“Sorry for your daughter, bud, but what’s it got to do with me?” the guy said. But Bob thought he saw just a flash of dread and the beginning, soon quashed, of a guilty swallow. Maybe the fellow was just a nervous type.
“Well sir, my girl wasn’t into guns or anything, which is why I thought it odd that on her laptop we came up with what appears to be the phone number of this place. I don’t know why she’d call or come by, but she may have. I’m trying to track down what happened that day.”
“The papers said it was an accident. What difference does it make what she did? Accident don’t follow no plan. It just happens.”
“I know, but there are some discrepancies in the official account. I’m just poking about trying to make sense of it all, sir. Sure it don’t amount to nothing, but I have to do something while I’m waiting for my daughter to come back to me.”
“Well, I don’t know if-”
“Here, let me show you her picture. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”
He pulled his wallet, showed the man a nice picture of Nikki at last year’s graduation, so beautiful, so young, so vulnerable.
The man didn’t really look at it, just said, “No, no, believe me, we don’t get many young women on their own in here, and I’d remember. Sometimes a young fellow comes in with his girlfriend and sometimes the wife comes along to buy the Glock for home protection, but almost never will you find a girl like that in a place like this.”
“I see.”
“I’m real sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help a bit.”
“Uncle Eddie-” came a call from a workroom behind the counter, and a kid peeped out. “You sure on that? I seem-”
“Billy, goddamnit, you git to work. You got a lot of ammo to break down and get shelved. I don’t pay you to palaver.”
“Yes sir.”
“Goddamn kid,” said the man to Bob. “Girl crazy. Catch him reading them dirty magazines one more time instead of breaking down all that.223 and his ass is gone, I don’t care what Margaret says.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Yep, good help is hard to find these days. What about a phone call from a woman? There wouldn’t be a pretty face associated with it.”
“Mister, I get nothing but phone calls, some of the damnedest you ever heard. Can I rent a machine gun? Will you guarantee a deer? How come Wal-Mart in Johnson City has it for $324.95 and you got it for $339.95? Is a nine millimeter more powerful than a.38? What’s the best gun for home defense? Can I buy a gun like the soldiers use? So maybe I got a call from her and maybe I don’t, but I sure as hell can’t answer you one way, the other with certainty. Billy, you get any calls?”
“No sir,” said Billy, yelling from the back. “None that I can remember.”
“That seems to be all she wrote, sir. Unless you want to buy a nice SKS for under a hundred?
“What’s an SKS?” asked Bob.
“Chinese military rifle. No, I don’t think you’re the type.”
“Anyhow, thanks. You got me scratching another one off my list.”
He turned and left.
The Reverend Grumley was thinking about fucking, as he almost always did when he wasn’t thinking about the next few days. He hadn’t fucked in about three weeks now, and the ordeal was getting harder and harder. The images poured over him, all the holes that he had filled, all over America, how the gals just seemed to want to give a man of the cloth a reward for all the natural good he brought into the world. He was going insane! Some of the damn boys beginning to look pretty good to him! But the last time-
The phone rang, he answered it there in the office of the chapel, and it was B.J. and Carmody, reporting that goddamnit, that fellow had somehow gone straight, straight in a goddamned beeline to Eddie Ferrol’s Iron Mountain Armory. How in hell he make that connection? He’d been in the goddamn county two hours and already he’d made two big connections on…
The Reverend got the whole story, the fellow’s sit by the roadside, going over notes, then speeding off.
“He see you?”
“Nah. Carmody’s too good a driver.” B.J. was always boosting Carmody and Carmody, B.J. because they knew in the scheme of things, they were second-stringers to the more glamorous pairing of handsome Vern and Ernie. See, that’s what the Reverend hated. All that competition, the formation of cliques and rump groups and bitter outsiders. It made for bad business. And if he wasn’t mistaken Carmody might actually be Vern’s half brother, rather than cousin, but, hmmm, he’d have to work that one out later as these issues were never too clear. But now wasn’t time for lectures on brotherliness.
“You got him?”
“Yeah, he’s in there now. We’re parked a good three hundred yards down the road, eyeballing him with glass.”
“Okay, hang tight. This here thang’s gittin’ a little hard to handle. Soon as he leaves, you call me and I’ll call Eddie, see what’s what.”
“Yes sir.”
“What y’all packing?”
“I’m.45, Carmody’s.40.”
“Git ’em ready. May have to go to guns.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll try and think some plan up. You know, something-”
“There he is.”
“Okay, you hang tight.”
He hung up, went to his wallet to find Eddie’s Mountain Armory number, but before he did, the phone rang again.
“Reverend!”
“Eddie, hear you had a visitor!”
“Goddamnit, Reverend, you done promised me nothing, nothing like this going to happen. It was clean, it was legal, it was okay, we had the paperwork and everything, and goddamnit, first that gal shows up with that cardboard piece of box top and now her goddamn father, asking questions.”
“The old gray-haired guy?”
“Didn’t look so goddamned old to me.”
“Tell me what he asked. Tell me what he knew. Did he know much?”
“He said he’d heard she called or come out this way, it was on her laptop.”
Eddie narrated the story of his conversation with Swagger.
“But he didn’t seem to know nothing about what you got for me, what its possible use was, what we had planned?”
Eddie said no.
“He had no clue. He’s just grasping,” the Reverend said.
“Maybe not, Reverend, but he sure come close, and when this thing goes down there’s going to be all kinds of commotion, and he might be the one to figure it out. So even if he don’t got no idea now, maybe he will then. You said nobody could connect all this up, and goddamn it’s already been connected up.”
“Settle down, Eddie. I see now I got no choice. It’s too close, too much is at stake. Okay, you sit tight, the Reverend will figure on it.”
He hung up, repunched B.J. in Carmody’s follow car.
“You got him.”
“Yeah, some bad news too.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t know what this means but he didn’t go straight to the car. He went around back. He’s back there five minutes. Ain’t there an entrance or something? I don’t know what he’s looking at or doing back there, but when he come out, he made a beeline to the car, and now he’s headed back into town.”
“You stay with him, you understand, while I work out a plan.”
“How’s this for a plan. We pop him. There’s the plan.”
“You idiot. Why’d he get killed? You get state polices in here and they much smarter than the Johnson Smokies and the whole goddamn thing crashes and burns just a few days before. Got to come up with some way to get rid of him that don’t look like Grumleys done the work on contract for something else big. That goddamn Sinnerman is out blowing up trucks with my boy Vern, and I can’t use him again, like on the gal. You stay with him, you hear? Meanwhile, I’ll think something up.”
“Reverend, in 1993,” said Carmody, evidently taking over the cell while driving, “I worked a Memphis hit where we waited till the mark was in a little store. We walked in, shot him dead, beat the shit out of the storekeep, took all the money and some peanut butter, and was gone. They never ever made it to be a hit. They may have suspected, but they never could do nothing about it. How’s about that one?”