Bobby wiped his hands and stepped out of the bathroom. He still had ingrained oil he couldn't get out from under his fingernails, but 'least it was clean dirt. In the kitchen, Ellen was chopping vegetables for a stew. Bobby took a beer from the icebox and helped himself to a piece of carrot, earning himself slapped fingers for his pains, and Ellen pulled the beer bottle out of his hand. Woman was a pain in Bobby's ass.
Probably why he married her.
"You gonna ask them?" she demanded quietly.
"When the time's right," he assured her, his voice equally low. "Winchester's boy hardly knows us and Sam barely remembers me. Give 'em a reason to trust us before we ask 'em to."
Ellen shrugged acknowledgment and Bobby turned toward the study where the two boys were poring over the books he'd shown them. Jo was seated at the kitchen table, nose deep in her books. She looked up and smiled at him as he passed but went straight back to typing notes on her computer. Bobby worried about her a little. Dedication was a fine thing, to be sure, but you'd think a young girl of that age would pay more attention when there were two strapping young lads in the house. It'd only be natural. But it wasn't none of his business, he guessed.
He paused at the door, momentarily awed anew at the sight of the young men, the changes since he'd last seen each of them. Could hardly credit it'd been so many years since he'd seen Sam: time enough for the boy to grow tall, tough and battle hardened. Still Bobby thought he could see something in the eyes: a ghost of the shy, neglected youngster he'd known. There'd always been something ethereal there. Now Bobby couldn't help recalling fleeting moments when the little boy would get an odd, distant expression, then laugh suddenly. When you asked why, he couldn't tell you. The recollection troubled Bobby somehow.
And Dean: when Bobby had met him he'd been a reedy college kid, friendly, exuberant, vain about his looks and cocky with the girls - wooing them with sappy pop songs, boasting about his band and dreaming of being a rock star some day; typical kid with his whole life ahead of him and a world of options to explore. Now he was a man, driven and single-minded, with a world of trouble on his shoulders. It'd been just a handful of years but it was like he'd aged ten.
The younger man sat at the desk turning pages while the elder hung over his shoulder, right up in his space. It seemed accepted; the two were tight like only men who are in a rat hole together can be, but Bobby sensed there was some trouble in the ranks. There was awkwardness in the way they'd look at each, each trying to catch glimpses when the other wasn't looking. Sam looked insecure, seemed to be searching for some kind of reassurance; Dean was anxious, worried about his young companion. But as soon as their eyes met, the walls went up: Sam's face became wooden, Dean's stony. Almost like they'd had a lover's quarrel . . .
Bobby's gaze moved to the amulet that hung from Dean's neck. That, in itself, told a story that God alone knew the end of.
The boys glanced up as he entered the room. "You were right, Dean," Bobby replied to the unasked question. "Just a crack between cylinders. You were real lucky to pick up on it so quickly before it did any more damage."
The young man straightened up, pulled back his shoulders and directed a smug look at the other boy, but his expression was masking some real relief at being proved right, and Sam looked too ashamed for being wrong. Something sure wasn't right between these boys; they had far too much riding on a little thing like a tricky mechanical diagnosis.
"Can you fix it, Bobby?" Sam asked.
"Yeah. It's not the only thing in need of fixing, though." Bobby paused and let his meaning equivocate for a bit. "I'll put the word out," he said, "but it'll take a few days to get the parts. 'Fraid she's gonna be off the road for a while."
Dean suppressed a hiss of frustration and impatience.
"You got somewhere you need to be in a hurry?" Bobby asked him.
"Maybe," Dean told him, and Bobby could see the fire of mission burning in his eyes. "Bobby, I think we might finally be close to getting a jump on this thing." The boys exchanged a look that seemed to communicate something between them. "We've been following a lead on Samuel Colt," Dean admitted warily, clearly nervous of the old hunter's reaction, and not without reason.
"Samuel Colt?" Bobby repeated skeptically. "The arms dealing, gun making Samuel Colt?"
Dean nodded. "O.K. I know," he acknowledged. Doubtless Sam had advised him of the apocryphal status of the Colt lore. "But, it's starting to look like the legend he was also a hunter might have some legs." He nodded to Sam who pulled a map out from his duffel bag and Dean pushed some books aside to make space for it on the desk. "We've just come from Wyoming," he continued. "We spent the last few days in Sunrise. Turns out Colt was there between 1856 and 61, and each of these Xs . . ." Dean indicated five crosses that were marked on the map "is an abandoned frontier church, all of them built by Colt. And there's more. He built private railway lines connecting church to church that just happen to lay out like this . . ." He drew in lines connecting the crosses to form a five pointed star. "We figured it means something, and after what you've shown us – "
"Bobby, this book . . ." Sam interrupted, handling the pages of the volume Bobby had given him with something like awe. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Key of Solomon? It's the real deal, all right," Bobby assured him.
