Paul thought a moment. "Obviously they didn't cut every phone line in town."

"I doubt it," said D.B.

"This place where Purcell's at, he's got one-right?"

"I would guess so," said Mona.

"Then I'm in."

"Stay down," Mona muttered before stepping out of the van and quickly and quietly closing the door.

Kathy Lee wiggled over to the driver's seat and placed both hands on the wheel. Paul caught a quick glimpse of her worried eyes before she adjusted the rearview mirror for a straight shot behind her. There had been no time for rehearsals. No contingency plans for dealing with a police car squealing into the parking lot off Middle View and sealing the only route into and out of the alley behind the building. If that happened, Paul thought as he hugged the rough floorboard carpet with a sweating cheek, they were all dead. And so was his family.

He could hear Mona's muffled rapping on the door facing the parking lot entrance to the Dog. She'd make up some lame excuse and scuttle the raid if a daylighter answered.

Paul wished D.B. had taken personal charge of the raid, but they'd all agreed that their de facto leader was needed to hold the troops together at the Sundown. The unspoken thought was that D.B. was too valuable to lose if they didn't make it back.

Paul's breath hitched when the van's door rumbled open.

"Jesus, don't scare me like that," Jamey gasped. Tough to tell whether he was talking to Paul for the inadvertent hitch or to Mona for causing it.

"Everyone out," she said in a low, level voice.

Wordlessly, the three sweaty men scrambled out and stood blinking into the sun. Dunbar, looking sicker by the hour, held up a bulky blue duffel bag like an umbrella. Jamey Weeks carried a small, battered toolbox, while Paul's only load was fear. Mona led them around the corner of the building, exposing them to a trickle of traffic on Middle View Road.

They moved fast, staying close to the brick side of the Dog. Paul felt naked and vulnerable until they squeezed through the unlocked main entrance where they faced two locked interior doors. One was frosted glass, with a crudely painted German Shepherd that had an obscenely long tongue and one closed eye. The other, a heavy wooden door, painted chocolate brown like the foyer, had a hammered metal mailbox next to it and the number "101" over a peephole.

That was the door Mona stood behind. She rattled the knob just to be sure it wasn't going to be easier than they expected. It wasn't.

"How do you know they can't hear us?" Paul whispered.

"They're vampires," Mona replied.

"I know that, but-"

"My grandparents, my folks and my in-laws are vampires. I know what they're like when they're out."

Jamey, meanwhile, had withdrawn from his unwieldy toolbox a long, pointy metal device on the end of a wooden screwdriver handle. He'd been chosen for this mission for his unique skills with such delicate tools. He knelt on one knee, inserted his homemade device into the doorknob and twitched his wrist a few times. Paul heard a popping sound and the knob turned freely.

"Holy shit," Dunbar mumbled when the door started to swing open.

It caught at the end of a taut chain.

Jamey looked up at Paul and smiled peculiarly. He reached once more into his felonious toolbox and pulled out a pair of yellow-handled bolt cutters. Wishful thinking on Paul's part that a safety chain would stop them. Jamey snipped it slack even faster than he'd popped the knob lock, and cautiously pushed the door open.

His role completed, he stepped proudly aside and waited for someone else to enter the darkness first.

Their B&E man's movement had left Paul in front. It was like in that ridiculous war comedy where Abbott and Costello are tricked into accepting a deadly mission because everyone else takes a step back when volunteers are called for.

Or was it Laurel and Hardy?

He couldn't do it, he thought as he stared into the shadows beyond. He was fifty-two years old and suddenly feeling every day of it. At the same time, he was nine and terrified to walk into the dark cellar alone.

He heard an impatient little snort behind him and Mona took the lead. With his face burning, he let her. Todd, with a disgusted sigh, followed her. Paul only squeezed in ahead of Jamey because he didn't want his back exposed.

They climbed a steep set of stairs, into total darkness. Paul's hands began acting as eyes, feeling blindly for walls and obstructions. The place smelled of dust and rancid chicken, beer and cigarettes and body odor. Flies buzzed and he could imagine other creatures slithering out of his way as they tiptoed over groaning floorboards.

"Jamey, shut the door behind you," Mona called out. Not loudly, but too loud, as far as Paul was concerned.

The door squealed shut, leaving them in darkness even more complete than before. No one had brought flashlights because Mona had told them they wouldn't be necessary. When the light suddenly snapped on, Paul and Todd grunted in breathless shock.

"It's alright," Mona soothed. "Worst thing the light's gonna do is make them stir a little."

"Yeah?" Jamey said, voice quaking. "They're such light sleepers, how come I'm here?"

Paul figured he couldn't have asked a better question himself.

