Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris [48]
“Because she hates your guts,” Lily said calmly. “And you were never found guilty by any court of the disappearance of her sister. You weren’t even arrested. I don’t think you ever will be. You might even be innocent, though I don’t think so. Sandra Pelt is simply crazy. And she’s obsessed with you. I think you need to be careful. Real careful.”
“Why was she in jail?”
“Assault and battery on one of her cousins. This cousin had gotten a cut of the money in Sandra’s parents’ will, and apparently Sandra took issue with that.”
I was very, very worried. Sandra Pelt was a vicious and amoral young woman. I was sure she hadn’t hit twenty yet, and she’d made a determined attempt to kill me more than once. There was no one now to call her to heel, and her mental status was therefore even more suspect, according to the private detectives.
“But why did you make a trip down here to tell me?” I said. “I mean, I do appreciate it, but you weren’t obliged . . . and you could have picked up the phone. Private eyes work for money, last I heard. Is someone paying you to warn me?”
“The Pelt estate,” Lily said, after a pause. “Their lawyer, who lives in New Orleans, is the court-appointed guardian for Sandra until she reaches twenty-one.”
“His name?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. “It’s a sort of Baltic name,” she said. “And I may not pronounce it correctly.”
“Cataliades,” I said, putting the emphasis on the second syllable where it belonged.
“Yes,” said Jack, surprised. “That’s him. Big guy.”
I nodded. Mr. Cataliades and I were friendly. He was mostly a demon, but the Leedses didn’t seem to know that. In fact, they didn’t seem to know much of anything about the other world, the one that lay beneath the human one. “So Mr. Cataliades sent you two down here to warn me? He’s the executor?”
“Yeah. He was going to be away from his desk for some time, and he wanted to be sure you knew the girl was on the loose. He seemed to feel some obligation to you.”
I pondered that. I only knew of one time I’d done the lawyer a good turn. I had helped him get out of the collapsing hotel in Rhodes. Nice to know that at least one person was serious when he said, “I owe you.” It seemed pretty ironic that the Pelt estate was paying the Leedses to come warn me against the last living Pelt; not ironic as in “ha!” but ironic as in bitter.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how come he contacted you two? I mean, I’m sure there are lots of private eyes in New Orleans, for example. You all are still based in the Little Rock area, right?”
Lily shrugged. “He called us; he asked if we were free; he sent the check. His instructions were very specific. Both of us, to the bar, today. In fact . . .” She glanced down at her watch. “To the minute.”
They looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to explain this oddity on the part of the lawyer.
I was thinking furiously. If Mr. Cataliades had sent two tough people to the bar, instructing them to arrive at a given time, it must be because he knew they were going to be needed. For some reason, their presence was necessary and desirable. When would you need capable hardbodies?
When trouble was on its way.
Before I knew I was going to do it, I stood and turned toward the entrance. Naturally, the Leedses looked where I was looking, so we were all watching the door when trouble opened it.
Four tough guys came in. My grandmother would have said they were loaded for bear. They might as well have stenciled “Badass and Proud of It” on their foreheads. They were definitely high on something, full of themselves, brimming with aggression. And armed.
After a second’s peek in their heads, I knew they’d taken vampire blood. That was the most unpredictable drug on the market—also the most expensive, because harvesting it was so dangerous. People who drank vampire blood were—for a length of time impossible to predict—incredibly strong and incredibly reckless . . . and sometimes batshit crazy.
Though