“You stole several hundred grand worth of electronics.” Logic never trumped emotion, but it was one of the windmills I couldn’t resist tilting.
A bit nonplussed, he crossed his arms. “Rules. Sometimes you just gotta see if you can break them and get away with it.”
I totally got that. In fact, it was becoming a bit too strong a theme in my life at the moment. But, I was so not going to bond with the likes of Frenchie Nixon over a shared authority issue. James Bond, maybe, but not Frenchie Nixon. Not ever Frenchie Nixon.
With one arm, I made a sweeping gesture, taking in the stained and flaking linoleum, the paint so old it held shadows of previous items that had hung in the sun. The dusty inventory held little value—electronics so old they probably were sneaking up on being collectibles, some abandoned jewelry dotting the cases, guitars with broken strings, playing cards, and other things of no discernable value unless a rare painting lurked underneath a velvet Elvis. Pawnshops always seemed like businesses hanging on the savvy and smarts of their owners. If that was true, and I suspected it was, this place didn’t stand a chance.
Nobody was tending the store and, by the looks of things, they hadn’t in a long while.
“How’d you end up in this lovely establishment?”
“My sister and the owners here are tight. I’m on loan to get their operation running smooth.” He kept the counter between us as if it would deter me should I become violent. I was a bit insulted—some puny little glass case would never stop me.
If I had more time, I’d love to get him to expound on his definition of “smooth.” Even as wise as I was to most of the tricks, I bet he could teach me a few.
Miss P leaned in and whispered, “We’d like his help.”
“There are many ways to elicit help,” I reminded her. Intimidation was my go-to.
Her frown told me what she thought of that. “Okay, we’ll try it your way.” I turned up the corners of my mouth. My smile wasn’t totally devoid of feeling, assuming homicide was a feeling. “Frenchie, I’m looking for a gift for my father. His birthday’s coming up and I’d like to get him something special.”
“You’re a rich gal. I’m sure you can buy him anything he wants.”
“Maybe. But I’m looking for something unique, original. Something I couldn’t get at a gallery or a department store.”
“Like?”
Even selling to a willing customer was beyond Frenchie’s scope. The last time I’d seen him, he’d scored some decades-old dynamite that was ready to explode. Perhaps my expectations—hell, any expectations—might be too high. “The Marauders coming to town has everybody going crazy over football. Got any memorabilia or something that might be one-of-a-kind?”
“Got some new stuff in tonight. Stanley doesn’t even know we got it yet. It’s fine and one of a kind. Value’s gonna skyrocket what with all the local interest in the NFL and all.”
I elbowed Miss P in the ribs, making sure a grunt covered the gasp I knew she wouldn’t be able to hide. “Sounds like just the ticket. My father’s a fan. I’d like to see what you have.”
As expected, Frenchie started his backpedaling. The guy never did anything without a negotiation. “Thing is, with all the stuff in the safe, I’m not supposed to touch it unless Stanley’s here.”
“I’ll give you an extra twenty percent to pocket if you show me what you’ve got.”
He licked his lips, parched by the flames of greed, no doubt. “I gave him my word.”
Which, with a nickel wouldn’t buy a piece of penny candy. For once, I actually managed to keep my thoughts to myself. “The line’s out the door at the Pawn Star’s place. I’ll take my business there.” I guided Miss P toward the door.
“You won’t find stuff like this at that Hollywood store.” He didn’t even try to shade that with contempt, only longing. Even Frenchie Nixon wanted his fifteen minutes.
I let my pace slow slightly. “So you say, but I haven’t seen it.”
“Thirty.” He breathed the word, infusing it with the hope that he’d lived to pocket the profit. Living at the edge—that’s what Frenchie Nixon liked. And, given his relatively limited repertoire, this was as close to the edge as he got.
I stopped and turned back around. “What?”
“Thirty.” His voice was stronger now, riding on a conviction that the risks were worth it. “Thirty off the top and you’ve got a deal. And you owe me.”
