Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  My dad lifts his chin. “I made a deal.”

  The old man stands before him. As my father confesses his misdeeds—or has them dragged out of him—by his father, I have the sense of seeing some very old pattern playing out.

  “What kind of deal?” Pops demands.

  “To save your life.” My dad pulls the hourglass out from under the counter and places it on the glass top. An infinite amount of white sand drains down into the black, never stopping. “I got this.”

  Pops snatches it up, stares at it. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a vessel for sands of time. The power of life and death.”

  The old man’s eyes narrow. “So you don’t know what the fuck it is?”

  “No...but I know that it works.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From a demon.”

  “I told you I don’t want that kind around here...” His gaze slides to Bert. “Present company excepted.”

  “There was nowhere else to go to get it.”

  “Which demon?”

  My dad looks away. “One I’ve dealt with before.”

  “When?”

  “When you had heart surgery last time.” My dad stares down at the glass. “I didn’t want to lose you, Pops.”

  “You made a goddamn deal with the devil then, and didn’t learn your lesson,” Sid growls.

  “What the hell did you trade?” Pops demands.

  My dad looks away, won’t answer.

  “He made a deal with the devil, and the devil took Zach.” My voice is low and cold. “A deal for blood.”

  Pops yells, “You had no right to do that. None. This is why I have that goddamn Do Not Resuscitate order in place!”

  “I didn’t know.” My dad’s voice is rising. “I didn’t know that it would happen that way.”

  “And you kept it from us.” I can’t keep the hurt and the anger from my voice. “You let me believe that Zach’s death was my fault. All this time.”

  “It has nothing to do with you.” My dad’s growl comes off as dismissive. He’s only seeing the problem before him, and his father. And he’s putting his father above the rest of us.

  “It has everything to do with him.” Carl is behind me, and I’m reassured by his presence. “He’s been blaming himself for years. That’s majorly fucked him up—no offense, Raz.”

  “None taken.”

  “And you went and did this again?” Pops roars. “What did you promise that devil? Did you promise him your other son?”

  “No,” Sid says. “He promised blood, but not our blood. And a favor. To be collected by the demon at any point in the future.” He glances at Bert. “Does that accurately sum up the situation?”

  Bert’s sitting on his stool, fiddling with his harmonica. “Yeah. You guys are pretty well immune, but not anyone you love. And he can ask you to do anything for him. Anything. And he may choose to let this hang over your heads for generations. Demons are a patient lot.”

  Pops whirls on my father. “I’m an old man. What part of that are you not understanding?”

  “You’re not—”

  “I’m old!” Pops pounds his fist on the glass. This is the angriest I’ve ever seen him. “I’m going to die! And I want to. I want to die peacefully, knowing that the rest of my family is taken care of, not in debt to the devil.”

  My dad’s eyes fill with tears. He loves his dad. Carl loves Sid that way, too. I know he does.

  Too bad I don’t love my dad that much.

  Pops turns back to Bert. “If I eat a bullet, does that nullify the deal?”

  My dad squawks in protest, but Bert thinks deeply on it, stroking his chin. “That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think suicide is going to bail you out. Hoodie wants to choose the blood...”

  Pops reaches for the hourglass. He turns it over, slamming it back on the counter. Black sand drips into the bottom. The color drains from his face, and he stumbles backward, clutching his chest and coughing. Sid catches him.

  My dad launches himself across the countertop to flip the hourglass back over. He cradles the hourglass in his hands as Pops stops coughing. Pops blinks up at Sid, catching the edge of the counter and pulling himself upright. He points at the hourglass in my dad’s grip.

  “Gimme that, you sumbitch.”

  My dad whisks the hourglass away to the back. I imagine he’s locking it in one of the secure safe deposit boxes in the vault, one only he has the key to.

  Pops gestures to Carl and me, and we approach. He pulls us down to him, wraps his hands around the backs of our necks. “Boys, I am so sorry for this. I’ll do everything in my power to make it right. I promise.”

  “Pops, we love you,” Carl says. “We want you to live.”

