Midnight Crossroad

39

Bobo felt terrible. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked down at the floor for a minute, gathering his thoughts. “I never wanted anyone to use them,” he said, trying to explain. “And I never wanted law enforcement to have them, because that would mean it was for sure that my grandfather had done more terrible stuff than he was even charged with.” He sighed, and the big intake and exhalation of breath helped him steady his voice. “Mostly, I didn’t want any right-wing militia types to use them, and I didn’t want anyone else to know about them. I’d rented a storage unit under another name in Oklahoma. I left them there for a long time, making sure to keep my payments up. But when I came here, and it felt so—so doable . . . I knew I could learn the business, and Lemuel didn’t throw me any . . .”

“How did you find the secret closet?” Lemuel asked, and he didn’t sound happy.

“I just held my hand up to see if warm air was coming out. You remember, I moved here in the cold weather, in November. I was taking inventory in here, and I thought it felt kind of cold, and I thought it was strange since there was a heat register in here, and then I thought it was strange that it was way up there, and then I started fooling around with it . . .”

“What was in here, instead of the guns?” Olivia nodded her head toward the guns.

“Just some old books. I carried them up to my apartment and hid them in that old TV console that I have under the front windows.”

“Old books,” Lemuel said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “The old books I’ve been looking for, all these years.”

“Seriously? If I’d known, I would have told you,” Bobo said, honestly surprised. I found something a vampire didn’t find, he told himself, and tried not to smile.

“And you went to get the rifles?” Joe said.

“Yeah, I took a Sunday and Monday and drove over to load them up. I sweated bullets all the way back, thinking a state trooper would stop me and find all those guns.” He looked at Fiji. “Hey. Sweated bullets?”

“I got it,” Fiji said, with half of an unhappy smile.

He was used to Fiji giving him the full smile, all the wattage. He knew he’d screwed up. “Okay, I get that I should have told you all either before this or never,” he said. “I just couldn’t take the secrets anymore. My grandfather was a shitty human being. I hate that the world knows our family as the kind of people who think bombing a church is a good idea. I hate having a secret to keep. Since I realized what a—what kind of person he was, I’ve lived to refute that.”

“I understand,” Joe said. He turned to look at his partner. “You, Chuy?”

“I’m having to rearrange the way I think about you,” Chuy admitted. “But I understand why you hid all this stuff. This is what everyone’s looking for?”

“Yeah. This pile of rifles and guns and the other stuff. This is what everyone is looking for.”

“Hard to believe,” Manfred said.

Bobo wasn’t sure what he meant. Did his tenant mean that the fact that Bobo had the guns after all was hard to believe? Or the fact that people would go to such lengths to acquire a secret cache of weapons that wasn’t nearly as fabulous as it was reputed to be? “I think it was just . . . these aren’t any different from rifles and guns you can buy anywhere,” he said hesitantly. “It’s just the legend around them. And the fact that they’d be hard to trace, or at least not as quick to trace as guns stolen from Walmart or Jack’s Outdoor Center.” Looking around, he didn’t see any faces that weren’t displeased or outright unhappy.

His back straightened, and he lifted his head. “So, if you’re going to come back at me on this, say so now.”

The little crowd in front of him looked back at him. Fiji said, “Bobo, you did what you had to do, and it’s a family matter. I’m not telling anyone. It’s none of my business.”

He’d known he could count on her. She’d never let him down.

Olivia said, “I’ll sleep better knowing that I can bring down Armageddon if I have to.” She smiled at him.

“I would only like to see the books,” Lemuel said next. “I have to recover my pride somehow. I was too short to reach the grille and too dated to ask myself why the room wasn’t warmer.”

Chuy said, “Joe and I will not tell anyone.” But he didn’t add anything else, and Bobo knew they were both disappointed in him.

Manfred said, “I’d much rather they were here than in the possession of assholes like that Price Eggleston. And I’d like to know how you feel, Fiji. About letting Price off the kidnapping hook.”

