by Alyssa Day
So who could he be? A fed? But why would the feds be investigating Chantal?
“I’m Tess Callahan,” I said, not exactly answering his question. “And you are?”
“Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez,” he said, with that liquid accent that would have made Molly melt into butter if she’d been here. He held out his hand, but I shook my head. No way was I taking the chance of seeing a federal agent’s death. He didn’t seem surprised though; maybe lots of people avoided shaking his hand in his line of work.
He showed me his badge, which looked real enough that I’d probably offer him cash if he’d been there to pawn it, but you could never really tell with badges or anything else. Run a pawnshop for long enough, and you’ll realize that everything that can be forged has been forged. Even the sheriff himself, an avid gun collector, had been fooled at gun shows a few times.
“Agent Vasquez is from Guatemala,” Eleanor said, smiling broadly and adding a little extra drawl to her voice. “Couldn’t you just listen to him talk all day long?”
“Fluttery southern woman” was one of Eleanor’s favorite personas with tourists. She claimed it got her an extra ten percent added to the top of every transaction.
“Originally from Guatemala. Currently from the FBI’s Paranormal Operations division,” he said, slanting an amused glance at Eleanor.
I had a feeling she didn’t fool him at all. Actually, I had a feeling that not much got by Special Agent Vasquez.
“Not to be rude, Agent Vasquez, but what are the feds doing here? You know you don’t have any kind of jurisdiction in Dead End.”
His eyes gleamed, and now I had the impression that I was the one amusing him. “You’re right, of course. I’m simply here as a courtesy. Is there anything you can tell me about the circumstances under which you found Ms. Nelson?”
I had a feeling he already knew exactly the circumstances, and everything else about Chantal, me, Jeremiah, and anybody else in town that he might have been interested in. P-Ops didn’t mess around when they were investigating something.
The question was—why were they investigating this?
“Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for,” I said. “Anything in particular? Not that any murder is ordinary, but somebody shot Chantal and dropped her off on the porch. She wasn’t clawed up like in a shifter attack, she wasn’t a drained-dry husk like in a vampire attack. I know there must be other kinds of supernatural murderers out there, but I bet not many of them make a habit of shooting grocery store clerks with guns and dropping them at pawnshops. Surely we would have heard about that in the news by now.”
Eleanor pulled out a duster and started to swipe the countertops, but never took her eyes or ears off the two of us.
“So you do confirm it was a gunshot wound? You saw it yourself?” The agent seemed particularly intent on hearing the answer to this question.
I shrugged. It was an easy answer. “Yes, I saw it. And I’ll probably never forget it. Deputy Gonzalez took pictures, and I’m sure she’ll share this with you. And the sheriff was here. Shouldn’t you be talking to him?”
“Funny thing about those pictures. They somehow disappeared off your deputy’s camera,” he said slowly, all traces of amusement gone from his face. “In fact, the entire camera seems to have disappeared before she managed to transfer or upload the photos.”
I didn’t know how to take that. To stall for time before I answered, I walked over to the counter and put my purse down before turning to face him. “If you’re suggesting that Susan deliberately…what? Tampered with evidence? Is that the way you say it? Then you are completely wrong.”
“I didn’t say anything about Deputy Gonzalez,” he replied. “How well do you know the sheriff? And what do you know about the upcoming Blood Moon?”
Oh boy. Now we were getting into dangerous territory. I didn’t know whether I should answer, call my lawyer, or throw the very pretty Agent Vasquez out of my pawnshop for asking me about the sheriff. The Blood Moon question I didn’t get at all. What could that possibly have to do with anything?
I stared at him, and he stared right back, and I could see that he must be very good at getting criminals to talk. But I wasn’t a criminal, and I had nothing to say.
“I know Sheriff Lawless to say hello to, just like everybody else in town. If you want to know anything else about him, you should ask him,” I said evenly. “And the Blood Moon? All I know about that is that it makes some supernatural creatures go kind of nuts, like the full moon supposedly does to normal humans. There’s one coming up in a week or so, I think?”
