“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.”

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.

Fuck, why didn’t I bring a gun. I am on the goddamned bull’s-eye and I need a gun and there’s no place I can go without-

He thought: Drive to the sheriff’s department. Go see Detective Thelma. Spend an hour or two there until you figure out what-but they’d wait. So tell her everything. She’d laugh, then she’d be pissed, because his findings directly contradicted hers, and she’d shoo him out the door and where’d he be? They’d wait for him and take him when he was available. They were hunters, they waited for their shot.

Then he got his hard, cold Bob the Nailer mind back, and he thought, How will they do it? They can’t do me with a car again, it would be too strange. It has to be a firearms thing, a shooting. What, they’ll take me, put me in the trunk, drive me deep in the forest and shoot me, then bury me. It’ll be days before anyone figures out I’m missing. That would be one way.

But even then, questions, things hard to control, things hard to foresee. Someone might find the car too soon, or someone might see them, someone might hear them, I might get close enough to hurt them or get a gun away from them, they don’t know who I am. No, they’d much rather shoot me dead from twenty-five feet and leave me. How would they do that?

Then of course he saw how it had to happen.

He realized he had one card to play, and that was, he could control where the thing took place. And he could only come up with one answer.

He picked up the cell, tried to remember the name of the goddamned place, then produced an image of the sign, LESTER’S GROCERY, on Route 167.

He punched 411, gave them the town and name of the place, waited for the connection, and shortly enough, after three and a half rings, he heard a familiar voice.

“Yeah?”

“Is this Lester’s?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“You recognize my voice. I’se just in there two hours ago. Old guy, gray hair, limp, gave you a little lecture.”

“Yes sir, I remember.”

“Okay, son, you listen hard to me, son. This ain’t bullshit. Okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m going to get there in about five minutes, maybe goddamned sooner. I will park, come straight in. As I park, you’ll see another car pull in behind me. In a bit two fellas will get out of it. They will have masks and guns-”

“Oh, shit,” said the boy. “I’ll call the-”

“You don’t call nobody. Ain’t time, sirens’d chase these boys, they wouldn’t show, you’d look like a fool and so would I, and I’d still be dead by morning. You understand?”

The boy made a sound that sounded like a cross between a whimper and a gulp.

“Son, you listen to me and you will come out all right. You reach under that counter and pull out the gun stashed there, an old Colt I’m guessing. I know you got one there, ain’t been cleaned or checked in twenty years, but it’s there, and let’s hope it’s working. Just take it out so I can reach it easy. I will come in, take it up, and git ready. Then when the two men in masks come through the door, you hit the deck. I will take care of them.”