Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things.pdf - Kristine Kathryn Rusch - margozap

Sweet Young Things

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Art by Laurie Harden

* * * *

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a published author in several genres but readers of

mysteries may not recognize her name since books in her private-eye series starring

Smokey Dalton appear under the pseudonym Kris Nelscott. The latest in that series,

Days of Rage , was published in February 2006 by St. Martin’s Minotaur. Ms.

Rusch, who is married to Dean Wesley Smith, is a former EQMM Readers Award

Winner.

* * * *

Pawnshops were all the same. Crowded with junk, reeking of cigarette smoke,

they always had one guy who hadn’t bathed in a week sitting behind a glass counter.

The counter was the only thing that had been cleaned in twenty years.

Fala rested her palms against the countertop, feeling the warmth of the glass

beneath her skin. Old lights illuminated the jewelry inside. Some of it glistened. Much

of it was as worthless as the junk on the walls—old class rings, Masonic pins, cheap

rosaries—but some of it had possibilities. A garnet ring with emeralds on the side,

clearly 1950s. A Tiffany pin, all gold, shiny and complete. A grandmother ring,

ostentatious with its twenty different jewels, half a dozen of them small rubies.

Estate jewelry. Desperation jewelry. The last of a large lot.

“Sixty-five dollars,” the scrawny guy said, taking the Jeweler’s Eye from his

own. His fingernails were black, and his hair was matted against his skull.

She reserved her shiver of distaste for later. The ring he held was worth four

thousand, minimum. The diamond was an emerald-cut from the 1920s, rare these

days, and the setting was pure white gold.

“A hundred and fifty,” she said.

“Lady—”

“C’mon,” she said, trying to sound whiny. “It was my grandmother’s. I doubt

I’m coming back for it. At least give me something.”

“A hundred.” The ring clinked as he set it on the countertop.

“I need a hundred and fifty.”

He wouldn’t get a deal like that anywhere else, but then again, he wouldn’t

turn it around that quickly, either. She knew how it worked, maybe better than he

did.

“You’re lucky I’m a soft touch.” He reached the shelf behind the counter,

tapped the old-fashioned cash register, and it opened with the ring of a bell. She

hadn’t heard that sound since she’d been in college.

He handed her seven twenties and a ten, all crumpled, all feeling slightly

greasy. She counted them, forcing her hands to shake as if she couldn’t believe her

good fortune.

Actually, she was making sure each bill was legit. The last time she’d done

this, in Detroit, she’d gotten two counterfeit twenties, all the “unduplicatable” kind.

But the bills she held in her hand this time came from the last century: none of that

phony-color Monopoly money stuff.

She shoved them in her right-hand pocket as he filled out the brown ticket

with her fake name and address. He slid the top half back to her. She put that in her

left pocket, knowing she’d lose the little stub within a day.

Not that she cared. The ring hadn’t been her grandmother’s and she wasn’t

here for the money.

She’d come to check out the place before she made the owner an offer he

couldn’t refuse.

* * * *

Division Street in Gresham, Oregon, still wore its 1950s roots with pride.

Once the main drag in a city that had once been more than a suburb, Division had

decaying supper clubs with faulty neon lights, taverns with one single greasy window

up front, and more pawnshops than any other stretch in the Portland metropolitan

area.

If you drove with your eyes half-closed, you could see how classy this place

had been: An overgrown golf course hugged the bend in the road, and motels that

advertised color television led into a development of 1950s houses twice the size of

an ordinary ranch.

There’d been money here once—not a lot, but enough to give its residents a

sense of power and pride. But sometime in the ‘seventies, the highway bypassed

Division, taking the important business traffic with it, and nearly killed the street. The

moneyed elite either moved to Portland proper or watched sickness and old age eat

away their tiny pot of gold.

The houses got shabbier, the businesses rattier, and the neighborhood filled

with outsiders who had too many babies and bought their clothing at Wal-Mart.

Fala had known it was the perfect place the moment she’d driven past the

newly opened discount cigarette store, right next to the boarded-up bank. It was

only a matter of time before Preston Lidner—or someone like him—would show.

* * * *

She bought the Fast Cash Pawnshop for two hundred thousand dollars cash,

about a hundred and fifty thousand more than it was worth. The business might’ve

been a going concern twenty years ago, when it had been the only pawnshop on

Division, but now it had rivals on every block, most of them computer savvy and

willing to take the absolute junk for much higher prices.

Behold the great god e-Bay.

In the back, beneath a decade’s worth of newspapers, she found a

four-foot-high cast-iron safe with a combination lock. She called a locksmith from

Portland, had him reconfigure the lock, and, the moment he left, placed the estate

jewelry inside. She set up her computer, added a DSL line, and established more

firewalls than she really needed.

Then she spent the next two days combing through the junk, looking for the

buried valuables, and placed them in the back as well. When she got a chance, she’d

take the larger items to a storage unit she had just rented. The storage unit was at the

edge of Lake Oswego, another once-independent city that had become one of

Portland’s high-end neighborhoods.

Her new home, though, was a trashy apartment at the edge of Division, in a

cinderblock building that had never seen better days. Every morning when she went

to work, she tucked her long hair under a Seattle Mariners baseball cap and put a

fresh pack of Pall Malls in her purse, next to the scratched vintage lighter she’d

found in Topeka.

