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.
Pawnshop 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 pawnshop—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 pawnshops 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 pawnshop. 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.
“Please,” Eleanor said, clasping her hands together under her chin. “I can spend all my time with my beautiful grandson. Did I tell you that I have new pictures?”
I sighed. “Does a goat poop in a pawnshop?”
We both looked at the goat, who let rip with another very loud mehhh and then let rip with a giant load of something that was all kinds of wrong, right in the middle of the floor.
“Apparently yes to both questions.” Eleanor leaned over the counter. “Is that a beer can?”
I just started laughing. “What else could go wrong?”
The bell over my door made its tinkling sound, and Jack walked in. “The guys say we have at least one, possibly two, teams of professional assassins in town. Why is there a goat in your shop and goat shit on your foot?”
I threw the rest of the carrots at him.