The three stood facing Paul on the terrazzo stone front porch. The one in the middle, taller and somewhat less elderly than the others, held high a black umbrella under which his friends gathered, framing him tightly like carolers sharing a songbook.

"Good evening, Mr. Highsmith," said the old man on the right. Like the others, he wore a necktie, his creased with careless disuse. Not much occasion for one in a town like Babylon. He stood the most hunched of the three, looking oddly frail despite his wide shoulders and deep chest. "I wonder if we can come in out of the rain."

"Of course."

Paul mumbled a puzzled apology and stepped aside so the three could enter and shake themselves dry in the foyer. Like Tuck after his bath. One umbrella seemed to offer insufficient coverage over three old men. Together, they stomped imaginary mud from their feet and murmured greetings to Darby, behind him.

The tall one said, "We really should have called, but old men have old habits."

"It used to be," said the one who'd spoken first, "you wanted to chat, you took a walk, rapped on your neighbor's door and talked his ear off while his wife put the kids to bed. You folks have a kid, don't you?"

The abrupt question and the nonchalance with the harsh-sounding "kid" caught Paul by surprise.

"Won't you come in?" Darby asked.

She led them to a couch in the family room where they plunked themselves down in the same order in which Paul had greeted them at the door, then took an inordinate amount of time settling stiff bones.

"Big house," said the third guest, a dour-looking man who spoke for the first time. His voice seemed unused to the workout. "Much too big, I'd think, for just the three of you."

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, the tall umbrella owner chuckled. "John, you always get right to the heart of matters, don't you? We haven't even introduced ourselves yet."

The frail man with the massive upper body chortled an apology. "Sorry. That should have been my job, being the mayor of our little town. I'm Olan Buck. This tall fellow here is Mr. James Chaplin, and the grumpy man simply talking your ear off is John Tolliver."

The tall one, Chaplin, flapped a hand self-consciously. Tolliver barely nodded. He sat folded compactly upon himself, his features seeming to meet in the middle of his face as his scowl pulled his eyebrows down and lifted the center of his mouth nearly to his nose.

"Well then," James Chaplin said into yet another awkward silence. "Now that you know us..."

"Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?" Darby asked, springing to her feet. It was obvious that she wouldn't mind leaving Paul alone with the odd group.

"No thanks."

"Not a thing."

Obstinate head shake.

With that, Mssrs. Buck, Chaplin and Tolliver removed any excuse for Darby to abandon him. Paul could hardly contain his smug glee.

Groping for something, anything, to contribute, he finally blurted, "Chaplin's Department Store," to the tall man. "And Buck Cement Products," he added, this time addressing the town's mayor.

"Very good," the department store's namesake said.

"Yes, Buck Cement Products," the mayor contributed. "You've obviously explored the industrial area to the southeast of town."

"I've been everywhere," Paul said, enjoying, without understanding why, the stir caused by his words. It was as though the three decrepit bulls squirmed their discomfort in unison.

"Well, it doesn't take long," Olan Buck finally offered. "Babylon is so small and uninteresting." He tittered. "I'm mayor. I shouldn't be talking like this, should I?"

The department store owner patted Buck's knee. "I think we all feel the same way, Olan. I'd probably take off for greener pastures myself if I wasn't trapped by generations of Chaplins. We've always lived here and I suppose we always will."

Mayor Buck murmured his agreement while John Tolliver stared with half-closed eyes at a spot between the two chairs occupied by Paul and Darby.

"My department store, Mr. Highsmith," the taller old man continued," is a tradition here, but if you lived twenty miles outside of Babylon you would have never heard of it. That's what I'm trying to say. For nearly a century, my family's lives have been intertwined with that store. We'd be useless in the outside world."

Chaplin leaned back at the same moment the town's mayor scooted forward. "It's the same with us, Mr. Highsmith. Buck Cement Products...I hardly even know what the company does, but it's run by cousins and uncles and I get a quarterly dividend check because I'm family."

"What these two are trying to say," grunted John Tolliver from his still corner of the couch, "is that Babylon is an old town-old with family-and that's the way we like it. It's home to the Tollivers and the Bucks and the Chaplins and the Drakes and the Cravens and a dozen more names. There's no place for people like you."

The dour old man remained motionless, hunched in upon himself, his wizened body almost lost in the couch. The other two smiled serenely as though applying salve to the sting of their friend's words.

"When you mention the Drake family, that would include Miles Drake, wouldn't it?" Paul asked casually, his eyes flitting from face to face to face for a reaction truer than words.

"And that would be your little boy, Tuck, wouldn't it?"

It was only after John Tolliver spoke that Paul heard the faint wailing from up in the nursery and echoing out of the baby monitor in the kitchen. Darby gasped and skipped up the stairs.

"Sorry," said Mr. Chaplin. "We'll keep our voices down."

"Wonderful boy," John Tolliver said dryly. When he spoke, only his lips moved, and just barely. "Kids, you have to watch them. You think they're safe in a small town, but that's not always so."

