But it wouldn't be any of those things.

Paul knew.

Having practiced their procedure on some half-dozen closed doors in upstairs bedrooms, cluttered closets, a bathroom and elsewhere throughout the house, they knew exactly what to do. Paul would press his back to the wall by the frame, take a firm grip on the knob, turn it as quickly and silently as possible and push the door open. Freddie, stationed near the hinge side and holding the hatchet in a two-handed grip, would get to charge in first.

But this one was different. This was the real deal, they both knew. Paul could read it on Freddie's face as they stared each other down.

Paul made a throat-clearing sound. When he spoke, it was low volume, but not a whisper. Why bother? Either they were already expected on the other side, or they weren't. "When you're ready," he said.

Freddie nodded, absently scraping his whiskers with the back of the blade.

"Me first." That was a break from the standard routine, but it felt like something Paul had to say. His house, his godforsaken community, his decision to move here.

Freddie didn't fight him for the honor.

Chapter Fifty.

Ponytail Pete obviously loved his assignment. He had the Rambo thing going with a red bandanna tied to his forehead, Judd's taped baseball bat slung in a homemade sling on his back and Denver's 30-.30 deer rifle cradled in his arms.

"Nice," Todd murmured as Pete helped Joy drag him out of the Lexus.

"Where you hit?" the snaggle-toothed driveway sentry asked, his voice sounding hazy, as though coming at him from far away. "They catch you guys, those bastards down by the road? We thought you left us yesterday, man, but Mona tole us you'd be back. You should see what they done to us last night. Poor Tonya dead and Jermaine near crazy. Say, you dint bring any food back, didja? We're running low."

The single squad car at the foot of the motel drive had left them alone. Maybe Marty had radioed ahead to make sure the Dunbars were ignored. Or the cops were just too afraid to act without orders. Likelier still, the Sundown was like one of those roach traps that lets you in without a problem. It's getting out that's the bitch.

Todd heard Joy from miles and miles away saying no, everything's fine. Just help me get him in and put him to bed.

"But what happened?" Pete was asking as he tugged on Todd's sluggish body.

Or maybe it was someone else doing the tugging. It was hard to say, all stimuli fading so fast. His last thoughts before his brain turned off the lights were about how his Sundown friends would react when they found out the truth. Maybe he'd wake up with an ash stake through his heart.

The robbery itself was no problem whatsoever. Just two guys at work and a single customer, a house painter buying solvents. The locals took one look at all the guns pointed their way and got instantly cooperative.

Nope, no objection at all to you boys loading up as many hatchets and chainsaws and fuel drums as you can carry. Hey, we'll even help you pack up your car. Don't have one? Why don't you take the Chevy pickup parked right outside?

Well, maybe not as cooperative as that, but close. The gunmen added flashlights and lanterns, batteries and walkie-talkies to their shopping list, even bags of trail mix on display by the cash register.

The gas station on Third and Main View, same way, but only after D.B., Denver and Jermaine had locked the hardware store people in the basement and cut the phone lines and told them to count real slow to five hundred before coming up.

Things didn't get complicated till the men in the gas station figured out that the Sundowners needed the fuel pumps turned on, but weren't going to submit credit cards for payment. They didn't take well to that, but Jermaine waved that Smith & Wesson of his and everyone went running for cover.

D.B. was keeping everyone cool, especially Jermaine, who looked grim and half spent. D.B. hadn't even wanted the new widower going along on the raid, but what could he do? There was no stopping the guy.

Then someone said, "Hey, I think he's coming around."

Then someone else goes: "The sun's not even down yet."

And Joy goes, "Well, you know, he's not a full-fledged vampire yet, so I guess he don't follow all the rules."

Todd in his sorry-ass in-between state thinking, Jesus Christ, you cannot keep that woman quiet.

Todd closed his eyes and opened them again, but no, it wasn't just a bad dream. D.B. was still there, his pink grinning face all of a foot from his own. The room was dark and stuffy, shades drawn, curtains pulled.

Todd licked his lips, his mouth so dry it felt like he'd swallowed sand. From somewhere beyond D.B.'s big pink face, Mona Dexter was saying, "Sorry about the lack of air conditioning, but they cut the power toward morning."

