“Really?” Olivia stared at Bobo. “I thought we’d kind of had our fill of surprises.”

He laughed. “You may like this one. I don’t know.”

He walked toward the back of the shop, pulling some keys out of his pocket as he went. When he got to the storage closet, he unlocked the padlock, then the dead bolt, and opened the door.

Manfred first noticed all the televisions on the shelves, maybe thirty—plus a small locked case full of guns and jewelry. And there was a shelf of power tools and appliances.

“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