“It’s ten past ten,” I said. “Who’s selling a car at this time of night?”
“We’ll find out, dear.”
“Can’t it wait till morning?”
“No. The Buick is already hot. We’ve got to dump it.”
“You kids have fun,” Sparky said.
Winston leaped onto the bed, perhaps to assist with the tabulation.
I said, “You seem to have reformed Winston, but somewhere down inside he’s still the attack dog that was. Should you really leave your grandfather alone with him?”
Leading me out to the Buick, she said, “Grandpa would never hurt him.”
Because the motel was fully booked, its sign had been turned off. In the infinite sea of darkness overhead, uncountable stars glowed like channel lights. With its dry climate, Tucson has limited cloud cover, enjoying more hours of sunshine than almost any other city in the country, and its night skies offer the spectacle of eternity.
Bridget drove because her psychic magnetism was more developed than mine and because she was far more confident than I was that we could find someone who would sell us a car at that hour.
“Confidence,” she said, “improves the efficiency and accuracy of the magnetism.”
“What were you confident of finding when you found the bomb factory instead?”
“Don’t be snarky, Quinn.”
“No, I’m really curious.”
We cruised along a boulevard, turned onto a lesser street, segued into an alley while she said, “Last year, we took a road trip to Austin. Grandpa had a friend from the old days he’d fallen out of touch with. Harry Peacemaker. Rumor was Harry moved to the Austin area, but we couldn’t find a phone listing. So while Grandpa told me colorful stories about this Peacemaker guy, we let magnetism take over. It pulled us to this small industrial building with a sign that said PEACEMAKER UNITED. We went in through the main door. No one was in the public area. There was a call button, but it didn’t work. Grandpa being Grandpa, he opened the gate in the counter and went looking for someone, and I followed him. We found this big room with maybe a hundred assault rifles and shotguns racked along one wall. In the center of the room were these tables where three guys were building bombs with bricks of C-4 plastic explosives and cell phones for triggers. You’d think terrorists would have at least some sense of security, but no. Of course, the kind of people who’re into such things are usually eight cards short of a full deck.”
“So the peacemakers were bomb makers.”
“A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize it. They’re opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They’re opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world’s gone weird.”
“On the other hand, if you blow someone up, they rest in peace thereafter, so then you would be sort of a peacemaker. What happened in the bomb factory?”
“We had an altercation.”
“Which evidently you didn’t lose.”
“We’re always prepared for trouble. It’s why we don’t fly, we do road trips instead.”
“You always go everywhere with guns?”
“Well, only since I was fifteen and Mr. Scuttler followed us home on parent-teacher night, clubbed Grandpa, and tried to rape me prior to killing us both.”
I felt increasingly that I, an orphan abandoned at birth, had been so sheltered that I needed to apologize for having had such a cushy life to date. “Who was Mr. Scuttler?”
“My English teacher. After that, I was homeschooled.”
“Good idea. What happened to Mr. Scuttler?”
“I held him off with a battery-powered carving knife until Grandpa pounded him silly with the debate-club gavel.”
“Gavel?”
“You know, a wooden mallet like a judge needs in a courtroom. Mr. Scuttler was adviser to the student debate club. He’d brought the gavel as a weapon.”
“You said Sparky had been clubbed.”
“Yes, with the gavel. This may sound odd, but it’s extremely difficult to knock Grandpa out. And even if he’s unconscious, he refuses to stay that way for long.”
“I don’t find that at all odd,” I assured her.
“Here we are,” she declared as she pulled to the curb and parked.
The neighborhood was either zoned for mixed use or, having once been residential, was later rezoned for commercial enterprises. The result was a hodgepodge of older single-story homes scattered among fast-food outlets, used-car lots, and small strip malls with six or eight stores each.