The silence now seemed unbearable.

Todd shrugged and kept his eyes on the cracked pavement. It was like being in high school and trading sex stories and worrying that your lies wouldn't hold up next to everyone else's. So what if these other assholes used to pull down fifty, a hundred grand a year and quit whenever they felt like it? All of their grand stories were twenty years in the past. What had they all been up to for the last couple decades? Same as him, Todd thought. Scrabbling. Avoiding phone calls. Paying off the interest on payday loans so you could borrow more. It didn't matter how great life used to be, so why torture yourself talking about it?

He thought about how stifling hot it had suddenly turned, the late afternoon sun beating down on them in righteous punishment. He was still thirsty, even with a longneck halfway to his lips. Then he thought about the silence his wife had brought down on all of them just by feeling a need to contribute. To build her husband up to people he barely knew and didn't give a shit about.

"Who the hell is that?" Tonya Whittock asked.

All heads turned, as much to change the subject as it was out of curiosity.

"Never seen him before," Kathy Lee drawled. "Whaddya think he's doing?"

"Him and his fucking Lexus," Judd said. "You can bet he ain't checking in at the Sundown for the night."

"Cop, maybe. Think he's taking down license plate numbers?" the crew-cut kid with the attitude nervously asked.

He was young and had watched too much television or he'd know real-life cops rarely drove luxury Jap cars. Todd watched the driver slowly cruise the parking lot.

Judd said, "He ain't gonna steal nothing, is he?"

"Now you're on to something," said D.B. "Bet he smashes and grabs all that cash you're hiding in your glove box."

"Then what the hell's he up to?" said Kathy Lee.

The kid with the muscles and the buzz cut had at least gotten something right. The driver actually was checking out license plates. Looking around him, Todd saw nervous faces and wondered what was going on in their minds right then. D.B. had admitted to what he'd called "a minor warrant" on his head and plenty others had turned the conversation away from their pasts.

Compounding the problem, probably half the tags in the lot were expired.

The sleek car coasted up and down the twin rows of battered, rusted and primed cars and pickups before straightening out and coming back down the circular drive. The Lexus glided to a stop parallel to the pool, maybe sixty feet from the gathering.

"Uh oh," someone said softly.

The driver's window bounced back enough sunlight to obscure his features, but Todd could see that he sat tall and straight-backed in his glove-soft upholstery.

God, to have a ride like that. Its tires would whisper over pavement. There'd be a CD player with crystal-clear hidden speakers, the upholstery would always smell new and you'd ride on an invisible cloud of cool air, oblivious to the day's heat and the smell of the streets.

Todd licked his lips as though it had been a naked and willing woman driving his fantasy.

Judd Maxwell rose quickly, his lightweight lawn chair skittering away from him. "I've had enough of this," he growled.

Maybe the driver heard him, for the sleek car pulled away as silently as it had appeared. It coasted down the winding driveway to Pleasant Run Avenue, its tires caressing the pavement, all cylinders purring with mechanical contentment.

"Asshole," Judd mumbled, but he put nothing behind it.

And no one chimed in. It was as though each of the two dozen men and women sitting around that pool was thinking about their parking lot of cancerous metal and tailpipes suspended by hanger wire and arriving at the conclusion that the tall man wasn't such an asshole after all. Not for driving a car that purred, that taunted the summer swelter with its own pure cushion of cool air.

Which one of them wouldn't do the same?

Chapter Thirteen.

"Honey, I'm sorry," she whispered later. "I didn't mean to embarrass you." Joy placed a hand lightly on his shoulder. "You had a good job, too, you know. I just wanted people to know that."

Todd silenced her with a kiss before laying his head on her cushioning breasts. She began to moan softly as his tongue flicked over an exposed nipple. Moving up, his tongue touched hers as their lips came together, stifling the sounds of her pleasure.

The walls were thin, Little Todd asleep but the girls still up, still playing just outside the door.

