Pawnbroker: A Thriller

by Jerry Hatchett

“This is Central Monitoring. Password, please?”

  “No ma’am, I don’t have any...” I started to say “televisions” but caught myself. Anyone, including Overcoat, could see I had a shelf full of them and figure out what was going on. “...rocking chairs right now. Sorry.”

  “Dispatching now.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” I hung up the phone and it happened. He whipped his right hand out of the pocket, holding a little nickel plated semiautomatic, probably a .22 caliber. He’d likely have to hit me in the head or directly in a vital area to kill me, but that was little consolation.

  “Step away from the counter! Give me what I want, I’m out of here.” His head looked nervous but his hand was steady. Weird.

  I didn’t turn my head or even take my eyes off his, but in my peripheral vision I saw Bill’s van leave the parking lot and pull into traffic. He pulled out in front of a car, and the driver laid on the horn. Overcoat turned his head to look, and by the time he turned back to me, he was staring at my Bodyguard and its considerably bigger hole at the end of the barrel. If I’d had another half-second with him looking away, this might be over. As it was, we had a hell of a stalemate.

  “Be smart, put your gun down nice and slow,” I said.

  “Don’t think so, motherfucker.”

  “Then we got a situation, don’t we?”

  “Put your gun down,” he said.

  “Kiss my lily-white ass.”

  “I’m gonna fuck you up if you don’t put that gun down!” He was screaming now, ratcheting up the tension. If I could maintain the status quo, the cavalry would be here soon.

  He had forgotten about LungFao, who had managed to duck into a little alcove about thirty feet down the line of showcases. He had gotten the Mossberg assault shotgun off the wall and was leaning around the corner of the alcove with it pointed in our direction. The drills had paid off, but LungFao was not hard, and he had never been in a situation even close to this. I hoped like hell he remembered the rest of the procedure. Time to find out.

  Please, God. A little help here. I slowly tapped my left foot twice. LungFao remembered. The sound of a Mossberg pump being chambered is very distinctive. When Overcoat heard the shotgun being shucked, he instinctively turned toward it. Very bad move.

  He had turned to his right. Within a half-second I drew a bead on his head. Another half-second later, I smoothly pulled the trigger. Even now, I can’t remember hearing the shot, nor feeling the buck of the little Smith & Wesson in my hand. What I do remember—and will never forget—is the way the little purple hole just appeared in his left temple. The way he crumpled to the floor in a lifeless heap. Like you turned a switch off. I heard sirens in the distance.

  * * *

  My shop is next door to the headquarters (a small but posh office suite) of Abraham Enterprises, Ltd. The company president and proprietor, Theodore Abraham, is Montello’s business wunderkind, a local boy who went to college, then came back home to build his little empire. He owns a multitude of businesses in town, from the only hotel to a small chain of convenience stores. Teddy Abraham is also my best friend.

  I saw him peer cautiously around the edge of the front display window, and motioned him in. He burst in, nearly tearing the door off its hinges in the process. He took about two steps, then froze when he saw the body in the floor. His eyes flared wide and his jaw fell. With pale, freckled skin and red hair, Teddy looked like Opie Taylor, the Adult Edition.

  “What the...”

  “Robbery,” I said.

  “Oh, man! You okay?”

  I nodded. He stared at the body, his eyes still huge. “Who is he?”

  “No clue,” I said. “Just some thug.”

  Chapter 3

  “Let’s go through it one more time,” Mitchell said as he flipped to a new page on his legal pad and readied an imitation Mont Blanc pen.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He carefully laid the pen onto the pad, sucked in a long breath and tilted his head down, peering over the frameless reading glasses he surely wore in an attempt to look intelligent.

  “Excuse me?” The tone was classic Mitchell: smarmy, affected, as if he had surely misunderstood me. His big head was frozen in place, lips slightly parted as he waited for me to come to my senses. He looked like Jabba the Hut in a bad suit and a worse comb-over.

