He told Darby he loved her and she said the same and he told her to be safe and to keep their son and his daughter well.

As he cradled the phone, he turned to see Freddie holding the Canon in the palm of one hand.

"I think we should hurry, man," he said.

Meaning it was time to unwrap those things. Paul stood in the doorway of the smaller room for a closer look. One narrow bed lined up against each parallel wall, with maybe four feet of walking space between. There was a single nightstand with a single lamp filling up that common area, a rag rug underfoot so the sleepers wouldn't have to wake up to cold feet on bare concrete. The walls had been whitewashed in a bleak attempt at brightening the place.

"Now what?"

"Turn it on."

Paul had given his friend a brief lesson in operating the camera in video mode. Still, Freddie looked and acted like he'd never seen a digital camera before. He struggled with buttons, toggle switches, the zoom setting, the record button and viewfinder.

"What if the batteries-?"

"They're fully charged," Paul snapped. "I handled it overnight. Just point and shoot."

"Nothing to shoot." Freddie looked up at him. "Yet."

Paul's cue. He stared at the two wrapped lumps. The sheet on the left twitched. An elbow, maybe. Looking closer, he could see both sheets inflating and deflating where mouths would be.

"When you get a red "Rec" icon in your monitor, you're recording," he said.

"I figured that out already. Quit stalling."

They looked like a pair of mummies. Paul inched closer to the one on-flip a coin-the left and took hold of the sheet. It was warm with body heat. Paul pulled his hand away and wiped it off on his shirt.

"Come on," said Freddie, barely breathing.

"You getting this?" He sure as hell didn't want to have to do it again.

Freddie didn't even dignify it with a response.

Paul started to rip the sheet away in one fluid motion, like an amateur magician doing the old tablecloth trick. Started to, but caught himself. Bad plan if it disturbed the thing's sleep. He remembered with a shudder poor Jamey Weeks letting that shade fly.

He moved through it cautiously. Slowly peeled back the sheet, the camera soundlessly documenting. At least it better be.

He picked up his pace, revealing a head of hair not as white as Drake's, and less of it. The head rounder, the skin more wrinkled but less mottled. He pealed back more. The inverted smile, the forehead creased in a sleeping scowl against the lamplight...

John Tolliver.

The eyes were going to fly open, the irises hard and brown and knowing, and he'd be captured by the vampire's hypnotic glare.

Paul stepped way. "Wrong one. Turn it off."

"So that's it,"Freddie said, lowering the camera. "I guess I thought it'd be more..."

He didn't finish it, but the unspoken word dramatic hung in the air.

You want drama, you should have been with us yesterday, Paul thought.

He went to work on the other bedded figure, faster this time. "You getting this?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Yep."

"Come closer. I mean, zoom in. Remember how?"

Paul sat next to the prone figure, his face nervously posed no more than a couple feet from the other's. The thing had the pallor of putty. His face looked dry and chalky to the touch, the lips with barely more color than the cheeks.

"We're getting a close-up, Drake," he murmured. He had to concentrate to steer the fear from his voice.

He even managed a small, tight smile. "You're gonna be a big star, Miles Drake," he said, speaking loud enough to be picked up by the camera's microphone. "Think back to Sunday night, when your cronies attacked the Sundown while you gave me more than a century of background. Everything, Drake. Dear homicidal Frederick Darrow and that sweet daughter of yours. And the murder of Frank Dexter? But I think the highlight of the long evening was how your vampire buddies wiped out the Jeff McConlon family in Ithaca, New York."

The vampire's mouth twitched. Just reflex action, Paul told himself. He had to believe that.

He cleared his throat. God, it was hard sounding calm and self-assured when his stomach roiled, when his skin ran slick with sweat on a cool morning in a cool basement.

"Quite an earful, Drake, but who'd believe such a bizarre story if I went to the police? No one. That's why you were unconcerned about giving me every last detail. That and the fact that you had to keep me busy while John here and your old friend Chaplin and the others attacked the Sundown."

He could feel his anger growing as he chatted on. He leaned even closer so Freddie could catch him in close frame with the putty-skinned vampire.

"Get ready for this, Drake. Darby and I ran video and audio the whole evening."

That was the hardest part, having to implicate his wife. But it was necessary to lend credence to his story, so Drake would know he wasn't bluffing. Paul briefly explained how she'd caught him on videocam from the second floor balcony and how they'd rigged a second camera in a bookcase and a digital recorder between the cushion and his easy chair.