The sour old man's eyes shone with a touch of yellow as they focused on Paul. "Read the papers, Mr. Highsmith-or the Internet, which I guess is the thing these days. Violence, child abuse, missing children. It happens everywhere, not just in Detroit. The only thing we lack here is white collar crime."

Did a smile crack his dour countenance? Paul couldn't be sure.

"Wouldn't it be ironic," Chaplin said with a pleasant chuckle, "if you leave Detroit for the safety and serenity of little old Babylon, where nothing ever happens, and all hell breaks loose."

Was that a threat? Paul opened his mouth, but he couldn't dig words out of his storm of thoughts. He sat stunned, literally speechless, until his attention was grabbed by the sound and fury of his young wife racing down the stairs and sliding across the foyer and into the living room, screeching to a halt before the three startled old men.

"Listen and listen well," she said, the words escaping her like steam from a hot teapot. "I heard you threaten my child. That's a fact, so don't waste my time denying it." She swept the air with one trim arm. "First, you come into our home and insult me with your story of the good old days when you'd drop by for a chat with the man of the house while the little wife prepared the children for bed. Well, alright. I put up with that anachronistic bullshit from my grandfather, who didn't know any better and was slightly daffy at the time, so I'll cut you three the same slack. But don't ever issue even the most veiled threat against my son. Do you all understand?"

The three men sat with gaping mouths.

James Chaplin recovered first. "Mrs. Highsmith, please don't think any harm would ever come to your lovely little boy. Not from us. I think Mr. Tolliver here was merely-"

"Mr. Tolliver here," Darby interrupted, "is a fool and a bully who's been allowed to get away with too much for too long in the guise of being old and crotchety."

John Tolliver's rheumy eyes momentarily sparkled with a heat that would hurt to the touch. "Longer than you can imagine," he said.

As soon as he'd made his inscrutable comment, the eyes seemed to cool, the lids droop to their half-mast expression of bored disillusionment.

"Now gentlemen," Darby said, "I want you to leave. Please don't forget your umbrella because it's still raining and you're not coming back for it."

The three struggled to their feet, pulling at neckties and smoothing the creases from slacks.

At the door, Mayor Buck said, "Mrs. Highsmith, I assure you-"

"No, I assure the three of you," Darby said evenly, "that I'll hunt you to hell if anything happens to my son or my husband. Please take that as a promise, and don't return. Don't make a new offer on our home or even discuss the matter with our real estate agent." She smiled engagingly. "And it would be wonderful if you could pretend not to know us if we pass on the street. We'll do the same."

As the door closed, Paul's last sight was of three speechless old men hunched under an inadequate umbrella in a steady drizzle.

Chapter Sixteen.

Great, Todd thought Friday morning while standing in front of the crumbling brick and wood and concrete garage. Life just keeps getting better.

"Get back in the car," D.B. shouted. "I'll run you back out here on lunch break. He'll definitely be open by then."

Todd shook his head with the finality of a man who'd already listened to his fill of reason. He burned with a vague, smoldering anger that found targets in Joy for insisting he come out here to check on the car, but mostly in the hick who ran Zeebe's Garage for not being open at damn near eight-thirty on a weekday morning. When were working people expected to take in their cars if not before work?

"Thanks," he managed to get out from between clenched jaws, "but I'm gonna wait around. I'll walk to work if the Olds isn't done yet."

He'd caught Don Brandon on his way out that morning, and been readily granted a ride to the garage. Like most of the men from the Sundown, D.B. worked in one of the six or seven small factories on Sennett Street in the so-called Industrial Parkway.

Zeebe's was at the very end of Main View Road before it took a ninety-degree turn, exchanged pavement for gravel and became Sennett. Bean fields and gravel roads and rickety factories. A walk would be all of a mile, mile and a half. And he'd have the advantage of gloomy silence rather than D.B.'s sunny chatter.

The ride in the Ford pickup had been filled with country music rattling like broken glass from defective speakers and the driver's incessant morning cheer. The white sky and early humidity also contributed to Todd's foul mood.

Now facing an empty building, he wiped his face of the sweat already accumulating and said, loud enough to be heard above the radio twang, "Really, D.B., thanks for the ride but I'm gonna wait around."

D.B. shrugged. "Guess it don't matter if you're late. I'm thinking you gotta sleep with the boss's wife and drink all his beer to get fired in this town. Just remember, Friday's payday."

He rapped his palm against the door of the F-150, some kind of high-energy sign-off, then threw gravel as he shimmied out of the lot.

Todd saw more Sundowners in rattletrap cars and hillbilly trucks. They honked and waved at him as they screeched around the turn onto Sennett. To get out of the worse of the heat, Todd slid behind a crooked row of dead vehicles with missing grills, missing doors, missing tires, missing lights. The patch of dirt and weeds in front of the garage was a rust-flaked graveyard of American metal, unburied corpses with hoods up, engine blocks gone. Hulks with no seats sitting on cinder. If the property offered any indication of Zeebe's mechanical skills, Todd already regretted his decision to send the Olds this way.

Of course, it hadn't actually been his decision in the first place, a recollection that sent him seething. Goddamn cop.