They stood in a long hallway narrow enough for them to touch both border walls at once. There were two doorways cut into the left wall and the same number on the right. The first to the left was a large open area still in darkness. Directly across from it, Paul could see the standing shadows of stove, fridge and countertops. As they crept past, Paul's nostrils were assailed by the strong odor of a backed-up sewer or unflushed toiled. He moved quickly out of scent range.

Todd sneezed loudly and was hushed by the others. Even by Mona, who'd earlier announced their presence by turning on a fucking light. Paul felt a comparable tickle working its way up his dust-clogged sinuses.

"Two in here," Mona said. She'd entered the second room on the left and Paul could hear her patting down the wall for a light switch.

No, Paul wanted to warn her, but as he came up behind she found what she was looking for and flicked to life a single naked bulb on the ceiling. It did little more than toss shadows around, but that was enough to reveal the two squirming pink figures on the bed.

He was out of there. Paul backed up without looking and crashed into Jamey, who said in a strangled voice, "Hey, what the hell?"

"Paul, it's alright," Mona said, sounding nearly as agitated as he felt, but holding it together better. "They're asleep. It's just an involuntary response to the light."

"I'm experiencing a similar response to them," he muttered.

Heart thudding and black spots mushrooming in the corners of his vision, he chanced another peek at the nude couple, limbs intertwined on the bed. Not a bed, but a mattress set on the floor. The bedsheet had been pulled up on one corner to partially cover them, but they'd tossed it off.

Mona bent over the two. "Warren Lattimer, the bartender at the Dog," she said, straightening. "The girl with the cracked red toenail polish, I'm pretty sure it's Perry and Dot Farr's younger daughter. I had no idea. There hadn't been any rumors about her. She's all of sixteen," Mona said, shaking her head sadly.

The beer poster in the bedroom caught Paul's eye. Not the poster itself, but more the way it was taped high on the wall over the bed. The way it clung to the wall with multiple layers of masking tape when four small strips should have done the job.

Someone wanted to make damn sure it wouldn't come down. It firmly blocked out the room's only window.

Following his gaze, Mon said, "You need any more proof of what we're dealing with, you just tear that thing down."

Not likely. Paul couldn't stop wondering how he was going to do what had to be done. He followed the others down the long corridor and through the open doorway near the front of the apartment. Find it fast, he urged himself as the others ahead of him fumbled for a light source. He saw too much in the dark, too many still black lumps on the floor.

Body bags was his first impression when someone finally found a workable lamp on the floor by tripping over it. The naked bulb cast a Rorschach pattern of light and shadows that made it difficult to see where one vague shape left off and another began.

"Three, four of them," Mona said softly.

The room was still as death but for the harsh panting of four frightened daylighters. It was hotter than hell and twice as humid.

"Christ," Dunbar said, perching on the arm of a garage sale couch, about the only piece of furniture in the room. Paul stared at the oddly lumped shape of the cushions until it dawned on him that a figure lay beneath them.

Most of the yellow lamplight extended waist high and no higher. The papered walls, once a flocked pattern on white, were smudged colorless by fingerprints and darker matter. Paul felt heavy, damp air tickle his sweaty face, stirred by a slow-moving ceiling fan.

"They wouldn't risk opening a window," Mona said. "If a breeze fluffed up that shade, they'd be in trouble."

A bookcase in one corner held a CD player and a short stack of thrash metal CDs next to a tattered pile of men's magazines full of harsh pink shots. Should have the Internet, Paul couldn't help thinking. An empty six-pack of beer perched high atop the pile. Still attached to the plastic ring, it looked like the cans had been downed without being twisted free. Paul heard flies buzzing unseen at the front window, the faint tapping of their small bodies hitting the glass behind the one long shade.

"Looky here," Jamey said excitedly. He lifted a shotgun from the floor behind a stack of men's magazines. The stock had been crudely sawn. "Twelve gauge," he said, his foot accidentally kicking a pile of shells across the floor.

He broke the thing open and peeked into the twin barrels. "Gimme them," he said, taking the handful of shells Paul and Mona had collected from the floor. Jamey dropped a couple into the barrels and made a series of loud clacking sounds with the weapon before proclaiming himself, "Armed and dangerous."

"Easy," Mona murmured.

His sensitive stomach not appreciating the fact that it was Jamey Weeks covering him with a loaded sawed-off, Paul returned his attention to the shapes on the floor.

Despite the room's intense heat, one was burrowed under an open sleeping bag. Another had taken what he assumed to be the top sheet from the mattress in the bedroom while a third had slit open and taped together green plastic trash bags to wear as a shroud.

"Four for sure," Mona said after fearlessly peering into sleeping bag, garbage bag, sheet and under the couch cushions. And then: "Oh shit."

