by Alyssa Day
The phone rang.
Stupid Feds.
“Okay, what? I have you on speaker phone, not that Jack needs it,, Alejandro. What’s going on?”
Jack sat down at the table, stretched out his long legs, and stared at the phone with an unhappy look. I knew just how he felt.
“All right. Sorry for the pushiness, but I’m on a plane in forty-five minutes. I want you to be on the lookout. We have become aware of a serial killer operating in your general vicinity. Given how weird Dead End and its inhabitants are—”
“Hey,” I protested. “Watch it, buddy.”
Jack grinned at me.
“Sorry, Tess,” Alejandro continued after a beat. “Other than you and your family. Anyway, we have almost no evidence and nothing in the way of clues. Your grandmother probably knows more about it than we do.”
“The serial killer is after banshees?” Jack sat up, all business now. “You heard about the death last night.”
“We did,” Alejandro said in a grim voice. “There have been at least eight in the past year.”
“Leona and Ned only know about six of them,” I said.
“This is just between us, please, but the other two were a judge’s daughter and one of our agents.”
I put my coffee mug down hard on the table. “Not easy to catch and kill a P-Ops agent, I’m guessing.”
“No, it is not. Far easier to go after an unprotected pawn shop owner,” Alejandro said.
Jack leaned forward and spoke directly into the phone. “If you truly think she is unprotected, my friend, why don’t you come down here and test out that theory?”
Alejandro laughed. “I know better. I know you, Jack Shepherd. But your arrival in Dead End and your connection to Tess is not widely known. So an attempt might be made.”
“Let them try,” Jack growled.
I stood abruptly. “I would like to remind you that I’m right here. And if you’re talking about using me as bait, the bait would like to have a say in this plan.”
Alejandro said, “Are you willing?” at the exact same time Jack said, “Over my dead body,” and suddenly there was a whole lot of tension in my kitchen.
Lou picked that moment to hop up on my lap and start meowing at me for her breakfast, so I busied myself with that, while I thought about the ramifications of what Alejandro was saying.
“You mentioned a plane. Are you coming here?”
“No. We’re currently dealing with a rogue pack of werewolves in Idaho. And we have too little information to send anybody after the banshee killer yet,” he answered me.
“Motive?” Jack asked.
“We have no idea. It just doesn’t track. We don’t even know if the killer is supernatural or human,” Alejandro said, frustration clear in his voice. “No idea what the motive might be, either, except possibly a general hatred for supernatural beings, or a specific hatred of banshees. That’s not exactly uncommon.”
I felt my face scrunch up into a grimace. “I actually know somebody like that here, so I know what you mean. Felix Wildenhammer, the toy maker? A banshee screamed a foretelling of his wife’s death when they were on vacation. Their son Oskar, a friend of mine—well, acquaintance, more like—was devastated. He’s hated banshees ever since.”
“What do you know about Felix’s whereabouts last night? Or Oskar’s?”
We could hear typing in the background when Alejandro spoke.
I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t offering up a suspect. Felix is an old man, and Oskar takes care of him. Felix used to let the local kids go to the toy factory for field trips, but after his wife’s death he quit doing that, even quit making toys for a while. He just became a recluse. I run into Oskar at the grocery store sometimes, usually in the sweet potato aisle. Felix loves sweet potatoes, I guess.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Tess, you understand that even killers can enjoy sweet potatoes, right?”
“Right. A sick old toymaker and his son are murdering banshees across the country in between batches of sweet potato casserole. Whatever. What about Leona’s husband’s illegitimate son, Everett?”
“Who?”
Jack and I filled Alejandro in on Everett, whom he hadn’t heard about and promised to check on, and then we wrapped up the call with my promise to be careful and Alejandro’s promise to bring his wife Rose to meet me one day.
Jack stood up and stretched, and I tried not to stare at his perfect eight-pack abs. When he caught me lusting over him again, he took a step toward me.
