Reckless
Chapter 2
More than a few people in my life had died. I'd lost my parents to a flash flood, my grandmother to old age, and my aunt to cancer. But the thing is, no matter how tough you are, no matter how closed off you let yourself become, death still hits you like a ton of bricks dropped from fifty stories. You never expect it even though you know it happens to everyone. It's sort of like this big black cat, ready to scamper across your path and blacken your whole…everything. I was getting ready for work, the morning shift on a Thursday, when Sam called me. I threw my work shirt on over a crappy "silk-feel" bra from Wal-Mart and grabbed the cordless phone off the hook. Outside, I could hear rain drops banging on the tin roof.
"Sookie," Sam said in a sad voice that would have pulled at my heart if I'd let it. I didn't.
"I'm coming, Sam," I looked at the clock, but I knew I wasn't late yet.
"Stay home, Sookie. We're closing for the day. Maudette…she…" Sam paused and I tensed. The sound of his voice plus the mention of Maudette made me want to grab for my package of cigarettes though I had vowed to Gran that I would never smoke in the house.
"She what? What?" I almost yelled into the phone. I don't take bad news well, but shit, who does?
"She's dead, Sookie." Sam frowned. I could hear it in his voice. I almost dropped the receiver. I sank into the fluffy mattress that had once belonged to my Gran. I was definitely reaching for the cigarettes now, vow be damned.
"She…" I whimpered into the phone in a pathetic voice that didn't belong to me. I put a cigarette between my lips but I didn't light it. My hands were shaking.
"She…it looks like Maudette was murdered, Sook," Sam went on.
That did it. I was up again, on my feet, off the bed. I felt a rage boil inside me that hadn't been there a second ago. She was murdered? Who was she murdered by? Where could I find them? How could I kill them right the fuck back?! I dropped the cigarette because it would only serve to calm me down. I didn't need to be calm. I needed to be mad. Angry. Batshit insane. I needed to hurt something, bad, and I needed to do it soon.
"Sookie, are you still there? I'm coming over." Sam was still talking into the phone and I hung it up. Talking was done. I threw the phone onto the bed and stalked into the living room. I didn't know what to do with myself, how to relieve the pressure that was very clearly building up inside me. Steam was going to start rolling out of my ears.
Maudette was the only girl I knew that was remotely close to a friend. She wasn't particularly smart, and she didn't know jack about my mind-reading ability. She liked taking field trips to the vampire bars in Shreveport and then coming back to tell me all the gory details. I wondered, instantly, if one of them had followed her home. I twirled around in a circle in the middle of my living room and finally threw my foot into the rickety old coffee table. I wasn't wearing shoes and it smashed into several large chunks, spraying me with splintered wood. But fuck, who cared if I had a damn splinter in my toe? My only friend in the world was goddamn dead. Dead as dead could be! I thought about Jason's rifle sitting in the shed. Vengeance boiled me up. I didn't have anyone to kill but I knew I wanted to kill somebody.
The knock on my back door almost sent me screaming through the ceiling.
"WHAT?" I barked at the closed porch door. It bounced open, and there was Sam Merlotte. His hair was soaked and his jean jacket was damp. He looked like a wet dog and smelled like one too. I squared my hands into fists and stared at him.
"Chere," Sam said. He was the only person in the world that called me by a pet name. I let him because he was a good man, almost friend-like. I hadn't let him into my head, into my heart, but I'd thought about it a few times. Sam was great about getting me out of some mean scrapes.
"Don't," I hissed, because I wasn't in the mood. I was angry and I needed to stay that way. "Tell me what happened."
"They don't know. They found her in her apartment. She was…she'd been…they believe she spent the night with company."
"No surprise there," I shrugged. Maudette typically had male company seven nights a week. She'd even invite them over after hauling ass through a double shift. Maudette Pickens was never too tired to get laid.
"They found vampire bites on her thigh, but they don't know if that was what killed her." Sam sighed. He remained standing in the doorway, dripping on Gran's welcome mat.
"I'll just have to find out," I said resolutely. Maybe I could talk to that vampire that came into the bar, Bill. Maybe he'd know something about Maudette. Who knows, maybe he'd killed her himself, drank her blood to replenish what he'd lost.
I felt sick, and I had to sit down.
