Bloodthirst in Babylon Read online

  She crumpled up another snack bag and sat it next to her. She licked the salt from her chapped red fingers, stubbed out her smoke, expertly flicked it into the trash container and produced another and a lighter in a flash of nicotine magic.

  Todd peeked around the alcove wall again. There were more of them now. Even a few kids mucking about by the stagnant water. Mental note: keep the kids away from there. Someone turned on the boom box and the twang of old-style country drifted their way.

  “They all work here?” he asked, thrusting a thumb in their direction.

  “They have jobs here,” she said, as if intent on making that point clear.

  Todd was now very conscious of the electric hum of the vending machines. It vaguely annoyed him.

  “Except for Carl Haggerty and D.B., I been here the longest, a couple months. Guy named Doyle-something came with Carl, before me and after D.B., but I barely knew him and he just up and disappeared one day, so I s’pose he don’t count. A couple others have left the same way, all of a sudden.” She shrugged. “Drifters.”

  She watched him watching her, and went on. “I work at a diner on Main View Road, which is what Pleasant Run becomes once it rolls into the heart of town. Maybe a mile from here. Town’s got like four or five blocks of gas stations, bars, small offices, a department store, post office and what have you.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Place I work, it’s the Old Time Café. I get six dollars an hour on top of the tips, which ain’t bad. Not bad at all. Sometimes three bucks on a seven-dollar breakfast check. Figure it out.”

  Todd had no idea where she was going with this.

  She shrugged off his blank stare. “I’m not saying I’m getting rich, but they let me work my own hours and even pay basic medical for my kids and me. Ideal job, right? And yet they’re so desperate to fill the position, they get Marty McConlon to flag me down and make me the offer right there on the spot. I mean, like this whole town ain’t got a single person wants a waitressing job with the best tips, benefits and working conditions I ever seen.”

  Todd felt his chest tighten. He grabbed his pack and plugged a cigarette between his lips, lit it and dragged deep. He still had no idea what the woman was getting at. Didn’t know what she wanted from him.

  “Did he tell you your car was a road hazard?” he asked her.

  She laughed. “That’s what he used on you, huh? That’s how he got Denver Dugan and Jamey Weeks and some of the others. But with me—” She stopped, her eyes flitting from his gaze. “It was different with me,” she mumbled. She stubbed out her cigarette and flicked it so that it sparked hard on the pavement. “Let’s just say—”

  She never finished. Her eyes went as wide as Todd’s when the screaming started. Maybe she thought it was one of her own ragged children, but it wasn’t.

  It was Melanie.

  Chapter Six

  The road tilted upward enough to get a faint whine out of the smooth engine of the Lexus, and Paul had to stay alert to follow the multiple curves taking him up Darrow Road until it became Pleasant Run and took him into his still largely unfamiliar home.

  It was a few minutes after five as he fiddled with a radio that had turned to static mush at the same point as always, just before that seedy motel sitting high on the edge of town.

  Although Savannah Easton, their real estate agent, had hinted that Babylon didn’t exactly lay down the welcome mat for newcomers, there seemed to be quite a few of them staying at the Sundown Motel. He could see them as he drove by, lounging by the barely visible swimming pool. At first he’d taken them for locals in that the town couldn’t possibly draw that many overnight lodgers, but they didn’t look like everyone else he’d seen about town. Mostly men, they looked rough. They looked like outsiders imported to do the town’s heavy lifting during the day, then dispatched to the outskirts as evening approached. Like third-world laborers in some oil-rich nation.

  The Lexus flew past the motel and negotiated a slight bend where Pleasant Run smoothed out and changed names to Main View, one of Babylon’s two main drags. Paul hung a left onto Third Street and cut to Middle View where he took a right. It was nearly as busy as Main View here, but fewer restaurants and retail and more modest commercial space.

  With too much time on his hands since he and Darby and Tuck had moved here, he’d burned off some of his energy with long, aimless walks that had gradually uncovered the town’s delightfully skewered sense of time. A curious number of shops, restaurants, offices and service providers only came alive after sundown. There seemed to be as many Babylonians walking the streets at midnight as could be found in the middle of the afternoon.

