Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  Only then did he recall the woman imploring Paul to keep her name out of it.

  “I have suggested such a course of action,” the chief corrected. “But I wouldn’t characterize my remarks as undue pressure.”

  He might be a small-town cop, but he spoke like a big-city lawyer. Paul felt for the first time since meeting him that Chief Sandy might not be as soft as his voice.

  “I’m just curious…” Paul let the sentence trail, waiting for the other man to pick up the slack.

  The cop stared at his big hands. “People in other towns around here, if they go visiting out of state and someone asks where they’re from, they might say Toledo. Or Detroit. Not because they’re lying. They just consider themselves part of a larger metropolitan area, which technically they are.” The chief glanced up suddenly, his eyes the weak blue of rain. “Mr. Highsmith, residents of our town don’t think of themselves as living anywhere but Babylon. We’re self-sufficient. We’re no…” He sniffed the air as though hesitant to go on. “…bedroom community. And no one ever leaves.”

  “And yet,” said Paul in something of a gentle tweak, “the McConlons sold us their home and moved away.”

  Bill Sandy leaned back, the air whooshing out of his chair. His jawline twitched as he stared Paul down. “Yes, that did catch us by surprise,” he said. “Even Marty wasn’t expecting his brother to move his family out like that.”

  Paul stared at the police chief. “Marty,” he said. “You mean the cop who was hassling me? That Marty? He’s Jeff McConlon’s brother?”

  Chief Sandy stared at Paul for several beats, managing to look at once both grim and expressionless. “Mr. Highsmith, as Detroit and Cleveland and all those other cities grow bigger and nastier, their citizens move farther and farther away. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to bring their problems with them, threatening to turn the peaceful little outlying towns into something not so peaceful, not so safe and clean. We don’t want that to happen here, and that’s why we’re willing to pay good money to see that it doesn’t happen. The McConlons should have known better than to sell to outsiders. It’s something we just don’t do.”

  Genuine shock held Paul without comment for half a minute. In his head he was explaining, At worst, I’m a white collar criminal. Not someone who’s going to break into the neighbors’ home and steal their DVDs.

  When he could finally formulate a rational sentence he said, “Savannah Easton broke an unwritten law, didn’t she?” He stood and planted the palms of his hands on the other man’s desk. “Is that why she’s so afraid, Chief?”

  His chair squealed as the lawman rose. “Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Highsmith. I hope you realize that the town means you no harm. We just prefer that you leave.”

  Paul was stunned. There were fair housing laws prohibiting such treatment, weren’t there? Before now, he’d never had occasion to wonder.

  With a grim chuckle, he yanked out the orange slip hanging limp, trapped between the wiper and windshield of his Lexus, and got in. He wasn’t even surprised at having been ticketed for parking in an unmarked but apparently illegal space. Seemed the town was full of unwritten laws. Paul made a show of tearing the ticket and releasing it to the muggy air. He watched the scraps sink like confetti to the flawless lawn.

  It was well after six, the day’s shadows starting to grow and flatten. But one more thought worked him over like an ulcer before he could head home. Not every stranger in this godforsaken town was as unwelcome as his family.

  He’d take one more quick drive before calling it a night.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Sure, it’s good money,” Denver Dugan was saying. “Good for these days anyhow, but I was making more than this twenty years ago at the GM plant in Cleveland. Didn’t know how good I had it back then.”

  There were maybe twenty of them out there. Smoking, drinking, reminiscing under a fading sun by the brackish swimming pool. Todd and Joy sat side by side in borrowed lawn chairs, the kids having joined the Dwyer hooligans and a few others in whatever misdemeanors were being committed on the motel grounds.

  “Hell, I owned Detroit back then,” chipped in a man Todd didn’t know by name. He was up there in age with big Denver, but as thin and worn as old socks. His teeth were cracked and uneven, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. “Me, I’d get bored working the same job, same shift, so I’d quit, stay away for a few months. When my money ran out, I’d get me another job at Chrysler or AMC or some supplier. They all paid more than the chickenshit wages we’re taking home now and kissing this town’s ass to get it.”