Sam crossed the living room floor even though he was still wet and a complete mess. I let him get close because I felt nauseous. He was one of the few people in the living world that I'd let get near me, and even Sam Merlotte couldn't get too close. I'd never hit Sam before but I had no qualms about doing so if the circumstances were right. He knelt on the floor in front of me and, after gazing up at my face for a few seconds, took my foot in his hand. The splinter was sticking out of my big toe and it had bled a little too. It was a fairly awesome chunk of wood in my skin. It was so big, Sam didn't even need tweezers. He pinched the sliver between his thumb and forefinger and yanked it out of my skin. I flinched, but that was all.
"I'm going to find out what happened to her, Sam," I said again. He touched my knee and looked at me with forlorn longing or something fairly similar. I didn't have time for that. I got to my feet and stomped back to the bedroom to change clothes. If I didn't have to work, I was going to wear something more appropriate for hunting down a killer. I was going to wear something black.
"I'm going with you," Sam yelled from the living room.
"You're not!" I called back. I pulled a pair of blue jeans from the closet, and yanked them on underneath a black low-cut v-neck long sleeve shirt.
"I am," Sam said. He was standing right in my bedroom door, looking at me with puppy-dog blue eyes. His jaw was set and determined. I slid my feet into a pair of black knee high boots and threw on a jacket.
"I'm going to find out who-the-hell killed her, Sam," I said. "And then I'm going to kill the son of a bitch."
"All the more reason for me to go with you, chere," Sam said. "Come on. Have a little faith in me, okay?"
"Yeah," I muttered. "Right."
Sam drove me to Maudette's first, where we were met with tons of yellow police tape and a cool stare from Sheriff Dearborn. Bud Dearborn and I were what you might call enemies. He'd arrested me more than once for assault charges, though none of them ever stuck. I could always say I was defending myself, and since the fights happened to be with men fairly often, I usually won and the charges were dropped. After all, what kind of man wants to admit that some girl beat him up? Except, you know, I often did beat him up. Sam rolled down the car window and asked if the Sheriff had learned anything new about the case. The sheriff shook his head sadly and said it definitely looked like a homicide.
There was that rage again.
"I'm going to buy you a beer, Sookie, and then we're going to open the bar. People need a place to gab about Maudette, and you need a place to…cool off." He looked at me while he spoke.
"I don't want to cool off! I want to find out who murdered my friend!" I roared at him.
"You think that attitude is going to help anybody, Sook?" Sam retorted.
"Maybe," I growled under my breath.
"Yeah, or maybe not," Sam grunted.
Sam drove to the bar and parked beside his trailer. I got out of the trunk and trudged through the rain to the employee entrance. It was locked, so I had to wait for Sam to join me with the keys. Rain splattered against my neck and face, cooling off more than my temper. I shivered and sighed until Sam pushed open the back door and swept through the hallway. He unlocked his office and went in. I took off down to the front of the restaurant and sat down on Jade Bodehouse's barstool. I thought about getting as drunk as she was and just not caring about anything. Sometimes, it just seemed like a better route than the one I was on.
I let my shoulders fall and the tension sank from them into my back muscles. I couldn't think about anything but Maudette Pickens, staring up at the ceiling in her apartment with unseeing eyes, her cold naked skin completely exposed to the world. I could see vampire bites on her leg in my head and that just made the whole image that much worse. In the minute or so of time between sitting at the bar and having Sam pour me a beer from the tap, I thought about crying, screaming, stabbing someone, and stabbing myself. I wasn't sure what to do with all the anger, so I washed it down by chugging the piss-colored liquid in front of me.
"She was my friend," I said to Sam in a moment of weakness. He sat down on the stool beside me and touched my hand. I looked at his fingers touching mine, and I thought about all the comfort I could probably squeeze out of him. I could use a little comfort. I could use a little of that distracting sex time that Maudette seemed to enjoy so much.
"I'm your friend, Sook," Sam said gently. He seemed to stare right into me.
"Okay, yeah, that's enough," I said. I shrugged him off, swatted his hand away. I'm not a touchy-feely kind of girl. I don't need any sympathy from anybody.
Sam opened the bar at noon, and I worked hard, slinging beer and chicken baskets and hamburgers. The restaurant buzzed with talk of Maudette, and I couldn't block them out. I had tremors in my hands by five thirty, when I decided to take a smoke break out back. The rain had tapered off and though it was cold, I sat the bed of Sam's pick up truck and lit a cigarette. I swung my legs over the gravel and tried not to think about anything. I closed my eyes and stared at the dark insides of my eyelids. I took a long drag on the cigarette and let the smoke roll out of my nose in one long wave.
"Smoking is bad for you, Sookie," I heard a raspy male voice before someone grabbed me by the leg and yanked me off the truck bed and into the gravel.