"Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 05 - Dead as a Doornail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Charlaine)

plenty of chances to ask him later.

For the first time since New Year’s Day, I was thinking about the future. The full moon symbol on my
calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting
time. As I pulled on my waitress outfit (black pants and a white boat-neck T-shirt and black Reeboks), I
felt almost giddy with cheer. For once, I left my hair down instead of pulling it back and up into a
ponytail. I put in some bright red dot earrings and matched my lipstick to the color. A little eye makeup
and some blush, and I was good to go.

I’d parked at the rear of the house last night, and I checked the back porch carefully to make sure there
weren’t any lurking vampires before I shut and locked the back door behind me. I’d been surprised
before, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Though it was barely dark, there might be some early risers
around. Probably the last thing the Japanese had expected when they’d developed synthetic blood was
that its availability would bring vampires out of the realm of legend and into the light of fact. The Japanese
had just been trying to make a few bucks hawking the blood substitute to ambulance companies and
hospital emergency rooms. Instead, the way we looked at the world had changed forever.

Speaking of vampires (if only to myself), I wondered if Bill Compton was home. Vampire Bill had been
my first love, and he lived right across the cemetery from me. Our houses lay on a parish road outside the
little town of Bon Temps and south of the bar where I worked. Lately, Bill had been traveling a lot. I only
found out he was home if he happened to come into Merlotte’s, which he did every now and then to mix
with the natives and have some warm O-positive. He preferred TrueBlood, the most expensive Japanese
synthetic. He’d told me it almost completely satisfied his cravings for blood fresh from the source. Since
I’d witnessed Bill going into a bloodlust fit, I could only thank God for TrueBlood. Sometimes I missed
Bill an awful lot.

I gave myself a mental shake. Snapping out of a slump, that was what today was all about. No more
worry! No more fear! Free and twenty-six! Working! House paid for! Money in the bank! These were
all good, positive things.

The parking lot was full when I got to the bar. I could see I’d be busy tonight. I drove around back to the
employees’ entrance. Sam Merlotte, the owner and my boss, lived back there in a very nice double-wide
that even had a little yard surrounded by a hedge, Sam’s equivalent of a white picket fence. I locked my
car and went in the employees’ back door, which opened into the hallway off of which lay the men’s and
the ladies’, a large stock room, and Sam’s office. I stowed my purse and coat in an empty desk drawer,
pulled up my red socks, shook my head to make my hair hang right, and went through the doorway (this
door was almost always propped open) that led to the big room of the bar/restaurant. Not that the
kitchen produced anything but the most basic stuff: hamburgers, chicken strips, fries and onion rings,
salads in the summer and chili in the winter.

Sam was the bartender, the bouncer, and on occasion the cook, but lately we’d been lucky in getting our
positions filled: Sam’s seasonal allergies had hit hard, making him less than ideal as a food handler. The
new cook had shown up in answer to Sam’s ad just the week before. Cooks didn’t seem to stay long at
Merlotte’s, but I was hoping that Sweetie Des Arts would stick around a while. She showed up on time,
did her job well, and never gave the rest of the staff any trouble. Really, that was all you could ask for.
Our last cook, a guy, had given my friend Arlene a big rush of hope that he was The One—in this case,
he’d have been her fourth or fifth One—before he’d decamped overnight with her plates and forks and a
CD player. Her kids had been devastated; not because they’d loved the guy, but because they missed
their CD player.