"You didn't have to treat him that way."

Todd looked up from the motel room desktop where he'd been playing a made-up game of field hockey with coins and beer can pull tabs, and cocked his eyebrows.

"He got you out of jail, hon. You can't forget that."

Moments before, she'd shut the room door despite the clackety room unit that barely moved any air, and left Little Todd and the girls watching television in their room next door. That meant Joy was ready for a Serious Discussion.

Jesus Lord.

He mumbled an insincere apology as a way of heading her off at the pass, but suspected he was too late.

She stood, hovered, sighed. Crossed to the window to peer at the patch of woods that separated them from the town. "Getting darker," she said.

He knew what she was thinking. The same shadowy thoughts kept crawling through his own mind. He knocked askew two nickels with a quarter while listening to the tinny murmur of the TV in the adjoining room.

"We could leave," she said.

"Yeah." Hoping that might slow her down some.

He thought about what was in his wallet, and that reminded him that he didn't really know how much he had, so he got up and pawed through the pockets of a pair of jeans on the floor and found it. He opened the bill compartment and swore.

"What?" she asked, alarmed.

He poked through more pockets of the same jeans, and then attacked more discarded clothing from the previous night. Turned out more pockets full of breath mints and used tissues and more coins, and brushed aside a bunch of crap on the desk.

"They took it," he sputtered, and swore again.

"Took what? Who did?"

"My money. Most of it."

He tore through desk drawers, tossing aside Joy's underwear, inexplicably stored there. He grabbed her purse, scattering lipstick, more tissues, creased turnpike receipts, and found three crumpled singles and more coins, mostly pennies.

"Todd, what are you doing? Leave my things alone." She snatched the purse from him, stuffed her shit back in and placed it behind her, on the mattress. Maybe thinking he couldn't do further damage if he couldn't see it.

He froze, half bent. "We aren't going anywhere, Joy. They made sure of that by stealing our money."

She gave him a crooked glance. "You mean they broke in-"

"I mean," he said, "the cops musta took my cash when they booked me." He slumped into the desk chair. "We couldn't leave this shithole even if we had a working car. We wouldn't get far with seven bucks and change."

He was ready for any kind of response but the heavy silence he got. The room was collecting too many shadows for him to be able to gauge her expression in the mirror, so he turned.

"What did you mean when you said they'd taken most of your money?"

"I've got four bucks," he said.

"Funny they'd take most of it, but not everything."

He saw where she was going with that, and headed her off. "I didn't spend it. I had two, maybe three beers all evening."

They'd already had it out that morning about the missed babysitting duty of the night before, but now she was back at it. Hitting at him from a different angle.

To break her brooding silence, he said again, "I didn't spend it all."

"Okay, fine," she said, but he could see that it wasn't. "It's just that when you drink..."

He placed both hands in his lap.

"I'm not saying..." she said.

"Yes, you are."

"It's just that, you go into a bar, and...two or three?"

His fist crashed to the desktop, sending their pathetic money pile fluttering, the coin stacks crumbling. She never knew when to walk away from an argument before it hit the red zone. He stood and began pacing, trying to burn through the energy fueling his anger. He could no longer hear the tinny TV in the next room. Melanie always knew when to turn it down.

"That's right," he rasped. "I'm the grade-A fuck-up who can't drink, can't hold on to his own money, can't even remember to come home at night."

"Honey, calm down," she said, but it only made him pace faster.

There was still too much fuel to burn up, so he had to throw something. But everything in the goddamn room was bolted down. He picked up his jeans from the floor and whipped them against a wall. A totally unsatisfying whish of a reaction.

"Honey," Joy said. "It's alright. I got the job anyway."

Coming at him from yet another angle. "What?" Stopping him cold.

"I should have told you earlier, but I was saving it."

Meaning she'd withheld the news as punishment for his lost Friday, but he tried to brush it off.

"A woman from the Water Department came and got me at about seven last night, after I called and told them why I couldn't make it. She took the girls, too. They sat and read while I was interviewed.

He stood over her, one foot propped on the bed. He was wearing shoes, and just waiting for her to complain about dirt on the spread even though it wasn't their spread. He'd never heard of an employer who'd do something like that for a job candidate. And the Water Department was open on a Friday evening?

He was going to congratulate her anyway and worry about it later. But he never got the chance. Not before the gunshot rang out and cries filled the air.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

Full night had somehow sneaked up on them while he and Joy had been fighting. Now, as he shouted through the thin wall for the girls to stay where they were, Todd slipped out and followed the voices to the ravine that demarcated the rear of the motel complex, cutting it off from the woods that separated them from the town.