  I looked him in the eye, drew a breath, then changed my mind. I pushed back from the table, stood, and turned to his partner, Bobby Knight. They were such a mismatch visually that it was almost comical. Mitchell, squat and overweight, managed to look perpetually rumpled, while Bobby, fit and tan, always had that sharp, pressed, new-penny look.

  “I’m out of here,” I said as I left the detectives’ office, sorry I’d ever agreed to go there and give a statement. It was about fifteen minutes into the process when I noticed I was being treated more like a suspect than a victim.

  Bobby followed me into the hallway. “Sorry about that, Gray.”

  “Whatever Mitchell’s problem is, this is over the fricking line, Bobby.”

  “Like I said, I’m sorry.”

  “Is this some kind of corny good-cop, bad-cop routine?”

  “Come on, Gray, you just killed a man, for God’s sake. You didn’t expect to answer some questions?”

  “I did answer them. Three times. The bastard had a gun on me! I acted in self-defense and you damn well know it.”

  He didn’t answer, and that sent a chill ripping down my backbone from stem to stern. I shook my head and left him standing there.

  My wife, Abby, was just pulling into a parking space as I walked outside. Most husbands declare their wives beautiful whether it’s true or not. (Who wants to admit he had to settle for homely?) With Abby, it’s true. She was stunning the first time I saw her. Seventh grade, Mrs. Wade’s social studies class, one row to the right and two desks up. She’s stunning now. She changes hairstyles from time to time—right now it’s just long enough to brush her shoulders. It’s the color of sunlight. Not harsh sunlight that hurts your eyes. Magic hour sunlight, the last thirty minutes of the day, that soft golden light that soothes the soul. Her face is smooth and sweet, with a smile that melts the heart. Her eyes are green, captivating. She got out and sprinted to me. I grabbed her and held her tight for a long time. She started crying.

  “You could’ve been killed,” she said between sobs.

  I laid my hands on her shoulders. “Look at me.” She did. “I’m fine. It’s over.”

  * * *

  Detective Bobby Knight stared as Bolton walked away, his arm around Abby. Under his breath, he said, “Just getting started.”

  Chapter 4

  “You doubt they’ll bring charges? This is insane!”

  “I’ll get back to you, Gray,” Charlie Langford said. Charlie was my attorney, had been for years. He was the best one in town, but Montello, Mississippi, is hardly a magnet for courtroom stars. He’s also a local, hometown lawyer, a major player in the community, which isn’t always a good thing. I won’t go so far as to call Charlie dishonest, but here’s reality: In Montello, a lawyer like Charlie will fight hard for his clients, but only to a point. No one who lives in this town will buck Ricky Ballard, our illustrious third-generation sheriff. As long as he doesn’t take a personal interest, you’re fine. But if Ballard wants you, Charlie or any other lawyer in town will crack under the pressure. If this went any further, I’d have to look for outside talent.

  I punched off the call and laid the cordless phone back in its cradle. Charlie’s hard of hearing and shouts on the telephone, so Abby had heard it all. She looked like I felt: worried.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here, Ab, but it’ll work out.” I gave her a hug, sat down, turned on the TV. She went to the kitchen and started unloading grocery bags. A couple minutes later, she was back.

  “I forgot something at the grocery store,” she said. “I won’t be long.”

  “Okay.” I kissed her good-bye and watched her leave,
wondering how this mess would affect our marriage. Adversity can strengthen a relationship. Circling the wagons and all that. It can also go the other way when things aren’t grand to start with, and we weren’t in a grand phase.

  We had been together a long time. We were high school sweethearts. We managed to stay together with the two of us going to different colleges—like Teddy, she went to Mississippi State. After graduation, we made it official, and it had been a good ten years. But Abby had grown detached, almost disinterested, over the past several months, and I honestly didn’t know why. I’m not perfect, but am I a decent husband and good father? Yes.