"We got two video angles and an audio file out of it, Drake," he told the sleeping creature. "Now Darby's long gone and even I have no idea where she is. But what I do know is that she found a coffee shop or a library somewhere along the way-an anonymous place where she could download the files and send them as email attachments to various addresses."

Paul thought he saw REM activity under the vampire's nearly translucent lids, and he moved his head away.

"She stored them online somewhere and sent retrieval directions to various people. Maybe to friends, lawyers, old classmates. Even I don't know because I told her not to tell me. She told the recipients to only take action if she disappears, at which point they're to send the files to police agencies and media."

He forced himself to smile confidently for the camera.

"You'll try to recall exactly what you told me the other night and wonder how much of it is prosecutable. You'll also figure that the police will dismiss it as nothing more than the ravings of an elderly man-and you might be right. But I'll bet you gave me details of the McConlon killings that weren't released to the public. The way you tore into the pregnant woman's abdomen for the fetus, for instance. That sounds like the sort of thing that isn't graphically shared even today. And consider this, Drake."

Paul moved in closer again, his fear of the sleeping creature at its lowest point since they'd broken in.

"At the very least, the police will visit Babylon to investigate. Not to mention the tabloid journalists with camera crews. Darby added her own narrative to the digital files, Drake. With lots of names. The cops will want to know what happened to the Highsmiths, the Dunbars, Don Brandon and the rest. And what will your people think when outsiders start tearing this town apart? What if the police demand an interview with you and others of your kind at, say, high noon? When the reporters knock on your door, middle of the day?"

He pulled away again, but stayed close enough to make camera frame. This was the part he found hardest to deliver. "But your secrets are safe with us, Drake. The only way we'll give you up is if our lives are in danger."

Freddie murmured, "It's getting late."

Paul nodded and returned his attention to the vampire. "Think what we could do to you and Tolliver right now, Drake. We had no problem breaking in, no problem getting to you. But we let you live because we need you as much as you need us. We can't move all of the Sundowners out without attracting unwanted attention from your daylighters, so we need you to do what you want to do anyway. Take on Purcell."

On camera, he sounded so much more confident than he felt. He forced himself to once again move in close to that mottled, ancient skin. He caught a whiff like the long-term storage scent of old clothing.

"You've got a precarious hold on things around here, Drake. Some of the younger generation thinks you're a joke. Think about what happens to your reputation if the authorities move in because you said too much and it all got caught for the cameras."

While filming, Freddie had been removing one of the final items from the backpack. Now he opened Paul's laptop, attached the cables and they quickly connected camera to computer and transferred this latest video file to the hard drive.

Paul, meanwhile, took the memory card out of his camera and stared at it.

"What?" Freddie asked.

"I'm not even sure he'll know what this is," he said.

"Then leave the whole camera. Even he'll be able to figure that out."

Paul re-inserted the memory card and left the Canon on the vampire's pillow.

"You wake up with a camera by your head that wasn't there when you went night-night," said Freddie, "you get curious enough to play it. Don't you think?"

To be on the safe side, Paul scrawled some basic usage instruction on the back of a dog-eared business card he found in his wallet and left it with the camera.

Chapter Fifty-Two.

Many transvestites are practicing heterosexuals. Some, in fact, have more practice at it than a lot of men who can stay out of their wives' underwear drawers. Furthermore, cross dressers come in tall, short, fat, slim, hunky and frail packages, and as far as jobs go they run the gamut from construction workers to male models to chemical engineers. And the women who stay with them! Positively gorgeous, some of them, the kind you'd never get a shot at if you had a deep voice and five o'clock shadow.

"It's unreal, man."

Freddie's words every time he'd come rushing back to Paul at commercial breaks from whatever daytime television show he was watching. "This is wild. Hell, some of those guys are so pretty I'd date them. Can you imagine how memorable your first time would be?"

Freddie was in denial again, and not only regarding his sexual orientation. He'd spent most of the remainder of the morning and early afternoon in brooding silence. Like a lawyer considering his options. Toward midday he'd found the remote and the flat-screen in an upstairs den and kept checking in with Paul in his and Darby's bedroom where he was trying to make up for his lost sleep and convince Freddie to do the same.

The night to come would be more memorable than the most shocking Springer show ever recorded, he reminded the lawyer. Freddie had just waved him off and gone back to the den.

Not that Paul was handling the situation much better. His nerves had frayed as the late morning light gave way to the afternoon angle of the sun. It was a down time in their planning, and in many ways that was worse than being in the same tiny basement room with the vampire. Too much time meant too much time for thought.

