"That's more than I need to know, Boyd."

"Serves you right, talking about your sister that way."

"You saying you don't want to bang my sister?"

"What? You crazy? I'd fuck her through a wall. But that isn't why we're here."

"No," Holdstedter agreed. "We're here to get drunk and bitch about the disappearing populace."

"You think Freemont did in his wife?"

Holdstedter looked around to make sure none of the people in the bar was paying them any attention. No one was, except there was a brunette looking him over like he was a fine cut of meat. "I think he either did something to his wife, or he did something to someone else. He looked like he was ready to shit his pants when we pulled up."

"Maybe. I don't think he has the balls."

"Listen here, Boyd, and listen well. Brian Freemont is a dangerous man. He gets into power."

"Why do you say that?"

"He thinks too much like me, and I get into power."

"Yeah? What do you do about it?"

"I have a beer and then hope I can get lucky. Nice game of hide-the-salami and I feel plenty powerful again."

"You're gonna have a kid that way, you know. You should wait until you're married."

"Yeah, that's not happening."

"So we put him down as a suspect?"

"Yeah, we do. I looked over dispatch's records. There's a while last night when he didn't call in to report his location and he didn't write a single ticket. He had time to get home and do something to her if he really wanted to."

"You think it was that bad between them?"

Holdstedter shrugged his broad shoulders and got a sour look on his pretty-boy face. "I think anyone married to him would be miserable. I also think he looks at other women too much to be a good husband."

"Nothing wrong with looking, Danny."

"There's looking and then there's looking. If that boy had x-ray vision, every woman in this town would have reason to slap his face off."

"Okay. We keep him as a suspect." Boyd picked at the fries surrounding his burger and then decided to have a sip of beer instead. "So what the hell is going on in this town, Danny? How come we have so many missing people and not a body anywhere?"

"Maybe they're all leaving town."

"Some of them, sure. I can see that with the college girl and all, but ten-year-old corpses don't walk away. And whatever the hell happened with the Falcones, I can bet they didn't climb out of that car and skip their asses out of town for a little fun."

"Yeah," he grinned and took another sip of beer. "So a few maybe stayed here, but other than the corpses and car-crash victims, maybe they just left town."

"That's what I like about you, Danny. You're an optimist."

VI.

Maggie was feeling a little tender when she got back to her apartment. The Baptist minister apparently liked his women submissive and he liked to fuck like a bunny on Spanish fly. Maggie visited him right after the Presbyterian. She was almost done with the list. Part of her was happy about that, because it was a lot of work with men who apparently weren't getting any regularly. She was also a little saddened because she was having a good time with the whole lot of them.

Ben was outside, sitting on the ground near his front door. His head was hanging low and his knees were up so high they almost reached his shoulders.

"Ben? What are you doing out here?"

He looked up slowly, and she saw that he'd been drinking. He was ripped.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and waved his hands around aimlessly. "Thinking I maybe fucked up."

He didn't normally curse, and he wasn't exactly a legend around school for his drinking habits. She walked over to where he was sitting and looked down at him. "What's wrong?"

"That damned cop."

"Oh, shit, Ben. He didn't find out it was you, did he?"

"No. His wife is missing." He looked miserable.

She shook her head. "What's that got to do with you?"

"He said it was my fault. Accused me of doing something to her." He shook his head with the slow, deliberate actions of a drunk who didn't want to lose everything in his stomach.

"Did you do anything to his wife?"

"What?" He looked up sharply and immediately regretted it. Ben leaned back against the wall, his eyes moving fast behind closed lids and his face an unpleasant shade of green in the darkness. "No, Maggie. I don't even know what she looks like."

Maggie squatted down on her haunches next to Ben and tried to look into his eyes. His face was tear-streaked and he was sweating alcohol in the cool night air. She reached out her hand and touched his cheek, making him look at her.

"Then you didn't do anything and he's just a dick, Ben."

"But maybe she left him because of me."

"What? Because you hid his money and put it back?"

He nodded his head and simultaneously leaned his face against her palm. "Yeah. 'Cause I'm a bastard and hid his money."

"Ben, he was blackmailing girls and raping them; they didn't want it, but he made them do it. The only bastard here is him. If she left him because of anything, it's because she finally saw what you saw."

He shook his head and blinked his eyes several times. His bottom lip jutted out and pulled toward his chin. He was on the verge of tears over something he had no control over, because he'd been doing something genuinely nice for a girl he barely even knew.

"Still my fault. Maybe he deserved what I did, but what did she ever do?"

"Honey, for all you know she'd been hearing about everything he did and never reported him. Some people are like that."

Ben shook his head again and rolled his eyes around until he could look in her face. "Why are you so nice to me?"

"Because you're a nice guy, Ben."

"No I'm not."

"You just stop being a nutcase, okay?" She sighed. He really was a nice guy, but he was also a very drunk nice guy who was depressed as all hell.

"Tom is lucky. He knows that, right?"

"Let's not talk about him, okay?" The last thing she wanted to think about was Monkey Boy. "Let's get you back inside your place."

Ben nodded and managed to stand on the first try. She'd expected him to fall on his ass. It still took almost five minutes to navigate into his apartment and move him toward his bedroom.

She helped him get his shoes and socks off. After that he was on his own. He didn't try to get undressed.

As she was leaving he called out to her. "Maggie?"

"Yeah, Ben?"

"Thanks. Sorry to be a pain."

"You're not. Get some sleep. Feel better tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay. Good night."