This time, I took a step back, the word relationship still ringing in my skull.
“Nope. Step away from the pawnbroker, fur-face. I need to get a shower and some breakfast and then head for the shop.”
He sighed, but quit advancing on me. “Actually, I need to get going, too. I want to head out to the swamp and talk to the boys, see if they’ve heard of any strangers around.”
The “boys” were a group of guys who’d come back from fighting for various branches of the U.S. military, mostly in the Middle East, and now lived out in the swamp. Many of them suffered from PTSD and didn’t consider themselves fit for human company, but they’d had our back when we went in to rescue Shelley from the black magic coven, and that was good enough for me. I called them Jack’s swamp commandos; they called him Commander, and one of them—Lucky—I knew from the trips he made to my shop.
Jack went out there every so often with a case or three of beer, and they’d talk about everything and nothing, the way soldiers and sailors did. Or at least, so I heard from Jack. He said they wouldn’t be comfortable kicking back and sharing war stories with a civilian around, and I respected that.
The one time I visited the old wooden shack one of them called home, we were in battle planning mode. I’d seen them in action and I was very glad they were on our side.
They were honorable men, hardened by war, but they were also kind. Sometimes, when Shelley’s pain from losing her mother and grandparents and her memories of being captured and held for human sacrifice grew to be too painful for her to hold inside her tiny nine-year-old self, Jack would take her out to the swamp, and she would spend an afternoon riding around on the airboat with the men. They all adored her, and saved special treasures for her; fossilized frogs, bits of shiny quartz or—her favorite—Spanish doubloons from the pirates who’d wandered the area more than a century ago.
Shelley, who had her own metal detector for treasure hunting and was pretty handy with it, adored them right back. Especially Jack, her hero, who’d turned into a tiger to rescue both of us from a burning building.
Anyway, all of this was just a long ramble to circle me around to realizing that Jack was right. If anybody nefarious happened to be lurking around Dead End, they’d know.
“Great. Go see your commandos. It’s too early for beer, though. Take them donuts.”
“It’s never too early for beer, woman,” he told me in a mock-offended tone. “We can have beer with our donuts.”
Then he started stalking me around the kitchen table again.
“No. Bad kitty. No Meow Mix for you,” I said sternly, while backing away like a big chicken. “You, swamp. Me, pawn shop. Busy day. Busy, busy, busy.”
Jack’s lazy grin told me quite plainly that he knew I was running, and he was going to let me escape—this time. “Really? What does a busy day look like in the pawn shop world?”
“I have to see a man about a goat.”
Chapter 9
I opened my shop, feeling guilty at how relieved I was to be doing something normal instead of meeting grandparents, seeing dead people, or having my home invaded by law enforcement personnel. My sole employee, Eleanor Wolf, was due in around lunchtime for the afternoon shift, so I could look forward to some peaceful hours doing my actual job.
Dead End Pawn: my very own business. I’d never planned to grow up to be a pawnbroker, but after my curse made it clear I wouldn’t be going to college. I’d started working for Jeremiah, Jack’s late uncle, when I was
sixteen and had never left. I’d been so proud when he promoted me to manager, and shocked to discover that he left me half the shop in his will.
Jack hadn’t wanted his half of the shop, so we’d worked out a deal, and now Tiger’s Eye Investigations shared the building with me. We had a tendency to get caught up in each other’s worlds, though—and I still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
Pawn shop owners, contrary to popular depictions in movies or on TV, are not all criminal providers and procurers of stolen goods, fences for stolen jewels, or weirdos like that guy from Monk who turned into an alien and got shot a lot by Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black.
Okay, some, but not all.
In reality, the pawn business was a pretty straightforward one, mainly specializing in short-term loans for people who don’t have enough collateral for a bank loan.
For example, if Joely Smith has a house, she can go to the bank and get a mortgage. If she has an iPad or a diamond ring or maybe even a taxidermied goat, she can go to a pawnshop. We loan customers what we think their item is worth at resale value, and they leave the item with us for the term of the loan. Ninety days is common, and around eighty percent of people come in to redeem their property by paying us back the loan amount plus interest.