"What?" Paul's throat very nearly locked under his panic, his breath wheezing from him.

He could see Jamey Weeks inching toward the open doorway, captured shotgun sweeping the room. He seemed ready to bolt for daylight, and Paul was looking to be two steps behind him.

Mona swore again and repeated the process of examining each of the inert figures. Paul could see limbs switch as she briefly exposed them to what little light found its way into the room.

"He's not here."

Dunbar sprang off the arm of the couch, then braced his hands on his knees, panting as though rising too suddenly from a dead sleep. "What're you talking about?" he choked out.

She went through it all a third time. "He always sleeps here," she said. "Usually," she amended softly.

Dunbar grabbed her, squeezed her upper arms until she hiccuped a sound of pain and surprise. "Purcell's not here," he snarled. "You told us-"

Mona twisted free and stepped back. "Maybe the kitchen," she said, sounding like she didn't believe it herself.

"No one's there," said Jamey, who'd apparently looked while considering exiting the premises.

Obviously frustrated, Mona said, "There's more of them now than ever. That means more safe houses, more places to spend his days."

Dunbar made a peculiar hissing sound. He sat hard on the arm of the couch, as if exhausted by his own rage. "Now what?"

"We do it anyway," Mona replied.

Paul shook his head. "No way. All we'll do by killing off his friends is antagonize him."

"Too late to worry about that," Mona said. "Don't forget the busted locks and the stolen shotgun. Besides, they have...other ways. He'll know we've been here so we might as well accomplish something. At the very least, we cut down his forces."

Other ways? That didn't sound too comforting. Paul sank wearily to the unoccupied couch arm. What a picture he and Dunbar must make, flanking a sleeping vampire like a pair of worried bookends. Every hour, every minute, he was dragging himself deeper into an impossible nightmare. Darby and Tuck wouldn't leave his mind. The understanding as they'd reluctantly split up that morning was that she shouldn't expect to hear from him for awhile, but they'd forgotten to define "awhile." Picturing his wife cruising the streets in search of him, their young son strapped into the car seat behind her, made the adrenalin bite harder at his stomach lining, doubling him over.

He straightened with all of his remaining might and said, "Purcell. If he comes back and sees what we've-"

"Of course he'll see," Mona snapped, pacing the room. "We have to give him something to remember us by. Prove we can give as well as we take. Make for a few sleepless nights."

It was obvious she was making this up as she went along. After the initial shock of not finding her husband's killer, she'd recovered to the point of sounding like things were progressing exactly as planned. Couldn't be better. But was she letting her fury for Purcell, her need for vengeance, get the best of her? Of them?

Paul had another thought. "A phone," he said. "Dammit, they don't have a phone."

"Yes, they do." Jamey aimed his new shotgun out the door. "On a wall in the kitchen."

The plastic handset felt too warm against his chin and ear. It smelled of garlic. Paul kept it as far from his face as he could and still use it. He couldn't remember the number. When he closed his eyes and forced his mind to paw through familiar combinations, he saw nothing but the twitching figures hidden from the light.

He muttered a curse and called up directory assistance. The operator asked him what city and he said Detroit and gave her the name of the law firm. After a short, static-filled silence, a nearly genderless voice gave him the number and told him it could be dialed for him for a small additional charge.

What the hell. The vampires were paying.

"Freddie Brace, please," he said when the call went through.

"Hurry up. We got things to do," Mona said, stepping into the central hallway. She held a shiny new hatchet against her chest like some murderous mama in a redneck drive-in flick from the Seventies.

Things to do.

Hey, Freddie, can we make this quick? I have vampires to behead.

Diamond and Streisand were dueting on hold as the sweat trickled down Paul's cheeks. He was picking up the kitchen odors of bacon grease and day-old burgers on top of all that garlic, proof that at least some of the legends got it wrong.

"Freddie Brace," came the voice on the line.

Paul closed his eyes with relief. "Freddie, what kind of car are you driving?"

White noise. Paul was about to hang up and tell the others to run for it because the town was on to them when Freddie said, "Who is this?"

"It's Paul," he said, exasperated. "Answer my question. What're you driving?"

"I've got a Prius and a Grand Cherokee. My yin and my yang of green acceptance."

"Definitely the Grand Cherokee. We need the passenger room."

"We? Passengers?"

"I need you to come down to Babylon and take some people away. I'll give you directions."

"Hold on, I'm writing."

The confusion had left his lawyer's voice. He now sounded rock-solid, which is the reason Paul had called him in the first place. Paul gave him detailed directions to his home and told him it would take him at least an hour from the moment he got in his car. "Which is very, very soon, I hope."

"Don't worry. I'm heading out the door."

"Without telling anybody." The fewer involved, Paul felt, the better.