“Hmmm,” said the Reverend.
“Could goddamn work. You’d get Thelma and that photo-crackpot sheriff and maybe some Mountain City fellows, but they’d be thinking robbery and they’d never link it to nothing else. They’d say, damn, this family sure did run out of luck when it come to Johnson County.”
“You make certain you don’t kill the clerk or any of the other witnesses. Scare hell out of them, you hear? So the cops have to wring necks just to get descriptions. Got it?”
“This one’ll be fun, Daddy,” said Carmody.
SIXTEEN
Bob went to the car, then stopped and looked back. Only one grimy window of the Quonset fronted the parking lot, and he could see that no one was eyeballing him. Maybe they were listening, so he went to his car, turned it on, gunned the engine, then turned it off. He got out, walked at an angle to a path around back, and followed it. There he found the receiving area, an open garage door and a loading dock. He leaped up some steps-ouch, the pain in his hip stabbed at him!-and slipped in. There he found the grubby assistant on his hands and knees, applying crowbar to a crate of Russian 7.62 x 39mm ammo, by which rough process he liberated twenty boxes, junked the wood, and loaded the boxes on a cart for eventual shelving.
“Howdy,” Bob said.
The kid looked up, one of a type. Sallow-eyed, furtive, maybe a little brighter than the poor boy in the grocery store, backwoodsy but not an idiot.
“You ain’t supposed to be back here, Mister.”
“And you ain’t supposed to contradict the great Eddie when it comes to remembering things.”
“Sometimes I speak out of turn.”
“Well maybe you have something to say worth hearing,” said Bob.
“Why’d I tell you a thing? ’Round here, folks treasure loyalty.”
“What I see in you is righteousness. You’re stuck with a moral center. So you’ll know that if it was my daughter in here, I have a right to know, and Eddie ain’t got no right to clam up.
“Eddie’s not righteous, that I’ll say. Some things I know could-well, that ain’t your business.”
“But this young woman is,” he said, handing over the picture of Nikki.
“She’s a fine-looking young gal,” said the boy. “I have to say, she deserved a lot more than getting knocked into a ditch by an asshole playing Mr. Dale, the senior.”
“I’m looking for him. He and I have business.”
“Hope you find him. Okay, here’s what you want to know. Yep, she was here that afternoon, late then, near dark, like it is now. Close on closing time. I heard her voice, and knew it was a younger gal. I peeked out and got a good look and damn, she was a beautiful young lady, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Takes after her mother. What was it all about?”
“Well, took a bit of squirming and I come in late on the conversation, see, I wiggled over there-” he pointed up the wall to a hazed window that separated the backroom from the store itself-“and I popped the window a bit. I suppose, I don’t know, you might think bad of me, I just had to figure out what it was, sorry to say, had to get close or-”
“She’s an attractive young woman. You’re a young guy, you have hormones. It’s only natural.”
“Yes sir, thank you. Anyway, she’s asking about something. The Bible, I think.”
“Hmmm,” said Bob. “The Bible.” That Bible again. Somehow between leaving the Reverend’s prayer camp and showing up here, the Bible had become important.
This connected with no theory of his daughter he could imagine.
“She had a Bible. And they’d been talking about a passage, I think that was it. I was forty feet away now.”
“What passage?”
“Mark 2:11.”
“Mark 2:11. And she had a Bible?”
“Unless they make other books that have black imitation leather covers and gold page edges. It was a Bible. It was Mark 2:11.”
“Why’d she come to a gun store to ask about the Bible? Any ideas?”
“Well, Eddie is a lay preacher. He does know the Book. Maybe she asked someone to help her on a Bible passage and they said, hell, just down the road, Eddie Ferrol knows his Bible times backwards and forwards. Makes sense to me.”
“Yeah. Possibly. And that’s it?”
“Well, yep, except…”
“Except what, son?”
“You didn’t never hear this from me.”
“I never even talked to you.”
“You will go away and not come back into my life.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Eddie’s twitchy anyhow but suddenly he’s real twitchy and I hear him on his cell, he goes way over in the corner so nobody can make out what he’s saying, and he’s like, totally twitched out, almost in tears, almost crying, almost sobbing, and then he’s calmed down somehow by whoever’s on the other end, he says ‘okay, okay.’ Then he hangs up. He comes looking for me, tells me to go home early-that’s a first, let me tell you-and only time I ever saw him look like that was two years ago when his wife left him and he went on a binge. I know he binged hard that weekend, and was a grouchy son-of-a-bitch for-well, till now.”
Bob knew what happened.
Somehow Nikki revealed through a Bible passage that she knew something and it scared the hell out of Eddie and as soon as she left, he called whoever he was in this with, whoever he was working for, and they called the driver fast and he raced after her, which is why he had to leave rubber up and down Iron Mountain and only just caught her, and did his killing thing then. Only she’d gotten too far down the slope and she was too good and he didn’t get that roll on her, and so she survived.
Boys, he thought, I’m getting close. And then we will have our business.
But then another thought hit him.
“You go look. You tell me what Eddie’s doing right now.”
The boy went to the hazed window, cracked it, and peeked out.
“Just like then. He’s over in the corner talking on his cellphone and he’s all twitched up.”
SEVENTEEN
Now what?
It was getting dark, and the two boys on him weren’t holding back anymore. They’d gotten up close, maybe two hundred yards out.
Could do a sudden turn, shake ’em.
What would that accomplish? You forestall confrontation, certainly violence, but a cost: you tell them you’re onto them and suddenly you’re the object of a manhunt here in Johnson County and you don’t have any weapons. Maybe you don’t even shake ’em, they’re damned good, they run you down and that’s it, you’re dead, after all you’ve been through, some white trash peckerwoods take you down in a gully in Passel o’ Toads, Tennessee, or wherever the hell it is.
No. You keep surprise on your side, make it work for you. Make them think you’re an idiot. You’re just bob-bob-bobbin’ along, singing a song. You don’t know a thing. You’re an amateur. They’re the professionals.
I need a gun.
That was what it came down to.
Without the gun, he was an old goat with a limp, a gray-haired fool in over his head. And he had two gunmen on his tail because he’d done exactly what his daughter had done, somehow cut trail on somebody’s plans, even if he didn’t know those plans himself or hadn’t figured them out. Something would be happening soon though, else why the urgency to kill his daughter and now to kill him?
Whatever, it came to one thing: I need a gun. God made men but only Colonel Colt can make them equal, for without the gun the old, the young, the weak, the meek, the silly, the soft were nothing but prey to the hard and ruthless predators of the world, no matter what the rules say. Rules are written for nice people in well-guarded zones who laugh and chatter and enjoy their little jokes at cocktail parties, but here in the hard world where the shit happened fast and the blood gathered in lakes on the wet pavement, without the gun you were just roadkill anytime anyone decided such a thing. You lived at their whim and when they decided to take you down for whatever reason, down you went, cradle and all.