  Stopping for the light on Fifth and Middle View, just before Crenshaw, their own street, his attention was drawn to a plate glass window. He frowned as his thoughts returned to a minor, though unsettling, event of the week before.

  Babylon hadn’t been Paul’s first choice, but he loved strolling its moonlit streets. The Detroit suburb he’d formerly called home consisted of a couple square miles of cul-de-sacs with pseudo Tudors and sprawling McMansions on imposing lots, the residential pockets bordered by cookie-cutter malls and franchise restaurants.

  Babylon, by pleasant contrast, actually had its own distinct downtown, five or six blocks of unzoned brick and wood storefronts from a mishmash of eras. The pubs and specialty shops and service stations, the theater and bowling alley and department store and funeral home carried names that would most likely be known only to fellow residents: Crenshaw, Chambers, Chaplin, Buck, Tolliver—all evidently prominent names in Babylon, perhaps for decades or a century or more. It was a place with its own unique history, with a story attached to every faded brick, each carved cornice and pilaster.

  It was on a night of exploration the week before that he’d stumbled upon the colorfully named Winking Dog Saloon. The same bar that his Lexus now idled uncomfortably near while the damned red light refused to change.

  He wasn’t sure what had drawn him to the Winking Dog that other night except that he carried a romantic picture of planting his ass on a barstool just like the regulars, and knocking back a beer. Make it a shot and a beer if that was the local custom. The night being cool and clear and inviting, he could see himself as the transplanted city boy, hailed for his sophistication and youthful charm. He’d meet people who knew nothing about him—his soap-opera relationships and suddenly rocky career—and talk sports and local gossip with them. They’d later tell their friends and neighbors, “That new guy, Highsmith, he’s not so bad for a rich city guy. Drinks beer, slams shots and tells dirty jokes.”

  And he—and by extension, Darby—would finally find the acceptance that had eluded them since moving day.

  Right in line with his fantasy, the locals did take notice as soon as he walked in the door of the Winking Dog. All heads had turned, and conversations stopped.

  Paul stood frozen in the doorway, his psychic hairs bristling like a cat sensing danger from the shadows. It was as if he’d intruded on an orgy, the closest image his mind could come up with for what was going on.

  And yet there was nothing happening in there. Darts were being thrown, girls chatted up, cigarettes smoked. At the bar sat a cluster of men in their twenties. They were dressed in the summertime attire of young men everywhere: baggy shorts, loose T-shirts, ball caps. But they watched him with glittery-eyed interest. Grinning, unshaven, one or two with long, greasy hair jutting beneath their caps.

  “Hi, Paul,” one of the grinning men said, his voice like gravel at the bottom of a wheelbarrow. His whiskers and brim-shadowed eyes shone black against his pale face.

  Paul nodded. More than once he’d made sales presentations to grim, hard-faced clients and plowed on as though he couldn’t read their doubts. He’d held the shocked or sullen glances of employees while terminating them on more occasions than he liked to recall, but he failed this time and this time only. He couldn’t force a return greeting from his locked jaw.

  Then another sound goosebumped his arms and th
e back of his neck. A low rumble, something you felt in your feet before your eardrums caught notice. The slow warning growl of a threatened animal. A big animal. A sound you’d take very seriously if it came out of the dark woods.

  Just as intimidating coming out of a dark bar.

  Paul backed up a step until his spine pressed against the door that had closed behind him.

  It had come from the dark-whiskered man who’d spoken to him.

  “Purcell,” warned the bartender, a rangy, broad-shouldered man with a jewel twinkling in one earlobe.

  Paul gave his watch an exaggerated glance, shook his head and mumbled something that was supposed to imply a need to leave the premises as suddenly as he’d entered.

  Someone snickered. “Guess you got places to go.” He had a male model’s sharp, clean features under a spike of unwashed blond hair, and a high taunt of a voice.

  Without his eyes deviating from the crowd, Paul reached behind him and found the doorknob. As he did, he heard the unearthly, deep-throated growl again, a sound so untamed that he would have been sure it came from the television over the bar except that it relayed nothing more beastly than a Tigers ballgame.

