Living Dead in Dallas (9 page)

“That’s the one, Bethany,” I whispered. “What do you remember about him?”

“Oh, him,” Bethany said out loud, startling me so much I almost jumped out of my chair. In her mind, she turned to look at Farrell, thinking of him. He’d had two synthetic bloods, O positive, and he’d left her a tip.

There was a crease between Bethany’s eyebrows as she became focused on my request. She was trying hard now, searching her memory. Bits of the evening began to compact, so she could reach the parts containing the memory of the brown-haired vampire. “He went back to the bathroom with the blond,” she said, and I saw in her mind the image of the blond tattooed vampire, the very young-looking one. If I’d been an artist, I could have drawn him.

“Young vampire, maybe sixteen. Blond, tattoo,” I murmured to Stan, and he looked surprised. I barely caught that, having so much to concentrate on—this was like trying to juggle—but I did think surprise was the flash of feeling on Stan’s face. That was puzzling.

“Sure he was a vampire?” I asked Bethany.

“He drank the blood,” she said flatly. “He had that pale skin. He gave me the creeps. Yes, I’m sure.”

And he’d gone into the bathroom with Farrell. I was disturbed. The only reason a vampire would enter a bathroom was if there were a human inside he wanted to have sex with, or drink from, or (any vamp’s favorite) do both simultaneously. Submerging myself again in Bethany’s recollections, I watched her serve a few more customers, no one I recognized, though I got as good a look as I could at the other patrons. Most of them seemed like harmless tourist types. One of them, a dark-complexioned man with a bushy mustache, seemed familiar, so I tried to note his companions: a tall, thin man with shoulder-length blond hair and a squatty woman with one of the worst haircuts I’d ever seen.

I had some questions to ask Stan, but I wanted to finish up with Bethany first. “Did the cowboy-looking vampire come out again, Bethany?”

“No,” she said after a perceptible pause. “I didn’t see him again.” I checked her carefully for blank spots in her mind; I could never replace what had been erased, but I might know if her memory had been tampered with. I found nothing. And she was trying to remember, I could tell. I could sense her straining to recall another glimpse of Farrell. I realized, from the sense of her straining, that I was losing control of Bethany’s thoughts and memories.

“What about the young blond one? The one with the tattoos?”

Bethany pondered that. She was about half out of her trance now. “I didn’t see him neither,” she said. A name slid through her head.

“What’s that?” I asked, keeping my voice very quiet and calm.

“Nothing! Nothing!” Bethany’s eyes were wide open now. Her haircut was over: I’d lost her. My control was far from perfect.

She wanted to protect someone; she wanted him not to go through the same thing she was going through. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking the name, and I caught it. I couldn’t quite understand why she thought this man would know something else, but she did. I knew no purpose would be served by letting her know I’d picked up on her secret, so I smiled at her and told Stan, without turning to look at him, “She can go. I’ve gotten everything.”

I absorbed the look of relief on Bethany’s face before I turned to look at Stan. I was sure he realized I had something up my sleeve, and I didn’t want him to say anything. Who can tell what a vampire is thinking when
the vamp is being guarded? But I had the distinct feeling Stan understood me.

He didn’t speak out loud, but another vampire came in, a girl who’d been about Bethany’s age when she went over. Stan had made a good choice. The girl leaned over Bethany, took her hand, smiled with fangs fully retracted, and said, “We’ll take you home now, okay?”

“Oh, great!” Bethany’s relief was written in neon on her forehead. “Oh, great,” she said again, less certainly. “Ah, you really are going to my house? You . . .”

But the vampire had looked directly into Bethany’s eyes and now she said, “You won’t remember anything about today or this evening except the party.”

“Party?” Bethany’s voice sounded sluggish. Only mildly curious.

“You went to a party,” the vampire said as she led Bethany from the room. “You went to a great party, and you met a cute guy there. You’ve been with him.” She was still murmuring to Bethany as they went out. I hoped she was giving her a good memory.

“What?” Stan asked, when the door shut behind the two.