"Hey, get a light," Denver Dugan was shouting. "What happened here?"

Several people lit cigarette lighters, and Todd could just make out that about half of the bleary, stumbling shadows carried guns, knives or homemade weapons of some kind.

"Someone's gonna get shot out here," Joy said.

"Someone did get shot."

Todd aimed his own lighter at the voice. Kathy Lee was firing up a cigarette, her lighter hand shaking so that the flame left swirling tracers in the night. A dull, black automatic hung by her side, at the end of her other scrawny arm.

"What happened?" This from D.B., coming up behind them with a flashlight and his gentle take-charge manner.

Kathy Lee, now centered in D.B.'s beam, said, "Over there." She pointed her shaky gun at a stand of greenery just before the ravine fell away to the creek bed below.

"Who'd you get?" Duke Gates demanded, slipping his fire-breathing dragon arm around her. He stood bare-chested, his shorts unbuttoned to a wiry patch of hair below his belly button. He took the gun from her and notched it in his waistband, gangsta style.

"Heard something after you fell to sleep, so I went to see," she said.

More than Todd cared to know.

"It came at me."

"What? A rat?" Carl asked.

"If it was," she said, "it was as big as you. And on two legs."

Explaining nothing.

D.B.'s eyes and flashlight beam swept the crowd before landing on two side-by-side armed men: Denver with his scoped deer rifle and Jermaine with the .38 the others had already met. "Will you two take a look? Here. Take the flashlight."

They went.

There might be fucking vampires out there, Todd thought, but all D.B. had to do was ask them nicely.

The Sundowners waited silently topside while Denver and Jermaine thrashed around below. Jermaine aimed D.B.'s weak flashlight beam at tangled brush that looked black as the night, the light sometimes picking up Denver's big, scared face.

Meanwhile, Kathy Lee was going on in that steady twang of hers. "It was climbing out of the ravine, right up at me, its eyes shining in the moonlight."

It, she'd said this time. Man or creature? Todd wondered.

"When it saw I had Duke's nine millimeter with me, it-he scrambled back behind that bush, but not before I nailed it once, point blank in the chest."

Flip-flopping pronouns like even she didn't have a clue.

"Duke didn't mention having no nine," Todd said.

"Why should I?" the kid replied.

"We're all in this together, you little prick."

"Hold it, you two, I wanna hear this," said D.B. He motioned for Kathy Lee to continue.

"Not much more to say."

Oh yes there was. Todd wondered where she'd stashed her kids for the evening. What if it had been one of her own little urchins she'd trigger-happily plugged?

"There's nothing here, D.B.," Jermaine shouted up at them.

By now, a couple more Sundowners had found flashlights and brought them to life. D.B. took one and joined the two men digging footholds into the cantilevered soil like mountain goats. Others followed and, with a deep sigh of annoyance, Todd did the same.

"Todd, get back up here," Joy snapped, but he ignored her.

"See. Nothing," Denver said.

"Give a woman a gun..."

"I heard that, Dukey," Kathy Lee said.

Denver, who'd been scrambling up the hill, chose that moment to lose his footing and topple backward, slo-mo style. He rolled like a playful grizzly most of the way to the creek bed below, triggering hoots of laughter, beams crisscrossing his prostrate body like footlights.

"Hey, look at this," said a man with a last name so complex that the Sundowners had taken to simply calling him Ponytail Pete.

Flashlight beams hit him. He'd slid several feet down the hill and anchored himself to a tree root. When a light found him, he was prodding at a couple saplings that had tried to cling to the side of the ravine, but failed. Their spindly trunks were snapped clean.

"So?" said Carl.

"These are recently broken," Pete said. "Crushed. Like something big fell into 'em."

"Something like a body?" Tonya Whittock asked.

"Could be," said Pete.

"Bullshit," offered Dukey.

Hating himself for appearing to agree with the asshole, Todd said, "So where's the body?"

That was the worst moment, standing there watching them all take in that question and put together what it meant. The woods seemed darker, the flashlights weaker just then. Even the creek whispering below sounded like it was against them.

"Blood," said Ponytail Pete. Still gripping what remained of the snapped-off saplings, he stared at the fingers of one hand.

And there it was. The flashlights found it. Moisture picked off a torn sapling, now turning two of Ponytail Pete's fingers black and wet.

Todd grabbed a flashlight from the nearest Sundowner and slashed the woods, the ravine and the motel grounds with its yellow beam, the sudden motion triggering gasps from all around.

"Jesus, what is it?" Jermaine Whittock asked.

It was nothing. Dark, dark woods, that's all. Unseen, on the other end of those woods, the weird, fucked-up town of Babylon, Michigan.