Not that he'd experienced a working window unit since they'd gotten there, but the guest room of Mona Dexter's usually icy apartment felt even stuffier than the Dunbar family's old rooms.

Joy came into view, sat on the bed and squeezed Todd's hand. "It's okay, honey. D.B. and Mona know what happened."

"We don't hold it against you," D.B. offered.

"Who else?" Todd's voice sounded rusty to his own ears, like he hadn't used it for a half-century or so.

"Well, Carl," Joy admitted. "And he might have mentioned something to Jermaine, thinking he might enjoy someone else's bad news. You know, so he don't think he's the only one suffering."

"Glad I could help," Todd grumped. "Then what happened?"

D.B. frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You slipped out of here through the woods to avoid the cops at the end of the drive, stole a pickup and stuck up the hardware store and gas station. What then?"

The group surrounding him stared, wide-eyed.

"Musta heard us talking," D.B. said.

Once again, Todd had felt himself rising, floating out of his bed and joining the others as an observer. The scene felt disjointed, scenes jumbled and surreal gaps of action missing. Like someone put behind the wheel of a car for the first time and told to take off.

"That must be it," he said.

He took his first good look around the intensely feminine room. Joy sat on the bed next to him, holding one of his hands in both of hers over the lacy spread. Mona Dexter rocked gently in a rose-painted rocker in one corner while D.B. hovered overhead like a big pink jack o'lantern.

"Water," Todd croaked.

He felt numb with weariness. He downed the glass passed to him from his wife as he felt the others studying him with concern. Wondering what a vampire looked like up close. Maybe gauging the odds of him ripping their throats out if they strayed too close.

Frankly, he was working himself into enough of a simmering piss fit to consider the same odds.

D.B. said, "Well, picking up where we left off..."

It was a part of the story that had come in to him particularly hazily, so he listened carefully.

The three men-D.B., Jermaine and Denver-had squealed out of the gas station in the stolen pickup, Jermaine waving his .38 like a black Dillinger. As they hit the 'S' curve where Main View became Pleasant Run, Denver poked his scoped deer rifle out the passenger window.

"We had to assume the squad car that had been parked at the foot of the Sundown most of the day would still be there, the cops alerted by radio," said D.B.

But if the radio had been on, the two cops, not much more than boys, hadn't been listening. One lay sprawled on the car hood with his shirt unbuttoned, taking in the afternoon rays. The other had just found a tree for relieving his full bladder. They scattered as the pickup came roaring at them, Jermaine and Denver riddling the cruiser just for the mean hell of it.

Yes, thought Todd. He remembered this part. Sort of. But the images came back to him like the parts of a movie glimpsed while in the process of nodding off on the couch. You have to rewind it some the next day to make it all make sense.

"They fired a couple wild shots at us, I think, but didn't try coming after us."

"They won't," Todd said. He was fading fast. He moved his numbed fingers over his wife's hand just to try to get feeling back into them. "Purcell's daylighters are after immortality, or as close to it as they can get." He had to struggle for every word, his mind as tired as his body. "But that don't mean shit if they get killed before they can get it. That's why they won't take any chances they don't have to take. And they sure won't call for outside assistance. But watch out for them. They're..."

Sneaky, he meant to say. But the merciful blackness set in and took him once more out of the agony of daylight before he could get the warning out.

Chapter Fifty-One.

There was no sudden movement as they crept into the small room. No charging, hissing vampires. It was a tidy rectangle, a windowless space that might have once been a wine cellar. With only the light from the larger basement room behind them, it was hard to see much detail. Paul's roving hand snagged the cold, musty wall just inside the doorway and crawled along it until he found the switch he was fervently hoping would be there.

It was wired to a small lamp sitting on a nightstand behind one of the room's two single beds. A lamp whose smudgy yellow shade seemed to capture most of the bulb's glow, but enough escaped to show Paul more than he wanted to see.

He heard Freddie suck in his breath behind him. He waited, really needing a wisecrack that never came. Holding the hatchet as far out in front of him as his arm would allow, the lawyer jerkily backed out of the small room, looking like he could bolt for the stairs at any moment. Paul was right with him.

He said, "Freddie," trying to steel his own nerves as well of those of his friend.