“Bethany thought the club bouncer would know more. She watched him go into the men’s room right on the heels of your friend Farrell and the vampire you didn’t know.” What
I
didn’t know, and hardly liked to ask Stan, was whether vampires ever had sex with each other. Sex and food were so tied together in the vampire life system that I couldn’t imagine a vampire having sex with someone nonhuman, that is, someone he couldn’t get blood from. Did vampires ever take blood from each other in noncrisis situations? I knew if a vampire’s life was at stake (har de har) another vampire would donate blood to revive the damaged one, but I had never heard of another situation involving blood exchange. I hardly
liked to ask Stan. Maybe I’d broach the subject with Bill, when we got out of this house.

“What you uncovered in her mind was that Farrell was at the bar, and that he went into the toilet room with another vampire, a young male with long blond hair and many tattoos,” Stan summarized. “The bouncer went into the toilet while the two were in there.”

“Correct.”

There was a sizeable pause while Stan made up his mind about what to do next. I waited, delighted not to hear one word of his inner debate. No flashes, no glimpses.

At least such momentary glimpses into a vampire mind were extremely rare. And I’d never had one from Bill; I hadn’t known it was possible for some time after I’d been introduced to the vampiric world. So his company remained pure pleasure to me. It was possible, for the first time in my life, to have a normal relationship with a male. Of course, he wasn’t a
live
male, but you couldn’t have everything.

As if he knew I’d been thinking of him, I felt Bill’s hand on my shoulder. I put my own over it, wishing I could get up and give him a full-length hug. Not a good idea in front of Stan. Might make him hungry.

“We don’t know the vampire who went in with Farrell,” Stan said, which seemed a little bit of an answer after all that thinking. Maybe he’d imagined giving me a longer explanation, but decided I wasn’t smart enough to understand the answer. I would rather be underestimated than overrated any day. Besides, what real difference did it make? But I filed my question away under facts I needed to know.

“So, who’s the bouncer at the Bat’s Wing?”

“A man called Re-Bar,” Stan said. There was a trace of distaste in the way he said it. “He is a fangbanger.”

So Re-Bar had his dream job. Working with vampires,
working for vampires, and being around them every night. For someone who had gotten fascinated by the undead, Re-Bar had hit a lucky streak. “What could he do if a vampire got rowdy?” I asked, out of sheer curiosity.

“He was only there for the human drunks. We found that a vampire bouncer tended to overuse his strength.”

I didn’t want to think about that too much. “Is Re-Bar here?”

“It will take a short time,” Stan said, without consulting anyone in his entourage. He almost certainly had some kind of mind contact with them. I’d never seen that before, and I was sure Eric couldn’t approach Bill mentally. It must be Stan’s special gift.

While we waited, Bill sat down in the chair next to me. He reached over and took my hand. I found it very comforting, and loved Bill for it. I kept my mind relaxed, trying to maintain energy for the questioning ahead. But I was beginning to frame some worries, very serious worries, about the situation of the vampires of Dallas. And I was concerned about the glimpse I’d had of the bar patrons, especially the man I’d thought I recognized.

“Oh, no,” I said sharply, suddenly recalling where I’d seen him.

The vampires shot to full alert. “What, Sookie?” Bill asked.

Stan looked like he’d been carved from ice. His eyes actually glowed green, I wasn’t just imagining it.

I stumbled all over my words in my haste to explain what I was thinking. “The priest,” I told Bill. “The man that ran away at the airport, the one who tried to grab me. He was at the bar.” The different clothes and setting had fooled me when I was deep into Bethany’s memory, but now I was sure.

“I see,” Bill said slowly. Bill seems to have almost
total recall, and I could rely on him to have the man’s face imprinted in his memory.

“I didn’t think he was really a priest then, and now I know he was at the bar the night Farrell vanished,” I said. “Dressed in regular clothes. Not, ah, the white collar and black shirt.”

There was a pregnant pause.

Stan said, delicately, “But this man, this pretend priest, at the bar, even with two human companions, he could not have taken Farrell if Farrell didn’t want to go.”

I looked directly down at my hands and didn’t say one word. I didn’t want to be the one to say this out loud. Bill, wisely, didn’t speak either. At last, Stan Davis, head vampire of Dallas, said, “Someone went in the bathroom with Farrell, Bethany recalled. A vampire I didn’t know.”

I nodded, keeping my gaze directed elsewhere.

“Then this vampire must have helped to abduct Farrell.”

“Is Farrell gay?” I asked, trying to sound as if my question had just oozed out of the walls.

“He prefers men, yes. You think—”

“I don’t think a thing.” I shook my head emphatically, to let him know how much I wasn’t thinking. Bill squeezed my fingers. Ouch.