  “Hey, Denver,” Jamey Weeks shouted, “what’s the most you ever made?”

  The big man tilted his cap back from his sweaty forehead and said, “Well, let me think about it.”

  It was obvious from his crooked smile that the former autoworker didn’t need the thinking time. Todd figured that Denver probably reflected on those past paychecks every night while sacked out in his tiny motel room with the sweat crawling over him.

  After the proper pause, the big man said, “In the late Eighties I remember a year when I booked seven twelves for six or seven months straight—eighty-four-hour work weeks. Ended up divorced over it, but I pulled in just over a hundred grand that year, pre-tax.”

  The pool area went silent as two dozen men and women studied the money like they could see it.

  “Hundred grand,” Jamey repeated softly.

  “Course that was just before things went bad again,” Denver added ruefully. “On top of the divorce, I didn’t get any overtime the next year. I had to pay for her lawyer as well as my own, but I musta bought her a better one than me since she got the house and spousal support and child support. By that time, the automakers were all laying off again, not hiring.”

  Bringing them all down.

  D.B. said, “Most I ever made at one time was twenty-eight an hour.”

  “Get outta here,” snapped a muscle-bound kid with a crew cut and an attitude.

  “It’s true. I was working construction outside Boston just before the housing market went to shit. Bunch of us, we had more money than we ever seen, but we lived in trailer camps, some of us in tents ‘cuz we couldn’t afford nothing else. Most expensive town I ever been in.”

  “I made twenty an hour once,” said a quiet guy of no more than thirty despite his shiny dome. “Made it in a lumber camp in Oregon, but the job only lasted through the summer.”

  “Shit,” grumbled Carl Haggerty. “I ain’t never took in more than eight, ten dollars an hour. Not even when times was good.” Although he couldn’t have been more than forty, he had the deepest forehead furrows Todd had ever seen. As he sat scowling into his beer can, the furrows dug even deeper. “Don’t suspect race has anything to do with it, do you?”

  “Jesus, now we get the lecture,” Judd Maxwell said.

  “Ain’t no lecture. Just facts. Me and everyone I know been making minimum wage even during the so-called good times. And that’s if we can get work at all. Which is why Doyle was so suspicious of this goddamn town. You spend your life getting shafted, then someone gives you the keys to the city. If you smart, you stop and ask why. That’s what Doyle was tryna tell me, and I shoulda listened.”

  Judd snickered. “And right now your old buddy Doyle’s standing in some unemployment line telling everyone who’ll listen that he don’t got no money ‘cuz the white man shafted him. Not ‘cuz he left a perfectly good job for worrying he’s got too good a deal.”

  “Is that what happened?” Carl hunched in his lawn chair like he was trying to wrap his big shoulders around himself.

  “Is it?” Todd asked. Every eye on him now, the first time most had seemed to notice him. “What happened to your friend? Why did he leave town?”

  “Cuz he a fool, that’s why.” Carl grumbled as though reluctant to admit Judd Maxwell had been right in his appraisal of Carl’s friend.

  Todd caught several people stirring, like the conversation had gone off into uncomfortabl
e territory.

  “Todd was making good money outside of Parkersburg,” Joy piped in. “He drove a Caterpillar loader for a coal mine.” His wife nudged him in the ribs. “Todd, tell ‘em how much you was making at the mine before it closed down.”

  The silence now seemed unbearable.

  Todd shrugged and kept his eyes on the cracked pavement. It was like being in high school and trading sex stories and worrying that your lies wouldn’t hold up next to everyone else’s. So what if these other assholes used to pull down fifty, a hundred grand a year and quit whenever they felt like it? All of their grand stories were twenty years in the past. What had they all been up to for the last couple decades? Same as him, Todd thought. Scrabbling. Avoiding phone calls. Paying off the interest on payday loans so you could borrow more. It didn’t matter how great life used to be, so why torture yourself talking about it?

