Night of Thunder

“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?”

“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.”