Pawnbroker: A Thriller

PAWNBROKER

A thriller by

JERRY HATCHETT

Copyright © 2012 by Jerry Hatchett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, except for brief passages quoted in a review, without the written permission of the author.

Mississippi, I miss you.

Tom and Nancy Wheeler,

you guys were the first people I remember

encouraging me to write. I miss you, too.

Acknowledgments

So many alpha/beta/review readers and fellow writers have helped me through the years by reading and critiquing that I hardly know where to begin. I so hope I don’t leave out someone who helped, but if I did, you have my unending appreciation and a great big apology. For immeasurable help as a reader, proofreader, typesetter, and great friend, I humbly bow to Linda M. Au and recommend you check out her books post-haste. She’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever known and that humor comes across beautifully in her work. Another huge debt is owed to award-winning author Dora Machado for reading and critiquing, and also for letting me return the favor. Louise Cole, for more encouragement than you know, thank you and all the other CritClubbers for the years of friendship and encouragement.

Finally:  Thank you, God, for giving me a love of story and the ability to tell one every now and then. Thanks for providing me a way out of my many shortcomings through your Son.

PROLOGUE

A rusty
chain hung across the spot where the abandoned road entered the woods. A stencil-painted tin sign, drooping from the chain on baling wire, issued a Day-Glo warning to the curious: PRIVATE LAND. TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED. RICHARD BALLARD, SHERIFF, PONTOCOLA COUNTY. Three miles into the woods, atop a shallow ridge, an old building still stood. Once fresh and gleaming, its weathered shell had long ago turned the lifeless gray of decaying lumber. Such was its condition when Ray Earl Higgins and Rocky Shackleford first beheld it in the beam of an Eveready flashlight on a hot August night, thirty minutes shy of midnight.

Rocky and Ray Earl had killed more deer over the past twenty years than anybody in Pontocola County, maybe even the whole state. (It helped that they weren’t hindered by things like seasons, rules, or limits.) Rocky knew they were on posted land, but if they got caught hunting deer three months before season opens, at night, a trespassing charge would be the least of their worries. Besides, the deeper they went, the less likely they’d meet up with a game warden. Or some candy-ass animal rights freak who might run whining and blabbing. Finally, all those fine considerations aside, Rocky just didn’t give a happy damn. He’d go where the hell he pleased.

As for Ray Earl, well, he went where Rocky went. That’s the way it was in the second grade, and that’s the way it was on this fine evening. If Ray Earl were diagnosed by modern standards, he would probably have been deemed autistic, with a savant-like ability to mentally record and catalog detail. Instead, at age four he was diagnosed by Dr. Hurston Westerfield—a portly gentleman who hung his shingle just after World War II—after much careful evaluation, as “a V-8 hitting on four cylinders, maybe five on a good day.” Ray Earl was well liked in town, or at least well tolerated.

They had never hunted these woods, and to be accurate, the quest for venison was not what drew them in tonight. It was the stench. It rode in on a hot southern breeze, a reek so strong it made Rocky gag. Rocky, who had disemboweled countless deer as he dressed them out. Rocky, the A-shift foreman at Montello’s open-surface sewage treatment plant. He had to find the source of such an impossible stink.

As strong as it was, he figured it couldn’t be more than a couple hundred yards into the woods. A mile in, they crossed a small stream and the kudzu started, its thick vines and leaves covering and choking everything it encountered. Every tree was wrapped in the stuff, from the ground up to the highest branch, making them look like leafy green monsters. At two miles, the smell was so stout that he almost called it off. Fortunately, the very strength of it numbed their sense of smell enough for them to continue.

The road veered left and tracked its third mile alongside a small canal that Rocky had never seen. It was obviously manmade, and just as obviously abandoned decades ago. The kudzu thinned out and tall hardwoods grew right at the water’s edge on both banks, their treetops meeting over the water and forming a dark tunnel.

“That smell’s real bad, Rock. I’d just as soon turn around,” Ray Earl said, his camo T-shirt pulled up over his nose.

“Don’t be a pussy, Ray Earl.”

*          *          *

Ray Earl saw it first. “Rock,” he said in a low tone, almost a whisper. “Look.” He played the beam of his flashlight across the front of the building. Something about the place creeped Ray Earl out. He wanted to turn right the hell around and run.

“The hell you whispering for?” Rocky said, using that voice that made Ray Earl feel like the dumbest person in the whole county.

