A customer came in, and I quickly wrote him up for two hundred dollars for his antique pocket watch. It was the third year in a row that he’d brought the item in for pawn in January, I noticed, and I smiled at him. “Paying for Christmas presents, Mr. Newton?”
“You know it. We went a little crazy on the kids this year,” he said, grinning cheerfully. “I’ll be in next month with a payment.”
When Mr. Newton left, I walked over to where Agent Vasquez was talking to Dave, probably getting him to give up all his dark secrets. Not that Dave was the type for dark secrets; he was a pretty open guy. Jack, on the other hand…
I seriously had to quit thinking about Jack.
“What’s up, Agent Vasquez?”
“Alejandro, please.” He smiled at me, and I briefly wondered if P-Ops was hiring based on gorgeousness these days. Because, wow. Dave apparently had the same thought, because his eyes got huge, and I could almost hear his lonely heart go pitter-pat.
I leaned over and whispered in his ear. “He just said he’s married, remember?”
Dave’s gaze darted to the agent’s left hand, and of course Mr. Spooky noticed.
“I am, but I’m flattered by the interest,” he told Dave, ratcheting up the Charming Meter.
I snorted. “Yeah, yeah, you’re flattered. Flattered, spooky, and incredibly nosy. So why are you really here?”
Dave winced. “Tess, that’s pretty harsh. I’m sure the man is just doing his job.”
“Right. But what is his job? Why is he here, when he has no jurisdiction?”
“Well—” Alejandro began, but I ruthlessly cut him off.
“Why does he keep showing up in my pawnshop?”
“I—”
“Why does he want to talk to Jack so badly?”
“I want to talk to Jack too,” Dave said. “I don’t know why the fed does.”
The fed gritted his teeth. “Ms. Callahan—”
I threw my hands in the air. “Oh, please call me Tess. Aren’t we all friends here? And by friends, I mean that I have the ability to sell you a stuffed alligator, and you have the ability to lock me up in a deep, dark, Black Ops site for the rest of my life. So, we’re really on equal footing, aren’t we?”
Alejandro looked at Dave. “She watches a lot of TV, doesn’t she?”
“I get that a lot,” I admitted.
Dave could tell that I was about to lose my patience. He turned to Alejandro. “Why are you here?”
Alejandro gave us his Serious Special Agent face. “This stays between us.”
I shook my head. “I don’t agree to that. Whatever you tell me, I’m going to tell Jack.”
“You couldn’t just agree and then go behind my back, like most people do?”
“She’s very honest,” Dave said.
“I’m a terrible liar. What would be the point? Let’s just get it all out in the open.”
Alejandro considered us for a moment. “If I tell you this, will you convince Mr. Shepherd to call me?”
“I’ll give him your number and ask him to call you, but I couldn’t even convince him to get out of my bedroom, so I don’t know what luck I’ll have,” I said, not realizing the effect that my astonishingly poor choice of words, combined with the bruising on my face, would have on both men.
“Did he hurt you?” Alejandro’s eyes turned to ice.
“I’ll kill him,” Dave said, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. “I can’t believe Jack… I’ll kill him.”
“What? No! He didn’t—no. He came and got me and made me soup. Then he slept on my floor as a tiger,” I explained. “To protect me, in case the guy came back. Come on, Dave. You know me. Do you think I wouldn’t be pressing charges against the person who did this if I knew who it was?”
I shook my head and walked back into the office to get some bottles of water out of the mini-fridge. Everybody needed to cool down a little bit.
When I walked back out into the shop, Dave was leaning against the jewelry case, and Alejandro was examining a Native American dreamcatcher on the wall.
“It’s from a Chippewa tribe, and the claim is that it has a nightmare trapped in it,” I told him. “It can be yours for the low, low price of five hundred dollars.”
Alejandro frowned, and whatever lurked in the shadows in his eyes chased the flippancy right out of me. “I have all the nightmares I could ever need, Ms. Callahan.”
“I’m sorry.” I handed him a bottle of water. “Look, please just say what you need to say.”
“Have you heard of the Blood Moon?”
“You mentioned it the last time you were in here. It’s a total lunar eclipse,” I said.