She let herself out and crossed the courtyard to her own place.

After she'd cleaned up and gotten comfortable, she lay back on her own bed and thought about Ben for a moment. He had a few homemade posters on his walls, and one of them looked very familiar. It was a poem by Byron; the same poem that she had pinned to the wall above her desk.

She drifted to sleep thinking about the poem and about the boy next door.

VII.

The view from his new home was spectacular, but not good enough for what he needed to see, so Jason Soulis lifted into the air and rose until he could properly view the entire town of Black Stone Bay.

Their faith was like a beacon to him, a light that shone brightly even in the darkest hours of the morning. Through the centuries, he had seen many of the powerful auras on thousands of people.

These days it happened less and less. That suited him very well.

Inevitably, there were the ones who served their god with undying devotion and they were always a burden to him. Most times the truly devout served in a church, either in an official capacity or as a volunteer. They were the ones who could make his life uncomfortable. Through their piety, they served to protect the holy places from his influence and to protect their unwitting associates from his needs.

His eyes scanned the town, looking for the places of worship that had nearly blinded him when he first came into Black Stone Bay. There had been several places that were painful to see when he arrived. Most were barely noticeable anymore.

He smiled, looking to the buildings that had grown dark, pleased that his suspicions had been correct. It was not the building so much as those who attended to the structures that provided them shelter. Faith was a fleeting thing when laced with sin and guilt.

Every place that Maggie had visited had been tainted, not by the acts committed there but by the crisis of faith the acts had brought about.

Throughout Black Stone Bay people slept and, in some cases, worked. The proud were here in abundance, as were the wealthy and the vain. That was true in most towns. The difference was simply that the faithful were becoming an endangered species.

In the far distance a siren called out, an ambulance racing to save some fool driver who'd hit another vehicle and was now pinned in the metal that folded around his body on impact.

Slowly, very slowly, he descended back to the earth below and finally settled on the lawn of his home. He moved to the Cliff Walk, staring out at the ocean and the increasingly violent waves.

Somewhere below, deep beneath the waves, he could feel them as they moved about, growing stronger and more desperate. They were his now, to use as he saw fit, or to discard as they became redundant.

Soon they would be freed, but for now they suffered, lost in darkness and growing tired of their prison.

"Soon," he promised them. "Soon, but not just yet. The way has not been cleared."

Chapter 10.

I.

There were two abiding pains in Ben Kirby's world when he woke up. The first was the throbbing, shrieking thing that had been his brain trying to crawl out of his head and find a place to die in peace. The second was the raw humiliation of having the girl he loved find him outside his apartment and help him inside.

The head he could do something about with a few hundred aspirin and a gallon or two of water; the heart was just something he had to endure. The only good news for him was that it was Sunday and he could sleep in for a while. Being a proper masochist, he made himself climb out of bed as soon as the sun's rays tried to fry his eyeballs.

He made it out to the living room and sat down on the couch just in time to see Maggie leaving her apartment dressed in her Sunday best. One look at her and his headache faded to a whisper. Her hair was free to run around for a change of pace, instead of pulled back into her traditional ponytail; the thick, dark cascade of curls held his attention as surely as her smile always did.

She cast her eyes in the direction of his door for a second, warring with whether or not to check on him. Her teeth worried at her lower lip and he decided to make it easy for her.

Ben opened his door and looked out at her, smiling against the glare of the sun. "Good morning."

"I was just thinking about you. You all right?"

"I think my head exploded, but otherwise, yeah, I'm good."

She had a wonderful laugh. "It looks like it's still attached to me."

"I meant what I said last night, Maggie. Thanks for being a friend."

"You saved my ass the other day, Ben." She shrugged and looked away. Then she got a playful grin on her face. "Besides, I couldn't leave you to puke in the courtyard. Somebody would have to clean it up." She smiled, fired a wink over her shoulder, and headed toward the parking lot. "See you around."

He watched her walk away, savoring the chance to look at her without being noticed. When she was gone, it was back inside to medicate his aching brain.

II.

Maggie sat in the center of the third row of pews and found herself staring at Father Wilson as he stood behind the altar and started speaking of sin and the wages it most certainly brought about. He looked a little twitchy up there, which was rare for him. He certainly wasn't quite as calm as he had been in the past, and while he looked at her several times, he didn't wear the same expression of fatherly kindness she'd gotten so used to seeing.

His desire was torn between giving his all to the parishioners and simply bending her over the altar a second time: she could see it in his face and his troubled eyes. She couldn't keep a small smile from playing around her lips, and the more she thought about what they had done right where he was standing in front of his congregation, the more aroused she became. It wasn't just the act of sex; it was everything else as well. The man was trying his best to behave, but she knew what he was thinking. He wanted her; he wanted to run away from her. He wanted to speak with her and tell her what a mistake it had been, and he wanted to make sure she would keep her word about never telling another soul.

Wilson's voice faltered for a second and she looked into his eyes. Maggie smiled for him, a fast sultry expression, and her eyes traveled the length of his body. She placed one finger against her lips, just for a moment, and licked her fingernail for his benefit. Nothing overt about the gesture; it would mean nothing at all to anyone but him, but for Father Wilson that gesture had powerful meaning.

He cleared his throat and looked away as if burned. Part of her was appalled by her own actions; part of her was amused by his reactions. Part of her wanted to bare her breast to him and see how long it took him to hurtle the rows of faithful churchgoers between them in order to take her again.