  He thought about how stifling hot it had suddenly turned, the late afternoon sun beating down on them in righteous punishment. He was still thirsty, even with a longneck halfway to his lips. Then he thought about the silence his wife had brought down on all of them just by feeling a need to contribute. To build her husband up to people he barely knew and didn’t give a shit about.

  “Who the hell is that?” Tonya Whittock asked.

  All heads turned, as much to change the subject as it was out of curiosity.

  “Never seen him before,” Kathy Lee drawled. “Whaddya think he’s doing?”

  “Him and his fucking Lexus,” Judd said. “You can bet he ain’t checking in at the Sundown for the night.”

  “Cop, maybe. Think he’s taking down license plate numbers?” the crew-cut kid with the attitude nervously asked.

  He was young and had watched too much television or he’d know real-life cops rarely drove luxury Jap cars. Todd watched the driver slowly cruise the parking lot.

  Judd said, “He ain’t gonna steal nothing, is he?”

  “Now you’re on to something,” said D.B. “Bet he smashes and grabs all that cash you’re hiding in your glove box.”

  “Then what the hell’s he up to?” said Kathy Lee.

  The kid with the muscles and the buzz cut had at least gotten something right. The driver actually was checking out license plates. Looking around him, Todd saw nervous faces and wondered what was going on in their minds right then. D.B. had admitted to what he’d called “a minor warrant” on his head and plenty others had turned the conversation away from their pasts.

  Compounding the problem, probably half the tags in the lot were expired.

  The sleek car coasted up and down the twin rows of battered, rusted and primed cars and pickups before straightening out and coming back down the circular drive. The Lexus glided to a stop parallel to the pool, maybe sixty feet from the gathering.

  “Uh oh,” someone said softly.

  The driver’s window bounced back enough sunlight to obscure his features, but Todd could see that he sat tall and straight-backed in his glove-soft upholstery.

  God, to have a ride like that. Its tires would whisper over pavement. There’d be a CD player with crystal-clear hidden speakers, the upholstery would always smell new and you’d ride on an invisible cloud of cool air, oblivious to the day’s heat and the smell of the streets.

  Todd licked his lips as though it had been a naked and willing woman driving his fantasy.

  Judd Maxwell rose quickly, his lightweight lawn chair skittering away from him. “I’ve had enough of this,” he growled.

  Maybe the driver heard him, for the sleek car pulled away as silently as it had appeared. It coasted down the winding driveway to Pleasant Run Avenue, its tires caressing the pavement, all cylinders purring with mechanical contentment.

  “Asshole,” Judd mumbled, but he put nothing behind it.

  And no one chimed in. It was as though each of the two dozen men and women sitting around that pool was thinking about their parking lot of cancerous metal and tailpipes suspended by hanger wire and arriving at the conclusion that the tall man wasn’t such an asshole after all. Not for driving a car that purred, that taunted the summer swelter with its own pure cushion of cool air.

  Which one of them wouldn’t do the same?

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” she whispered later. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” Joy placed a hand lightly on his shoulder. “You had a good job, too, you know. I just wanted people to know that.”

  Todd silenced her with a kiss before laying his head on her cushioning breasts. She began to moan softly as his tongue flicked over an exposed nipple. Moving up, his tongue touched hers as their lips came together, stifling the sounds of her pleasure.

  The walls were thin, Little Todd asleep but the girls still up, still playing just outside the door.

  Joy took his hand and pressed it against the warm flesh covering her hipbone as his thoughts returned again to the silver Lexus. The cloud of cool air that would, unlike the window air conditioner rattling a few feet away, kiss the skin with a gentle, nearly silent chill.

  She unlocked her tongue with his as he rolled heavily on top of her. “I just thought it would be a good way of meeting people, joining the conversation like that,” she said, picking it up where they’d left it. Where he thought they’d left it.

