Bloodthirst in Babylon Read online

  Dedication

  This one’s for my folks, Roger and Doris Searls. Mom fed my love of storytelling with all of those rich Irish family tales. Dad introduced me to the magic of dark and speculative fiction.

  And for Annie. Always for Annie

  Ann Horky Searls (1962-1988)

  Home Before Dark

  I

  Doyle Armstrong sneaked another quick peek at his watch. It would have looked less obvious if there’d been a clock hanging on the wall, but he’d never seen one in the department store.

  “You coming out for drinks afterwards?”

  She wasn’t talking to him, of course, but to a heavyset sales clerk who shook her head.

  “I want to get home before dark.”

  “Come on. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Still…” the heavyset chick replied doubtfully.

  “Lighten up, Charlotte.” The first girl chuckled, as if setting the example.

  Doyle puzzled over the slimmer girl’s odd inflection: You don’t have anything to worry about.

  “Your attention, please. The store will be closing in fifteen minutes. Thank you for shopping at Chaplin’s.”

  The girls yelped with unconcealed glee, then went to work on their cash registers.

  Closing out before nine o’clock was a no-no, but everyone did it, and rather openly. As he quickly surveyed the store’s first floor, Doyle witnessed little activity except for huddled pairs of employees rummaging in their tills, counting, recording and pouching excess cash for delivery to the department store’s office at the precise strike of nine. Doyle had the vague notion that one of his duties was to at least discourage early closing out, but he’d never gotten in trouble for ignoring the violation.

  He had what should have been a cushy job, so why did he feel like the world’s biggest fool? Prowling the store’s three floors all day with the same battered and nearly empty shopping bag for a prop. But with his skin tone and stranger status in the pale-faced town, he felt as inconspicuous as a Jew wearing a yarmulke at a Klan rally. There couldn’t be a person within fifteen miles who didn’t know he was the new Chaplin’s Department Store plainclothes security guard.

  But, as Carl had pointed out on more than one occasion, the job paid well enough, so who cared whether or not the store actually needed security? Long as those paychecks kept coming…

  Doyle took another quick peek at his watch. Twelve minutes to go. God, had it only been three minutes since the PA announcement?

  II

  “I’m telling you, Carl, it’s weird,” he’d said a week ago, after getting a fifty-cent-an-hour raise for no reason he could see. “I’m already making more money than I ever seen in Philly, and now they want to stick more of it in my pockets.”

  “Those heartless bastards,” Carl said.

  The early summer sun was warm and cloudless. They’d pulled lawn chairs and a six-pack up to the edge of the empty swimming pool where they sat drinking and bullshitting. Carl Haggerty had been a friend of Doyle’s brother, Winthrop, in a section of North Philly known as the Badlands. After Win caught a fatal one in the chest in a drive-by, bunch of coked-up kids misidentifying their target in the dark, Carl and Doyle had drawn closer. When, months later, another whizzing stray shattered Carl’s picture window, the two decided to find a place where bullets weren’t more common than jobs.

  Such a place, they’d found quite by accident, was Babylon, Michigan.

  They’d been chasing the rumor of employment in Gary, Indiana, but after a series of wrong turns and an hour or so of highways that just kept getting narrower and lonelier, they’d found themselves in a town where they could stop for directions. Doyle had hoped, as he spied all those white faces gawking their way, that no one misplaced any money or young children until he and Carl were long gone.

  Only, it hadn’t been like that.

  “I swear I don’t understand you,” Carl told him that night more than a week ago, by the pool. “You do nothing but piss and moan about Philly…the gangs, the drugs, the poverty. So we end up here. You see anyone flashing colors? Heard any gunshots in the night? And now you taking home a raise. Tell me again, how bad you being treated here?”

  Had a point. Still…

  Doyle squeezed finger dents into his empty beer can. “Yeah, about that raise. You know what I do in that store? I walk. They got no shoplifters, so I walk ten, twelve miles a day with a blank stare.”

