to my surprise. “But come in the bathroom and wash yourself off while I fill you in. Mustapha, man, I owe you.”
    “I know,” Mustapha said. “Just help me find Warren. That’s all I need.”
    Alcide hustled me into a bathroom right off the entrance hall. It was all granite countertops and pure white towels, and I felt like the nastiest thing the cat had ever drug in. Alcide didn’t necessarily mind the blood, because that’s not a Were hang-up, but I sure did. I turned on the shower and stepped under it after shucking my shoes, which were the cleanest things I was wearing. When Alcide’s back was turned,I stepped out of the waitress outfit and let it fall to the floor of the shower. I grabbed a washcloth, soaped it up, and began scrubbing. Alcide resolutely kept his eyes turned away.
    “Start talking,” I reminded him, and he did.
    “After I talked to you about Jannalynn, I began to think about her pretty seriously,” he said. “The more I took her recent actions apart, the more I thought I should look deeper. I figured out that Jannalynn was not telling me the truth about a few things. I wondered if maybe she was skimming off the top at Hair of the Dog.” He shrugged. “Sometimes when she was supposed to be around, she was out of touch. I thought maybe her romance with Sam was going over the top, but when she’d tell me one thing about them, you didn’t seem to know anything about it. And Sam’s your partner, so you’d know, I figured.”
    So he’d called me to talk about Sam and Jannalynn’s “wedding plans,” at least in part to hear my reaction; of course, I’d been completely shocked.
    “I saw her one time when she didn’t see me. She was at a bar way across town, instead of at the Hair. And she was with the rogues I had turned down. I knew she was planning something. I’d had them all over at social evenings at the house, talked to ’em. The only one worth anything was Kandace, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be in a pack. Didn’t like the power struggles. I got to respect that, but I thought she’d be an asset.”
    I thought maybe he’d also liked Kandace’s assets, but that was his business.
    “So I called up Kandace, and I asked her to meet me alone. Without me even bringing it up, she volunteered to tell me what was going on, because it troubled her.”
    Alcide clearly wanted me to give Kandace a virtual pat on the back, so I said, “She must be a good person.”
    He smiled, gratified. “Kandace said Jannalynn wanted to challenge me, defeat me, but first she wanted to get a good toehold in the pack by socking away some money, enlisting pack members to her side, getting some of her own muscle. Her proposal to these rogues was that