The silence was tense until the teenage-looking vamp returned with a burly human, one I’d seen in Bethany’s memories. He didn’t look like Bethany saw him, though; through her eyes, he was more robust, less fat; more glamorous, less unkempt. But he was recognizable as Re-Bar.

It was apparent to me immediately that something was wrong with the man. He followed after the girl vamp readily enough, and he smiled at everyone in the room; but that was off, wasn’t it? Any human who sensed vampire trouble would be worried, no matter how clear his
conscience. I got up and went over to him. He watched me approach with cheerful anticipation.

“Hi, buddy,” I said gently, and shook his hand. I dropped it as soon as I decently could. I took a couple of steps back. I wanted to take some Advil and lie down.

“Well,” I said to Stan, “he sure enough has a hole in his head.”

Stan examined Re-Bar’s skull with a skeptical eye. “Explain,” he said.

“How ya doin’, Mr. Stan?” Re-Bar asked. I was willing to bet no one had ever spoken to Stan Davis that way, at least not in the past five hundred years or so.

“I’m fine, Re-Bar. How are you?” I gave Stan credit for keeping it calm and level.

“You know, I just feel great,” Re-Bar said, shaking his head in wonderment. “I’m the luckiest sumbitch on earth—’scuse me, lady.”

“You’re excused.” I had to force the words out.

Bill said, “What has been done to him, Sookie?”

“He’s had a hole burned in his head,” I said. “I don’t know how else to explain it, exactly. I can’t tell how it was done, because I’ve never seen it before, but when I look in his thoughts, his memories, there’s just a big old ragged hole. It’s like Re-Bar needed a tiny tumor removed, but the surgeon took his spleen and maybe his appendix, too, just to be sure. You know when y’all take away someone’s memory, you replace it with another one?” I waved a hand to show I meant all vampires. “Well, someone took a chunk out of Re-Bar’s mind, and didn’t replace it with anything. Like a lobotomy,” I added, inspired. I read a lot. School was tough for me with my little problem, but reading by myself gave me a means of escape from my situation. I guess I’m self-educated.

“So whatever Re-Bar knew about Farrell’s disappearance is lost,” Stan said.

“Yep, along with a few components of Re-Bar’s personality and a lot of other memories.”

“Is he still functional?”

“Why, yeah, I guess so.” I’d never encountered anything like this, never even realized it was possible. “But I don’t know how effective a bouncer he’ll be,” I said, trying to be honest.

“He was hurt while he was working for us. We’ll take care of him. Maybe he can clean the club after it closes,” Stan said. I could tell from Stan’s voice that he wanted to be sure I was marking this down mentally; that vampires could be compassionate, or at least fair.

“Gosh, that would be great!” Re-Bar beamed at his boss. “Thanks, Mr. Stan.”

“Take him back home,” Mr. Stan told his minion. She departed directly, with the lobotomized man in tow.

“Who could’ve done such a crude job on him?” Stan wondered. Bill did not reply, since he wasn’t there to stick his neck out, but to guard me and do his own detecting when it was required. A tall red-haired female vampire came in, the one who’d been at the bar the night Farrell was taken.

“What did you notice the evening Farrell vanished?” I asked her, without thinking about protocol. She snarled at me, her white teeth standing out against her dark tongue and brilliant lipstick.

Stan said, “Cooperate.” At once her face smoothed out, all expression vanishing like wrinkles in a bedspread when you run your hand over it.

“I don’t remember,” she said finally. So Bill’s ability to recall what he’d seen in minute detail was a personal gift. “I don’t remember seeing Farrell more than a minute or two.”

“Can you do the same thing to Rachel that you did to the barmaid?” Stan asked.

“No,” I said immediately, my voice maybe a little too
emphatic. “I can’t read vampire minds at all. Closed books.”

Bill said, “Can you remember a blond—one of us—who looks about sixteen years old? One with ancient blue tattooing on his arms and torso?”

“Oh, yes,” red-haired Rachel said instantly. “The tattoos were from the time of the Romans, I think. They were crude but interesting. I wondered about him, because I hadn’t seen him coming here to the house to ask Stan for hunting privileges.”

So vamps passing through someone else’s territory were required to sign in at the visitors’ center, so to speak. I filed that away for future reference.