“How can you do that?” the taller one asked.
“It’s bullshit,” said his friend.
He turned his back on Paul and his cellmate. For a ludicrous moment, Paul thought he was walking out on the conversation, but then he remembered where they were. He heard a zipper unzip and a steady stream splash into the open toilet bowl.
While taking care of business, the short one called over his shoulder, “Yeah, I know who you are. I saw you last night, all decked out in your country club duds. Your khaki shorts. You drive the Lexus, right? I can just recall bits and pieces of what happened, but I remember you sounding so goddamn sure all you had to do was clear your throat and those pissant cops would all snap to attention.”
He zipped up and turned, smiling for the first time. “But here we are, Country Club Dude. We spent the night in jail, but I see you had a chance to go home, sleep in your own bed and change into a nice pair of Dockers so you can save us poor boys in style. Maybe write an editorial or take up a petition.”
Paul took two quick steps, all the distance it took to be in the shorter man’s face. “Yes, here I am. I talked my way into your cell not much past daybreak, which is more than your family and friends have been able to accomplish so far. But if the way I dress and talk repulses you so much, just tell me to get out of here and I’m gone. On the other hand, if you think I just might be able to help you, then ignore whatever you find offensive about me and prepare to cut me some goddamn slack.”
The short one tried staring him down, but that would be a contest Paul wouldn’t lose.
“Hey, no, man, it’s cool,” said the taller of the two. “He didn’t mean nothing. Right, Todd? Todd?”
If the little creep’s name was Todd, then the other was Donald Brandon, the copper thief. The Todd creature dropped his gaze and mumbled something that might have passed for an apology, but Paul wouldn’t have bet on it.
Letting it go, he said, “Fine. I’m Paul Highsmith, and the two of you are Todd Dunbar and Donald Brandon.” He pointed a finger at each in turn.
“D.B.,” said the taller one, nodding amiably. “What people call me.”
“D.B.,” Paul repeated. He stepped down from his confrontational pose in front of Dunbar and took his place back by the bars. “Right. Now can we talk about what happened?”
“There were vampires watching us all night,” Dunbar said.
The vampires again. Paul wondered if Dunbar still had a buzz going from the night before.
“It’s true,” said D.B. “It wasn’t as bad once the blood on our faces dried up, but at first I thought we were goners. Like Judd.”
Great. A shared delusion.
Paul sighed. “Okay, let’s talk about that.” He wanted to hear about police brutality, withheld phone calls and trumped-up charges, something Freddie Brace could sink his teeth into. He most definitely didn’t want to discuss vampires.
“I can understand your skepticism,” D.B. said chattily. “Hell, I’d be the same way if I didn’t see the way the one cop’s shiny eyes went all hungry at the sight of our blood. Like a dog drooling at a juicy steak. He stayed down here with us all night, just staring at us. Sometimes he’d be joined by one or more of the others and we’d hear them whispering in the dark but we couldn’t see much ‘cept the gleam in their eyes. I’d say at least half the local force is vampires.”
Paul needed to sit. He even considered bracing himself on the lidless toilet until he saw the fresh urine splotches on the porcelain rim. He maintained his position. “Chief Sandy tells me they found a warrant for your arrest,” he told D.B.
“Found it four months ago when Marty pulled me over for a missing taillight,” D.B. said.
“They didn’t take you in then?”
The tall prisoner smiled a touch sadly. “I got the distinct impression the charges would go away if I took their cushy warehouse job and kept my nose clean.”
Paul nodded. “They’re not in such a forgiving mood anymore, but I’ll get you a lawyer and work on getting you out. But it might not be until Monday.”
“Why?” Dunbar’s face hardened once more. “Why you doing this for us?”
Paul stared until the shorter man’s face softened a fraction. “Your wife knows where you are,” he said quietly. “She’ll be here soon and I’ll make sure they let her visit. What’s her name?”
It looked for a long time like Dunbar wouldn’t answer. Then his black eyes dropped and he said, “Joy. Her name’s Joy. If you see her, tell her I’m sorry. Will ya? She’ll know what I mean.”
