Bobo sighed. “When he was well into his eighties, he began using the like-minded employees who worked in his sporting goods store to start stockpiling guns illegally. He was siphoning them from the stock. But my dad . . .” And here, for the first time, Bobo faltered.

Fiji waited patiently.

“My father suspected his dad was up to no good. He hired a private detective to work in the sporting goods store, keeping watch and digging stuff up. The guy’s name was Jack Leeds. Jack couldn’t stop them from bombing a black church. People died. A child. Other people.” Bobo took a deep breath, almost a sob. “One night—I can’t remember how—the men working for my grandfather found out that Jack was working undercover, but they didn’t know who he worked for. They thought it might be the government, and as you might expect, they went a little nuts. They really hurt him.” Another deep breath. “They tortured him. Right in front of me. My grandfather made me go with him. I was too young to say no and call the cops. I was too scared and weak.” Bobo’s voice was full of scorn for his younger self. “I was looking for a way out when Jack’s girlfriend came to rescue him. She was the great fighter from my karate class.”

That was a lot to figure out, and Fiji wasn’t totally sure she had the story straight, but she put that behind her to puzzle over later. “So she rescued Jack?” Fiji liked that part.

“Yeah. I’m simplifying, but she did. And I just carried my grandfather out of there. He was cursing up a storm, but I couldn’t let him stay there and keep on . . . being evil.”

“What happened?”

“All the men involved got arrested, including my grandfather.”

“That’s terrible.” While Fiji’s family had never been rich or influential, none of them had been arrested. Oh my gosh, I pick jail terms to be snobbish about? she thought. She said, “What happened after that?”

“While my grandfather was out on bail, he had a stroke. He never had to go to jail. But he never spoke again, and he died within three months. All the other men who were charged got prison sentences; the ones who set off the bomb in the church got life with no parole.”

“Which was right,” Fiji said. “Those sentences.” She stared at Bobo’s face. She couldn’t discern how he felt about these events.

“Which was right,” Bobo agreed. “Which was what Grandfather deserved, too. But he dodged that, like he dodged all the responsibility for what he’d done, by having the stroke.”

Fiji found it easy to decipher her friend’s emotion now; he was bitter.