He circled Zeebe's grounds, sinking into the mud up to his work boot laces. He made his way around the rusted corpses and the seriously leaning building, searching with all the enthusiasm of an earthquake survivor hoping not to find loved ones.

The building sat on a colorless concrete foundation, two closed bay doors in front. Todd tugged at one of the roll-up doors and wasn't surprised when it didn't budge.

"Damn," he said as he took off for the street.

Then he recalled spying a second door, to the side of the building. He turned with another curse, this one for his wife for sending him on this fool's errand. He jammed a cigarette between his lips and fired it up.

It was unlocked. It opened a crack. Todd looked up and down the road, giving the garage owner one last chance to show up if he wasn't already here. He took a big drag of good tar poison, stomped the butt underfoot and pushed the door open.

The bright white sky left him squinting in the dark interior. He stood in the doorway until his irises slitted and his vision adjusted enough to pick out six parked vehicles, one of which was his Olds Eighty-Eight. Looking no worse, at least from this view, than when he'd last seen it.

"Hello?" he called out to the shadows.

Nothing.

The cement floor was sleek with engine oil and lubricants, littered with tools that wanted to trip him up as he picked his way as carefully as possible to his car, his T-shirt glued to his back by sweat and anxiety.

The floor wasn't level-had he really expected otherwise?-and now he heard the door behind whine slowly close, another victim of gravity. Todd turned and nervously watched the sharp white line of natural light disappear. By the time the door nudged up against its jamb, daylight had fled the premises altogether, but by now his eyes had grown accustomed to the shadowy bleakness.

Or at least enough so that he could pick his way carefully past a beater of a Cadillac and to his own car's front door, which he opened for the sake of the dome light. And got nothing for his troubles.

Now fairly well accustomed to the dark, he could identify five cars and a pickup, arranged in two rows. The Olds with the burned-out dome light headed up one of those rows.

He'd lit another cigarette at some point-probably as much for the illumination as the jolt-and now he tapped the ash loose on the slick floor and called out another weak greeting to the ever-present shadows. It bounced back without comment.

Todd climbed into his car, noting with new annoyance the absence of lighting. The key was dangling from the ignition along with a yellow tag. There were greasy fingerprints on it, and scribbled numbers in a code that would mean something to the mechanic.

Not sure what he hoped to accomplish except to assure himself they hadn't stolen the battery or hoisted the engine, Todd fluttered the gas pedal and turned over the ignition. It barely even threatened to catch. He sat back. Counted to three. Tried again. Again got the mechanical drone of a starter that couldn't quite make it over the top. Like a sneeze watering the eyes but just hovering at the edges.

"Shit."

He kept fluttering, kept grinding, devoid of expectations but filled with rage and frustration. He might have kept this up until he killed what little battery juice remained, except that his attention got drawn to a winking dot in his rearview mirror.

As he stared at it, Todd's thumb and forefinger forgot their sweaty grip on the ignition key. In a few seconds the red light was gone, leaving him only with the glowing after-image burned into his mind.

He turned for a better look out his rear window at whatever he'd seen back there. He found the spacious interior of the monster Caddy parked immediately behind him. A car from the days when Detroit ruled and gasoline ran like water and success meant more horses under your hood than the neighbors.

Staring hard, Todd grew convinced he's seen nothing of any significance. Then he caught another red wink from the vicinity of where a steering wheel should be if good old Zeebe hadn't plundered it and sold it on eBay. Todd squinted, but the light was gone. Again.

"What the hell...?" he breathed.

He sniffed the air. Cigarette smoke. Maybe his own. Maybe not. He stabbed his butt out in the ashtray. Then saw the glow again.

Incensed at being spied upon, and embarrassed by his momentary shock and confusion, Todd slammed out of his car, strolled to the parked Caddy and rapped on the driver's door.

Like one of those optical puzzles where you see nothing at first and then the smiling witch suddenly shifts into view, the car's open window afforded shadows and then from the shadows emerged the chilling reality of a slouched man smoking behind the wheel. Todd jerked away from the massive head and broad shoulders, the rest still lost to shadows.

The man said nothing. Just smoked. Stared at him. Smoked. Smiled.

Todd hid his fear-more than that, his sudden and inexplicable revulsion-in chin-out aggression. "Hey, what's the deal with my car?" The effect was supposed to be forceful, but it sounded thin and whiny even to his own ears.

The man coughed up a wet, chesty substance that he caught in a used tissue., This he balled up in a grimy fist and tossed to the floor on the passenger side of his big ride. He grinned. "Kids, don't smoke," he said.

Christ, thought Todd, thankful the asshole hadn't been resting in his car.

The man behind the wheel gazed out the cracked windshield with the bored expression of a long-distance hauler. He took another drag on his cigarette, the glowing ash feebly lighting the car interior for a second.

It was enough. Todd stumbled back a step, choking slightly as he inhaled secondhand smoke with his startled gasp.

The seated man turned so Todd could read 'Jim Zeebe, Prop.' sewn in an unsteady hand over his work-shirt pocket.