Paul nodded. He was on the verge of saying more, but the door at the top of the stairs opened and heavy footsteps clumped carefully down.
“Well, I see you’re okay,” Bill Sandy told Paul when he came into view. “No one made you bend over for a bar of soap, did they?”
He didn’t know how much he appreciated freedom until he got back upstairs and noticed how spacious and airy and light and dry the lobby was. He found Chief Sandy at his desk, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. He’d tap one out, twirl it around his thick fingers and jam it back in the pack while Paul stared at the framed portrait of the town’s leading citizen.
Lawyer or vampire? he’d been asked by the cellmates downstairs.
“Miles Drake,” Paul said, not meaning anything specific.
The chief studied him. “I can’t figure out why you’re here,” he said, ignoring the name mention. “You some kind of community activist sent by the big city lawyers to check up on us local yokels and make sure our prisoners don’t end up hanging by their shoelaces?”
Paul leaned back in his chair. “I’m a…retired…investment banker.”
“You mean like those guys headed to jail in New York?” the chief asked, with no idea how close he’d come.
Paul met his gaze and said nothing.
Chief Sandy decided on that cigarette after all, despite the building’s probable no-smoking status. He flicked some fire at it and turned a half-inch of the tip to ash in one hearty inhalation. “I’ve done some talking with our prosecutor,” he said. “It’s looking like we’ll be able to get the Dunbar character sprung earlier than I’d thought. I guess everyone figures he didn’t do anything worth a weekend in jail.”
“What about the other one?”
The chief shook his head. “Told you, he’s got a warrant out. Grand theft.”
“I understand,” Paul said, rising. “Just give me the name of the prosecuting attorney and I’ll pass it along.”
The chief stared blankly at him. “Pass it along?”
“To my attorney, of course. He doesn’t handle as much criminal defense work as he used to, but he should be able to get up to speed fairly quickly.”
Bill Sandy hadn’t risen with Paul. He remained slouched low in his air-cushioned seat, staring up at his visitor with an unreadable expression. Then he chuckled, but the humor didn’t make it to his eyes.
“How about this?” he said. “When Dunbar’s wife gets here, we’ll release both of them to her custody. As long as they stay clean and sober, we’ll forget everything. How does that sound?”
Bill Sandy was coming across like some Old West lawman. He’d caught the bad guys, pressed charges, locked ‘em away and issued the reprieve. Paul wasn’t up on the intricacies of the American judicial system, but he was pretty sure things were done differently these days.
“What about Pittsburgh?” he asked.
The chief shrugged expansively. “What about it? You think someone wants to extradite Brandon for a few rolls of copper? Think they wanna send a couple cops to Michigan to drive or fly him back for that?”
Paul awkwardly took and shook the hand extended to him and mumbled his thanks. On the way out, he held the door for a jittery-looking blond woman who looked like she could lose a few pounds. Mrs. Dunbar, he told himself as she rushed into the lobby.
There was a whole mess of unanswered questions staring him down, but he couldn’t help feeling good as he found the early morning su
nlight.
“Why are you doing this for us?” Todd Dunbar had asked him, and now he knew.
Because I still can. Maybe not the answer he’d give if the question got put to him again, but that was the heart of it.
There were questions to answer, obstacles to evade, goals waiting to be met. It felt like there was still a place for him out here.
He was back in the saddle again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Early that Saturday evening, the sun was too bright and the sky too blue for conversation to have turned to vampires, but that was what Paul overheard as he left the Lexus gloating over the parking lot heaps and joined the mass of sweaty humanity on the cracked pavement surrounding the Sundown Motel pool.
A bare-chested man in his twenties with a near skinhead haircut and a fire-breathing something-or-other decorating one muscular bicep was saying, “Vampires, my ass. If you two are trying to tell me—”
That was as far as he got before catching sight of Paul as he came toward them. The kid’s small eyes narrowed, both of his hands inexplicably occupied with lit cigarettes. “Hey,” he said. “Who’re you?”