“I said that?”
“Hey, I have internet,” I told him.
Dave spoke up. “I guess it’s supposed to be a big deal magically, right? Melody always said Shelley would have a special life since she was born on the night of a Blood Moon.”
Alejandro and I both stared at Dave.
“You knew Shelley’s mom?” I was surprised, again, at how the same names kept coming up in weirdly interconnected ways.
He nodded, sadness in his eyes. “We were friends. Mom tried to set us up, back in the day, before I came out, before Melody had her daughter. We used to laugh about it when we saw each other around town. Shelley and Zane were in the same class last year too, but she hasn’t been back to school since her mom died.”
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that yesterday had been a school day when she’d been in the shop. Wasn’t truancy a problem? I knew those Kowalskis were a bad foster family for Shelley. But skipping some school after her mother died probably wasn’t enough of a reason to get her away from them, either.
Alejandro’s face was grim. “The Blood Moon is magically important. Certain dark rituals, when conducted on that night, will become massively more powerful than they would normally be.”
“But that’s black magic,” I protested. “We don’t have any black witches in Dead End. You have to go clear to Miami to find black magic, according to Mrs. Kowalski.”
“We’ve heard rumors that something big is happening somewhere in the southeast; we’re just not sure exactly what or where.”
“That’s pretty vague,” I pointed out, and he nodded.
“Frustratingly so. I learned that Mr. Shepherd was here in Dead End, though, and I thought I’d combine two trips,” Alejandro said. “I just stopped by today to ask you to pass along my message to him.”
“Sure.”
“Thank you. I’ll be on my way now.”
“Good luck with that Blood Moon thing,” I said.
He nodded. On his way out the door, he patted the gun case. “Nice selection here, but the real prize is in the sheriff’s office. Did you ever see the nickel-plated .41 caliber Colt Thunderer that the sheriff owns? He claims it was the gun that Doc Holliday carried at the O.K. Corral.”
The agent’s eyes gleamed with the pure appreciation of a true collector. Under other circumstances, I’d try to sell him a gun or three. But, reeling from the bombshell that Alejandro didn’t even know he’d just dropped, it was all I could do to keep a level smile on my face.
“Is that so? Fascinating,” I said. “Have a nice drive.”
Dave scratched his head. “But, Tess—”
“Wish the nice agent luck, Dave,” I said, smiling through clenched teeth.
“Good luck, nice agent,” Dave said, looking puzzled.
Alejandro’s sharp gaze fixed on me for a second, but then he just nodded. “Thank you. I look forward to hearing from Mr. Shepherd. I need a new partner.”
I didn’t move until I heard his car drive off, and then I sank down onto the stool behind the counter. “Yeah, I bet he does. Lost his old one to a basilisk accident, after all,” I said bitterly.
Dave walked over and peered down at me. “Tess, isn’t that gun—”
“The one that Jeremiah swore he’d never sell? The one Sheriff Lawless wanted so badly?” I nodded. “Yeah. So how did he get it?”
A few hours later, I was still thinking about that damn gun. Eleanor had come in for the afternoon shift, and I’d driven straight home to catch up on some nice, ordinary chores. Cleaning the bathroom was normally my least favorite chore, but I’d set to with a will today, glad to be out of the public eye and free of answering questions about how the other guy looked.
After an apple, crackers, and Tylenol snack, and a quick text to Owen to tell him I needed a rain check, I’d played “chase the amazing ball of yarn” with Lou, which was one of her favorite games. Now she was taking what was probably her seventh or eighth nap of the day while I dusted furniture, sorted through mail, and wondered how exactly the sheriff had convinced Jeremiah to sell him that gun.
Jeremiah had adored that Colt. Told the story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the O.K. Corral to anybody who’d shown the slightest bit of interest in it. Sworn to me that he’d never sell it. Then out of the blue one day, I’d noticed it was gone. I’d asked about it, figuring that he’d sent it out to be restored or something, and Jeremiah had gotten a strange look on his face and said he’d sold it to a collector in Europe. He wouldn’t tell me anything else about the sale, and I wasn’t doing the books at that time, so I’d figured it was none of my business.