Joy took his hand and pressed it against the warm flesh covering her hipbone as his thoughts returned again to the silver Lexus. The cloud of cool air that would, unlike the window air conditioner rattling a few feet away, kiss the skin with a gentle, nearly silent chill.

She unlocked her tongue with his as he rolled heavily on top of her. "I just thought it would be a good way of meeting people, joining the conversation like that," she said, picking it up where they'd left it. Where he thought they'd left it.

For some reason, that brought to mind the condescension of her previous statement: "You had a good job, too."

Todd rolled off her and stared at the ceiling. He clicked his teeth in a gesture of irritation that he hoped wouldn't drag them into a fight. Why couldn't she just drop it?

"Sorry," she said again. Reading him.

He found and squeezed her hand to show more understanding than he felt, and hoped that would end it. They needed to enjoy the alone time before the girls grew bored and came knocking.

"I got a call at the room phone while you were at work," she said. "Someone who's with the Water Department at the what-not Municipal Building. I forget her name, but she wants me to come in for a job interview tomorrow."

Todd wondered how she planned to interview with the woman if she didn't know her name, but let it go. "When?" he asked her instead.

"I told her you work till five and I'd have no one to sit with the kids, so she said it was okay if I came in at five-thirty. Kind of funny, don't you think?"

"What?"

"A job interview at five-thirty on a Friday evening. I don't know."

Todd felt her shrug beside him as he continued staring at a ceiling already lost in the shadows, the days growing depressingly shorter. He could hear a radio with too much bass playing down by the pool. Voices getting louder and drunker.

"Will you do something for me, honey?" Joy asked in a warm whisper. When he made no reply, she said, "Will you go to Zeebe's Garage tomorrow and see how the car's doing?"

He nodded. "Fine. But the municipal building's so close, you could walk there. I'll give you directions in the morning. And I can always get a ride into work from someone."

"That's not why I want it," she said. If she expected him to ask, he didn't. "I just think...I think we need it."

"I told you, I'll check on it."

She'd get the job. They both knew it. That's what was scaring her...and him, too. It had never been this easy before, people calling them up and practically begging them to take jobs. He was used to sweat and grime, lung-choking smoke, toil and boredom broken up by the degradation of unemployment lines and job applications going nowhere and milk money borrowed from relatives and neighbors.

He didn't trust Babylon's brand of prosperity any more than Joy did, but he felt like a starving mouse sniffing at a smear of peanut butter. He didn't know what the contraption was around it, or how it worked, but he distrusted the hell out of it. He was so hungry, though, that he had to take a careful walk up to it and hope he could fill his belly before the damn thing bit him.

He caught a few moments of sleep before the kids burst in the door. Long enough to dream about sitting behind the wheel of a silver Lexus with buttery upholstery, riding on a cushion of cool night air.

Chapter Fourteen.

Thank God for microwaves. After finding Darby taking washcloth swipes at Tuck while he splashed away in a tub of water, Paul found a chicken and broccoli casserole in the fridge and started heating it up.

"You didn't call," she said after he returned upstairs and found Darby now bracing their squealing son into some semblance of temporary inactivity so she could wash his hair. She could have entered a wet T-shirt contest.

Paul took a seat on the toilet lid. "You're all wet."

"And you're late, buster. You missed dinner."

"I tried calling, but I think the nearest cell phone tower is in the next county."

He scooted out of the way as a small tidal wave came at him.

"Daddy!" Tuck screamed. He slapped the water with both hands in some sort of nautical welcoming ceremony.

Darby rolled her eyes as she picked up their pink-skinned son in an oversize towel. She was amazing with him, ever-patient, eternally understanding of his loud enthusiasm. It was something that Paul felt was a little harder to do at fifty-two.

But that thought brought to mind his daughters, kids he'd had in his twenties and early thirties and with whom he'd bonded no better. He felt his chest tighten at the ramifications, the knowledge that he was running out of time and second chances.