  “Paid to exercise.”

  “Then I hang around a few minutes after closing time to make sure everyone gets out. I don’t set the alarms or even turn out the lights. They got store managers and Mr. Chaplin for that.”

  “They got no shoplifters ‘cuz you on the job, Bob. Sure, everyone knows you the man, but you ever hear ‘bout those towns got dummies sitting in police cars?”

  Doyle shook his head, clueless as to where this was going.

  “Usually it’s, they got no budget for overtime, so they park a police car with some dumbass mannequin in the driver’s seat. Everyone knows the deal, but they still slow down till they get out of the dummy’s sight. Habit, I guess. You get it, Doyle? Sometimes just being there’s enough.”

  “What I get is you calling me a dummy.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “You know how I got that job? Well, I don’t, either. No pissing in bottles, no background check. Didn’t even fill out an application form. Just got it.”

  “Random good fortune. Rich white folks get it all the time. ‘Bout time we did, too.”

  Doyle wasn’t buying it. He waved an arm to take in the empty pool and the low-slung, two-story building behind them. “Putting us up in here for practically nothing…these people are trying to put something over us ‘cuz they think we’re stupid.”

  “Oh boy, here we go. Good jobs, cheap lodging, just another example of the white man sticking it. How does that explain D.B.? Huh? He ain’t black, and they’re putting him up here, too. And Judd. And a buncha others. There go that theory, whatever it was.”

  Doyle licked his lips of beer foam. “Ain’t just my job makes no sense. Tell me again how busy you are with that paint crew you follow around. What is it, you hold brushes, move ladders? How much you making to do that? I forget.”

  “Now it’s me getting screwed ‘cuz the job’s too easy and I’m getting paid too much. You see how it sounds?”

  “Well.” Doyle took a final swig. “There ain’t no Santa Claus, and I’m clearing out of here some day soon, with or without you.”

  There were all kinds of additional thoughts churning away in the back of Doyle Armstrong’s troubled mind, but none made sense enough to be pulled out in the open. Carl was right, lately always telling him how he was getting old and cynical. But it was hard-earned cynicism. He’d had so much bad news in his life he couldn’t accept anything without questioning it to death. But if he got on the phone to whatever was left of his bullet-riddled family and described to them his job and his eighteen—no, make that eighteen-fifty an hour—pay, no one would believe his good fortune. He knew that; he wasn’t stupid.

  So what, exactly, was the problem?

  III

  The biggest thing was the way they looked at him.

  As the last of the few remaining customers shuffled for the exits, Doyle examined his watch. Openly, no danger of being accused of clock-watching. It was all but impossible to get fired, judging from his experience of the night before. Just six minutes till closing time.

  He decided on the spot that he’d gotten it all wrong. It was the way the white citizens of Babylon didn’t look at him and Carl that gave him the creeps.

  There was literally not another black face in town, so he wouldn’t have been surprised to ha
ve been gawked at. But it was nothing like that. He only felt eyes when his back was turned. If that made any sense. All other times, the townsfolk looked right through him as if he wasn’t there.

  Like now, for instance. Four minutes to go and the store virtually deserted of customers. While a few employees had heads buried in cash drawers, others paced about impatiently, examining their watches or chatting in small groups. None made eye contact as Doyle strolled by.

  The hell with them, he thought as he made his way to the doors that opened out onto the parking lot. Employees would be scrambling for this exit in another minute or so. One of his night shift duties was to guard the door while the on-duty manager locked up elsewhere. Make sure everyone made it safely to their cars and no one tried to enter from the street.

  But there were no other security guards on the payroll, so who performed this task when Doyle was off?

  No one, that’s who. Security wasn’t a real concern here. Mr. Chaplin didn’t need him, and the department store didn’t look so prosperous that it could afford the unnecessary cost. So why, he mentally asked absent buddy Carl, did they hire me?

