Bluff City Pawn (26 page)

“That’s a sweet story. Call that a cautionary tale. The moral being, go for less. Break the law smaller. Don’t try for an even million—but just about.”

A baby arm swings, the sippy cup knocked off the tray. “Uh-oh,” he says.

“You told me it before,” Huddy says, after Christie bends down to pick what fell.

“Yeah? I thought so. It felt familiar. I was looking at you, wondering if you’d heard it. Why didn’t you say?”

Huddy angles his head, gestures at his motive. “I wanted to see how you told it.”

Later, after Cody’s bedtime, after watching TV in the living room, Huddy turns off the bedroom one and faces her. “How long did he steal cars? Your cousin?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say it like you did.”

She sits up to understand. “You mean, make something up?”

“Tell me how long he stole cars.”

“A year,” she says, but her eyes lift in a giveaway. He shakes his head at her body language. “What’d I do?”

“Not much. You just looked like somebody else. Or trying to be.”

“That’s what you have to do?”

He shrugs, sees her doubt and fear, her arms wrapping her stomach. The door is closed, the blinds drawn. The back porch light, set on a timer, casts shadows on a window. Dirty clothes tumbled in a dark corner, stray papers on the bureau, disorganized. A phone on a nightstand that if you stared too long, would ring.

“Don’t,” she says.

“I’m already.”

“Well . . . don’t,” her voice nervous, stammering.

“The alternative being?” He stares ahead, at the red light on the TV indicating Off. “Maybe I could tell ’em that Harlan wanted to join the Army. He went to the woods to enlist, but nobody was there. I already told you, it’s too much blame. ’Sides, they won’t find anything.”

“They’ll surprise you. And then they’ll find it. You’ll get in more trouble.” She shakes her head hard, as if she were answering a list of questions.

“I didn’t steal a thing. Just bad bookkeeping, but they won’t penalize me for that. Now I’m liable for what Harlan done.” He’s tired of defending himself for Harlan, or what he forgot to do himself. He wants to answer differently,
be
someone different.
I stole cars for one year
. No, he changes himself better.
I never stole cars
. Ain’t responsible for cars getting stolen.

Outside a dog barks at a dog that’s barking from inside the next house. They listen for a noise from the crib, a thump or cry. The barking dies down, stops. The commotion out front is nearer to the baby’s room, not enough to wake him, but they both lie still. He gives a second look at the red dot.

“I’ll tell you something else about Bobby,” she says. “About his wife. She moved to Florida because she was part deaf and she always wanted to live by the ocean, because water was the only nature noise she could hear. Couldn’t hear the birds, but water came in fine. So now she’s on a houseboat and she gets to hear it all day.”

He’s watched her—noticed a small eye-shift on a mostly signless face, and her voice sounds sure, her words authentic. “You just made that up,” he says, but he’s guessing.

“It’s true.” She stares right at him.

“Yeah?” He tries to glimpse what’s invisible.

“True story.” She blinks. “Just not about him.”

“Who about?”

“Someone I used to work with.
Her
cousin.”

“She married someone on a houseboat?” Because he can’t follow where she is, what she means.

She smiles at his confusion and her own act. “No, my cousin’s the one that lives on the houseboat. Her cousin’s the one that’s part deaf. Bobby’s single, far as I know.”

“So . . .” He’s stuck between stories. Or inside one story that’s inside another one. “You just came up with that ocean bit?”

“No, Huddy. That part’s true. She lives on the Gulf Coast. I was just telling different water.”

Huddy laughs at her adjustments, the switched geography, the borrowed lives and different sources. “Different parts of the same. Of course, that depends on which coast that houseboat sits on.”

“I guess I don’t know that either. Suspect it was somewhere in the Keys.”

“Oh, I know which side,” Huddy says.

“You do?”

“Sure.” He knows this part by heart, can say it honestly. “The right side.”

He lies back, exhausted. He imagines he’s in a car, stealing through darkness, the headlights broken and no traffic and the road so dim he can’t see past the hood, and then a light brightens behind on a highway shoulder and flashes in closing pursuit. His eyes open, his mind comes back. Her hand covers his, he feels its weight, and she stares up at the ceiling, then over to the glowing window. Another barking fit, inside and out, from the window and the street, the same dog and a different one. The noise passes. He rests again. He sees himself, in the next vehicle. Floating offshore, a deaf man on a houseboat. And the questions are called from a distant island and as silent as the water all around him.

“Hey,” she says.

He’s almost on a boat, then not. A voice, a light scratch on his skin. He opens his eyes and he’s not away. No water, no wind, just himself.

“Don’t go to sleep.”

“No?”

“Not yet,” she says, and her body curls sideways.

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was
dreaming
, but I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh, yeah?” She smiles.

“I don’t fall asleep till the middle of the night. Not till I’ve been dreaming for hours.”

“Now
you’re
the one confusing.”

“I’m just playing,” he says. “Or maybe I’m sleepwalking.” His eyelids drop low, a zombie hand comes out and she swats it laughing. He tries again and she lets him touch. She pulls him close, clutching. He kisses her, she breathes on his neck, seizes his shirt, and now it’s early and they’re both awake.

