Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (94 page)

And two armed robbers up by the clerk’s platform inside the door.

Holy Moses, why don’t they just give these poor clerks shirts with big targets printed on them?
That was my first thought, detached, as if I were watching a movie with a convenience store robbery. Then I snapped into the here and now, tuned in by the very real strain on the clerk’s face. He was awfully young—a reedy, blotched teenager. And he was facing the two big guys with guns. His hands were in the air, and he was mad as hell. I would have expected blubbering for his life, or incoherence, but this boy was furious.

It was the fourth time he’d been robbed, I read fresh from his brain. And the third time at gunpoint. He was wishing he could grab the shotgun under the seat in his truck behind the store and blast these sumbitches to hell.

And no one acknowledged that I was there. They didn’t seem to know.

Not that I was complaining, okay?

I glanced behind me, to verify that the door to the bathroom had stuck open again, so its sound would not betray me. The best thing for me to do would be to creep out the back door to this place, if I could find it, and run around the building to get Eric to call the police.

Wait a minute. Now that I was thinking of Eric, where was he? Why hadn’t he come in to pay for the gas?

If it was possible to have a foreboding any more ominous than the one I already had, that fit the bill. If Eric hadn’t come in yet, Eric wasn’t coming. Maybe he’d decided to leave. Leave me.

Here.

Alone.

Just like Bill left you
, my mind supplied helpfully. Well, thanks a hell of a lot, Mind.

Or maybe they’d shot him. If he’d taken a head wound . . . and there was no healing a heart that had taken a direct hit with a big-caliber bullet.

There was no point whatsoever in standing there worrying.

This was a typical convenience store. You came in the front door, and the clerk was behind a long counter to your right, up on a platform. The cold drinks were in the refrigerator case that took up the left wall. You were facing three long aisles running the width of the store, plus various special displays and stacks of insulated mugs and charcoal briquettes and birdseed. I was all the way at the back of the store and I could see the clerk (easily) and the crooks (just barely) over the top of the groceries. I had to get out of the store, preferably unseen. I spotted a splintered wooden door, marked “Employees Only” farther along the back wall. It was actually beyond the counter behind which the clerk stood. There was a gap between the end of the counter and the wall, and from the end of my aisle to the beginning of that counter, I’d be exposed.

Nothing would be gained by waiting.

I dropped to my hands and knees and began crawling. I moved slowly, so I could listen, too.

“You seen a blond come in here, about this tall?” the burlier of the two robbers was saying, and all of a sudden I felt faint.

Which blond? Me, or Eric? Or the peroxide blond? Of course, I couldn’t see the height indication. Were they looking for a male vampire or a female telepath? Or . . . after all, I wasn’t the only woman in the world who could get into trouble, I reminded myself.

“Blond woman come in here five minutes ago, bought some cigarettes,” the boy said sullenly. Good for you, fella!

“Naw, that one done drove off. We want the one who was with the vampire.”

Yep, that would be me.

“I didn’t see no other woman,” the boy said. I glanced up a little and saw the reflection off a mirror mounted up in the corner of the store. It was a security mirror so the clerk could detect shoplifters. I thought,
He can see me crouching here. He knows I’m here
.

God bless him. He was doing his best for me. I had to do my best for him. At the same time, if we could avoid getting shot, that would be a very good thing. And where the hell was Eric?

Blessing my borrowed sweatpants and slippers for being soft and silent, I crept deliberately toward the stained wooden “Employees Only” door. I wondered if it creaked. The two robbers were still talking to the clerk, but I blocked out their voices so I could concentrate on reaching the door.

I’d been scared before, plenty of times, but this was right up there with the scariest events of my life. My dad had hunted, and Jason and his buddies hunted, and I’d watched a massacre in Dallas. I knew what bullets could do. Now that I’d reached the end of the aisle, I’d come to the end of my cover.

I peered around the display counter’s end. I had to cross about four feet of open floor to reach the partial shelter of the long counter that ran in front of the cash register. I would be lower and well hidden from the robbers’ perspective, once I crossed that empty space.

