“That’s a lot of TVs,” he said. “But surely that’s not the surprise?”
“That’s not the surprise. Those are just the first things people think of pawning.” Bobo went down the narrow corridor between the shelves to arrive at a wall at the back. It would have been a good place to put some extra shelves, now that Aubrey’s boxes were gone.
“What are you doing?” Lemuel said.
To Manfred, the vampire sounded not only surprised, but unhappy.
“I found this,” Bobo said, looking over his shoulder at them. He was not-quite smiling. “It made me feel like the shop was the right investment.” He reached up high—he was the only one of them who could stretch that far—and lifted up the corner of an old heat register. It was in a dark corner, and it had looked for all the world like it screwed firmly into the wall. Bobo’s fingers, fully extended, pressed something inside the aperture, and there was an audible mechanical noise. Somewhere, parts had worked together.
Bobo pressed the wall, and it folded back.
“Jesus God,” said Chuy. Bobo reached in to pull a chain hanging from the ceiling, and a bare bulb lit up the closet, which measured about four feet by three feet.
It was full of guns, rifles, grenades, ammunition. Those were the things Manfred could recognize. There were things he couldn’t.
“You had them all along,” Olivia said, after a shocked silence.
“You had them all along,” Fiji echoed.
Olivia sounded admiring. Fiji sounded angry.
Manfred had to bite his lip to keep himself from saying the same damn thing.
“Well,” Joe said. He took Chuy’s hand. “I guess we didn’t know you as well as we thought we did.”
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 ass**les 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.