In the remaining daylight, after the sheriff had driven back to Davy, the motorcycles roared through Midnight. They all paused outside the pawnshop and milled around in a threatening manner. The inhabitants of Midnight wisely stayed inside behind locked doors. The most proactive community members, Olivia and Lemuel, were not able to respond. Olivia was on one of her mysterious trips out of town, and Lemuel was dead to the world.

Fiji called Bobo. “You okay?” she asked when he answered.

“I’ve got my shotgun and I’m ready,” he said. “I’ve called the police.”

“Good.” She called Chuy.

“You all right?”

“We’re good. We’re ready. You need us to come to you?”

“No, stay inside. Bobo’s called the police.”

In the next minute or two all the residents of Midnight had called each other, except the Rev.

Fiji asked for the help of several goddesses. She was too frightened to run out her front door and in the door of the chapel to check on him. After all, motorcycle gangs had a bad reputation when it came to women. She was ashamed of her own cowardice. Finally, she went up into her attic, a place she avoided normally, and peered out a window, the only place she could see into the pet cemetery.

To her surprise, the Rev was digging a grave, about half human size. He’d hung his coat on a tree branch while he worked. He was ignoring the loud engine sounds and the yells of the MOL. He didn’t even seem to notice the noise.

She scrambled down the rickety folding ladder and closed up the attic, feeling a flood of relief. Though the MOL were buzzing and droning, Fiji could just hear the siren of an approaching police car. She ran to the front window, hoping to see them all being cuffed and thrown in the back of police cars. There was only a single patrol, but at the sight of it, the MOL group scattered like billiard balls when the break occurs. They fled in all directions across the landscape, not sticking to the roads, and the patrol car couldn’t follow all of them at once.

In fact, it made no attempt to follow any of them.

Fiji dashed out onto her porch, her face flushed and furious, and she gestured from the patrol car to one of the fleeing motorcycles, her meaning as clear as if she’d had a blackboard behind her. But the officer inside only pulled up in front of the pawnshop and got out of the car.

The cop was a woman, and Fiji stormed across the road to her. Manfred joined her just in time to hear, “So you thought if you couldn’t get them all, you wouldn’t get any of them?” Fiji was livid.