“Kind of spooky, is all.”

Rocky tilted his head back, sniffed, and headed for the building. “Spooky, my ass. I swear, Ray Earl.” He turned his head and power-spat a narrow stream of tobacco juice through his front teeth, then stopped in front of the small stoop on the front of the building and looked up.

The sign above the front door was cracked and its letters faded, but the three lines of text could still be read: 
             
 

CCC BARRACKS, MISS.

*          *          *7

ERECTED 1933.
 

“I’m going in,” Rocky said, climbing the steps.

“I don’t know. That sm—”

“That’s right. You don’t know shit, Ray Earl, so clap your trap.”

Ray Earl watched as Rocky twisted the knob. It turned. He pushed and the door opened without a squeak.

“Gimme that damn flashlight,” Rocky said, reaching an open hand behind him while he stepped into the room.

Ray Earl stuck at the bottom of the steps. “I don’t want to go in there, Rock.”

Rocky was all the way inside the black room when he bumped into something. “You get that flashlight up here right now, Ray Earl Higgins!”

Ray Earl stood a moment longer, deciding which would be worse, the stinking spooky building, or Rocky being mad at him. He took a deep breath, climbed the steps. Just inside the door, Rocky stood facing him, shaking his head, hand outstretched. Ray Earl handed over the flashlight. Rocky turned back around and suddenly screamed. Then he puked. Ray Earl stood frozen, his brain processing the scene before him. Rocky had bumped into a folding metal chair. With a dead man in it.

Rocky straightened up, turned around, handed off the flashlight to Ray Earl, then bounded out the door and down the steps just before a new round of vomiting erupted. Ray Earl, unable to take his eyes from the scene, played the beam of the flashlight around the room, his fear squeezed aside by fascination. He never missed an episode of
CSI. Miami. New York. And the best of them all: Las Vegas. What would Grissom do? He would examine the crime scene. And so would Ray Earl Higgins. He raised his flashlight and stepped forward, walking carefully, disturbing nothing, mentally filing everything he saw.

*          *          *

Halogen work lights, mounted in pairs on bright yellow stands and connected by a grid of thick extension cords, lined the walls, their now-dark heads aimed inward. Folding metal chairs of modern manufacture were set in clusters all around the cavernous, rectangular room. Some groups had four chairs, some six, some eight. There were ninety-six in all. One of those chairs was what Rocky had bumped into in the dark. That chair contained a corpse. In fact, every chair in the room contained a corpse, most of them bound to the chairs by nylon ties at wrist and ankle.

Some of the bodies looked fresh. Others were in various stages of decay, from early deterioration to seething with maggots. A mix of male and female, most of the victims looked to be in their late teens to early twenties, though there were a few outliers who were considerably older. All were nude, all had dark skin, dark hair, Hispanic features. None presented any obvious physical defects. In a macabre twist, most of their death-masks were looks not of pain and torture, but bizarre smiles, frozen rictuses of some pleasure that bridged the spiritual gorge between their earthly existence and whatever lay beyond. None of the bodies showed any evidence of trauma. It was as if dozens of healthy people walked in, got strapped into metal chairs, and died in a state of bliss.

The bare wood floor had been swept clean. Black cloth, stapled in place, covered the windows. Aside from the stench of putrefaction, nothing else remained. No blood. No tools. No other furniture. No clothes.

*          *          *

After several minutes, Ray Earl made his way back to the door, outside, and down the steps. Rocky leaned against a tree twenty yards away. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and said, “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

“Wait,” Ray Earl said, walking along the front of the building. He stopped, pointed the flashlight up at one of the windows, then traced a thick extension cord from the window down to the ground, where it lay in a neat coil, its male end exposed. He played the beam across the ground nearby, stopping at a spot several feet away where four indentations marked the hard-packed red dirt.

“Looks like they had a generator, Rock.”

Something squawked overhead.

“Oh shit,” Rocky said, trying to unsling his gun and getting tangled up in the strap. “What the hell was that?”

Ray Earl aimed the beam up into the trees and squinted.

“Buzzards.”

Chapter 1

When Bill Berner walked through the door as the first customer of the day, I should have read it as a dark omen, a signal from fate itself, a stern warning to lock the door and head back to the house in abject surrender. Don’t get me wrong: Bill’s not a bad guy, and I doubt he has an evil bone in his body. But he is one of the most irritating people on the planet. The kind of customer you’d rather encounter midday. Not in the dream melt of morning, and certainly not before you’ve armor-coated your psyche with caffeine. Not the end of the day when you’re brain-fried, either. Midday.