  For some reason, that brought to mind the condescension of her previous statement: “You had a good job, too.”

  Todd rolled off her and stared at the ceiling. He clicked his teeth in a gesture of irritation that he hoped wouldn’t drag them into a fight. Why couldn’t she just drop it?

  “Sorry,” she said again. Reading him.

  He found and squeezed her hand to show more understanding than he felt, and hoped that would end it. They needed to enjoy the alone time before the girls grew bored and came knocking.

  “I got a call at the room phone while you were at work,” she said. “Someone who’s with the Water Department at the what-not Municipal Building. I forget her name, but she wants me to come in for a job interview tomorrow.”

  Todd wondered how she planned to interview with the woman if she didn’t know her name, but let it go. “When?” he asked her instead.

  “I told her you work till five and I’d have no one to sit with the kids, so she said it was okay if I came in at five-thirty. Kind of funny, don’t you think?”

  “What?”

  “A job interview at five-thirty on a Friday evening. I don’t know.”

  Todd felt her shrug beside him as he continued staring at a ceiling already lost in the shadows, the days growing depressingly shorter. He could hear a radio with too much bass playing down by the pool. Voices getting louder and drunker.

  “Will you do something for me, honey?” Joy asked in a warm whisper. When he made no reply, she said, “Will you go to Zeebe’s Garage tomorrow and see how the car’s doing?”

  He nodded. “Fine. But the municipal building’s so close, you could walk there. I’ll give you directions in the morning. And I can always get a ride into work from someone.”

  “That’s not why I want it,” she said. If she expected him to ask, he didn’t. “I just think…I think we need it.”

  “I told you, I’ll check on it.”

  She’d get the job. They both knew it. That’s what was scaring her…and him, too. It had never been this easy before, people calling them up and practically begging them to take jobs. He was used to sweat and grime, lung-choking smoke, toil and boredom broken up by the degradation of unemployment lines and job applications going nowhere and milk money borrowed from relatives and neighbors.

  He didn’t trust Babylon’s brand of prosperity any more than Joy did, but he felt like a starving mouse sniffing at a smear of peanut butter. He didn’t know what the contraption was around it, or how it worked, but he distrusted the hell out of it. He was so hungry, though, that he had to take a careful walk up to it and hope he could fill his belly before the damn thing bit him.

  He caught a few moments of sleep be
fore the kids burst in the door. Long enough to dream about sitting behind the wheel of a silver Lexus with buttery upholstery, riding on a cushion of cool night air.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thank God for microwaves. After finding Darby taking washcloth swipes at Tuck while he splashed away in a tub of water, Paul found a chicken and broccoli casserole in the fridge and started heating it up.

  “You didn’t call,” she said after he returned upstairs and found Darby now bracing their squealing son into some semblance of temporary inactivity so she could wash his hair. She could have entered a wet T-shirt contest.

  Paul took a seat on the toilet lid. “You’re all wet.”

  “And you’re late, buster. You missed dinner.”

  “I tried calling, but I think the nearest cell phone tower is in the next county.”

  He scooted out of the way as a small tidal wave came at him.

  “Daddy!” Tuck screamed. He slapped the water with both hands in some sort of nautical welcoming ceremony.

  Darby rolled her eyes as she picked up their pink-skinned son in an oversize towel. She was amazing with him, ever-patient, eternally understanding of his loud enthusiasm. It was something that Paul felt was a little harder to do at fifty-two.

  But that thought brought to mind his daughters, kids he’d had in his twenties and early thirties and with whom he’d bonded no better. He felt his chest tighten at the ramifications, the knowledge that he was running out of time and second chances.

  He waited until Tuck had no more moisture to shake off before moving in for hugs and kisses. Hard hugs and wet kisses, as if staving off a repeat of familial history. After pajamas and bedtime stories from the both of them, Tuck was finally done for the night. Nice trick, warm water. The toddler’s mouth had dropped open and his lids drooped even before his parents made it out of the room.

  “So where were you?”