When he dozed for a few minutes at a time, Drake haunted him. "You learned nothing from the McConlon family experiences," the dream-vampire said with a sour expression, snapping Paul instantly awake from one brief doze.

The hours crept by, but late afternoon eventually gave way to twilight. Toward dusk he felt he'd gotten so good at observing his bedroom's play of sun and shadows that he could tell the time without a timepiece. Just examine the colors: soft yellows muting to goldenrod before the grays and purples moved in, one horizontal shaft of pink fighting for survival on the horizon.

"It's time."

He mouthed the words, but didn't move off the bed where he lay on his back, his head propped in his hands. His body and limbs felt too heavy to support movement. His paralytic fear had left him weak but seemingly calm with dread as he watched the color drain from the sky outside and convinced himself that he wasn't stalling; he was giving the master vampire time to find and play his leave-behind message.

He'd never felt such a weighty sense of impending doom. Everything he saw or heard or smelled made him wonder if this would be his last experience with that object or sensation.

A good deal of his bleak outlook could be traced to separation from Darby and Tuck. What had he been thinking, putting them in such danger? His mind ran over a million alternatives to the plan they'd so carefully worked out, but, if he was being honest with himself, none sounded any better than what they'd chosen.

He knew and trusted one thing: there was no security anywhere unless they won it for themselves.

The television was playing too loudly in the den, some cable-produced sitcom without a single familiar face. Either television was getting more niched and obscure...or he was getting older.

"I'm going, now. Lock up after me," he told the man sacked out on the couch.

Freddie jumped to his feet, wobbly from the sudden transition from sleep state to relative wakefulness. He found the remote and killed the TV. "You mean we're going. Right?"

Paul paused. He already felt bleak, weighty guilt about his wife and daughter, his young son, his ex-wife Meredith, his two other daughters, Tonya Whittock and all of his former clients. He wasn't crazy to see the list growing. "You know you don't have to," he said.

"You kidding? How many people you know have ever been on an adventure like this?"

There was nothing funny about it. Paul didn't try to hide his grim outlook. "Tonight won't go well, Freddie. Purcell's faction will be steamed up about what went down yesterday and Drake will be less than thrilled when he plays back the camera."

"Should be memorable. Let's get going."

Paul swallowed hard. He found his car keys and said, "You've been warned."

Safely locked into Darby's sporty Jeep, but before buckling, Paul craned his neck into the darkness behind him.

He let out a breath. "I can't believe I did that. Looking for monsters in the backseat. This is going to be one memorable evening."

"What I've been saying all along."

They drove up Crenshaw and onto Middle View in silence, but as they cruised past the Drake Municipal Complex, Freddie said, "I guess if they were going to do anything they'd do it now. Before we get to the motel."

Paul shook his head. "I think we're still a little hands-off. At least until they figure us out."

Hopeful thinking more than anything. At some point, Paul knew, one faction or the other would decide he was more trouble than he was worth. His only hope was that the video would freeze up the old-timers and their allies long enough for Paul and Freddie to slip through. And that Purcell still retained enough fear of Drake to ignore the two of them for now.

Feeble hope, but he needed whatever strength he could pull out of the air.

"More young people than I was expecting," Freddie murmured.

He was right. Over the course of the last few days the average age of the town's afterhours population had dropped noticeably. Not that each and every one of them would be a vampire, but he had the distinct impression that most daylighters liked to keep their doors locked and shades pulled when the sun went down. Just in case.

At least that had been the case before Purcell went to work convincing them there was no reason to wait.

He hung a left onto Second and winced in the morbid expectation of bullets shattering the glass. Bungalows and wood-frame homes in need of paint, the residential monotony was broken by a hair salon with a self-painted window sign and a concrete bunker of a structure that seemed to be offering discount auto glass. Half as many streetlights lined the street around here as had been present in the wealthy area of town and many of those were unlit.

Even in progressive vampire societies, it would seem, some were more equal than others.

No whizzing bullets so far, but Paul couldn't relax the tension he felt in his jaws and in the muscles just under the flesh of his face. Signaling carefully, he made a right onto Main View.

"If Drake's seen the camera by now, he'll make sure no one touches us."

"If he can figure out how to playback the video," said Freddie. "If your argument convinces him to hold up. If everyone in town still listens to him. And if I don't die of a massive coronary in the next few minutes."

Paul chanced a quick glance at his friend. Freddie sat there as seemingly calm as he'd been while watching his afternoon television. Which is exactly why he'd wanted the man in his corner if he was ever indicted for financial malfeasance.