He just looked at me with those intense dark eyes, and I realized he was good at getting non-criminals to talk too.
“We’re all just plain, vanilla humans here. No shenanigans on the Blood Moon, or any other moon, right, Eleanor?”
She was staring at me like I’d grown another head. I wasn’t usually the babbling type, but Very Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez was getting to me. Maybe he had some kind of magical truth-getting ability. Everybody knew that P-Ops preferred to hire agents with supernatural talents.
Or maybe I was just losing it. It had been a rough couple of days.
The tension in the room was clearly getting to Eleanor, who was brandishing the feather duster about so wildly I was afraid that she was going to destroy half our inventory.
“You should talk to Jack Shepherd,” she blurted out. “He was here when it happened. We really need to get to work here, very busy.”
Agent Vasquez pointedly looked around the empty shop, but refrained from making the obvious comment.
“Anyway, why don’t you talk to Jack? I’m sure he’ll have more to offer you, Agent,” she continued, smiling overly brightly the whole time.
I forced myself not to groan. I’d really wanted to leave Jack out of this. He had enough to deal with right now, and given his somewhat mysterious past, I didn’t think he’d be pleased that we’d just pointed a federal agent in his direction.
Agent Vasquez, on the other hand, had the same expression on his face that Lou gets when I feed her roasted chicken. “Jack Shepherd is in town? Jeremiah’s nephew?”
Eleanor’s face lit up. “Oh, you know him? He was always the nicest boy. He came over and mowed my lawn the summer that my son broke his leg playing baseball. He and Dave were good friends, and they nearly ate me out of house and home, especially when I baked chocolate chip cookies.”
Vasquez’s eyebrows raised a fraction of a centimeter, which was apparently his version of surprise. “You are aware, I presume, that this nice boy you’re talking about spent the last several years as the co-leader of the North American rebellion?”
I suddenly felt dizzy. “Co-leader? As in, he was the head of it?
“He and Quinn Dawson. Then suddenly both of them stepped down, and there is new leadership, not that the movement is that active anymore. Between the two of them, their teams shut down most of the more blatantly power-mad vampires. At least, the ones that P-Ops didn’t get,” he admitted, with a refreshing lack of the “we’re the feds, we win at crime” attitude that I’d expected. “We’ve really been wanting to talk to him.”
He saw the defiance on my face and held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Not in a bad way. We admire Mr. Shepherd, and are wondering if he might want to work with us. Ms. Dawson turned us down in quite…forceful…terms.”
Quinn. The woman I’d seen in my vision. So she hadn’t been his girlfriend, but his co-leader? And why did I even want to know?
I blew out a sigh. “Okay. Well, yes, he’s in town. He had breakfast with me and my family this morning, not that your stool pigeons won’t tell you that anyway. He said he had things to do, but he’s probably around. I can tell you where Jeremiah’s house is, if you want.”
Alejandro laughed, and it transformed his face from serious federal agent to warm, approachable, hot guy. I felt a moment of envy for the woman or man on the other side of the simple platinum wedding band he wore.
/> “Stool pigeons? Really?”
“She likes to read mystery novels,” Eleanor confided. “I stick to romances, myself. People rarely get murdered in them, and there’s always kissing and hot, sweaty—”
“I think he gets it, Eleanor,” I interrupted, feeling my face heat up.
“Oh, I get it, ma’am. I like the kissing and the hot, sweaty stuff myself,” he told Eleanor, grinning, and she burst into delighted laughter.
A charming P-Ops agent. Now I’d seen everything. Next, a ballerina firefighter would pirouette into the shop.
“So, if there’s nothing else…” Hint, hint, get out of my shop, hint.
“Nothing else for now. I’ll chat with a few people and maybe see you again, Ms. Callahan.” He turned to Eleanor. “Mrs. Wolf, it has been my sincere pleasure.”