  “Bert will find a way,” I say. I don’t know if I believe there’s a way out of this mess, but if there is one, I have faith Bert will find it.

  The bell on the door jangles, and all eyes go to the door. Bert slaps his harmonica down on the counter and slides off the stool. I can see in the glass of the door that he’s taken on the shape of a six foot, ten-inch bald man in a wifebeater T-shirt with a sidearm strapped to his ribs.

  This is not good. Carl and I draw the old man to his feet, and Sid comes to the front to greet whatever trouble’s coming in the front door.

  Three men enter. They’re wearing long black coats with expensive suits underneath. Armani. I can tell from the hems. Two of them look like polished versions of Bert—big and muscular. I recognize one of them from Pearly’s visit to Mrs. Renfelter’s. The Muscle. The small one in the middle is in his mid-twenties, hair slicked back, fist glittering with rings.

  We are well and truly screwed.

  The Mob is here.

  CHAPTER 17

  They youngest mobster bears a striking resemblance to the old Don, to old man Spivelli. He has the same hawk nose, the same cold blue eyes I saw before with the Bunko. This has to be old man Spivelli’s son—the Young Don.

  I honestly expected the cops to catch up with us first. I have no idea why. Probably wishful thinking. If a cop showed up asking questions, that would give us enough time to get outta Dodge. But that’s not the way it is.

  I trade glances with Carl and edge toward the back hallway. I know I can’t run faster than a bullet.

  We’re gonna have to face this.

  Young Don makes eye contact with my father, nods at him. He lifts his hands, showing them to Bert, whose tail switches back and forth. Sid is behind the counter. I know his hands are inches from a gun.

  “What do you want?” my dad says. His voice is low and quiet. His hands are visible on the counter.

  “That’s not very cordial,” Young Don says.

  “I don’t tend to be cordial to people who burn girls out of their houses.” My dad’s chin lifts. Foolhardiness or brazen stupidity...can’t tell which is at play. “You have your money. Leave us alone.”

  Young Don approaches the counter. The two heavies stay at the door, with Bert. Young Don’s gaze flicks at me, at Pops, then Carl. My heart hammers under my tongue. But I sense that this is part of a game I need to bluff in; I stand my ground.

  “I’m searching for a particular artifact,” Young Don says. “Something unusual.”

  The muscles in my neck relax a fraction. Enough that my vertebrae crack.

  “We’ve got all kinds of bric-a-brac. Even a velvet Elvis.”

  Young Don’s mouth turns up into a smile of many white teeth that reminds me of the expression of the little sharks in the tank at Wong’s Dragon Buffet. He glances at the walls, at the gems in the case. “I understand,” he says, “that you deal in peculiar items.”

  My old man is playing obtuse. “I’ve got a lot of weird stuff. Shrunken heads. Antique firearms. I’ve got a Picasso in the back that’s really something. Not pretty, but something.”

  Young Don shakes his head. “That’s not what I want. I want something magic.”

  My dad’s mouth flattens. He always
makes the customer say it first. “I have a few knickknacks. Depends what you’re looking for.”

  “And what I’m willing to pay, I imagine.” Again with the toothy cold smile.

  “That, too.”

  Young Don leans forward. “I’m looking for an object I’m told you have. An hourglass that grants life.”

  My dad has his poker face on. “I’m curious where you get your information.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’d like to buy the hourglass.”

  I flick a glance at Bert. Was it Hoodie who told him? Bert’s glowering at the two Mob muscleheads milling in the store, fingering the samurai sword on the wall and flipping through the pages of rare books.

  “Don’t touch the merchandise,” Bert says.

  The men ignore him. The one with the book even licks his fingers before flipping the pages.

  “If I did have an object that did that,” my dad says, “it wouldn’t be for sale.”

  “Everything is for sale. And everything has a price.”

  Sweat trickles down my spine. This is something I’ve heard before.

  “One million,” Young Don says.

  Pops comes out from behind the counter. “Sold.”

  My dad says, “No sale.”

  Young Don looks Pops up and down. “How’s your health, old man?”

