Even the desk clerks were armed. There were shotguns on racks behind the counter. I wondered how far they would go to protect their guests. Would they really shoot other humans, intruders? How would the law handle it?
A man wearing glasses sat in one of the padded chairs that punctuated the marble floor of the lobby. He was about thirty, tall and lanky, with sandy hair. He was wearing a suit, a lightweight summer khaki suit, with a conservative tie and penny loafers. The dishwasher, sure enough.
"Hugo Ayres?" I asked.
He sprang up to shake my hand. "You must be Sookie? But your hair... last night, you were blond?"
"I am. I'm wearing a wig."
"It looks very natural."
"Good. Are you ready?"
"My car's outside." He touched my back briefly to point me in the right direction, as if I wouldn't see the doors otherwise. I appreciated the courtesy, if not the implication. I was trying to get a feel for Hugo Ayres. He wasn't a broadcaster.
"How long have you been dating Isabel?" I asked as we buckled up in his Caprice.
"Ah, um, I guess about eleven months," Hugo Ayres said. He had big hands, with freckles on the back. I was surprised he wasn't living in the suburbs with a wife with streaked hair and two sandy children.
"Are you divorced?" I asked impulsively. I was sorry when I saw the grief cross his face.
"Yes," he said. "Pretty recently."
"Too bad." I started to ask about the children, decided it was none of my business. I could read him well enough to know he had a little girl, but I couldn't discover her name and age.
"Is it true you can read minds?" he asked.
"Yes, it's true."
"No wonder you're so attractive to them."
Well, ouch, Hugo. "That's probably a good part of the reason," I said, keeping my voice flat and even. "What's your day job?"
"I'm a lawyer," Hugo said.
"No wonder you're so attractive to them," I said, in the most neutral voice I could manage.
After a longish silence, Hugo said, "I guess I deserved that."
"Let's move on past it. Let's get a cover story."
"Could we be brother and sister?"
"That's not out of the question. I've seen brother and sister teams that looked less like each other than we do. But I think boyfriend-girlfriend would account for the gaps in our knowledge of each other more, if we get separated and questioned. I'm not predicting that'll happen, and I'd be amazed if it did, but as brother and sister we'd have to know all about each other."
"You're right. Why don't we say that we met at church? You just moved to Dallas, and I met you in Sunday school at Glen Craigie Methodist. That's actually my church."
"Okay. How about I'm manager of a... restaurant?" From working at Merlotte's, I thought I could be convincing in the role if I wasn't questioned too intensively.
He looked a little surprised. "That's just different enough to sound good. I'm not much of an actor, so if I just stick to being me, I'll be okay."
"How did you meet Isabel?" Of course I was curious.
"I represented Stan in court. His neighbors sued to have the vampires barred from the neighborhood. They lost." Hugo had mixed feelings about his involvement with a vampire woman, and wasn't entirely sure he should've won the court case, either. In fact, Hugo was deeply ambivalent about Isabel.
Oh, good, that made this errand much more frightening. "Did that get in the papers? The fact that you represented Stan Davis?"
He looked chagrined. "Yes, it did. Dammit, someone at the Center might recognize my name. Or me, from my picture being in the papers."
"But that might be even better. You can tell them you saw the error of your ways, after you'd gotten to know vampires."
Hugo thought that over, his big freckled hands moving restlessly on the steering wheel. "Okay," he said finally. "Like I said, I'm not much of an actor, but I think I can bring that off."
I acted all the time, so I wasn't too worried about myself. Taking a drink order from a guy while pretending you don't know whether he's speculating on whether you're blond all the way down can be excellent acting training. You can't blame people - mostly - for what they're thinking on the inside. You have to learn to rise above it.
I started to suggest to the lawyer that he hold my hand if things got tense today, to send me thoughts that I could act on. But his ambivalence, the ambivalence that wafted from him like a cheap cologne, gave me pause. He might be in sexual thrall to Isabel, he might even love her and the danger she represented, but I didn't think his heart and mind were wholly committed to her.
In an unpleasant moment of self-examination, I wondered if the same could be said of Bill and me. But now was not the time and place to ponder this. I was getting enough from Hugo's mind to wonder if he were completely trustworthy in terms of this little mission of ours. It was just a short step from there to wondering how safe I was in his company. I also wondered how much Hugo Ayres actually knew about me. He hadn't been in the room when I'd been working the night before. Isabel hadn't struck me as a chatterer. It was possible he didn't know much about me.
The four-lane road, running through a huge suburb, was lined with all the usual fast-food places and chain stores of all kinds. But gradually, the shopping gave way to residences, and the concrete to greenery. The traffic seemed unrelenting. I could never live in a place this size, cope with this on a daily basis.
Hugo slowed and put on his turn signal when we came to a major intersection. We were about to turn into the parking lot of a large church; at least, it had formerly been a church. The sanctuary was huge, by Bon Temps standards. Only Baptists could count that kind of attendance, in my neck of the woods, and that's if all their congregations joined together. The two-story sanctuary was flanked by two long one-story wings. The whole building was white-painted brick, and all the windows were tinted. There was a chemically green lawn surrounding the whole, and a huge parking lot.
The sign on the well-tended lawn read THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SUN CENTER - Only Jesus Rose from the Dead.
I snorted as I opened my door and emerged from Hugo's car. "That right there is false," I pointed out to my companion. "Lazarus rose from the dead, too. Jerks can't even get their scripture right."
"You better banish that attitude from your head," Hugo warned me, as he got out and hit the lock button. "It'll make you careless. These people are dangerous. They've accepted responsibility, publicly, for handing over two vampires to the Drainers, saying at least humanity can benefit from the death of a vampire in some way."