  Don’t question good fortune, he replied on absent buddy Carl’s behalf.

  Doyle stepped just beyond the open doorway and breathed deeply of the clean night air. He couldn’t take any more of the fresh, monotonous smell of the fabrics and shoe leather on display, or the choking scent of dueling perfumes lining the makeup counters where the hottest chicks worked. He had to get out. Maybe tomorrow. With or without Carl, as he’d warned on more than one occasion.

  The heavyset girl wasn’t going to make it home before dark after all, he thought as he watched big purple splotches of shadow overtaking the handful of cars that remained in the lot.

  And what had she meant by that, anyway? The town was so small and quiet—eerily so after Philly—that most people, including himself, walked everywhere.

  Home before dark.

  Something flickered, quick activity to his left, but gone when he turned.

  Laughter.

  Doyle craned his neck and, yes, heard it again. Deep-throated male chuckles from the shadowy depths of the parking lot.

  “Hey there, bro.”

  Doyle took an involuntary step back. Now he saw them. Three figures in the lot where there’d been nothing but the shadowy forms of cars the last time he’d looked.

  “Purcell,” he mumbled to himself as his eyes adjusted.

  Not the one who’d spoken, but the middle of the three still figures staring at him from the lot. Doyle recognized him by the way the short, muscular figure wore his ball cap, pulled low on his head and straight-on. And by the way the shadowy figure posed, loose-limbed, seeming to loom over the others despite his height disadvantage. The one who’d called out to him and was now hooting at his own dumbass wit was Jason Penney, still more or less hidden in the gathering darkness.

  Hell, Doyle snorted. The Badlands had scarier creatures than them. By far.

  It hadn’t been true that the entire town had ignored him. There were a loud bunch of redneck assholes who liked to talk trash at him as he passed. Doyle had gotten the names Purcell and Penney by quietly asking around. At first he thought there were only three or four of the loudmouths, but the number seemed to have grown over the last several days. Or nights, rather. They didn’t seem to hold down jobs, and had their nights free to hang out mostly at the Winking Dog Saloon on Middle View.

  “Be seeing you later, bro,” Penney called out.

  His eyes now accustomed to the near-dark, Doyle could make out the wiry, blond-haired man with the high, jeering voice. He was sitting on a car that, in the near absence of light, resembled the mid-seventies Impalas that could be found on cement blocks all over the Badlands. Doyle would have liked nothing more than to knock the smug bastard from the hood, but then he’d have the others to contend with.

  More laughter erupted from behind him, and Doyle backed out of the way of a stream of joyously released sales clerks who would have trampled him if he’d impeded their summer evening plans.

  They were young, for the most part. Students earning a little cash for the fall semester, most likely. Doyle heard voices calling out for others to meet up in this or that bar, and for just a moment he wished he was going with them, sitting his ass down somewhere cool, downing frosted drafts while listening to music and talking about what a bitch college was.

  Yeah, right. The closest he’d ever come to stepping foot on campus was almost getting hired to the Temple University grounds crew. But then they’d looked at his record from his much younger days, and there went that job.

  No, he wouldn’t be meeting anyone for brewskis at the Winking Dog. What he and Carl and maybe the white dudes D.B. and Ponytail Pete and some of the others were going to be doing was sitting around a grimy pool, sharing six-packs and smoking too many cigarettes. Like most nights. Doyle sighed. Least he’d be off the job. No more walking empty aisles, roaming past half-filled racks and display cases, guarding the lingerie department, the junior misses and teen shop from no one.

  Change the subject, he told himself, still standing in the doorway, staring at the rapidly emptying parking lot. That’s how Carl told him to deal with just about everything: change the subject.

  So think about the girl. Kathy Lee something or another. Scrawny-ass white chick, not so young anymore, but not bad to look at. She’d just moved into town. Checked in at the Sundown, like him and Carl and all the others. Had herself a couple kids, but no man. Who knows…

  The stream of exiting employees had been trickling out while his thought went to his gonads, and now there was no one. He nudged the metal employee door closed before searching the premises for stragglers.