While the others craned or twisted or scraped their lawn chairs for position, the better to see the stranger in their midst, the kid with the crew cut and tats stuffed one butt in his face and handed off the other to a scrawny woman sitting in a ragged chaise lounge next to him. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, limp chestnut hair and nipples that announced themselves against her thin shirt fabric. She wasn’t unattractive, but seemed to exist on cigarettes and the Pepsi next to her.
“I’m Paul Highsmith.”
As far as announcements went, it felt a little underwhelming. One man smiled and nodded slightly. D.B., from that morning. Everyone else just stared at him, some with curiosity. Others with challenge.
“I wonder if I can join you all.”
Paul stood outside an irregular circle of hard, used-up men and a few weary women. A handful of kids chased each other dangerously close to the empty swimming pool.
He suddenly saw himself as they would: tall and leisurely tan, his smooth hands innocent of physical labor. Crisp linen shorts and cotton shirt in light, neutral colors. Deck shoes that still smelled of new leather. Heavy gold watch nestled in sun-bleached arm hair.
Most of the unshaven men had too much or not enough hair. They had man boobs and bellies that overran their belts. The women had faces drawn taut by bills, bad men and cigarettes.
Paul cleared his mind of distracting thoughts and said, “I already know what you’re talking about, so you don’t have to stop on my account. I’ve spoken with D.B and Todd and I’d like to be a part of seeing what needs to be done.”
The kid in the crew cut flapped an arm to get the scrawny older woman to move her feet so he could perch his butt on the end of her chair. From here, he glared up at Paul as though he hadn’t liked what he’d heard so far.
“Hey, it’s our rescuer.” This came from dark-haired, dark-eyed Todd Dunbar. He was seated next to and sharing a cigarette and a beer with the plump blond woman Paul had last seen entering the police station as he left it. Dunbar’s voice was bent with insolent irony, but by now Paul was considering the possibility that it always sounded that way.
“That’s right. This is the guy got us sprung,” D.B. said amicably. As if unable to detect his buddy’s sarcasm. “Thanks, man, but I hope you didn’t come here for a reward. I kinda blew my budget at the bar last night.”
One or two Sundowners chuckled while the others waited to see how the scene would play out.
A chair wasn’t offered, so Paul flipped off his shoes and sat at the edge of the pool. He’d been wrong about it being empty. There were several feet of black rainwater smelling of mold and decay. He scooted back and said, “It would be in all our best interests to figure out what’s going on here. Maybe we can figure it out together.”
“What makes you think your best interest is ours?”
This came like the crack of a rifle from a middle-aged black man with a heavily creased forehead. Paul could imagine his pulse throbbing like a heartbeat in that furrow.
“I came to Babylon with my family,” he said, trying to address everyone at once. “Bought a house and moved in a month or so ago. We’ve been approached a number of times since then about selling and leaving. I want to know why, and I want to know if our experience is in any way connected to what happened to you folks last night.”
To his own ear, he sounded like someone too intent on making a speech and swaying a crowd. The sort of thing that might go over at a board meeting, but not at the Sundown Motel. “However wild your stories,” he said, “I want to hear them.”
A cooler lid slammed. Lawn chairs scraped over the weedy pavement.
“How’s this for wild?” Todd Dunbar said. “Judd Maxwell got killed by fucking vampires last night and me and D.B. got snatched by the cops so we couldn’t report what we seen.”
His burning gaze dared Paul—dared anyone—to argue or laugh.
No one did, exactly, but the kid with the buzz haircut said, “Christ.” Putting equal parts disbelief and sarcasm into it.
Dunbar shot him a glare. “You got a problem with this…Dukey?”
Dunbar’s wife touched his forearm while the kid with the crew cut uttered a face-saving chuckle, but nothing more.
D.B., from his seat on a beer cooler lid, said, “I don’t blame anyone for their doubts, but we saw what we saw. Poor Judd got taken down by six or seven wild men. A gal, too. It’s just a fact, so now we gotta figure what to do about it.”