“Thirty flat. And only if it’s worth it.” No way would I mortgage my soul to Frenchie Nixon, well, not if I didn’t have to. And, since this was my first push back, I knew he’d cave. “And I’d say it’d take you three lifetimes to get close to even with me.”
He flashed the grin of a guy who knew his place and merchandise, then disappeared into the back.
I gave Miss P a self-satisfied smirk.
Could Frenchie be our thief? Was he that smart? Maybe he was smart enough to know how to hide behind playing dumb? My pea brain acknowledged the possibility but resisted it out of hand. I’d been wrong before—once, maybe twice—but not quite at this magnitude. To think Frenchie Nixon bested all of us and the FBI defied possibility.
No, if he was our thief, he had to have had help.
Miss P peeled off to pretend to be fascinated with the meager offerings in one of the cases on the right wall. A guitar hanging on the far wall caught my eye—an old Gibson. Teddie had one a lot like it. Not sure what had happened to it, but it had disappeared. I presumed it had perished in the fire along with the me I used to be, or at least her wardrobe.
He might like a replacement.
I stepped on that thought. Even I was becoming disgusted with me. Why couldn’t I let go? Pathetic. The road to self-loathing: hang on to someone who rejected you.
Just as I was starting into serious self-flagellation, Frenchie backed through the door. He held a large black velvet tray, which he maneuvered as if it held the crown jewels and a tumble would dent a centuries-old, priceless tiara. With one forearm, he swiped the top of the counter clean then presented the tray for my amazement. From the look on his face and the larceny in his eyes, not drooling was a huge victory, although he did dab at the corner of his mouth with a knuckle.
One look at the tray and I understood why. “Whoa!” Diamond-encrusted gold covered the thinning velvet from corner to corner, edge to edge. “Where’d you get this stuff?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“You got them tonight?” I glanced up and held him with a serious gaze.
“Yeah.” His eyes slipped from mine. “Courier was above reproach.”
Above reproach. While I’d entrust the fortune spread in front of me to a few of those closest to me, I wouldn’t characterize anyone as above reproach. I’d love to ask who Frenchie considered as occupying that lofty perch, but that would be the one tick that told him the cards I held.
I poked at the rings—yes, they were mostly rings, Super Bowl rings, each worth a fortune even when divorced from who owned it. And when attached to the previous owner, the value would skyrocket. Some of the rings had tags, many had inscriptions presumably identifying the owner, but I couldn’t read the fine print.
“These aren’t hot, are they?”
“Depends on your definition.”
I narrowed my eyes, hoping for clairvoyance. “Did you steal these?” I motioned Miss P over, so she could compare the stash against her mental list. While my memory was a sieve, I was pretty sure that I was looking at a large portion, if not all, of the missing jewelry. But Stanley and Godwin couldn’t be that stupid, could they? Hide the loot virtually in plain sight? Hell of a risk.
“Technically, no.” He pressed a blue-veined hand to his chest. “Since our last run-in, I’ve taken the high road as you said.”
The high road, my ass! Scared straight was more like it. Our last run-in, as he called it, involved enough old dynamite to level several square blocks. I pretended like he’d earned the benefit of the doubt. “Good to know. So where do
you get this stuff?”
“Beats me. Stanley and Godwin show up with most of it, except like tonight, when they use a courier. I don’t ask no questions. Figure if I don’t know, it can’t hurt me, right?”
“All depends,” I said, staying on the sidelines on that one. Normally, I couldn’t resist cannonballing into the moral quicksand. Maybe I’d changed. More likely I was tired and running out of time. A glance at my phone. I needed to wrap this up, but I had no idea how to do that. Even my platinum AmEx wouldn’t cover a down payment. And they’d probably get a bit testy over the whole stolen goods thing. “Godwin and Lipschitz are feasting in my hotel as we speak, so who showed up with the goods tonight?”
Frenchie backed up until the wall stopped him.
“Tell me.”