“Car pulling in,” the clerk said, and the two robbers automatically looked out the plate glass window to see. If I hadn’t known what he was doing telepathically, I might have hesitated too long. I scuttled across the exposed linoleum faster than I would have believed possible.

“I don’t see no car,” said the less bulky man.

The clerk said, “I thought I heard the bell ring, the one that goes when a car drives across it.”

I reached up and turned the knob on the door. It opened quietly.

“It rings sometimes when there ain’t nobody there,” the boy continued, and I realized he was trying to make noise and hold their attention so I could get out the door. God bless him, all over again.

I pushed the door a little wider, and duck-walked through. I was in a narrow passage. There was another door at the end of it, a door that presumably led to the area behind the convenience store. In the door was a set of keys. They wisely kept the back door locked. From one of a row of nails by the back door hung a heavy camo jacket. I poked my hand down in the pocket on the right and came up with the boy’s keys. That was just a lucky guess. It happens. Clutching them to prevent their jingling, I opened the back door and stepped outside.

There was nothing out here but a battered pickup and a reeking Dumpster. The lighting was poor, but at least there was some light. The blacktop was cracked. Since it was winter, the weeds that had sprouted up from those cracks were dry and bleached. I heard a little sound to my left and drew in a shaky breath after I’d jumped about a foot. The sound was caused by a huge old raccoon, and he ambled off into the small patch of woods behind the store.

I exhaled just as shakily as I’d drawn the air in. I made myself focus on the bunch of keys. Unfortunately, there were about twenty. This boy had more keys than squirrels had acorns. No one on God’s green earth could possibly use this many keys. I flicked through them desperately, and finally selected one that had GM stamped on a black rubber cover. I unlocked the door and reached into the musty interior, which smelled strongly of cigarettes and dogs. Yes, the shotgun was under the seat. I broke it open. It was loaded. Thank God Jason believed in self-defense. He’d showed me how to load and fire his new Benelli.

Despite my new protection, I was so scared, I wasn’t sure I could get around to the front of the store. But I had to scout out the situation, and find out what had happened to Eric. I eased down the side of the building where the old Toyota truck was parked. Nothing was in the back, except a little spot that picked up a stray fraction of light. The shotgun cradled in one arm, I reached down to run a finger over it.

Fresh blood. I felt old and cold. I stood with my head bowed for a long moment, and then I braced myself.

I looked in the driver’s window to find the cab was unlocked. Well, happy days. I opened the door quietly, glanced in. There was a sizeable open box on the front seat, and when I checked its contents, my heart sank so low, I thought it’d come out the bottom of my shoes. On the outside, the box was stamped “Contents: Two.” Now it contained one silver mesh net, the kind sold in “mercenary” magazines, the kind always advertised as “vampire proof.”

That was like calling a shark cage a sure deterrent from shark bites.

Where was Eric? I glanced over the immediate vicinity, but I saw no other trace. I could hear traffic whooshing by on the interstate, but the silence hung over this bleak parking lot.

My eyes lit on a pocketknife on the dash. Yahoo! Carefully placing the shotgun on the front seat, I scooped up the knife, opened it after I’d laid down the shotgun, and I held it ready to sink into the tire. Then I thought twice. A wholehearted tire-slashing was proof someone had been out here while the robbers were inside. That might not be a good thing. I contented myself with poking a single hole in the tire. It was just a smallish hole that might have come from anything, I told myself. If they did drive off, they’d have to stop somewhere down the road. Then I pocketed the knife—I was certainly quite the thief lately—and returned to the shadows around the building. This hadn’t taken as long as you might think, but still it had been several minutes since I’d assessed the situation in the convenience store.

The Lincoln was still parked by the pumps. The gas port was closed, so I knew Eric had finished refueling before something had happened to him. I sidled around the corner of the building, hugging its lines. I found good cover at the front, in the angle formed by the ice machine and the front wall of the store. I risked standing up enough to peek over the top of the machine.