“Holy Christ,” someone muttered. “So it’s true?”
Paul admired Don Brandon’s quiet strength. Without raising his voice, he’d established the credibility of an incredible claim. He’d turned the conversation from the theoretical to the strategic without ruffling a single feather.
“Duke,” a black woman said, “you don’t like what you hear, then tell me where Judd’s hanging out today.”
The poolside chorus mumbled its stricken endorsement of the foul play scenario. If there was nothing to all of this, then where was Judd Maxwell? The kid named Duke didn’t bother to reply. He sucked harshly at his cigarette, eyes hooded.
“That would explain the rats,” growled a shirtless polar bear of a man. About fifty, he had a full head of white hair, a face grizzled and sunburned.
“What rats?” asked Paul.
“Rats,” the man repeated impatiently. “They’re all over the place.”
“I forgot all about that,” said Dunbar, his eyes widening. “With everything else going on that night, I forgot how the damn things came after me about the time the screaming started.”
“And they went after the old folks, the ones with the blood or whatever the hell was in their plastic cups,” added D.B.
“Well I sure as hell don’t know what y’all are talking about, but it still makes sense,” said the shirtless polar bear. “Rats hang out with vampires.” He looked at the blank faces. “Don’t you poor fools never read nothing?”
The middle-aged black man with the creased forehead barked once, an abrupt imitation of laughter that did nothing to erase the scowl. “I get it. Now we gotta study up on garlic and bats. Stakes through the heart under a full moon.”
“Easy, Carl,” said D.B. “Denver’s just talking. But we’re getting off track. We got less bickering and more figuring to do. That make sense to everyone?”
How could it not? The man’s voice was an ice floe of cool reason.
Duke motioned D.B. to his feet so he could retrieve a beer from under him. “Let me play devil’s advocate here,” he said. It seemed the perfect role for the kid. He pulled the pull tab as he strolled center stage. “Let’s say somebody or a bunch of somebodies really did tear Judd Maxwell apart last night.” He made a show of flipping a cigarette ash, as though demonstrating how little weight he gave that view. “How do you know they’re vampires?”
“Because they ripped his
fucking throat out with their teeth, Dukey,” Dunbar said, sounding alarmingly calm. On the verge of committing the same foul act on the dragon-tattooed kid, Paul thought.
Joy Dunbar found her husband’s forearm in a move so practiced she probably didn’t even know she was doing it.
“And I heard it,” Paul said, surprising even himself. Not that he’d heard vampires, of course, but…something. Something worth talking about. “Not that I buy the official version, but what I heard was pure torment and terror. Not some drunks raising a ruckus. Besides, I stepped into the Winking Dog myself once, so I have a hard time discrediting any horror story that starts there.”
Now he had their attention. Chairs shifted more quietly now. Several parents seemed to search for children who’d wandered out of sight.
Eyes downcast like she was studying the soft drink in her lap, the thin woman sharing a seat with Duke said, “I was at the Dog last night, too, and I never seen fangs or nothing.” She dropped her spent cigarette into the can. “And I wouldn’t mind continuing to not see nothing in that I got two kids and a job. Don’t love the job—and, come to think of it, the kids aren’t always at the top of my list, either.” She looked up at Paul, her expression hard. “But life’s been worse, mister. You might not understand that.”
The rhythmic motion he caught out of the corner of an eye was heads nodding in unison.
“She’s right,” said the black woman who’d spoken before. Wide-hipped but attractive, she grabbed the hand of a well-built man next to her and said, “We got kids, too. Three of ‘em, and they ain’t seen their momma and dad for two months now. Every payday, money goes into a special envelope that’ll get us all together someday. Till then, Jermaine and me ain’t seen and ain’t gonna see.”
D.B. offered Paul a sad smile, then called out, “Jamey Weeks.”
“What?” cried the wiry young guy with a fuzzy mustache standing next to Denver, the polar bear. His entire body twitched at the mention of his name, while his face carried the expression of someone who’s just been called out in a police lineup.
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