Midnight Crossroad

Luckily, the dead man had the keys to his truck in his pocket, so Olivia didn’t have to interrupt Lemuel’s interrogation/meal. Olivia ran down to her place to grab some jeans and a shirt, and while Bobo was cleaning up the evidence of the struggle, including blood, she drove the dead man’s pickup to the back of the store and knocked on the rear door, which led onto a small loading platform. Bobo unlocked the door, and Olivia stepped through. She gave Bobo a fond smile and a pat on the shoulder as she went by, and when she came back, she had the body over her shoulder. There was a dreadful limpness to the corpse’s arms and legs, which moved in rhythm with her walk. “I’m on my way,” Olivia said. She wasn’t even breathing heavily.

“How do you do that?” Bobo asked. “I guess I could pick him up, but I sure couldn’t stroll around with him without getting short of breath.”

She grinned. “Every now and then Lem gives me some blood.”

“Does it taste awful?” Bobo made an effort not to look disgusted.

“Nah. Not in the heat of the moment. With all due respect to Lemuel’s modesty.”

“Thanks again, Olivia. I expected to take a beating.” At the top of his bagful of emotions, he was relieved. A layer down, he felt a bit horrified that his attackers were dead and that they’d been made that way with such speed and efficiency. At the bottom, he was sad and angry that his grandfather, so many years gone, had screwed up his life again.

“No problem. See you in a bit.” She moved quietly and quickly, even though she was lugging 185 pounds of dead weight.

After Olivia left to drive the pickup to “the usual place,” Bobo scanned the floor and the items around the crucial area, looking for blood spots. Though he used a flashlight and wiped up what he could find, he soon realized that he’d have to complete the job in the daytime. He folded the old towel he’d used to wipe up and put it by his book so he couldn’t forget to take it upstairs to his washing machine. After he’d turned the store sign to “Closed,” Bobo collected his hot chocolate (now tepid), his book, the towel, and his keys and went upstairs to his apartment. While he stood in front of his microwave (he was trying to salvage his drink), he thought the incident over. There was a lot to consider.

He led off with wondering where “the usual place” was and what Olivia would do with the dead man’s pickup. Would she need a ride back? He’d be glad to do that for her. In fact, he texted her to that effect immediately. Then he began to worry about how the men had found him. They weren’t the first ones to do so, but they were the first ones to find him since he’d moved to Midnight. The last ones had beat him up and left him in the store he’d run in Missouri, a souvenir stand outside Branson. He’d left the next day for . . . anywhere else. He’d landed in Alaska, and he’d stayed there working until he felt the cold and damp seeping into his joints. He’d saved his pay, and he’d sold the Missouri souvenir stand through an agent, and he’d still had some family money stashed away, so he was able to buy Midnight Pawn from the previous owner, Travis Bridger . . . who (though he was supposed to be Lemuel’s great-grandson) had turned out to be Lemuel himself. Lemuel was not the original owner of Midnight Pawn, but he’d been in charge for over a hundred years, plus or minus.

That was a whole other train of thought, one whose tracks Bobo didn’t want to follow, at least right now.

So how had they found him? Had they tracked him through some computer trail? Maybe he’d ask Manfred, because his new tenant seemed to know a lot about computers. But Bobo’d have to give Manfred something by way of explanation, and he didn’t know how trustworthy Manfred was, yet. He’d ask Fiji’s opinion. She seemed to “get” people pretty well. From Fiji, it was somehow a natural progression to thinking of Aubrey and how she’d left him.

Acting on an impulse, Bobo went back down the stairs to the store. At night, the store was even darker and more mysterious the farther you got from the front windows. The interior seemed impossibly deep—at least on this floor—and it held more goods than customers expected. At the very back, to the left of the rear door, was a large rectangular storage room. This was where the things that could still be redeemed were kept, the things not yet for sale and on display. He unlocked the padlock on the door and then the dead bolt, and he stepped inside. There were tiers of shelves to his right and left. They were crowded with flat-screen televisions. These were the items people pawned first these days, their televisions. Then came gold jewelry and guns. The guns were all together, the jewelry in a safe bolted to the lowest shelf. At the farthest point of the rectangular room, the west wall, there were no shelves, only a heat and air vent up high. That was where Bobo had stored the boxes of Aubrey’s stuff. He’d envisioned some awkward and painful scenario in which she sent a new boyfriend to pick it up, a person he would not want to take upstairs to the apartment they’d shared. He’d managed to cram all her belongings into seven boxes, and three of those were full of clothes and shoes. Her grandmother’s sewing machine was still upstairs in the apartment, because he couldn’t box it. He’d intended to carry it down and put it in the closet, but somehow he never had.

And no one had ever come to claim her things, so there in the storage room the taped boxes remained. He was sure that someday she’d want her stuff, and she’d tell him where to send it.

It had been an awful long time, though. His faith that he’d hear from her was beginning to fade.

On his optimistic days, Bobo reverted to his first theory: Aubrey had had to rush away in response to a sudden message, and while she was on this mysterious errand, something happened to her, something that prevented her return. She would walk in the door tomorrow, perhaps with a bandage on her head, or in a wheelchair, and explain everything. Though Bobo knew it was foolish to cling to this fantasy, especially as time went by, he did so nonetheless.

On his worst days, Bobo was convinced that some trait of his own had deeply repulsed Aubrey, repulsed her to the point where she’d not even wanted to speak to him again, to the point where leaving all her clothes and jewelry and her grandmother’s sewing machine had been preferable to dealing with him one more time.

He couldn’t see a mirror while he was thinking about this, and that was a good thing. Bobo looked ten years older when he thought about Aubrey.

Bobo knew both his theories were bullshit.