  Henry and Suzanne Hampton, good friends from church, had been through a similarly tough period that also made no sense. Until Henry came home early one day. Suzanne was in the bathroom when he walked in. The computer in the living room was on, which wasn’t unusual. Suzanne, an introvert whose shyness approached agoraphobia, was an eBay addict who spent an inordinate amount of time searching for useless crap to buy, so Henry expected to see some auction when he glanced at the screen. What he saw, however, was some guy beating off on a webcam, moaning and begging for his “Angel Eyes” to hurry back. Angel Eyes finished her bathroom break and walked out wearing a crotchless leather outfit and carrying a rubber penis. Battery powered.

  Abby and I were already having trouble, and the day after Henry shared that experience with me, I installed a keylogger on our home computer. I’m not particularly jealous. Nor am I prone to what I call relational paranoia, a condition in which someone constantly worries that someone is going to step in and whisk away their partner. If you live like that, you may as well be alone.

  Nonetheless, when people start behaving differently, there’s a reason, and gosh knows Abby would have no problem attracting the attention of male suitors. I was anxious the first time I checked the keylogger, but of sordid online infractions, Abby was innocent. I started feeling guilty after about a month and removed the software.

  And after a couple months of trying to figure out what the problem was, I grew weary of it all and gradually adopted my own brand of indifference. We were affectionate, but it was surface affection. Passion morphed into convenience. Our once-great sex life faded away. We didn’t fight. We just existed.

  I was mulling over this state of our union when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  I sensed someone there, but they didn’t say anything. “Hello,” I said again. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m the one who can help you, Mr. Bolton.” The voice was electronically altered, robotic.

  My first instinct was to hang up, but something told me this was no crank. “I’ll play. What can you do for me?” I looked down at the Caller-ID display: UNKNOWN CALLER.

  “You’re about to be charged with first-degree murder. Give it to me and I’ll help you.”

  My heart pounded my ribs. I felt my pulse in my eardrums. “Who is this? Give you what?”

  “You don’t understand what you’ve stepped into.”

  “All I did was protect myself.”

  “It’s far more complicated than that.”

  “And why exactly should I believe you?”

  “I’m one of the few people you can trust. Prepare yourself, Mr. Bolton. Trouble’s on the way.”

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t sleep well that night. My psyche was under attack from three angles. First was the growing concern about the police, which RoboVoice had heightened. Second, what was he talking about? Give it to me. Give what to him? I also couldn’t get the dead guy out of my mind. Despite my intellectual position that I did what I had to do, I had never shot anybody. I kept seeing that purple hole open up in his head. Kept seeing him melt into the floor, the blood trickling from that purple hole and down the side of his head, onto the carpet.

  What the hell had I done? Did I have a choice? Could I have stalled him until the police arrived? Could I have shot him in the shoulder instead of automatically taking the kill shot? Those questions cycled through my mind without mercy. When I did doze off for the occasional short nap, the same images played out in my dreams. Almost the same. In the dreams, the blood was black as crude oil. And the guy lay on the floor twitching and spasming, eyes open, staring at me.

  It occurred to me in the wee hours that I didn’t know the dead guy’s name. How callous was that? I had killed the poor bastard and didn’t even bother to find out who he was. Then again, it was understandable, wasn’t it? I wasn’t exactly calm and on top of my game. No, I was pretty freaked out when the cops got there. And after they left. And after I got through with the little interrogation scene. Hell, I was still pretty freaked out at four in the morning. I got up, brushed my teeth, gazed at the circles under my eyes, so dark they looked like bruises.

  I put on shorts, an old tee, and pulled on my running shoes. I’d been lax with my workouts the past several months, and this was a good time to get back in the habit. Besides, exercise clears my head. On the porch, I hit the deck and strained to get through a cycle of pushups and crunches, fifty each, then headed out. My legs and lungs lit up pretty quickly, but I fought through it and my head started to clear.

  I was pretty sure I did what I had to do. No, make that very sure. He had a gun on me. Well, not on me at the moment I pulled the trigger, but that’s a technicality. At that exact moment, I guess the gun was pointed somewhere between LungFao and me, but I had to protect us. No doubt about it. Once I had that established in my newly cleared head, I moved on.

