Шарлин Шарлин - Club Dead

He touched me as briefly as possible, and then he ignored me. "I wondered if you could come by this afternoon and help me set up our outside Christmas lights," Dell said-to Alcide, and Alcide only.

"Where's Tommy?" Alcide asked. He looked disappointed. "You didn't bring him by to see me?" Tommy was Janice's baby.

Dell looked at me, and shook his head. "You've got a woman here, it didn't seem right. He's with my mom."

The comment was so unexpected, all I could do was stand in silence. Dell's attitude had caught Alcide flat-footed, too. "Dell," he said, "don't be rude to my friend."

"She's staying in your apartment, that says more than friend," Dell said matter-of-factly. "Sorry, miss, this just isn't right."

"Judge not, that ye be not judged," I told him, hoping I didn't sound as furious as my clenched stomach told me I was. It felt wrong to quote the Bible when you were in a towering rage. I went into the guest bedroom and shut the door.

After I heard Dell Phillips leave, Alcide knocked on the door.

"You want to play Scrabble?" he asked.

I blinked. "Sure."

"When I was shopping for Tommy, I picked up a game."

He'd already put it on the coffee table in front of the couch, but he hadn't been confident enough to unwrap it and set it up.

"I'll pour us a Coke," I said. Not for the first time, I noticed that the apartment was quite cool, though of course it was much warmer than outside. I wished I had brought a light sweater to put on, and I wondered if it would offend Alcide if I asked him to turn the heat up. Then I remembered how warm his skin was, and I figured he was one of those people who runs kind of hot. Or maybe all Weres were like that? I pulled on the sweatshirt I'd worn yesterday, being very careful when I eased it over my hair.

Alcide had folded himself onto the floor on one side of the table, and I settled on the other. It had been a long time since either of us played Scrabble, so we studied the rules for a while before we began the game.

Alcide had graduated from Louisiana Tech. I'd never been to college, but I read a lot, so we were about even on the extent of our vocabulary. Alcide was the better strategist. I seemed to think a little faster.

I scored big with "quirt," and he stuck his tongue out at me. I laughed, and he said, "Don't read my mind, that would be cheating."

"Of course I wouldn't do any such thing," I said demurely, and he scowled at me.

I lost-but only by twelve points. After a pleasantly quarrelsome rehash of the game, Alcide got up and took our glasses over to the kitchen. He put them down and began to search through the cabinets, while I stored the game pieces and replaced the lid.

"Where you want me to put this?" I asked.

"Oh, in the closet by the door. There are a couple of shelves in there."

I tucked the box under one arm and went to the closet. The smell I'd noticed earlier seemed to be stronger.

"You know, Alcide," I said, hoping I wasn't being tacky, "there's something that smells almost rotten, right around here."

"I'd noticed it, too. That's why I'm over here looking through the cabinets. Maybe there's a dead mouse?"

As I spoke, I was turning the doorknob.

I discovered the source of the smell.

"Oh, no," I said. "Oh, nononono."

"Don't tell me a rat got in there and died," Alcide said.

"Not a rat," I said. "A werewolf."

The closet had a shelf above a hanging bar, and it was a small closet, intended only for visitors' coats. Now it was filled by the swarthy man from Club Dead, the man who'd grabbed me by the shoulder. He was really dead. He'd been dead for several hours.

I didn't seem to be able to look away.

Alcide's presence at my back was an unexpected comfort. He stared over my head, his hands gripping my shoulders.

"No blood," I said in a jittery voice.

"His neck." Alcide was at least as shaken as I was.

His head really was resting on his shoulder, while still attached to his body. Ick, ick, ick. I gulped hard. "We should call the police," I said, not sounding very positive about the process. I noted the way the body had been stuffed into the closet. The dead man was almost standing up. I figured he'd been shoved in, and then whoever had done the shoving had forced the door closed. He'd sort of hardened in position.

"But if we call the police …" Alcide's voice trailed off. He took a deep breath. "They'll never believe we didn't do it. They'll interview his friends, and his friends will tell them he was at Club Dead last night, and they'll check it out. They'll find out he got into trouble for bothering you. No one will believe we didn't have a hand in killing him."

"On the other hand," I said slowly, thinking out loud, "do you think they'd mention a word about Club Dead?"

Alcide pondered that. He ran his thumb over his mouth while he thought. "You may be right. And if they couldn't bring up Club Dead, how could they describe the, uh, confrontation? You know what they'd do? They'd want to take care of the problem themselves."

That was an excellent point. I was sold: no police. "Then we need to dispose of him," I said, getting down to brass tacks. "How are we gonna do that?"

Alcide was a practical man. He was used to solving problems, starting with the biggest.

"We need to take him out to the country somewhere. To do that, we have to get him down to the garage," he said after a few moments' thought. "To do that, we have to wrap him up."

"The shower curtain," I suggested, nodding my head in the direction of the bathroom I'd used. "Um, can we close the closet and go somewhere else while we work this out?"

"Sure," Alcide said, suddenly as anxious as I was to stop looking at the gruesome sight before us.

So we stood in the middle of the living room and had a planning session. The first thing I did was turn off the heat in the apartment altogether, and open all the windows. The body had not made its presence known earlier only because Alcide liked the temperature kept cool, and because the closet door fit well. Now we had to disperse the faint but pervasive smell.

"It's five flights down, and I don't think I can carry him that far," Alcide said. "He needs to go at least some of the distance in the elevator. That's the most dangerous part."

We kept discussing and refining, until we felt we had a workable procedure. Alcide asked me twice if I was okay, and I reassured him both times; it finally dawned on me that he was thinking I might break into hysterics, or faint.

"I've never been able to afford to be too finicky," I said. "That's not my nature." If Alcide expected or wanted me to ask for smelling salts, or to beg him to save little me from the big bad wolf, he had the wrong woman.

I might be determined to keep my head, but that's not to say I felt exactly calm. I was so jittery when I went to get the shower curtain that I had to restrain myself from ripping it from the clear plastic rings. Slow and steady, I told myself fiercely. Breathe in, breathe out, get the shower curtain, spread it on the hall floor.

It was blue and green with yellow fish swimming serenely in even rows.

Alcide had gone downstairs to the parking garage to move his truck as close to the stair door as possible. He'd thoughtfully brought a pair of work gloves back up with him. While he pulled them on, he took a deep breath-maybe a mistake, considering the body's proximity. His face a frozen mask of determination, Alcide gripped the corpse's shoulders and gave a yank.

The results were dramatic beyond our imagining. In one stiff piece, the biker toppled out of the closet. Alcide had to leap to his right to avoid the falling body, which banged against the kitchen counter and then fell sideways onto the shower curtain.

"Wow," I said in a shaky voice, looking down at the result. "That turned out well."