His voice rang out too sharply in the heavy silence. It bounced from wall to wall, eliminating whatever element of surprise they'd somehow managed to keep, but caused no movement of either sheeted figure in the space whose doorway they precariously blocked.

Paul gently pulled his friend back into the small room.

"Jesus," Freddie whispered. It sounded as much like a prayer as an exclamation.

Paul read plenty into that single word. Freddie had accompanied him on a lark. Never really believing in vampires, for God's sake, but possessing enough of an imagination to be frightened at all the right moments. Until now, the fear was that of kids too old to believe in ghosts even while telling ghost stories at night.

Now it was the real deal.

Paul jumped nearly as high as Freddie at the piercing shriek that bounced from wall to wall. Freddie spun in circles, waving the hatchet wildly. At Paul, at the beds, at the sheeted figures, the doorway and everything beyond.

"Easy, Freddie, it's just the telephone," Paul gasped, only fully realizing the fact as he said it.

He tore his cell phone out of his pocket, but only to use its digital timepiece.

"Darby," he said as the sound tore through the darkness a second time. "Just like we planned."

In all the suspense and drama he'd forgotten all about her scheduled nine o'clock phone call. Since cell phones were so undependable, she'd taken the Drake home phone number with her so she could call him here to tell him she was safe.

Paul backed once more out of the small room and eyed the rotary dial phone on the wall of the larger space. Evidently the thing actually worked.

"What if it's not her?" Freddie asked as Paul moved toward it.

He stood stock still. It seemed like he, Darby and Freddie had thought of everything. For instance, if she heard a stranger's voice when she called she was to ask for someone else, apologize for the wrong number and get the hell out of whatever rest stop they were at. And even if Paul did answer, she was not, under any circumstance, to tell him where they were.

All of those sensible precautions but they'd never thought to devise a way for him to safely answer in Drake's house. Presumably, anyone who knew the family would know that Miles was "indisposed" during daylight hours-but what if it was someone expecting Tabitha to be available? How long would it take for word to get around the tiny town that a stranger had picked up the Drakes' line?

"You gonna get it?" Freddie said after the third stomach-twisting ring.

They should have devised a code: ring twice, hang up, three more rings, pick up. Whatever.

Four rings.

"Do it," Freddie hissed. "For chrissake, you're waking them up." The lawyer, eyes wide, nodded toward the sheets twitching in both narrow beds.

Paul moved to the larger room and pulled the receiver off the hook.

"Yeah. Hello?" he said before he could overthink it.

"My God, you did it."

It was Darby. Paul closed his eyes in relief. It felt like every muscle in his body slackened. He let himself sag against the cold, damp wall.

"Paul? Paul?"

"Yes, honey, I'm here. You're at a pay phone, right? Don't tell me where, but you're going to immediately leave the location when you hang up, right?"

She told him that everything was fine and that she knew what to do, and asked him how he was doing.

Paul chuckled, a sound that slipped off the basement walls. "Well, we got in the house. As you know. The...things...are in the basement, and we were just about to-"

"Things? As in, plural?"

"Come on, Paul. Hurry up," Freddie whispered hoarsely.

Paul waved him off. "Two of them. We're not sure which two yet. We just got started. But tell me what happened last night."

Musty. The place smelled like his nightmare concept of a tomb. Paul tried stretching the cord as far as it could go, but couldn't get enough flex to check out the sheeted figures Freddie was watching in wide-eyed repugnance from the relative safety of the doorway.

Meanwhile, the story poured forth from Darby like she'd been waiting for him to ask. She was telling him as though for the first time, but it sounded a little like a summary of a film he'd forgotten having long ago seen. New...and yet maddeningly familiar. It took several seconds before it dawned on him that she was telling him the up-close-and-personal account Todd Dunbar had earlier relayed from a psychic distance.

Darby's voice expressed all the terror that had been missing in the tale previously. He could now feel what it felt like to be stalked by a silent van on a desolate road in the middle of the night. Gunshots, bullet holes, shattered glass, crumpled metal, screams, flames, hysterical children.

"I'm sorry," he whispered when she'd finished and he could hear the tears clogging her throat.

They listened to each other breathing on the line until Freddie interrupted with, "Um, Paul? They keep...moving."