She kept her nails short, but painted them ruby red, wore matching lipstick, a

little too much blush, and fake eyelashes that brushed against her upper cheeks every

time she blinked. She made sure all her denim shirts were one size too small. She tied

them at the waist, left them unbuttoned, and wore a bustier beneath them instead of a

bra. Her stone-washed jeans, all of them ripped at the knees, were too tight. Every

day, she matched the color of her high heels to the color of her bustier, and she’d

disappear into the shop, determined to impress no one.

The first week, not a single customer pushed open the grimy glass door. She

spent her days watching the black-and-white 12-inch television the greasy-haired

former employee had left her.

The second week, she had a couple of customers, and they were elderly, just

as she expected, looking to sell rather than buy. She gave the old man a fair price for

his 1950s Timex and lied to him when he tried to sell her his grandfather’s pocket

watch, telling him she had too many pocket watches right now.

The elderly lady’s eyes teared up when she tried to pawn a gold broach that

looked like a peacock’s tail. It only took a little prodding to get her to admit that her

husband had given it to her on their twentieth anniversary oh so long ago.

Fala pushed the broach back across the countertop, but paid nearly two

hundred dollars for the Bakelite bangle bracelets the old lady wore on her right arm.

The bracelets weren’t even worth one-tenth that.

The old woman had clutched the broach to her heart as she left, eyes still filled

with unshed tears.

Damn Preston or whatever the hell he was calling himself these days. Damn

him forever for bringing her here, and forcing her to make choices she never would

have considered ten years before.

* * * *

Ten years before, she’d been twenty-five, newly divorced, and naive as hell.

She’d been pretty, too, in a wholesome all-American-girl way, with her rounded

cheeks and bright blue eyes and not-quite-blond hair. Anyone looking at her had to

trust her, because she wore every emotion she’d ever had all over her unlined face.

Preston had been five years into his business then, and thinking of making a

change. Only she hadn’t known that. All she’d known was two things: He’d hired

her despite her lack of experience, and he was the most dynamic man she’d ever

met.

Dynamic: that was a word she hadn’t understood until Preston. He wasn’t

conventionally handsome—his nose was too wide, his eyes too small—and he

wasn’t very tall. But he had a beautiful head of shiny black hair, so thick every

woman longed to run her hands through it. His mouth was generous, and his smile

was endearingly crooked—just as he turned out to be.

She’d been lonely, she’d been hurt, and she’d been broke, all three of which

made her the perfect shill for H.T. Corrent Investments, the company that Preston

supposedly owned.

He’d been brilliant, even then. He’d rented office space in a brand-new

building, bought furniture at a tax liquidation, and set up all three rooms as if he’d

just moved in. Boxes sat in the corners, all of them labeled with a date and a letter of

the alphabet, all of them taped shut so thoroughly that only a lot of work with a knife

or a straight razor would get them open.

Dusty filing cabinets filled the smallest room, along with an early ‘eighties

microwave and a half-sized refrigerator. Preston’s office had the large desk and an

oversize leather chair, along with some photos which, Fala later learned, he’d bought

at an estate sale.

Out front, a middle-aged woman sat behind a smaller desk, working the

phones. She kept a pencil in her sprayed hair, and wore a sweater against the chill of

the air conditioner. Other women, all under the age of thirty, sat in chairs along the

wall, waiting for their turn to be interviewed.

They’d gone inside one by one, and Preston had smiled at the group each

time he closed the door, as if he expected to get lucky with each and every one of

them.

He’d gotten lucky with Fala and her favorite pair of black shoes, which fell

apart—literally—as she walked through his office door. She’d tripped, leaving the

sole of her right shoe on the threshold. Preston had picked it up, ever so gallantly,

and that crooked smile of his had turned into the widest grin she’d ever seen.

“Now that you’ve established how badly you need the job,” he’d said, “how

about answering a few questions?”

She’d been so mortified that her cheeks felt as if they would burn off. She’d

pressed her hands against them, trying to cool them, and refused to look in his eyes

as he went through her one-paragraph resume.

When he gave her the job two days later, he’d told her it was because of the

shoe.

That was probably the only time in their entire relationship that Preston hadn’t

lied.

* * * *

The signs went up a month after she bought the pawnshop. This time, they’d

been professionally printed, with the word “cash” in such large letters that a driver

could see it from the street.

When she arrived at work that morning, she saw one on the telephone pole

half a block away, and her stomach gave a little lurch. Other people stapled signs to

telephone poles and headed those signs with the word “cash” in gigantic black

letters. But she knew, even before she walked those last few yards, that someone in

Preston’s employ had stayed up all night walking the streets and stapling.

CASH!!

Planning to sell your home?

We’ll give you cash on the

dollar this week!

Fala memorized the phone number at the bottom of the sign, and then walked

away as if the notice meant nothing to her. Still, she opened her purse, grabbed the

unopened Pall Malls, and pulled them out, her blunt-edged fingernails finding the

edge of the cellophane wrapper. She opened the package like a chain smoker

Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things.pdf

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