Bobo blessed Manfred for diverting attention away from him. Everyone had had his or her say on the matter, and his secret was safe. And now, if something happened to him, everything in the closet would be taken care of in some way. He knew his friends would dispose of them wisely.

Fiji leaned against Chuy’s free side, and he put his arm around her. “It’s the price I’m going to pay to keep the sheriff from coming to my door, asking how I came to freeze three people in position for an undetermined amount of time. I got away. They won’t do it again. Mamie and Bart weren’t a part of my abduction, though they would have covered for their son . . . but I get that. Price is the dangerous one, at least to me, and I’m pretty sure he won’t be back. Especially now that I know he didn’t kill Aubrey.”

“But will he start up his group again?” Manfred said.

Bobo shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s beyond me. I think we’ve done all we can. We can’t stop extremists from spreading their propaganda. We can’t kill everyone who attacks us, as much as we might want to.” His eyes slewed to Lemuel and Olivia. “And, as Fiji says . . . we know he didn’t kill Aubrey.”

“And none of us figured that out, either,” Joe said, his voice very sad. “I should have seen it.”

There was a long, hushed moment, as they all looked back, trying to think of some signal Connor had given, some wave he’d sent off, that they should have been able to receive and decode.

“Well, I’m a witch,” said Fiji briskly. “And I didn’t pick up a damn thing. Great-Aunt Mildred would be ashamed of me. My guess is that Connor never thought of what he did as wrong, so he gave off no guilt. I’m giving myself a pass on that one. And now I’m going home to put away the food and fall into bed.” She did not look at anyone as she left, and Bobo knew he had fences to mend.

Olivia and Lemuel resumed their seats in the pawnshop waiting for whatever business would come. Olivia usually retired about one in the morning, leaving Lemuel to have some alone time. “Tonight it might be later,” she murmured to Manfred. “Lem will want to talk about the books, I suppose.”

Joe and Chuy left after murmuring, “Good night,” to everyone. Once they were outside, Joe slung his arm around Chuy, and the two walked home together in perfect harmony. They saw the Rev walking to his own home across the street, and they inclined their heads to him.

Once Bobo was up in his apartment, he looked out his front window, standing at the old console he’d rescued from the back of the pawnshop. He’d sanded it down and refinished it before installing some shelves inside for the books he’d planned on reading when he’d moved to such a very quiet place. Instead, he’d begun downloading what he wanted to read onto an e-reader or ordering special favorites from a bookstore in Houston. And that had worked out fine, because the space in the console was perfect for the books he’d removed from the secret closet. They were an unappealing lot. He was sure that if Lem was interested in them, they were not wholesome novels.

For the first time, as Bobo squatted to open the door and look inside, he wondered if he hadn’t exchanged one secret for another. But the musty old books were so worn you couldn’t even read the titles on the spines, and he had no desire whatsoever to open one of them. He shut the door and stood, looking out the window once again. As he watched, Fiji’s yard lights went off and then the lights in her big front room. After a moment, the only light showing was shining softly onto the ground at the right rear of the house, Fiji’s bedroom. All the lights at the Wedding Chapel and Pet Cemetery were off. The Rev had gone home to bed in the little house no one had ever entered.

If he leaned into the window and looked right, he could just see the glow from the trailer where the Reed family would be doing whatever they did at night. Putting the baby to bed? Watching television? Bobo could not see what was happening at the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon, but he figured after standing all evening in their wings and silver jumpsuits, Chuy and Joe were crawling into bed. (They were in bed, but they were indulging in some fooling around.)

Manfred’s front light was still on, and Bobo wondered if his tenant had gone back to work. The boy—the young man—did seem oddly compelled to work until he dropped. He had told Bobo that there was some reason that was pushing him, some drive that he didn’t understand.

“But I will,” Manfred had said. “Someday, I’ll know what it was all about.”

Bobo hoped that someday, he’d understand what it was all about, too.

Till then, he was staying right where he was, in Midnight.