If they don’t come back, because they’d rather have the money than their items, or they just don’t have the cash to buy them back, we keep the item and sell it in the shop to recoup our investment.
Sometimes, people just want to sell us unwanted items that we turn around and resell, like the Wildenhammer train. Other times, they come in to look for weird things. Everybody in three counties, and probably beyond, knew about Jeremiah’s well-known penchant for buying all things bizarre and unusual. Me? Not so much. I was still trying to unload some of Jeremiah’s stranger curiosities.
Case in point: my “no vampire fangs” sign. Also, the display of unlabeled magic potions in the “buy one, get one free” section. I’d had to keep one of our customers in the rabbit hutch out back for three days after he recklessly pounded one of those down.
And he hadn’t been a rabbit.
But, as Jeremiah had said at the time, anybody who buys discounted, unlabeled magic potions deserves what he gets.
A few regulars came in and looked around, but didn’t buy much of anything, which was fine with me. One thing about a pawn shop—the inventory was always changing, and customers usually came back. I spent the down time doing administrative work and keeping up with the constant cleaning and polishing. Nobody wanted to buy dusty or dirty merchandise.
I also talked to Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike, who were back at their friend Martha’s house, and texted Leona, who hadn’t replied yet. Part of me felt like I should rush over there and check on her, but she knew where I was, and I needed to earn a living.
Possibly I still had a little bitterness over the revelation that she was only in Dead End because she needed Jack.
Either way, I refused to let it get me down. We’d figure it out or we wouldn’t, and she’d go back to whatever she’d been doing in life before I met her. Speaking in purely practical terms, it wouldn’t leave a huge hole in my heart when a grandmother I hadn’t known I had went on her merry way.
That was definitely one of my “P” words: practical.
It went with another “P” word: pride.
So I was working, and cleaning—I even pulled out a stepstool and dusted the dream catcher that carried an authentic nightmare inside it—and humming along to Taylor Swift on the radio (although Bad Blood sounded a bit ominous, considering), all the while keeping an eye out for Rooster Jenkins, who was scheduled to show up to sell me his goat.
For some reason, taxidermied animals and pawn shops went together like salt and pepper. Like bread and butter. Like werewolves and lasagna. (Trust me, it’s a thing.) I’d taken Fluffy, the dilapidated alligator, in on pawn more times than I could remember. When Rooster had left a message that he’d be in on Tuesday with a goat, I’d just shrugged and figured I’d see him when I saw him.
There were—again, odd but true—plenty of people who’d want to buy a stuffed goat. Rooster was a mostly retired smuggler, from what I’d heard, and new technology made for hard times for smugglers in general. So I figured he needed to borrow a little beer money to tide him over.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Sadly, it’s stupid to think “nothing out of the ordinary” or “what else could go wrong?” in Dead End. I should have known better.
So I almost wasn’t even surprised when I heard the distinctive mehhh sound before Rooster opened the door.
Rooster was probably in his late sixties, and he was a mountain shaped like a man. He had to weigh well over four hundred pounds, and all of that was shoved into overalls and a tank top. He was also nearly seven feet tall, so he had to duck and turn sideways to get through the doorway.
That’s why it took me a minute or two to see the goat. The absolutely not dead or taxidermied goat.
At least, I think it was a goat. It sounded like a goat, and it certainly smelled like a goat.
But it was funny looking.
“Rooster, what the heck is that?” I walked around the corner and leaned down for a closer look.
“It’s the goat. Didn’t you get my message?” Rooster’s voice was a low rumble that sounded like it originated in the same place where magma came from.
“That’s a goat? It doesn’t have ears.”
It didn’t. At least not that I could see. Not like they were missing, just more like it…she…had never had any ears.