After he dropped that final load of charm, he left, and I sat down hard, feeling like I’d gone a few rounds in the ring with Ronda Rousey.
“That man is trouble. I wish you hadn’t mentioned Jack,” I said. “It’s not fair for him to get tangled up in this just because he happened to be here when it happened.”
Eleanor winced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to throw him under the bus. I was just getting so stressed out by the whole thing that I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. And you, you poor thing. I’m so sorry this happened. Are you okay?”
She rushed over to hug me, and I smiled. Any minute she’d be offering to make me cookies. She and Aunt Ruby were firmly in the “food equals love and comfort” camp, and they were both always giving me recipes for casseroles that would feed twelve people. I’d eaten lasagna for a week and a half the last time I’d tried out one of Eleanor’s favorites, and I hadn’t even been able to look at a lasagna since then.
“If you don’t want to talk about it…”
I sighed. I really didn’t want to talk about it, but she had the right to know, especially since a murderer or murderers might be targeting the pawnshop. I sketched out the story, expecting her to get scared and quit any second.
She surprised me—she got mad instead. On second thought, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The expression “steel magnolia” was coined for a reason, after all, and the women of Dead End personified it.
“If some low-life murderer thinks he’s coming after us, he has another think coming. I’m armed.” She retrieved her giant purse out of the big drawer behind the main counter, reached in, and pulled out a Glock.
Of course she had a Glock. My head started to hurt again. “You know how to use that properly, right, Eleanor?”
“More or less,” she said vaguely, waving it around, which didn’t help my peace of mind one bit.
I sighed. “Just put it away, please. The bus should be here any minute.”
She started back for the drawer, but I held up a hand. “In the locked storage closet, please.”
We had to have a secure place to keep customers’ items, and that room had a solid steel door and a very good lock, with a keypad, even. Jeremiah’s motto had been “You can never be too careful with OPP”—OPP being Other People’s Property.
The pawn business was a pretty straightforward one, mainly specializing in short-term loans for people who don’t have the kind of collateral that banks want. If John Doe has a house, he can get a mortgage. If he has a laptop or Grandma’s pearl necklace or maybe even a taxidermied alligator, he goes to a pawnshop. We loan customers what we think the item is worth at resale value, and they leave the item with us for the term of the loan. Ninety days is the most common term among our customers, and usually around eighty percent of them do come in to redeem their property by paying us back the loan amount plus interest. If they elect not to come back, because they’d rather have the money than their items, or they just don’t have the ready cash to do so, we keep the item and sell it in the shop to recoup our investment.
Sometimes, people just came in to sell us unwanted items that we could then sell, and most of the odder curiosities in the shop were from Jeremiah’s well-known penchant for buying the weird and the unusual. Don’t even get me started on how hard it was to dust some of that stuff. The voodoo doctor’s skull collection had creeped me out hugely when I was a teenager. I’d never been so happy to sell anything, even though we took a loss on it.
There’s just not a huge market in used skulls these days.
Chapter Eight
I heard the under-oiled brakes on the Golden Years Swamp Tours bus out in the parking lot, right on schedule. The GYST was a very popular day trip for senior citizens in Orlando with their families, who’d had more than enough of the theme parks. There was only so much giant mouse you could take when you were older than twelve.
We had a deal with Mr. Holby, the gregarious tour operator, to swing by after their mornings at the airboat swamp tour place. We paid him fifty dollars every time he brought a bus by, and his passengers got to spend money on things they didn’t need and enjoy the “authentic Florida swamp town pawnshop experience.” And of course we made money. So it was a win-win-win all the way around.
I put on my cheerful face as Eleanor came out from the back room—just a sweet, neighborly woman who’d been securing the Glock she might or might not know how to use—and we prepared for an hour of small talk, brisk sales, and breathless descriptions of the “real, live alligator” they’d all seen from the boats.
