And whatever was wrong, Risa was dead center in the middle of it.
Chapter 19
Las Vegas
November 2
Early afternoon
Socks left his neon purple baby in a parking space at a burger joint two blocks away from Joey Cline’s pawnshop. Backpack over his shoulder, jeans sagging around his ankles, Socks strolled past businesses whose windows were about as clean as the gutters outside.
A wadded-up cigarette pack blew along the cracked sidewalk, driven by a hard, dry wind. The cloudless sky was taking on a brassy sheen that would have been smog in Los Angeles but was just dust in Las Vegas. Socks didn’t really notice any of it. He’d seen it all before, too many times. He’d grown up four blocks from Joey’s pawnshop. Nothing had changed since then except the number of cracks in the sidewalk.
Nothing much was different in the pawnshop’s windows since his last visit to Joey either. Behind the dusty glass and iron bars there were guitars, amps, Indian jewelry, rifles, TVs, VCRs, DVDs, dirty handguns, and a violin with three strings waiting for someone to get lucky again. Socks gave the pawned handguns a look, but they were all small-caliber. He didn’t want a girly gun. He wanted something a man would be happy to stuff in his pants.
A friendly little bell tinkled when he opened the front door of the pawnshop. Experience told him that a much less friendly bell was going off in the back room and a video camera in front of the store had started running just to make sure a guy didn’t help himself before Joey came out of the back room to greet the customer.
The front part of the shop was clean but otherwise like the sidewalk display window—narrow, dingy, and unwelcoming. The light was bad, the counters were old, most of the glass was chipped or cracked or both, and the goods inside the cases were exactly what a cop would expect to find pawned by losers riding the downward curve of their luck into desperation.
Socks wandered off to the left side of the shop, where he knew the camera couldn’t reach. He leaned over a scarred wooden counter and pressed a button. Two things happened at once. The camera stopped recording, and a panel no wider than his butt opened at the end of the counter. He slid through before the panel could close again.
“Hey, Joey, it’s Socks!” he hollered.
A sound came from the back.
Socks took it as the invitation it probably was. He opened a man-size cabinet that held racks of shotguns and rifles so dirty they would have jammed or blown up on anyone fool enough to load and fire them. He reached between two worn stocks and pushed. A concealed latch at the rear of the cabinet snapped open, the back panel swung aside, and Socks walked into the real business center of Joey Cline’s pawnshop.
The weapons here were clean, modern, and large-bore. The best of them were cold—untraceable by any cops from city badges all the way to the FBI. Next to a case full of shiny weapons there was a bulletproof display table whose contents would have done credit to Tiffany’s. More than one second-story man had discovered just how little money on the dollar stolen jewels would bring from Joey Cline. On the plus side, Joey paid in cash and didn’t talk to anyone about anything that went on inside the back room, not even his wife.
Dressed in a dark, oil-stained denim shirt and jeans, Joey emerged from behind a worktable covered by the various lubricants, rags, and tools of a gunsmith’s trade. Joey’s first love was fixing guns until they were as oiled and eager as a hot woman.
“Hey, Cesar, been a long time,” Joey said, pushing his magnifying goggles up on his head and smiling big enough to put creases on either side of his wispy mustache. “You got something for me?”
Socks winced. He hated his given name. Everybody called him by his street name except people who had known him before he did time. Joey was one of those people. He and his father and his grandfather had fenced stuff for Socks’s family for years. Ripped them off for years, too, but that was the way it was in this part of town. If you couldn’t steal from strangers, you stole from friends. When it got down to the really short strokes, you stole from kin.
“Yeah, I got something,” Socks said. “If you make me a good offer, I won’t shop it over at Shapiro’s.”
Joey shrugged and wiped his hands on a rag that was as black as his hair. “I give you the best deal I can and still stay in business. You know that.”
“Uh-huh.” Socks knew that Joey gave him as little as he thought he could get away with. Nothing personal. Just the way things were.
Joey knew the game, too. Dumb lumps like Socks were a big part of the pawnshop’s profit margin, but the lumps came back again and again because they were just clever enough to want to stay out of jail. Joey had never snitched off anyone. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was only to stay out of jail himself. Nothing personal. Just the way things were.
Socks shrugged off his backpack and reached inside. The first thing he pulled out was one of the figurines that looked kind of like a buck with a nice spread of antlers. The designs on the body were so tiny they made Socks dizzy trying to figure them out. So he didn’t look at them.
He held the figurine about a foot above Joey’s oily palm and opened his fingers. “What do you think of this?”
Joey grunted as the surprising weight of the metal smacked into his palm. He knew right way it was either lead or gold. Nothing else felt that heavy for its size, yet almost soft to the touch. His heart quickened. He pulled the goggles over his eyes and flipped the figurine over in his fingers, looking for any sign that it was a gold-plate job.
Even magnified, the etched designs were so dense that he felt like his eyes were crossing when he tried to look at them.
He repeated the inspection. Slowly. It was like looking into one of those fractal screen savers his nephew loved, with a design repeated in smaller and smaller sizes but never ending, never still, and always staying the same. No beginning either. Just . . .