  Pops glares at him, completely unafraid. He has the fearlessness of a man who knows he’s going to die. “It’s shitty. But I’m pretty well ready to shuffle off this mortal coil.”

  Young Don peels his lips back on his teeth again. “The hourglass is for you.”

  “Yeah. Bad ticker.”

  “I can understand that.” Young Don’s unfocused gaze lands on the jewelry case, and he taps at a Rolex that isn’t keeping time below the glass. “My father is ill. Throat cancer. Can’t speak a word. I want him to live.”

  Pops looks back at my dad. “Sell it to him. Sell it to him and send the boys to college to be doctors or lawyers or something the fuck away from here.”

  “No.” My father is unyielding.

  Young Don’s smile fades. “That is...unfortunate. This is my only offer. If you don’t wish to sell it to me, I shall seek it in other ways.”

  “Are you threatening us? Like the girls next door?”

  Young Don holds his hand up. “I have not threatened anyone. Merely stated fact. And the more time I spend here, the less indulgent I grow. Now...the hourglass.”

  “No.”

  “Give it to him,” Pops says. “I’m a worn out old man. I don’t want to live forever.”

  The Mob henchmen are watching. One has opened his coat, his hand resting on the butt of a gun. The other’s still distracted by the samurai sword on the wall. He’s opened the case and is running his fingertip along the blade. I want to say, ‘Don’t touch that!’

  The sound of a shotgun ratcheting echoes sharply. Shit goes all pear-shaped from there. The guy fondling the sword jumps, cutting himself on the blade. A drop of red dribbles over the steel.

  I turn to Bert, who’s managed to sidle back to his corner. He’s aiming a shotgun at the guy making a display of his holster. “The man said no.”

  Sid pops up with a silver pistol, aiming it at Young Don’s head.

  The Samurai Wanna-Be wobbles on his feet, falls over. He crashes into a glass case. It explodes in a hail of shards and spilled jewelry.

  “What the hell?” Young Don snarls, his hands balling into fists.

  “I told him not to touch the sword,” Bert says. “It’s shitty manners. And that particular piece of folded steel drinks blood.”

  Samurai Wanna-Be lies motionless in the crushed glass. He stares blankly up at the ceiling. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that expression before, on Pearly. He’s dead, and the Don is pissed.

  “I think it’s time to go,” Sid says mildly. “What if we just call it a draw and say that this never happened?”

  Young Don turns and stalks toward the door. He gestures for his lone standing man to grab his fallen henchmen by the heels. Glass grinds into the floor.

  Young Don pauses in the doorway. “I gave you the chance to negotiate like gentlemen. Now the gloves are off, and we will have war until that hourglass is in my hands.”

  The door slams shut behind him, and silence reigns.

  We stare at each other, unwilling to speak.

  Pops is the first one to break the silence. He stares at my dad. “Nice going, jackass.”

  PREPARING FOR WAR ISN’T what I thought it would be.

  Not that I know a whole lot about war firsthand. I’ve seen glimpses of cannon fire and smelled Agent Orange in fragments from old war relics. I’ve worn the boots of a motorcycle soldier and heard the voices of Nazis while cleaning old insignia. I always assumed that war is a formal thing, with drawn-out lines and Christmas Eve truces.

  This isn’t going to be one of those things. Last time the Mob declared war on someone ten years ago, it was a payday loan chain that tried to open up on the strip. Four people were killed, and the building was bulldozed in the middle of the night.

  After the Mob leaves, the room erupts into yelling. Shit finally dies down when Callie starts crying upstairs.

  Pops goes to check on the girls. My dad throws up his hands and stomps off to make sure the surveillance system is operational.

  Sid and Bert bring out the guns.

  Normally, I get jazzed about guns. Everyone does. Well, maybe not everybody. But give a Gatling gun to a teenage boy, and he’ll be fantasizing about that moment for the rest of his life. Some of those boys never completely grow up—and then you have a guy like my dad, who keeps an arsenal.