As he opened his mouth, the door behind me burst open. “Everybody down!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
T HAT VOICE sounded familiar. Miss P and Frenchie hit the floor as I slowly turned, my hands held in front of me, waist high, palms out. “Seriously?”
Marion Whiteside, brandishing a pistol pointed at my chest, stopped when he recognized me. “Shit, what are you doing here?”
“Same thing as you, I suspect—looking for stuff that doesn’t belong.”
He lowered the gun slightly.
Now I’d only lose a knee should his finger tighten. I sidestepped a tad. “What are you thinking, barging in here with a gun? How long did O.J. spend at the invitation of the state for a similar escapade?”
The gun lowered even more. When a man got a good mad on, every logic circuit shorted out. Women weren’t immune, but it took us longer to drive the long road to insanity.
“The two losers who run this joint, they cornered me at the party spouting some bullshit about I had a debt to pay. Debt? Shit! What I was paying was usury.” He clammed up, biting down on words threatening to expose a secret.
One step too far and he’d given me an opening.
“And now your things are gone?”
“Yeah, stolen last night.”
Oh, I saw a connection coming. “Let me guess, from Bungalow 7?”
His sheepish look was all the answer I needed. “The stellar owners of this fine establishment offered you the bungalow as part of your payment for headlining the signing last night.”
Now he looked ashamed.
“Why were you pushing Boudreaux about your stuff at Babel? Is this what you were talking about?”
“Caught Boudreaux lurking around in front of my room. Made me suspicious. Sure enough, somebody had lifted my stuff. I figured he was a good place to start.”
“Was this when you left the signing and were supposed to go straight to the party?” Brandy had said something about making a detour through the Bungalows.
“Why didn’t you report the items as stolen?”
“When you got a secret to hide, your options are limited.” A bit of Marion’s anger took the hangdog out of his posture.
“So, you decided felony armed robbery, which is a serious offense by the way, was a good option? Must be some secret.”
He stared over my shoulder at Frenchie—a ruse to avoid looking at me, I’d wager. But he had Frenchie shaking out of a most-likely-stolen pair of Air Jordan 4 Retros that retailed for 1,600 bucks or so. I could only imagine the street price.
“What were you in debt to those two idiots for?”
“Look, man, don’t ask me that. They were just the muscle.” He extended the pistol to me butt first. “Stupid idea. Glad you were here.”
The muscle? Marion bulged in all the beach-muscle places. They must have something really big on him.
I tugged Miss P to her feet beside me. Somewhere behind me, Frenchie didn’t make a sound. “Watch him,” I said out of the side of my mouth to my right-hand man as I handed her the pistol. “Shoot him if you have to, but don’t let him move, much less touch those rings.”
A smile twitched as she took the gun. “As you wish.” In my absence, when Jeremy was on a case, she’d taken to watching old movies with Teddie. Now, she quoted them. The guy was getting on my last nerve.
I turned my frustration and a hint of badass on Marion. “So, have you gone all stupid or something? You want to tarnish a stellar career and reputation with one idiotic vigilante gambit?”
He squirmed under my dressing-down. “Man, you know what football does to you?”
“I think I have an idea. It lures you with promises of fame and wealth, and you might get both, but at a physical cost that can be devastating.”
“When you’re a young stud, you think you’re invincible. A few concussions, a broken leg, one ACL and an MCL on the other knee, along with the normal beating.” He winced. Even he knew it was an explanation, and not an excuse.
“What keeps the pain tolerable?”
“I started on Hydrocodone.”
“And when that stopped working, you moved to higher and higher doses, then stronger and stronger drugs?”
“Go figure, I’m one of the goddamn opioid epidemic. Ain’t that rare. I didn’t know what the hell those drugs were—still not all that clear on it. Football was my way out—out of the hood, away from the drugs and stuff.” A low rumbling chuckle vibrated through him, punctuating the irony. “But, I can hold onto some pride. I don’t do the drugs to get a high. I use them to live.”