He swallowed and closed his eyes so his head stopped spinning. Just plain weird was what the figurine was. But there wasn’t any sign of gold plate rubbed thin enough to show base metal beneath. Nor did he see any sign of the bubbles and pits bad plating often showed as it wore down over time.
“So someone plated a lead figure with low-karat gold,” Joey said finally. “Big fucking deal.”
But he didn’t offer to give back the piece.
“Blow it out your ass,” Socks said. “That’s solid gold.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“You just know. Uh-huh. Like when did you get to be a big-deal gold expert?”
Socks had expected this. It was part of the bargaining process. And because he was just smart enough to know that he wasn’t as smart as Joey, Socks had lined up his arguments ahead of time. No way he was going to be sent off with a hundred bucks for all the gold and a pat on the head for free.
“If you can’t tell real gold, that’s your problem. Gimme that. Shapiro knows real gold when he sees it.”
Joey’s fingers closed over the figurine. Shapiro was a few short steps up out of the gutter. Joey often resold really high-end stuff to him at a hefty markup. Shapiro resold it to Nance or Cochran or maybe even Smith-White, who traded it off to New York or Dallas or L.A., where he could turn it around in one of his fancy shops for ten or fifty or a hundred times what the original thief had been paid.
“Don’t go off half-cocked,” Joey said. “Maybe you better tell me what you think Shapiro will pay you that I won’t.”
Satisfaction rearranged Socks’s dark features into the kind of smiling geniality that made his surges of brutality all the more unexpected. “Oh, I think he’ll go a yard on this.”
“A thousand dollars for this?” Joey scoffed. “Man, you’re smoking crack.”
“A yard,” Socks said.
“ ‘A yard,’ he says,” Joey mocked. “Kiss mine. I’ll go three hundred, but only because we’re old friends.”
That was three times what Socks had expected, but he was already reaching for the figur
ine and couldn’t pull back in time.
Joey had no such problem. He jerked the piece beyond the other man’s reach. “Okay, okay. Four hundred.”
Socks was so surprised at the price he couldn’t even talk.
“What do you say?” Joey asked.
Silence came while Socks tried to wrap his brain around the idea of four hundred dollars for this crap. Maybe Tim’s bitch knew what she was talking about.
“Man, you’re killing me here,” Joey said. “Six hundred, and not one fucking cent more, and only because we go back so far, understand?”
Socks nodded.
The figurine vanished into Joey’s pocket. “Got any more, or was it a one-off?”
Socks started to say he had been talking about all the gold, not just the one piece. Before he could be that dumb, he shut up and pulled another figurine out of his backpack. Then a pin. Then the armband.
“This is worth twice any of the others,” Socks said, remembering what Tim had told him.
Joey wanted to disagree, but his mouth was dry. He knew just enough about old jewelry to realize that the heavily decorated gold band was likely worth an arm and a leg and a testicle if you had access to the right market. He didn’t. Smith-White wouldn’t even return his calls. Half the time Cochran wouldn’t either.
But Shapiro could get through to Cochran.
Visions of that South Seas cruise his wife had been bugging him about swam delightfully in Joey’s mind. “Two and a half yards for the lot of them.”
That was more cash than Socks had ever held in his fist at one time. Robbing convenience stores was a hand-to-mouth way to live. Most of the time he was lucky if he got a hundred bucks plus all the booze he could carry for a night’s work.
Twenty-five hundred dollars.
And lots more gold where that came from.
“I need a cold gun,” Socks said. “Forty-five.”
“Only got a nine-millimeter now. Try me in a few weeks.”
“The nine is cold?”
Joey nodded.
“Guaranteed?” Socks pressed.
“Hell yes. You think I’m dumb enough to piss off someone that whacks guys for a living?”
“I don’t whack guys. I just stick ’em up.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“Oh. How much?” Socks said.
“A thousand.”
“What! Fuck, you’d think the gun was made of gold!”
“Gold would melt if you used it for a gun barrel,” Joey said impatiently. “Look, just for you, just this once, I’ll throw in the silencer and sell it for five. That leaves you with two thousand bucks in your jeans. We got a deal?”
Arithmetic had been one of the many subjects Socks flunked on his way out of public schools, but the figure sounded about right to him. Best of all, he would have the gun, too. With that he could get more money.
“We got a deal.”
Chapter 20
Las Vegas
November 2
Early afternoon
Cherelle licked up the last bit of shrimp cocktail off her fork, mopped steak juices from her plate with the final bite of her third French roll, finished her second double Cosmopolitan, and sighed happily. “Now, that’s food. And it’s free! How can you work here and not weigh two hundred pounds?”
Risa smiled. Watching her old friend eat her own lunch—and half of Risa’s—had left her with a good feeling, as though she was giving back to Cherelle some of the help that she had given to Risa when they were much younger.
“Usually I’m too busy to eat lunch,” Risa said. “Otherwise my butt would be a yard wide.”
“Nah.” Cherelle stretched. “Two yards.”
