In fact, not that many people were out and about in the entire town of Wright. I saw a stout man about Sam’s age putting gas in his car at the filling station. I caught his eye as I drove by, and he turned away pointedly. Perhaps he’d recognized the truck. I saw an elderly woman walking her dog, an equally elderly dachshund. She nodded civilly. I nodded back.
I found Hall Road without any trouble and took a right. It was a dusty stretch of asphalt with a few straggling businesses, places in little faux-adobe structures spaced far apart. I began looking at signs, and it didn’t take long to spot the one that read LOS COLMILLOS COUNTY ANIMAL SHELTER. It stood in front of a very small cement block building. Roofed pens extended in a long line on either side of a concrete run behind the building.
I turned off the motor and jumped out of the truck. I was struck by how quiet it was. Outside any animal shelter, I would expect to hear yapping and barking.
The pens out back were silent.
The front door was unlocked. I took a deep breath, let it out. I steeled myself and pushed it open, left it that way.
I stepped into a little room containing a desk topped with a battered and grimy old computer. There was a phone with an answering machine, half-buried under a pile of folders. A dilapidated file cabinet stood in a corner. In the opposite corner were two huge bags of dog food and some plastic containers of chemicals that I supposed were used to clean the pens. And that was all.
A door in the center of the rear wall stood open. I could see that it allowed access to the runway between the pens where the ownerless dogs were kept.
Had been kept.
They were all dead. I’d stepped through the door with dread in my heart, and that dread was justified. Bundles of bloody fur were in every cage.
I squatted simply because my knees gave way. My face was wet without my even realizing I’d started crying.
I’d seen dead human beings plenty of times, and the sight hadn’t made me feel this awful. I guess, in the back of my mind, I believed most people could defend themselves to some extent, if only by running away. And I also believed people sometimes—sometimes—shared responsibility in the situation that brought about their deaths, if only by making unwise choices. But animals . . . not animals.
I heard another car pull into the parking area. I looked out through the open doors to see the black Ford Focus with the cracked windshield. If I could have felt more frightened, I would have. Its doors opened, and three ill-assorted people got out and approached the animal shelter slowly, their heads swinging from side to side as they sniffed the air. They came through the little room very carefully, the tallest man in the lead.
“What’s happened here, babe?” he said. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and purple eyes. I knew him fairly well. His name was Quinn, and he was a weretiger.
“Someone shot all the dogs,” I said, stating the obvious because I was trying desperately to pull myself together. I hadn’t seen Quinn in weeks, not since he’d tried to visit me at my home. That hadn’t worked out too well.
Quinn knew they were dead already. His sense of smell had told him that. He squatted down by me. “I came to Wright to make a chance to talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be here, with all this death around us.”
One of Quinn’s companions came to stand by him. The two of them were like a pair of amazing bookends. Quinn’s friend was a huge man, a coal black man, with his hair in short dreads. He looked like some exotic animal, and, of course, he was. He stared down at me with an incurious assessment, and then his eyes moved to the sad corpses in the pens, the streaks of blood running everywhere. The blood was beginning to dry at the edges.
Quinn extended his hand to me, and together we stood up.
“I don’t understand why anyone would do this to our brothers,” the black man said, his English clear and crisp but heavily accented.
“It’s because of the wedding today,” I said. “Bernie Merlotte’s younger son is getting married.”
“But a younger son will never change into anything. Only the oldest son.” His accent was sort of French, which made the whole conversation more surrealistic.
“People here don’t seem to know that,” I said. “Or maybe they just don’t care.”
The third wereanimal was pacing outside the pens, circling the area. She would pick up the scents of the shooter. Or shooters. Tears were streaming down her face, and that wouldn’t help her sense of smell. She was also furious. The set of her shoulders was eloquent.
“Babe, I don’t know that this wedding is going to go off without more trouble,” Quinn said. His big hand took mine. “I have a lot to say to you, but it’s going to have to wait until later.”
I nodded. The wedding day of Craig Merlotte and Deidra Lisle had definitely gotten off to a sad start. “Anything that upsets the Merlotte family upsets me. How did you come to be here?” I tried to keep my gaze away from the pitiful, limp forms.
“I was checking the twoey message board for information about the Shreveport area,” Quinn said. “Sam posts on there from time to time, or sometimes I talk to the members of the Long Tooth pack.” The Long Tooth pack was Alcide Herveaux’s. “Someone posted that you were coming to Wright with Sam, and I already knew Trish and Togo here. Texas is part of my territory, you know.” Quinn worked for Special Events, a branch of the national event-planning company E(E)E. Special Events staged important rites of passage for the supernatural community, like vampire weddings and first changes for the two-natured. “I knew Trish has a ranch outside Wright. I decided to take the chance to see you without the deader around.” That would be Eric. “I flew into Dallas, and they picked me up. We were able to track you. I didn’t want anything to happen to you on the way. I should have worried about what would happen when you got to Wright.”
“This town is full of hate,” the man called Togo said.
“I’m afraid so.” I looked up at the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the gleaming skin. He was quite extraordinary. He stood out in these surroundings like a bird of paradise in a wren flock . . . not that there was anything avian about him.
The third wereanimal had finished her prowling, and now she appeared beside us. “I’m Trish Pulaski,” she said. “You must be Sookie. Oh my God and his angels! Who would ever conceive of hurting poor dumb dogs to make a point?” She was lovely, and she was also clearly in her fifties. Her hair was solid gray, thick and curly. She didn’t wear glasses, and her eyes were bright chips of blue in a tan face. Her jeans left no doubt she was in excellent shape. She wasn’t thinking about herself or her companions. She was beside herself with rage and pain. I understood at that moment that the pound was her special project, that she’d raised the money to build it, she came every day to feed the animals, and she’d loved them all.
I said, “They left a sign in Bernie’s yard.”
“Bernie? They’re targeting Bernie? Those fools!” she said, and her anger blazed like a flame within her. She turned to Quinn. “When we agreed to come out like the vampires did, this is the last thing I imagined would happen.” She looked around at the dead dogs and the pools of blood, her gray curls dancing gaily and incongruously in the morning wind. She sighed, and her shoulders straightened. She said to me, “I’m sorry we had to meet here. This big guy is Togo Olympio. Quinn tells me you two are old friends. What was on the sign?”
I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but now was clearly not the time. I explained the little I knew. I also told them about Jim Collins.