Sookie 09 Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online

you can completely reconcile with someone who’s shot you.”
    Though I’d answered the phone by my bed and was still comfortably prone, I found it impossible to go back to sleep after we’d hung up. I’d hated to hear the pain in Sam’s voice. Sam had enough to fret about without troubling him with my problems, so I hadn’t even seriously considered bringing up the knife incident, though I would have been relieved to share my worries with Sam.
    I was up and dressed by eight o’clock, early for me. Though I was moving and thinking, I felt as rumpled and wrinkled as my bedsheets. I wished someone could yank me smooth and orderly, the way I yanked the sheets. Amelia was home (I checked to see if her car was parked out back when I made the coffee) and I’d glimpsed Octavia shuffling into the hall bathroom, so it was shaping up to be a typical morning, as mornings went nowadays at my house.
    The pattern was broken by a knocking at the front door. Usually I’m warned by the crunching of the gravel driveway, but in my heavier-than-usual morning fog, I’d missed it.
    I looked through the peephole to see a man and a woman, both dressed in proper business suits. They didn’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses or home invaders. I reached out to them mentally and found no hostility or anger, only curiosity.
    I opened the door. I smiled brilliantly. “Can I help you?” I said. The cold air gusted around my bare feet.
    The woman, who was probably in her early forties, smiled back. Her brown hair had a little gray in it and was cut in a simple chin-length style. She’d parted it very precisely. Her pantsuit was charcoal with a black sweater underneath, and her shoes were black. She carried a black bag, which wasn’t exactly like a purse, more like a laptop case.
    She held out her hand to shake, and when I touched her, I knew more. It was hard to keep the shock off my face. “I’m from the New Orleans office of the FBI,” she said, which is a bombshell of an opener for your average conversation. “I’m Agent Sara Weiss. This is Special Agent Tom Lattesta from our Rhodes office.”
    “You’re here about . . . ?” I kept my face pleasantly blank.
    “May we come in? Tom’s come all the way from Rhodes to talk to you, and we’re letting all your warm air out.”
    “Sure,” I said, though I was far from sure. I was trying hard to get a fix on their intent, but it wasn’t easy. I could only tell they weren’t there to arrest me or anything drastic like that.
    “Is this a convenient time?” Agent Weiss asked. She implied she’d be delighted to come back later, though I knew that wasn’t true.
    “This is as good as any,” I said. My grandmother would have given me a sharp look for my ungraciousness, but then, Gran had never been questioned by the FBI. This was not exactly a social call. “I do have to leave for work pretty soon,” I added to give myself an escape hatch.
    “That’s bad news, about your boss’s mother,” Lattesta said. “Did the big announcement go well at your bar?” From his accent, I could tell he’d been born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and from his knowledge of Sam’s whereabouts and identity, he’d done his homework, down to investigating the place I worked.
    The sick feeling that had started up in my stomach intensified. I had a moment of wanting Eric there so badly it made me a little dizzy, and then I looked out the window at the sunshine and felt only anger at my own longing.
This is what you get,
I told myself.
    “Having werewolves around makes the world more interesting, doesn’t it?” I said. The smile popped onto my face, the smile that said I was really strained. “I’ll take your coats. Please, have a seat.” I indicated the couch, and they settled on it. “Can I get you some coffee or some iced tea?” I said, thanking Gran’s training for keeping the words flowing.
    “Oh,” Weiss said. “Some iced tea would be wonderful. I know it’s cold outside, but I drink