“And watch all you worked for go down the drain. Once they have you over a barrel, they bleed you dry.” A story that played out so many times it had become almost trite—until you witnessed the carnage up close. “Most of the guys hock their jewelry to pay for the drugs?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure how it works. The stuff never shows up in the places you’d expect. It just disappears.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair as if pressing it into place.
Habits. Hard to break.
“They can have my stuff. That’s our deal. But I was holding stuff that wasn’t part of the deal for fellas who didn’t get the high-rent digs.”
Usually, at least in Vegas, the pawnshops paid a small percentage of the value to the owners, and then, after a bit of time, they sell it on the open market. Super Bowl rings bring high-dollar prices and media attention. And this didn’t sound like the usual deal, not if what Marion said was true.
“What’s the deal?”
“They get the goods; I get the drugs.” He shrugged. “They said they wanted it to look like a theft.”
“But you didn’t report the goods as being stolen?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair, would it? I got compensated, so to speak.”
Godwin and Lipschitz weren’t hobbled by the same morals. “When did you start using?”
“High school.”
My voice went deadly. “Who gave drugs to kids?”
He looked at me with a mixture of pity and incredulity. “You don’t watch much news, do you?”
“Please, I work 24/7 in Fantasy Land.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It has its moments. But, seriously, high school?”
“Most big careers are made or broken in high school and maybe the first year or two of college. But you get hurt, then you can’t play through the pain, or you need some meds to mask a concussion or something. Man, some of these kids come from lower than nothing—their talent is their ticket out.”
“Which leads to bad decisions.”
“The coaches juice them up, knowing what they have riding on it. You get shunted off to a second-tier college, and getting to the NFL gets that much harder. The coaches aren’t stupid—they know the raw talent when they see it.”
“Keeping the studs playing doesn’t hurt the coaches’ careers either.” Thinking about Lake, I wasn’t sure the same held true for him.
“No, but I’d like to think they started out with a more philanthropic approach.”
“Like a misguided Florence Nightingale? I got news for you—your Fantasy World is even more removed from reality than mine.”
I wanted to tro
t out the what-about-getting-an-education lecture, but for the ones with physical gifts, professional sports offered the lure of potential millions. The only other option with that kind of payout was dealing drugs—similar riches, similar physical Russian roulette. I’d not made that connection before. Talk about a cost-benefit conundrum. An education, even a professional one, offered much less unless you had a penchant for graft or an incredible skill with AI.
So many things were wrong with this picture, but, as long as the money was there, the kids would keep sacrificing themselves on that altar and we’d end up here with former greats of the game hocking their wealth to be able to function without screaming in pain…if their brains hadn’t turned to Swiss cheese.
Marion’s gaze drifted to the tray of sparklies behind me.
“Take a look. Let me know if you see anything that belongs to you or your friends.”
Frenchie had plastered himself against the back wall. His shirt stuck to him; his face had paled.
Marion fingered through the rings, stopping to pick one up and hold it to the light occasionally. “Man, I know all these guys.”
“Any of those rings stolen?” I asked as I looked over his shoulder.
“No way of knowing without asking, not that any would come clean.”
An interesting choice of words, but I’d dive down that rat hole later—once we solved the current problem. As it was, my list of problems was full to overflowing, not that that was unusual or anything. “Any of yours there?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to several items. “These are mine.”
“Is that all of them?”
“No. MVP ring is missing, but other than that, my stuff is all here.”
Miss P let the gun sag a tad.
“But not the rest?”
“No.”
“Keep the gun pointed at his heart.” Miss P jumped at my bark, then did what I said. “We’ve got some connections but no answers. If Frenchie so much as blinks, perforate him, but let him live. And let me think.”
I eyed Frenchie. Habits. Hard to break.
“Give me the gun,” I said to Miss P. When she handed it over, Frenchie looked like he was ready to faint—he knew I’d use the thing, and without much provocation. “Check the back,” I said to Miss P. “In his zeal to show us the goods, I bet Frenchie left the safe open.”
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