He waited until Tuck had no more moisture to shake off before moving in for hugs and kisses. Hard hugs and wet kisses, as if staving off a repeat of familial history. After pajamas and bedtime stories from the both of them, Tuck was finally done for the night. Nice trick, warm water. The toddler's mouth had dropped open and his lids drooped even before his parents made it out of the room.

"So where were you?"

They were in the kitchen now, Paul scooping his chicken and broccoli into a plate. It felt only lukewarm when Paul stuck a finger in it but he decided to eat it as-is rather than reheat.

"I went to the police station to see why the town fathers hate us."

"And?"

He shook his head. "Police Chief Sandy is a reserved but decent enough sort, I gather. Way he explains it, the town's afraid of turning into the big, bad city if they don't keep out dangerous characters like us."

"Sounds illegal," she said.

"Well, that's not exactly how he put it." Though, come to think of it, the chief's message hadn't come across a whole lot more guarded or diplomatic than that.

"I guess it makes a little sense. From their perspective, anyway."

"Very little," he said, gulping at dinner. "Total strangers willing to pay eight-hundred-thousand dollars for the house just to keep us out?"

"Maybe it's worth that much."

"In this economy? And if it is, how'd we get such a great deal in the first place? I'd love to know why the McConlons were so anxious to leave. I wish we'd actually met them. By the way, the cop who yelled at me is the seller's brother."

Darby was nibbling at a fingernail. She'd long ago found a way to tame her nail-biting habit by taking such tiny portions that the damage could only be seen under a microscope. "What cop?" she asked.

He washed his lukewarm meal down with milk. He drank more of the stuff than any grown man he knew. "I'd better back up. First thing I see at that Drake Municipal Building downtown is a blood drive. Simple enough, right?"

Darby kept taking her tiny bites from a thumb nail.

"You ever seen cops guarding blood like it's plutonium? That's how this was. Weird."

By the glazed look in his young wife's eyes, he could tell she was mentally making to-do lists. He couldn't blame her when he thought about it. You had to be there.

"Anyway, that's how I met this Marty character. McConlon. The cop. The brother. He almost arrests me for trying to enter the blood drive room, but gets real friendly once he stops PMSing. I can't figure him out."

"Uh huh."

Yep. Definitely mentally composing one of her to-do lists.

Before he lost her altogether, he said, "Forget the blood drive. I've got a puzzle for you. If the locals hate strangers so much, why do they have a whole motel full of them at the top of Pleasant Run Avenue?"

Darby sat and folded her hands demurely in her lap, apparently to keep her teeth away from them. "You mean the Sundown Motel? I've noticed those men by the pool."

"A few women and kids, too. I drove through the parking lot on the way home, another reason I was late. The rusted heaps had plates from West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio-even as far away as Oregon. They're obviously dirt poor and a lot easier to run off than we are. People like that, if you want to get rid of them, you throw them in jail for flicking cigarette butts from moving vehicles."

"That's awful," Darby said.

"I'm not saying it's right, but it's a fact of life. Only, it seems that the good citizens of this town would rather have the likes of them around than us." He ended it on a note of hurt disbelief that sounded more like priggish petulance than irony.

Darby stared at her slender fingers. "Maybe they're working on some kind of construction project."

"Maybe," he reluctantly agreed. He hadn't considered that. "But I've done a lot of walking and I haven't noticed anything going up. Have you?"

"Maybe an indoor project. More work in that monstrous municipal building. Whatever."

Yeah, that could explain it, but Paul hoped it didn't. A part of him-the bored, unemployed part, no doubt-was enjoying his little mystery.

The hollow two-note chime of the doorbell took them both by surprise. It was the first time he'd heard it since an earlier Savannah Easton visit. Paul found his wife's eyes and wondered if his were as wide with surprise and vague fear as hers. Even outside of this cold town it was unusual for anyone to get unexpected visitors these days...especially at night.

It was drizzling out, Paul noticed as he watched beads of water dripping down the glass over the front entry hall double doors. He hesitated briefly before cautiously unlocking and turning the knob. He heard Darby hovering in the background.

The door swung open to three old men.

Chapter Fifteen.