  And an arsenal it is. Most of it, to be fair, involves conventional weapons. Those, he keeps in a gun safe in his room. It’s green, big as a refrigerator, and weighs five hundred pounds. I know this because it took Sid, Dad, Carl, Bert, and I a whole afternoon of swearing to get that motherfucker up into my dad’s closet. During the process, we bitched and moaned about why the vault on the first floor wasn’t sufficient. He said that a vault on the first floor was completely useless in terms of home protection. He bolted it to the floor after that. We still call it the Bastard.

  The green maw of the Bastard is open, and my dad distributes its bounty like it’s Christmas. He won’t let anybody reach in there to touch a damn thing, but he’s emerging from the closet to pass out the presents like Santa with gifts from a secret death factory. There’s an AK-47 in there. Not sure if that’s entirely legal. Something about the clip makes it legal or not, but I haven’t ever really paid attention. This one came from Israel, and when I touch it, I glimpse an image of a woman sitting on top of a building, surveying the desert. Her dark hair is stuffed under a helmet, and her eyes are just lovely, golden and brown like a hawk’s. That’s how I learned that women also serve in the military in Israel. Compulsory enlistment for everyone. I held it long enough to see that the woman was very successful in her tour of duty, well-decorated for finding a bomb and evacuating an apartment building. At the end of her enlistment, she went to study art history, and moonlighted as an armed tour guide for pilgrims.

  There’s a tiny Derringer that belonged to a flapper in there. The handle is mother-of-pearl, and it only holds two shots. The accuracy blows, but I guess it’s one of those things that you’re supposed to be up close to use. Dad has a .357 that used to belong to a highway patrolman in Nevada. He shot it once and retired immediately afterward. He didn’t hit the guy he was aiming for, but decided that enough was enough. There’s a rifle that was actually used in the Hatfield-McCoy dispute, but we can’t prove it through any paperwork. Which majorly sucks. Full of buckshot, a shotgun that belonged to a moonshiner sits in the corner. There are a whole bunch of .38s and a couple of sniper rifles that were carried in Vietnam. Some of those guys even came home. My dad has a matte black MP-5 that was owned by a federal agent and is a lot of fun to shoot. You can shoot it single shot, in a three-shot burst, or like a machine gun. If I let myself go wh
ile shooting it, I can almost see the training ground he used, and the paper targets shaped like bodies that civilians aren’t supposed to own.

  There’s more, but those are the really exciting bits. And boxes and boxes of ammo, stacked like bricks on the floor.

  Mrs. Renfelter stands in the doorway. Lily’s behind her, watching with hollow eyes. Mrs. Renfelter’s hands are on her hips. “What’s going on here?”

  Sid parks the M-16 he’s been fondling on top of the safe. “We had a visit from the Mob,” he tells her. “Nothing to do with you this time. This time, it’s all Roger.”

  “And they’re probably going to come back,” Carl says.

  Mrs. Renfelter nods slowly. She doesn’t ask how come; I can tell she really doesn’t want to know. “I’ll take the girls back home.”

  “The lights aren’t even on over there...”

  Her lips thin. “Callie’s too young to be around guns. She’s never been around them before. I don’t think she can be trusted.” There is no disapproval or accusation in her voice, just a matter-of-fact assessment. Lily’s gaze is fixed on the M-16.

  My dad nods. “We can take everything that’s not locked in the safe down to the first floor. Lock the door to the second floor. She’ll be safe. No one will come up here with an unattended gun.”

  Mrs. Renfelter shakes her head. “I don’t want to inconvenience you further...” Part of me thinks she doesn’t want anything more to do with the Mob. I don’t blame her. “We can get a hotel.”

  “No,” I say. “We’ll stay on the first floor. It’s all right. Really.” I go to give her a hug.

  She hugs me tightly and thanks me.

  I look over her shoulder at Lily, who’s still staring at the guns.

  Sid nods. I don’t know if the Mob was watching this place when the Renfelters moved in, but they sure are now. If they leave to go to a hotel, I’m pretty sure Young Don will have them followed.

  My dad locks the safe, and we gather all the guns to go downstairs. The door locks behind us.