“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?”

“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.

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.”