It had bothered me, though. More than I’d even realized, I guess, because the idea of the sheriff having it was driving me nuts. Could he have killed my boss for the gun? No, that didn’t make any sense. Jeremiah had sold the gun months before he’d died.
I threw in a load of laundry, drank some water, and fired up the vacuum cleaner, no closer to any kind of epiphany than I’d been earlier, but with a significantly cleaner house. Lou opened one eye and gave me a disgusted look. She hated the sound of the vacuum.
“Sorry, kitty, but when a girl’s gotta clean, a girl’s gotta clean,” I told her, and then I went back to singing at the top of my lungs about my pocketful of sunshine and how people needed to shut up and dance with me. I was spectacularly bad at singing, but it helped me think. And clean. And probably scare off hot guys, small children, and grizzly bears. My secret weapon—the deadly “can’t carry a tune with a bucket” trick. I should have tried it on my attacker the night before.
“I’ll be happy to shut up and dance with you, if you’ll quit making that sound,” Jack said from right behind me, making me shriek and jump about a foot in the air.
I turned off the vacuum and glared at him. “What the heck? You can’t sneak up on a person. Especially a person who was just attacked from behind.”
“Oh damn. Tess, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about that. I knocked, and when it sounded like you were in pain, I just came in.” He looked really remorseful, so I forgave him on the spot. Except for the part about my singing which, though true, was a little bit hurtful.
“Who are you to judge? Can tigers even sing? Or is it all growl, snarl, I’m going to eat your face off?”
He grinned at me, taking in my Saturday afternoon cleaning clothes with a slow sweep of his gaze from the top of my ponytailed head to the bottom of my bare feet. I was wearing an old pair of cut-off denim shorts and a threadbare Garth Brooks concert t-shirt. Luckily, I was wearing a bra, because the appreciation in his eyes was making my nipples pointy.
No, no, no.
“I have stuff to tell you,” I said briskly, all business. Definitely not thinking about getting sweaty with my new business partner. Nope.
“I have quite a story for you too, but can we share while we go find a real grocery store? I need to stock up, and the Pit Stop isn’t up to the task,” he said, scooping Lou up off the couch and petting what was evidently the perfect spot, judging by the sound of her purr.
“Actually, grocery shopping is on my Saturday list,” I admitted. “Let me grab a quick shower, and we can run out to the Super Target.”
He gave me that slow, dangerous smile again, but he didn’t go so far as to offer to help me shower, which was good, since I wasn’t sure at that exact moment if my answer would have been yes or no. I put the vacuum away and escaped for a quick shower, threw on jeans and a sweater, combed my wet hair away from my face, threw on a little makeup—trying to mask the black eye as much as I could—and I was ready. I grabbed my grocery list from the counter next to the coffee pot, gave Lou fresh water and a quick cuddle, and I was good to go.
Jack was sitting in my living room, leafing through the latest issue of Archaeology Today that had been open on my coffee table.
“You are a woman of diverse interests, aren’t you?” He nodded at the table, where a stack of magazines and my library books waited for me to have a free evening to get back to them. “Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Tina Fey’s memoir, two mysteries, one science fiction, a romance novel about pirates, and a book on the history of the Academy Awards. Are you reading all this, or is it just for show?”
I tilted my head to the side and stared at him, not smiling and not speaking, until he put the magazine down and stood up. Then I finally answered.
“Yes, Jack, I leave books out just for show, in case Chris Pratt happens to stop by and wants to talk about literature and dinosaurs. That’s why I decorate with silk and satin and gold-plated furniture too. You never know when Oprah might stop by for tea.” I held my arms out in a flourish, encompassing the entirety of my worn but comfortable furniture.
He at least had the sense to look sheepish. “I’m not really good at small talk. My conversations over the past several years have been more the ‘here’s the exit strategy, make sure you have silver ammo’ kind.”
I waved a hand in dismissal. “Whatever. We don’t really know each other at all, do we? Let’s just go. You can tell me what you found out about Arroyo the overly dramatic vampire.”
He held the door open for me. “Yeah. You were right. It couldn’t have been him. He died quite a while ago in a tragic fishing accident.”
After the week I’d had, I didn’t even blink. “Is there any other kind?”