Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

For eight years, he’d visited the same shops again and again. Duluth. Cloquet. Grand Rapids. Hinckley. Even down to the Twin Cities. Dozens of them, from the upscale mall shops buying gold and silver to the alley-side joints that served up fast cash and payday loans. The owners all knew him, although he’d never told them what he was looking for. Howard was paranoid that if any of the owners knew they were fencing property stolen in a murder case, they’d make those items quietly disappear before he could identify them.

He climbed 2nd Avenue in the heat. He wore a red Kohl’s polo shirt, tan khakis, and sneakers with reinforced arches for his flat feet. The shoes were new, and the soles squeaked. Zenith Pawn was at the next corner, garish with neon.

Black pearl ring in a gold setting.

Hummingbird pin.

Emerald J brooch.

All these years, all these fruitless hours spent hunched over display cases, and he’d never lost faith.

Howard thought about his last visit with Janine and the odd confession she’d made. It shocked him, until he’d realized that she was trying to drive him away. He’d been too honest with her about his frustrations with Carol. Janine blamed herself for his dissolving marriage, and maybe she was right. Even so, he refused to let her send him away.

‘Say whatever you want,’ he had told her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Howard opened the glass door of the pawn shop. Inside, the air conditioning made his damp skin cold. It felt good. Another customer was at the counter, a silver-haired lady dickering with the owner over the price of an old penny. The shop overflowed with inventory. Jewelry. Guns. Video games. Stamps and coins. Leather. Cutlery and knives. Electronics. Some items were new, but most were used, the litter of the Great Recession. Three balls were the universal symbol of boom times gone bust.

‘This is a 1933 wheat penny,’ the old woman insisted. ‘I looked it up. It’s worth twenty dollars. I cleaned it up for you, too. Nice and shiny.’

The owner was bald and big and reminded him of a pro wrestler like Jesse Ventura. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket. Somewhere inside the jacket, Howard assumed the man carried a bad-ass gun.

‘Beverly, sweetie,’ he replied in an Aussie accent, ‘it’s twenty dollars in uncirculated condition. This penny looks like it’s been through a stretchy machine at Fun Land. And cleaning it makes it worth less, not more. I’ve told you that.’

‘Twenty dollars,’ she repeated.

‘Sweetie, I can give you two dollars and a cup of decaf, and that’s because I’m in a good mood.’

The old woman continued to argue. Howard ignored her. He saw the owner shoot him a wink and a grin.

Howard slipped reading glasses onto his face. He bent over the long counter crammed with one-off jewelry items, and the glasses slipped down to the end of his sweaty nose. He tried to stay focused. After a while, the jewelry all looked alike. The same stuff week after week, most of it cheap paste.

He checked the tag on each item. Ring — four hundred dollars. Necklace — seventy-five dollars. Elvis tie tack — ‘priceless’. The owner had a sense of humor. Each piece was nestled in a velvet sleeve, and when Howard had surveyed the entire counter, he moved on to the next one.

Watches. Earrings. Murano glass charms.

But again — nothing.

It had been nothing all day in the other shops. It had been nothing every month since he began his search years ago.

He’d hoped today would be different because of the gun. The police had finally found the gun that killed Jay Ferris, years after the crime. The same gun had been used in a murder in West Duluth the previous month and in a Chicago robbery shortly before Jay’s death. No one could explain it.

Howard didn’t know how or why this particular gun had made its way from one crime to the next, but he felt vindicated. He’d been right all along that Jay’s own gun had played no part in the shooting. This was something different. This was what you’d expect from a home invasion, just as Janine had insisted. A stranger came to the door. Killed Jay. Stole the jewelry. Disappeared, along with the gun.

Now the gun was back.

Where had it been for eight years? Howard didn’t know, but he was willing to bet that wherever the gun had been hidden, the missing jewelry had been hidden there, too. If someone had used the gun, then it made sense that the jewelry might show up at the same time. The truth was coming to light.

‘Howie!’ the owner bellowed at him. His name was Caffy, which was short for his last name, Cafferty. ‘Mate!’

Caffy loomed on the other side of the counter like a brown bear. Wheat Penny Lady was gone, clutching two dollars in one fist and a styrofoam cup of Green Mountain Nantucket Keurig coffee in the other.

‘Want an old penny?’ the owner asked, flipping it in the air with his thumb and catching it in his giant palm. ‘Only twenty bucks.’

Howard stopped his search and looked up, his mouth falling open. A grin bent across the owner’s face.

‘Kidding, mate. This penny ain’t worth a dime. If you’ve got a chair that wobbles, stick it under one of the legs.’

‘So why’d you give her two bucks?’ Howard asked.

‘Oh, Beverly’s all right. Likes a yank on the crank in the casino now and then. Who knows, maybe she’ll take my twofer and win a Cadillac or something.’

Howard smiled. He actually liked Caffy. Most of the pawn shop owners he met were too slick by half, but Caffy dealt straight with people. If he didn’t have a soft spot, he had a thinner plate of steel near his heart. They’d talked over the years. Sports. Chinese history. Irish poets. Caffy was surprisingly well read, and well traveled, which Howard found fascinating. The man had led the kind of unattached wanderer’s life that Howard envied.

Even so, he’d never shown the photographs of Janine’s jewelry to Caffy. You could like someone face to face and not trust them when your back was turned.

‘That watch over there,’ Caffy boomed. ‘That would look good on your wrist.’

‘Who wears watches anymore?’ Howard asked.

‘Ah, they’re coming back. Smart watches. That’s the new thing.’

‘No, thanks.’

Caffy never took rejection personally. ‘Sure, whatever. You’re in earlier than usual, ain’t you? Thought it would be another couple weeks before you showed up again.’

‘Yes, I’m early,’ Howard admitted.

He was at the end of the last counter. He’d looked through hundreds of pieces of jewelry, ranging in price from five dollars to a thousand dollars. He’d found nothing even as interesting as the wheat penny.

‘Might help if you gave me a clue what you want,’ Caffy told him. ‘After all these years, the I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it game gets old, doesn’t it?’

‘One needle, lots of haystacks,’ Howard said.

‘Come on, mate, give me a hint. Cheap, expensive.’

‘Expensive. Very expensive.’

‘Oh, well, why didn’t you say so?’ Caffy told him. ‘I do have a little private stock this week. Best customers only. Which don’t exactly include you, Howie, but you want to see it anyway?’

‘I do — thanks, Caffy.’

The owner retreated into the back. As he did, he pressed a button that locked the shop door, which told Howard exactly how far trust went between them. He could see the big Aussie disappearing inside an oversized steel vault, and he emerged a moment later with a typewriter-sized box. He set it on the glass counter in front of Howard and opened the top, revealing several dazzling felt rows of jewelry that were probably worth more than everything in the storefront counters combined.

‘Nice stuff, huh?’ Caffy said.