Risa laughed, but her amusement faded as soon as she noticed the ripped seams under Cherelle’s arms. Along with her friend’s worn jeans, run-down shoes, and outright hunger, it added up to a woman who was on the ragged edge of poverty. Motels, even the worst of them, weren’t cheap in Las Vegas.
The thought of Cherelle sleeping in her car or picking up some man in a bar just to have a place to spend the night made Risa feel angry and guilty at the same time. She was sure it wouldn’t be the first time Cherelle had traded a “ride” for a bed to sleep in.
But it was the first time Risa had been able to do something about it.
“Hey, I have a great idea,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work right now and don’t have any vacation time coming, but there’s no reason we can’t get together and play at night, is there? One of the perks of this job is an on-site apartment, complete with maid service. I’ll call the front desk and tell them to leave a key to my casino apartment for you. You get your stuff and go on up and enjoy the man-size bathtub, order more food from room service if you’re hungry, another drink from the bar, whatever. Take the bedroom on the left and treat it like your own hotel room.”
The two potent drinks Cherelle had gulped made her wonder if her hearing was going. “You mean it?”
“Absolutely. I’ll call down to the desk right now. They’ll program a passkey for you.”
“Well, go do it, girl! I can feel that steaming bathtub already. Uh, you mind if I borrow some of your clothes?”
“No problem. They might even fit. I’ve lost a little weight.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Why you’d want to dump those inches . . .” Cherelle shook her head. “Baby-chick, don’t you know that men like to grab a big ol’ double handful of what’s good?”
Shaking her head, Risa said, “You have some ID on you, or should I walk you down?”
“Driver’s license.”
“Perfect. My boss is a fiend for security.”
Risa went to the phone, called up the front desk, and began giving instructions.
Smiling, Cherelle ran her fingertip around her steak plate and waited for the key to the magic kingdom to arrive.
Chapter 21
Las Vegas
November 3
Morning
The phone rang on Shane’s desk. He ignored it and kept on frowning at the computer screen. Considering all the payoffs that the Golden Fleece had made on slots, the machines were showing a surprising profit margin. Most slots earned a profit of between $100 and $125 per day. Not much, but when you had four thousand slots, it didn’t take long to add up. Yet if the figures in front of him were correct, the machines were taking in an extra $18 per day, for no reason that he could discover. He expected some variation, a few percentage points over or under expectations. Under, usually, because cheats took money rather than depositing it. But here was a consistent high-end variation of more than 10 percent.
“Excuse me,” Susan Chatsworth said, sticking her head in the doorway, “but Mr. Smith-White insists that you’ll want to speak with him personally and privately.”
Irritation warred with curiosity. Curiosity won. Smith-White owned a series of very upscale decorator stores, the kind that supplied genuine antiques and antiquities to wealthy clients and the interior decorators who decked out wealthy houses. Since Shane wasn’t in the process of remodeling anything, there could be only one reason Smith-White was so insistent on talking to him privately.
Gold artifacts.
Shane picked up his phone. “Good morning, Jason. What can I do for you?”
“I understand you’re still looking for outstanding Celtic artifacts. Gold.”
“I’m always looking. That’s why you called me.”
Smith-White gave the breathless, liquid laugh of a lifetime smoker. “I have four pieces for you to look at.”
Shane settled back into his black leather chair. “How old?”
“Hard to tell. Gold doesn’t date. But my guess would be they’re part of a hoard. A Druid hoard.”
Excitement kicked in Shane. Antiquities normally came complete with papers describing them precisely, most especially on the subject of provenance. Obviously the four pieces of gold Smith-White was peddling didn’t have paper pedigrees.
“Druid? What makes you sa
y that?” Shane asked.
“When you see them, you’ll know. They’re quite extraordinary. Only high priests or kings would have possessed them.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“The best always is. These are museum quality, which is why I thought of you.”
And the reward, Shane thought dryly as he glanced at his watch. Early for lunch and late for coffee. “How soon can you bring them here?”
“An hour, maybe more. Depends on how long my ten o’clock takes.”
“Have the front desk call me when you arrive. A guard will meet you and bring you up.”
He disconnected and buzzed Susan. “Have someone meet Smith-White at the front desk anytime after ten-thirty.” He hesitated and gave a mental shrug. Even though he had called Rarities and given them the information from Cherelle’s driver’s license, Niall hadn’t called back yet. “Anything more on the Faulkner woman?”
“She went out an hour ago. She hasn’t returned.”
“Suitcases?”
“Still here.”
“What’s the tab so far?”
“Seven thousand seven hundred and change.”
Shane whistled. “How can anyone eat that much lobster and caviar?”
“She didn’t. She discovered the salon and the boutique.”
“Transfer the charges to the comp account,” Shane said, referring to the account that paid for the comps, or freebies for people who bet a certain amount of money every hour for at least three hours a day. “But call down and tell them to draw the line at real jewelry. Sure as hell she’d go for the fancy yellow diamond solitaire.”
“The one that’s worth three-point-four million?”
“You noticed,” he said, laughing.
“Are you kidding? Security is sweating bullets over it, not to mention the matching necklace and earrings.”
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