“As if we’ve never seen an alligator before,” Eleanor muttered under her breath to me some time later, when she was ringing up a sale of a taxidermied raccoon for a man and his wife who were wearing matching orange-and-green my-eyes-are-bleeding shirts. Given the way they were talking about him, I wouldn’t bet money against the idea that Rocky Raccoon might have a shirt of his own not long after they got home.
Dead End Pawn: Selling you the things you never knew you had to have. (Note to everyone who has to clean out an elderly relative’s house when he or she goes to the nursing home: You’re welcome.)
The GYST people might be a little over the top sometimes, but they were customers, and we served them with politeness and a smile. For a while, we were so busy that I didn’t have time to think about murders, dead bodies, or fascinating tigers who might or might not be in love with intense-looking rebel leaders.
So I almost missed the small voice calling my name.
“Miss Tess? I have some coins. Do you have time for me?”
I looked down, and my heart sank into the vicinity of my stomach. Shelley Adler was Exhibit A as to why Dead End’s having no state or federal regulations, and only minimal law enforcement, wasn’t always a good thing.
“I always have time for you, sweetheart,” I said, smiling.
Shelley was nine years old, but she was so small and thin that she looked maybe seven. Her mother, Melody, had been a single mom, and she’d died in a freak one-car accident on a cloudless night just a few months back. Melody’s parents had been in the car with her, leaving Shelley alone in the world except for the Kowalskis, who were distant cousins.
There was something about Dead End that seemed to churn out more than its fair share of orphans. Jack, me, and now Shelley, three cases in point. I looked down at the girl’s bright blue eyes staring up at me from her pinched, anxious face, and resolved to quit whining, even to myself, about my aunt and uncle’s overprotectiveness.
She was dressed in what looked like shiny new clothes, and I literally meant shiny. The word FIERCE shone out at me in blindingly pink sequins from her shirt, her pants had pockets made of what looked like reflective tape, and her shoes lit up in little flashes of colored light at the heels and toes as she fidgeted back and forth. An unzipped neon green jacket finished off the ensemble. Her entire outfit looked like it had been picked out by a third-rate stripper after one too many tequila shots—it didn’t fit her very well, either—and I’d never seen her dressed like that before. Either the Kowalskis had let her pick out her own clothes at the store, or some guy who’d never had a daughter or a sister had bought them
for her. I looked up and, sure enough, there was Walt Kowalski lurking near the door, glowering at me. Olga, being the massively important witch that she was, must have thought that shopping for a child’s clothes was beneath her and sent one of her hulking, loser sons to do it.
The word that came to mind rhymed with witch, but it wasn’t nearly as charitable.
“Hey, sweet girl, how are you? I haven’t seen you for a while.” I bent down and folded her into a hug, closing my eyes and smelling the sweet scent of baby shampoo in her hair. “What do you have for me this time?”
She bent her head while she fumbled in her pocket, and the sight of the crooked part in her light brown hair nearly undid me.
“Two Spanish doubloons,” she crowed, holding them up excitedly. “I’ve never found two together before.”
Shelley had a metal detector and a fierce work ethic. She’d worked out a payment plan with Jeremiah for the metal detector a little over a year ago, when Melody had come in to pawn some jewelry. Shelley had solemnly handed over a dollar a week, until the twenty-five dollars had been paid in full. When Jeremiah had tried to let her off early, telling her she was free and clear, she’d shaken her serious little head.
“No, sir. I still have two dollars to go. I keep track of it in my notebook.”
She’d used the money she’d earned from selling coins, and the occasional other bits and baubles she found, to help out her mom. On a good month, she’d earn at least a hundred dollars. Our deal was always that we paid her twenty dollars per coin upfront, and then we researched the coins by sending them to our expert at the historical society, rather than trying to guess at their value. The next time we saw her, we gave her whichever was highest, the coin’s value as an antique coin, or the value of the gold in it, less a smaller-than-usual percentage for the costs of resale. There’s always been rumors of pirates who hid out in the swamps around Dead End back in the 1700s, and the rumors must have some truth to them, because Shelley kept finding coins.