Dead to the World

try not to intervene in events when my only connection comes through my telepathy. If I stuck my oar in every time I learned something that would affect the lives around me (like knowing the parish clerk was embezzling, or that one of the local detectives took bribes), I wouldn’t be able to live in Bon Temps, and it was my home. But I couldn’t permit this scraggy woman to sell her poison in Sam’s bar.
    She perched on an empty barstool and ordered a beer from Terry. His gaze lingered on her. Terry, too, realized something was wrong about the stranger.
    I came to pick up my next order and stood by her. She needed a bath, and she’d been in a house heated by a wood fireplace. I made myself touch her, which always improved my reception. Where was the blood? It was in her coat pocket. Good.
    Without further ado, I dumped a glass of wine down her front.
    “Dammit!” she said, jumping off the stool and patting ineffectually at her chest. “You are the clumsiest-ass woman I ever saw!”
    “ ’Scuse me,” I said abjectly, putting my tray on the bar and meeting Terry’s eyes briefly. “Let me put some soda on that.” Without waiting for her permission, I pulled her coat down her arms. By the time she understood what I was doing and began to struggle, and tug, I had taken charge of the coat. I tossed it over the bar to Terry. “Put some soda on that, please,” I said. “Make sure the stuff in her pockets didn’t get wet, too.” I’d used this ploy before. I was lucky it was cold weather and she’d had the stuff in her coat, not in her jeans pocket. That would have taxed my inventiveness.
    Under the coat, the woman was wearing a very old Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. She began shivering, and I wondered if she’d been sampling more conventional drugs. Terry made a show of patting soda on the wine stain. Following my hint, he delved into the pockets. He looked down at his hand with disgust, and I heard a clink as he threw the vials in the trash can behind the bar. He returned everything else to her pockets.
    She’d opened her mouth to shriek at Terry when she realized she really couldn’t. Terry stared directly at her, daring her to mention the blood. The people around us watched with interest. They knew something was up, but not what, because the whole thing had gone down very quickly. When Terry was sure she wasn’t going to start yelling, he handed me the coat. As I held it so she could slide her arms in, Terry told her, “Don’t you come back here no more.”
    If we kept throwing people out at this rate, we wouldn’t have many customers.
    “You redneck son of a bitch,” she said. The crowd around us drew in a collective breath. (Terry was almost as unpredictable as a bloodhead.)
    “Doesn’t matter to me what you call me,” he said. “I guess an insult from you is no insult at all. You just stay away.” I expelled a long breath of relief.
    She shoved her way through the crowd. Everyone in the room marked her progress toward the door, even Mickey the vampire. In fact, he was doing something with a device in his hands. It looked like one of those cell phones that can take a picture. I wondered whom he was sending it. I wondered if she’d make it home.
    Terry pointedly didn’t ask how I’d known the scruffy woman had something illegal in her pockets. That was another weird thing about the people of Bon Temps. The rumors about me had been floating around as long as I could remember, from when I was little and my folks put me through the mental health battery. And yet, despite the evidence at their disposal, almost everyone I knew would much rather regard me as a dim and peculiar young woman than acknowledge my strange ability. Of course, I was careful not to stick it in their faces. And I kept my mouth shut.
    Anyway, Terry had his own demons to fight. Terry subsisted on some kind of government pension, and he cleaned Merlotte’s early in the morning, along with a couple of other businesses. He stood in for Sam three or four times a month. The rest of his time was his own, and no one seemed to know what he did with it. Dealing with people exhausted Terry, and nights like tonight were simply not good for him.
    It was lucky he wasn’t in Merlotte’s the next night, when all hell broke loose.