  “Stop in again, Paul, when you have more time,” the one named Purcell said, his voice still faintly tainted with the sound that had worked its way up his throat seconds before.

  “Ooh, Duane, you gonna get us in trouble with Drake,” sneered the blond man.

  The last thing Paul Highsmith heard as the door swung shut behind him was a chorus of high, insolent laughter.

  Recalling that evening of a week or so ago as he still idled in front of the interminable light, Paul locked his car doors. When he finally got the green, he accelerated away from the Winking Dog Saloon, took a left on Crenshaw and cruised home.

  Chapter Seven

  As Todd wheeled around the corner several steps ahead of Kathy Lee Dwyer, he steeled himself for the worst. The high-pitched screaming had stopped, but only to be replaced by the snarling profanity of an adult male. Whatever he was about to find, he wasn’t going to like it, Todd told himself.

  His fatalism was an effective habit. He’d survived long stretches of unemployment by visualizing his family homeless and hungry. With that future planted firmly in mind, the reality of the situation never seemed quite so severe.

  Just like the mental picture of his daughter squirming in the grasp of a lust-fueled child molester thoroughly overpowered the reality of a barrel-chested man pounding a large stick against a garbage bin while Melanie stifled her sobs behind one hand she’d planted to her mouth.

  Todd wrapped an arm around her while a chorus of “What’sa matter, what happened?” erupted around them. Almost instantly, Todd, Melanie and the cursing lunatic were surrounded by sweat-stained workmen and a handful of bedraggled women.

  “I’ll tell you what’s the goddamn matter,” roared the enraged man with the stick. “It’s those fucking rats again. They nearly took off that little girl’s foot this time.” He turned from his Dumpster-beating to reveal a blunt pair of arms with bunched muscles and a thick beard that hid a good deal of his contorted anger.

  All eyes fell on Melanie’s sandal-clad feet. Todd could only breathe again after counting ten intact toes.

  “What’s going on, Judd?” calmly asked a tall man with wide shoulders and a pink face.

  “I’m telling you, D.B., it’s getting worse around here. About time we did something ourselves ‘cuz they sure as hell ain’t gonna take care of it.”

  The man apparently known as D.B. winked at Melanie as he ambled over to his infuriated friend and laid an arm casually on his shoulder. “Come on, Judd. Whatever it was, it’s long gone. And there’s no damage, thank God.”

  “There really is a bite mark there,” mumbled a very thin, middle-aged man with pinched voice and a ponytail.

  As all eyes turned to her exposed red polished toenails, Melanie buried her face in her father’s hard belly in mortification.

  “Yeah, right,” a black woman drawled.

  “Well, not on her feet, maybe,” the ponytailed man admitted. “But on her sandal. See?”

  Todd squatted for a closer look. Yes, there seemed to be some kind of mark on the dirty white strap separating her big toe from the rest.

  “It almost got me,” Melanie murmured into her father’s neck.

  “What’d I tell you?” said the enraged man with the stick and fire in his eye. “What did I tell you? The fuckers nearly got her. You heard her.”

  “Judd Maxwell, don’t you be using language like that in front of a little girl,” Kathie Lee snapped. “Where the fuck is your common sense?”

  Judd glared at the garbage bin, then exchanged glances with everyone gathered around them, a fairly large crowd by now. The man’s body quivered like he’d just grabbed a power line. Todd was glad that the wild beard contained at least some of his intensity or he’d have scared Melanie even further.

  “I’m leaving if we gotta keep putting up with this shit,” the man snarled.

  His eyes seemed to blame everyone in his path for whatever calamity had befallen them. “The good news, D.B.,” he said, “is I finally got one of them little fuckers.” His tone now indicated the possibility of a smile lurking within all that hair, but who could tell?

  The tall, pink-faced man showed a shade or two of interest. “Yeah? Let’s haul it into the open.”