Like many of our regular pawners, Bill is unemployed. He lives on a confusing amalgam of government checks, government programs, and the occasional nuisance settlement from his portfolio of lawsuits. It’s disconcerting to look at Bill because one eye points vaguely at you while the other targets the Taco Bell across the street. They’re a bit beady and they ride atop a fat nose and shrunken mouth that is for the most part devoid of teeth. He has a perpetual three- to ten-day growth of stubble, and he shaves and bathes with the same frequency.

“Come in, Bill,” I said, the resonant tones of the door chime still hanging in the air.

“Need to borrow a little money.” He had a greasy hydraulic jack in his left hand and a plastic bag stuffed with
old DVDs in the right, a typical Bill Berner pawn. Low-dollar items trending toward junky, the sort of things a metro pawn shop wouldn’t fool with. In the small towns, though, we have to be a little less selective. Bill ambled to a stop and put his goods on the pawn counter.

“How much?” I said.

One eye swung my way, overshot the mark, then pulled back and drifted a bit before settling down and targeting my forehead. “I need fifty.”

“You need coffee.”

“Forty?”

I said nothing.

“Thirty?”

“Twenty bucks, Bill. Just like last time. And the time before that.”

“It’s a nice jack.”

“It’s a butt-ugly piece of crap with no handle and not another pawn shop in Mississippi would take it.”

“Does too have a handle.”

“Rusty screwdrivers don’t count. You want the twenty?”

“Thirty?”

“Fifteen.”

“You said twenty!”

“You didn’t want the twenty.”

“Give me the twenty.”

This is the way the pawn game is played, day after week after millennium. They want to borrow more. I want to loan less. They have sad stories, most of which contain about as much truth as an Oliver Stone movie. We haggle and moan, and a transaction takes place more often than not.

Twenty years ago, friends and family called me crazy for choosing the pawn business. I had a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Ole Miss, and had gotten several good job offers coming out of school, but none of them appealed to me.

“Those things are nothing but fronts, places where people take stolen goods so they can buy their dope,” the esteemed Judge Grayson Bolton, a.k.a. my father, had proclaimed. He never approved any idea that wasn’t his own, and his scorn only cemented my resolve. It was also the beginning of the end of our relationship.

“They take advantage of the poor. Unconscionable, just unconscionable,” was the summary from my Uncle Walt, professor and dean of some obscure philosophical curriculum at some arcane little New England college.

A litany of similar warnings flowed in from up and down the family tree and all around the circle of friends, but I’ve never been one to let others do my thinking. I did my research and decided it was a business as legitimate as any other, and one with the potential to provide a semi-lucrative living right here in Montello, where I wanted to be. To top it off, it looked like a hell of a lot of fun.

And it was.

At first.

Then the routine set in. The Bill Berners. The countless others like him, the same handful of perpetual hard-luck tales wrapped in slightly different circumstances and regurgitated ad nauseum. Milk for the baby. Medicine for dear old Mama. I used to smile and shake my head as they walked the milk money into the liquor store across the street. It wasn’t funny anymore, just very boring.

I keyed Bill’s loan into the computer, and handed him the ticket to sign. I made a point to do everything really fast, trying to project the message that I was oh so busy this day. He took his copy of the ticket, worked his toothless mouth around a bit, and reacquired me with that eye. Bill loves to tell jokes, none of which are funny. No, it’s worse than that. They’re so un-funny you can’t even make yourself laugh. He was determined to tell one that morning, and I was just as determined not to hear it. Showdown. He opened his mouth, drew a breath—

Ding Dong, said the door chime as another customer walked in. “Come in,” I said.

“Come in, sir,” LungFao said. LungFao’s real name is Larry. LungFao is blond, Caucasian, and tall, and my reason for calling him LungFao wouldn’t make the slightest sense, so I’ll not get into that. He’s the assistant manager of Gray’s Green Cash, Montello’s finest pawn shop.

Bill’s face sagged in defeat and he shuffled toward the door, no doubt shooting the newcomer a look with one of his eyes as they passed.

“Can I help you?” I said to the newcomer, a guy I’d never seen before.

It was early, I hadn’t had so much as a swallow of coffee, and I had already done business with Bill Berner. All those elements combined to weaken my senses, and I had just made the worst mistake of my life.