Rooster leaned down a little bit, and I swore I could hear creaking noises. “Sure she does. This here is a genuine American LaMancha, and the breed is rare and special, known for their short ear pins.”
“A what?”
“American LaMancha.”
“LaMancha? Like ‘Man of’?”
Rooster sighed and then spoke very clearly. “No, Tess. This ain’t a man. This is a goat.”
“Right.” With heroic restraint, I did not bang my head against the wall, even once.
Instead, we both stared at the goat, who stuck her head in the half-price potions bin.
I took her leash and moved her away, but I had another question. “What in the world is an ear pin?”
“Hell, I don’t know, Tess. That’s what the pirate told me, though.”
“A pirate told you about the goat. Of course he did.” I clutched my head for a second, wondering where I’d gone wrong in life. Wondering if I could still join the French Foreign Legion.
Wondering how long it would take me to learn to speak French.
“Ah, Tess? You okay?”
“Oui,” I said morosely, and then I looked up and up until I could stare into squinty brown eyes. “Rooster Jenkins, you know that we don’t take live animals. I don’t have a place to put them, I don’t know what to feed them, and I don’t have the time or staff. I’m a pawnbroker, not a farmer.”
His red cheeks quivered for a while, as he was probably trying to think of a persuasive argument, and the goat started to eat my shoe.
While I was still wearing it.
“No. Bad goat,” I scolded, feeling all déjà vu about it.
“But Mike and Ruby have a farm,” Rooster finally said.
I closed my eyes and sighed. In a town as small as Dead End, sometimes I despaired of anyone ever believing I was all grown up and standing on my own two feet.
The same two feet the goat was still nibbling on. I backed up again, reflecting that I’d already had to back up from a tiger today, and it was just insulting to have to back away from an earless goat.
I tried again. “Mike and Ruby don’t have anything to do with the pawn shop. I don’t have anything to do with farming. I can’t take a live goat, Rooster, I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
Rooster shrugged, not perturbed in the least. “Okay. I’ll take her out to the parking lot and shoot her.”
When Eleanor showed
up at noon, I was sitting on the floor feeding carrot sticks to my new goat and Googling “ear pinnae.”
Eleanor froze in her tracks, looked at me, looked at the goat, and then said, hesitantly, “Jack?”
I pointed a carrot stick at her. “You are not funny. This goat actually has ears, by the way, and is well-known for excellent milk production.”
She nodded and started walking again. “I was just telling Dave that what we needed around her was more milk and tiny-eared goats.”
This is why I love Eleanor.
My late boss had liked to call Eleanor our secret weapon, because nobody ever saw her coming. She wasn’t much past sixty, she wasn’t very tall, and she looked like she should be baking cookies. Instead, she was the best negotiator I’d ever seen. While I focused on the business side, and Jeremiah had focused on the crazy collectibles, Eleanor just wanted to get the Deal of the Century on every single sale. Not in a crooked way, but in a way that made it fun for everybody, including the customer.
Her son Dave had been Jack’s best friend growing up, and their friendship was growing again now that Jack was home. Dave was a hard-bodied, gorgeous construction worker, the father to an adopted son, and quite possibly walked on water, if you believed even every third thing Eleanor said about him.
“I have to take the goat to Aunt Ruby’s,” I admitted.
“Rooster?”
“Rooster. But it wasn’t my fault.” I got up off the floor and brushed goat hair off my jeans.
“Tess,” Eleanor chided, putting her purse behind the counter. “Sometimes I worry that you’re too much of a softy to run this business.”
“That is totally untrue. I am a hardhearted businesswoman,” I retorted, dodging just before my new goat took a bite out of my backside.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Eleanor looked up at the ceiling, as if it held some clue to life at Dead End Pawn, and then she pinned me with her patented skeptical face. “I have one word for you—Fluffy.”
“One of these days I’m going to fire you,” I muttered, grabbing a jar of pickled mouse wings before the goat could knock it off a shelf.