  Todd watched the two men paw through the garbage in and around the big metal bin. They yanked at bags that had fermented in the late-summer sun, and he backed away from the hot stench of rotting vegetables and sour milk, the wave of repulsion blending uncomfortably with the sweat and grime of the off-duty laborers. He clenched his daughter even tighter, wondering if this was what it was always going to keep coming back to: body odor and beer and cigarettes and raging rodents.

  “So what’s all this fuss about?” called out a black guy with square shoulders and round belly. “Like you never seen rats before, fer crissake.”

  Judd, sitting like dislodged royalty on a throne of garbage bags, his big stick in hand like a scepter, stopped directing D.B.’s efforts long enough to glare at the disbeliever. “No doubt you got rats where you come from, Carl, and maybe they’re even big enough to cart off little kids, but in my neck of the woods we tend to take care of problems like this.”

  “What I see is a little girl with, at worst, a nibbled-on sandal. Mice, probably. Let’s not call out the National Guard, huh?”

  Excellent point, thought Todd. He patted his daughter’s head, wordlessly sending the point home to her.

  “That’s right,” said a big man of about fifty. “You want to make waves ‘cuz the town’s got rats? Hell, what town don’t?” He had the kind of voice that began life as a rumble from deep inside his immense chest cavity and grew to enormous proportions by the time the words broke free.

  “Rodents big enough to wear dog collars, and twice as mean,” Judd grumbled as he pointed out new places beneath the bin and in the shadowy corners of the building for D.B. to look.

  “Judd, I don’t see nothing,” his friend said.

  The compact man sitting in garbage cursed, then hopped down to take a more active role in the investigation. “I gotta do everything,” he grumbled.

  Todd bent to his daughter and, speaking close to her ear, said, “Tell me about it, Mel. What happened out here?”

  He felt her nuzzling his face as she found his ear with her lips. “Rat,” she stage-whispered. “Big one with huge teeth.”

  Or mouse, Todd thought. You couldn’t blame her for confusing the one with the other. Especially after hearing the guy with the beard blowing it all out of proportion. He patted her shoulder, then pulled her to the fringes of the crowd.

  “What the hell’s going on here? Judd Maxwell, you’d better have some damned good excuse for tearing through my trash. And why are all these people here?”

  Silence descended like midnight snow. It sizzled out the fire in Judd’s eyes. He lowered h
is gaze from the fiery Sundown Motel owner to the thick stick he tapped on one foot. D.B., meanwhile, became one with the shadows gathering between the motel’s stucco wall and the overflowing bin.

  “I see you, Don Brandon,” Mona Dexter bellowed, apparently using the man’s proper name. “You get out here with Judd and explain to me what you’re doing throwing my trash around like that.”

  “It’s the rats, Mona,” Judd whined as the tall man with the fine red hair and an even rosier face than before shuffled reluctantly into full view.

  Todd watched the motel owner’s face twitch, briefly lose its frozen rigidity, then gain it back with a vengeance. “Rats,” she said.

  “It’s true, Mona,” Judd sputtered. “I’m tired of being called a liar.”

  “I seen ‘em too, Mona,” said the big man with the big voice. “I’m not complaining or nothing, ‘cuz your day rates suit us fine, but—”

  “I’m glad to hear you’re not complaining, Denver,” she said, advancing on him as quick as a hound dog going after bear.

  Denver backed up. He looked like he would have gladly climbed the nearest tree.

  “This time I got proof,” Judd volunteered. He twirled his big stick, rested it on one shoulder and waited for a reaction.

  D.B., looking no more intent on getting further involved than the bear of a man Mona Dexter had just treed, said, “ Judd thinks he got one this time.”

  Judd said, “Mona, you got rats here. You need to get an exterminator.”

  The motel owner’s dark eyes pierced Judd’s. “What do you mean, you got one?” she finally asked, hitting every consonant.

  Making Todd somehow glad he wasn’t the asshole with the stick.

  Judd, for his part, seemed to sense a trick question. The triumphant glint died in his eyes as the big stick left his shoulder. He pointed it toward Todd, standing along the outer ring of crowd, Melanie clinging to him. “The damned thing bit the little girl,” he said, putting more of a whine into it than he probably would have liked. “We got evidence this time, Mona. Look at her shoe.”