The robbers had come up into the higher area where the clerk stood, and they were beating on him.

Hey, now. That had to stop. They were beating him because they wanted to know where I was hiding, was my guess; and I couldn’t let someone else get beaten up on my behalf.

“Sookie,” said a voice right behind me.

The next instant a hand clapped across my mouth just as I was about to scream.

“Sorry,” Eric whispered. “I should have thought of a better way to let you know I was here.”

“Eric,” I said, when I could speak. He could tell I was calmer, and he moved his hand. “We gotta save him.”

“Why?”

Sometimes vampires just astound me. Well, people, too, but tonight it was a vampire.

“Because he’s getting beaten for our sakes, and they’re probably gonna kill him, and it’ll be our fault!”

“They’re robbing the store,” Eric said, as if I were particularly dim. “They had a new vampire net, and they thought they’d try it out on me. They don’t know it yet, but it didn’t work. But they’re just opportunistic scum.”

“They’re looking for
us,
” I said furiously.

“Tell me,” he whispered, and I did.

“Give me the shotgun,” he said.

I kept a good grip on it. “You know how to use one of these things?”

“Probably as well as you.” But he looked at it dubiously.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I told him. Rather than have a prolonged argument while my new hero was getting internal injuries, I ran in a crouch around the ice machine, the propane gas rack, and through the front door into the store. The little bell over the door rang like crazy, and though with all the shouting they didn’t seem to hear it, they sure paid attention when I fired a blast through the ceiling over their heads. Tiles, dust, and insulation rained down.

It almost knocked me flat—but not quite. I leveled the gun right on them. They were frozen. It was like playing Swing the Statue when I was little. But not quite. The poor pimply clerk had a bloody face, and I was sure his nose was broken, and some of his teeth knocked loose.

I felt a fine rage break out behind my eyes. “Let the young man go,” I said clearly.

“You gonna shoot us, little lady?”

“You bet your ass I am,” I said.

“And if she misses, I will get you,” said Eric’s voice, above and behind me. A big vampire makes great backup.

“The vampire got loose, Sonny.” The speaker was a thinnish man with filthy hands and greasy boots.

“I see that,” said Sonny, the heavier one. He was darker, too. The smaller man’s head was covered with that no-color hair, the kind people call “brown” because they have to call it something.

The young clerk pulled himself up out of his pain and fear and came around the counter as fast as he could move. Mixed with the blood on his face was a lot of white powder from me shooting into the ceiling. He looked a sight.

“I see you found my shotgun,” he said as he passed by me, carefully not getting between the bad guys and me. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, and I heard the tiny beeps as he pressed numbers. His growlly voice was soon in staccato conversation with the police.

“Before the police get here, Sookie, we need to find out who sent these two imbeciles,” Eric said. If I’d been them, I’d have been mighty scared at the tone of his voice, and they seemed to be aware of what an angry vampire could do. For the first time Eric stepped abreast of me and then a little bit ahead, and I could see his face. Burns crisscrossed it like angry strings of poison ivy welts. He was lucky only his face had been bare, but I doubt he was feeling very lucky.

“Come down here,” Eric said, and he caught the eyes of Sonny.

Sonny immediately walked down from the clerk’s platform and around the counter while his companion was gaping.

“Stay,” said Eric. The no-color man squeezed his eyes shut so he couldn’t glimpse Eric, but he opened them just a crack when he heard Eric take a step closer, and that was enough. If you don’t have any extra abilities yourself, you just can’t look a vampire in the eyes. If they want to, they’ll get you.

“Who sent you here?” Eric asked softly.

“One of the Hounds of Hell,” Sonny said, with no inflection in his voice.

Eric looked startled. “A member of the motorcycle gang,” I explained carefully, mindful that we had a civilian audience who was listening with great curiosity. I was getting a great amplification of the answers through their brains.

“What did they tell you to do?”

“They told us to wait along the interstate. There are more fellas waiting at other gas stations.”