"And these protective circles? They really work?" His fingers traced the intricate diagram illustrated on the page.
"Hell, yeah. You get a demon in - they're trapped. Powerless." Bobby chuckled. "It's like a Satanic roach motel."
"The man knows his stuff," Dean acknowledged, gazing at Bobby with growing respect, but he quickly returned his attention to the map. "So it seems pretty likely Colt built the railway lines to protect something," he speculated.
"Yeah but, Dean, what?" Sam turned back to Bobby. "We went there," he explained. "There's nothing there but an old cowboy cemetery."
"We thought maybe Colt had hidden the gun there, but Sam and I went all over it," Dean admitted. "With an EMF meter, even a metal detector. Turned up nothing but a rusty bicycle bell."
"So why Sunrise? Where did this lead come from?" Bobby thought it was a reasonable question but the tension in the room amped up the moment he asked it.
"There was this girl . . . we met her in Indiana. She gave us a list of towns and implied they had some connection to Samuel Colt." Dean scrubbed at the back of his neck and Bobby waited for more; he'd been around the traps long enough to know when he was only getting half a story. "O.K. so the girl turned out to be a demon," the young man admitted.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Bobby was pretty sure he wasn't drunk but he was starting to think he needed to be. "You wanna run that by me again?" he growled.
"Bobby, I know. I know," Dean insisted. "We don't know why she seems to be helping us – "
"Because she ain't! Use your head, Dean. Why would a demon lead you to a demon killing gun? It don't make sense."
From the way Sam rolled his eyes it looked like he'd made this point already, and Dean squirmed a little. "Well, she didn't actually mention the gun . . ."
Bobby let out an exasperated sigh. "Wherever she's leading you, you can bet it's into a trap!"
Dean's shoulders straightened again and he fixed Bobby with a determined look. "She led us here," he said pointedly.
That kinda took the wind out of Bobby's sails and Dean took advantage of his silence.
"Sioux Falls was one of the towns on the list," he explained. "I think she wanted us to meet up with you."
"Well, that's a comforting thought," Bobby drawled, his tone heavy with irony.
"Any port in a storm," Dean insisted quietly. "All the towns she's led us to have checked out so far. We don't know what the Wyoming thing means, yet, but it's obviously important. We've got useful information from all the places she pointed us at, and we had nothing before."
And she knew that. She knew how desperate the boy was, what he needed. Bobby shook his head but, for now, he decided to move on to a safer and more practical issue. "Even if it's true and the gun exists, even if you find it, what then? You're not gonna shoot your daddy," he pointed out.
But the kid had already thought it through. "It's leverage," he said."If there's something that can kill Yellow Eyes, he's gonna want it. So we use it. We use it to lure the son of a bitch and then we trap it," Dean stabbed a finger down on the ancient tome that Sam still held reverently in his hands, on the diagram of the Devil's Trap. "Then we exorcizes the evil bastard's ass back to Hell!" he snarled.
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. "That easy?" he said dubiously.
"It's the first time we've had anything close to a plan." Dean's chest heaved and his eyes burned with the fire of an excitement that wouldn't be extinguished. "We just need that gun. I feel like we're close; we're just missing a part of the puzzle. Maybe it's in one of the other towns."
"Maybe," Bobby replied thoughtfully, far from convinced, but he recalled that Sam's grandfather had made an extensive collection of Colt's more obscure private papers back in the early days of his obsession. He guessed it couldn't hurt to share that information if Sam didn't know it already. "Far as I know, Samuel never turned up any reference to the Colt," he cautioned them, "but what you know now might narrow it down some. If you take a closer look at those five years he was in Sunrise, maybe something'll leap out."
Dean and Sam shared an awkward glance but nothing was said and, once more, Bobby got the sense there was back story there he wasn't privy to. He figured Sam had reasons why he was working with John Winchester six months back instead of with his own family, and why he hadn't just taken Dean straight to the Campbells after the fire. Questions could wait. If the boys were going to be here a few days there'd be time for the Spanish Inquisition later.
"But you oughta know, this is some serious crap you boys stepped in. Normal year, I hear of, say, three demonic possessions. Maybe four, tops. This year, counting in this girl you're telling me about, I hear of twenty-eight. You get what I'm saying? More and more demons are walking among us – a lot more."
"Do you know why?" Sam asked.
"No, but I know it's something big. Storm's coming, and you boys - your Daddy – " He nodded to Dean. "You are smack in the middle of it."
