I went back to Connie. She was packing the service for eight in a box while a woman waited. She gave the woman the box and she left, elbowing her way through the crowd.

“I’m going to cut this off at noon,” Connie said. “We only have junk left. Nothing that’s going to bring any real money.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Yeah, you can get food. When I shut this down, we’ll count everything up. Lula’s either going to be passed out or have the munchies real bad by then.”

TWENTY

WHEN I RETURNED to the office a little after noon, the tables were gone from the sidewalk and the cars and trucks were also gone. Mooner’s RV was still parked in front of the bookstore, but Mooner wasn’t in sight. Most likely, he was inside the Love Bus planning out Hobbit Con. I carted the bags of food into the office and set it all out on Connie’s desk.

Connie was working with a calculator, adding in money she’d arranged in stacks on the floor. She had a Glock on the desk beside her phone. Lula was asleep on the couch. Lula woke up when she heard the food bags rustling.

“Is that food? God bless whoever brought food. I’m starved.”

“I have meatball subs and potato salad and macaroni from Pino’s,” I told her.

Connie took a sub and kept working, plugging numbers into the calculator.

“How are we doing?” I asked her.

“I think we’re going to make it. The guns and the motorcycle helped a lot.”

“That whole back room is just about empty,” Lula said. “Only thing left is dust bunnies.”

I sat back and ate my lunch and watched traffic move past the bonds office. The rhythm on the street was normal again. I imagined the militiamen were on their way back to Idaho with their dynamite, and some woman in the Burg was setting her new service for eight in her china closet.

“That’s it,” Connie said. “We have a million three for Sunflower and fifty-two dollars left over. I have the fifty-two dollars on my desk. Everything else can get packed. Count it as you go. We want to give Sunflower a million three. No more. No less.”

“What are we gonna put it in?” Lula asked.

Connie collected the lunch wrappers and stuffed them into the Pino’s bag. “We have a couple duffel bags in the back that were holding guns. We sold the guns, but I kept the bags.”

“Do you think Sunflower will recognize his money?” Lula asked.

“No. It’s all been rebundled,” Connie said to Lula. “So far as we know, we weren’t seen at Chopper’s, and you were the only one seen at the funeral parlor. I doubt they’d attribute the robberies to you.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “Sunflower’s one of them chauvinistic underestimators.”

Lula and I set to work packing the duffel bags, being careful to count as we packed, and Connie called Sunflower.

“He sounded happier this time,” Connie said when she got off the phone. “I think he needs the money.”