  Whichever manager had night duties had already turned off most of the old-fashioned hanging globe lights, actually improving the look of the place. Chaplin’s Department Store’s color scheme consisted mostly of putrid pink and pastel green, the entire place a throwback to the eighties. A perfect setting for the bland and outdated merchandise.

  Doyle wondered when the town would eventually see a Wal-Mart. Couldn’t be soon enough. Hell, you couldn’t even get cell phone reception in this throwback burg.

  Doyle suddenly became aware of muffled voices from the virtually unlit back, from the corridor beyond the cashier’s window where the managers had offices. He deliberately didn’t go to investigate.

  “Anyone need me?” he called out from a distance.

  “No, you can go,” someone shouted back. Sounded like Chaplin himself, the storeowner who’d certainly talked about him, but hadn’t exchanged a half dozen words with Doyle.

  “I’m leaving, then.”

  Doyle was the lone security guard, but he didn’t have a key to the place. He would have offered this fact to Carl as another point of suspicion, but it was like talking to a wall.

  “Go ahead,” the voice from the inner sanctum called out.

  Doyle let out a sigh of relief. He hadn’t been anxious to wait around or to go back there behind the cashier’s counter after what had happened the evening before.

  IV

  The evening before…

  “I don’t want him here. I don’t need him, and I can’t afford him. Get yourself someone else to—”

  “Come on, Mr. Chaplin. He’s useful, you know that. Pilferage happens in even the best of communities. And it’s such a charitable act, don’t you think?” This last comment ended with a dry chuckle.

  “I’ve decided to take it up with Mr. Drake.”

  “It’s not an issue that concerns Drake.”

  “Doesn’t concern him?” Chaplin barked in disbelief. “Everything in Babylon concerns him. You know that.”

  “Of course we value his opinion,” replied the second voice, bending just a little.

  “What’s this ‘we?’ Just how closely are you identifying with that man these days?”

  “Wait just a minute, Mr. C. You’re making it out to be a Drake versus Purcell thing, an
d it’s not. Duane’s going his own way and he invites Mr. Drake to do the same.”

  “In other words, butt out. Is that it?”

  Doyle camouflaged his eavesdropping by bending over a drinking fountain near the cashier’s window. The two voices were coming from behind the doorway that served as the entry point to a warren of small and uninteresting offices. It was afterhours, Doyle was closing up, and, as far as he knew, only the two men in the offices beyond remained with him.

  That second voice was irritatingly familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  And then it hit him. The wheedling tones of the younger man belonged to McConlon, the cop he and Carl had flagged down the month before for directions to a major highway, but who’d instead persuaded them to settle in Babylon.

  He kept sipping. Kept listening.

  “I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing that name. Purcell this, Purcell that,” Chaplin was saying. “And now you. Marty, how do you think your brother feels about your new loyalties? No wonder they want out so badly.”

  “Let’s leave my brother out of this.” Then the voice softened. “Hey, I’m just trying to maintain the peace. That’s my job. I’m serving as an intermediary between the two parties, that’s all.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t a Drake versus Purcell kind of thing.”

  “Look, I’m tired of playing games here. We’re not asking so much of you.”

  “It doesn’t seem as though you’re asking at all, Marty. If I thought I had a choice in the matter, I’d have turned you down on the spot.”

  “I think we’re wasting time, Mr. C. You’re not in the mood to discuss matters, so let’s take a break and pick it up later. Whaddya say?”

  Nothing followed but a strained silence. Then the young cop shuffled out of the room, nearly colliding with Doyle, still bent over the water fountain, and grunted in surprise. McConlon was in street clothes, a loud shirt and tacky pair of shorts that ballooned around him, bringing even more attention to his pudgy middle.

  “Oh,” said Doyle, trying his best to act startled.