  Why the hell was Tommy Mitchell acting like I had murdered someone? Not just Mitchell, either, once I thought about it. Bobby Knight, alleged friend, third baseman on the same softball team I shortstopped for, was acting the same way. Why? I picked up the pace. The run was doing me good. For sure.

  By the time I turned back onto Cherokee Run the sun had turned white and hot. I sprinted the next to last block, then pulled back to a warm-down trot for the final stretch. Ours was an old street lined with big maple trees that threw nice shade. I stepped into my own yard and lay down on the still-cool grass. After a couple minutes I sat up and looked at the house. It was fifty years old but looked contemporary even now. It was long, low-slung, with big white bricks that looked like a cross between basalt and marble. The first time I saw it, I loved it. Still did. Breathing back to normal, I pushed up and went inside.

  Abby was still asleep. I showered and headed downtown for breakfast. Since our house is only four blocks away, I walked, enjoying the cool air that would turn hot and sticky within the next two hours. I put on my sunglasses as I turned onto Main Street and into the sun. Montello is a small Southern town whose downtown has held up better than most. There’s Pontocola Hardware, owned and run by the third generation of the Williams family who started it. The Lyric Theater’s neon still shines brightly every night while one movie plays inside. Several clothing stores populate the street, including one called A Gentleman’s Haberdashery, a name I always loved, though pronouncing it gave me fits as a child. We even have a corner drug store with a pharmacy on one side and an old-fashioned soda fountain on the other. They still make fountain drinks with soda syrup and carbonated water.

  And there is of course the law office of Charles W. Langford. I glanced inside as I passed and saw Charlie pouring a cup of coffee from the pot in the waiting room. I waved and he waved back.

  I got to Hatley’s Diner, a local landmark where the food is cooked from scratch, a couple minutes before eight, and spotted Teddy in the corner booth on the back wall. Per longstanding tradition, if one of us arrives early, we wait for the other until eight o’clock. I slid into the booth and motioned for Louise, a long-time Hatley’s waitress. She arrived quickly and executed a perfect pour, starting right at the cup and raising the pot straight up in a graceful flourish as the cup filled, loosing a goodly aroma and somehow managing not to splatter a drop outside the cup. It’s how they’ve poured coffee at Hatley’s for the past seventy years.

  “Damn Harry Cochran,” Te
ddy said, vocalizing some mental tirade he was engaged in before I arrived, as if I had any idea what he was talking about. He’s done that his whole life.

  “What’d Harry do?” I said.

  He took a sip of coffee, set the cup down. “Asshole.”

  “You ready to order?” Louise said.

  “We had a deal,” he said to me, totally ignoring Louise, “and now he’s bugging out.”

  Louise rolled her eyes and moved on to another booth.

  “Deal on what?”

  “That piece of crap bait shop,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger for punctuation, eyes ablaze in something like fury, which I knew would disappear as quickly as it came. “Makes my hotel look like shit. Hell, who wants to look out their window and see some redneck sign about worms and crickets?”

  “Come on, Teddy, that store has been in his family for what, three or four generations?”

  “It’s standing in the way of progress.”

  I laughed. “Progress?”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Gray.”

  “Ready to order?” I said.

  “I’m thinking about putting a Baskin Robbins counter in the convenience store.”

  I motioned Louise over and we placed our orders in between Teddy’s rantings about the profit margin in ice cream cones and banana splits. Five minutes later, Louise was back with our food. She put mine on the table, then Teddy’s.

  “Christ almighty, Louise,” he said, sounding exasperated. “You’d think as long as I’ve been coming here, you’d remember I’m left-handed and arrange my plates and silverware accordingly. Is that too much to ask, Louise? Huh? Is it?”

  Louise tilted her head, put her hands on her hips, and stared at him.

  “What?” he said. I don’t think it’s as—”

  She gave him the finger, a satisfied smile, and walked away.

  “Service sucks here,” he said.