They drive up in two unmarked Chargers. Nine a.m. sharp to meet him at opening, but he’s been here hours, earlier than ever, but it’s never felt later, because he can’t go backward, reverse yesterday, rewind the month, redo the log-in when he first saw the selector switch and wrote nothing, called no one. He’s never been to the shop before six, but he woke up near five with a problem in his head as if he’d dreamt it from the dead of night: Joe took two guns, but Harlan took one. The imbalance of the theft, he couldn’t imagine Harlan taking less, worried Huddy through the house and out the door—speeding over, he remembered Harlan wanting to spin that Colt in the gun room. But when Huddy got inside the shop and the locker, and pulled the wooden tray from the top shelf, he saw the Colts all there, the pistols flipped to face each other, trigger guard to trigger guard, right angles undisturbed. But his heart still raced—there was something that Harlan or someone else had done with guns that he didn’t know about. He checked his watch: enough time for an inventory. He grabbed his gun book beneath the loan counter and returned to the racks and shelves and started counting (trying to rush carefully so the ledger lines wouldn’t blur and jump), the contents of the locker and then the various safes, and when he finished, the totals matched. At least there were two questions Huddy wouldn’t get today: “Where’d that gun go?” and “Where’d that gun come from?” None too few, and none too many. Even the absent AK corresponding, invisible in two places. His mind, for an instant, at rest. He nods, tells himself he knows everything. Minutes before nine, the morning hours feeling like a footrace, and he goes to the bathroom, splashes water, unclings his shirt. He readies himself at the loan counter. A chair but he can’t sit. He searches the
Appeal
and finds the article, not on the front page or even the front of the local, but tucked inside, at the margin, a small brief beneath the
crime report
heading, with no information that the police didn’t say prior, except for the final sentence:
The identity of the shooter was not immediately released
. He’s surprised that Harlan is unnamed, but he’s more surprised that there isn’t a photo, since he’d already pictured it in his mind.

Three agents. Two or more is trouble. Never dealt with this much manpower before, which means this team isn’t assembled for compliance but for criminal. Huddy knows this ain’t no knock-and-talk assignment,
We have a problem, can you clear this up?
They’ll close him down for the day. The dress code isn’t street clothes like previous visits, but slacks, white polo shirts, jackets. Like aggressive auditors. They look somewhere between accountants and him. Huddy half-recognizes one of the agents from the last inspection. The same man but in different clothing, and he now plays a lesser role, as assistant to the lead agent, who’s the oldest and flashes a badge and says, “Good morning, we’re from ATF.”

Huddy ready to be a kid, Yessir, yessir.

They cross the room, the lead agent in the middle, the others alongside and a step behind.

“We’re gonna need to see your bound book and your 4473s.”

Huddy nods, sure thing. Check my pockets, check my house, ask me my favorite color.

“We’re gonna secure the area.” His finger moves left and right, his voice important enough to shut down streets.

That’s okay, too. Go lock my door. Staying open isn’t an option anyway. Alone with them, he won’t be able to hardly function, and Huddy already postponed his appointments.

He opens the file cabinet and removes the stack of sold forms, and hands them over the counter to the youngest agent, who looks straight out of the military, a fact-finding rookie who’ll write Huddy up for everything, justify his pay. Huddy hands the gun book to the one he sort of knows. Doesn’t say, “My books have always been straight with you,” because being on good terms means nothing. Last audit, Huddy offered coffee, which the man rejected, “No thanks,” his voice polite but firm, but this time Huddy won’t say coffee. Today, coffee is bad conversation, a drink is a bribe. These three won’t take a glass of water. Packed their own lunch, their own beverage, and all they want from Huddy is a chair, a table, a light. And Huddy doesn’t need coffee either, the adrenaline like a third cup in his veins, but he’d sure like water, without them sensing his thirst, because his mouth is chalk-dry.

“We’re gonna do a count of the inventory,” the lead agent says.

Huddy swings open the counter door, brings them back, let’s all go where the guns are. Can’t be on their own with his toys. A small office beside the locker, and Huddy shows them to places where they can work. He retreats, positions himself close enough to be of help interpreting or finding, but only if they ask. The youngest agent takes the yellow sheets to the table, sets them down beside his pad, where he’ll write up errors. Forgotten dates, forgotten signatures, middle names only initialed, the state abbreviated where you’re supposed to write Tennessee full. The two others gang up on the physical inventory, the oldest one counting the open entries in the book, the middle one counting the guns in the inner room.

“Where else do you have guns?” he asks, when he’s finished there, and Huddy opens the back safe, walks to the showroom to open the front one (which he’d relocked moments before, to hide his nervous inventory just ahead of them), and declares his counter gun and his carry gun. And then it’s simple accounting, guns taken off racks or out from safes, chambers checked and the guns carried over and placed beside the book. Match the stock number on the ticket to the stock number in the ledger. One agent hash-marks the open entry, the other flips the gun tag over. The biggest noise is the sound of paper turning. Huddy tries to keep busy, kills time by pulling merchandise for sale, pricing stuff out. The phone rings to the answering machine. Maybe a brother calling for bail or information, but Huddy can’t supply either now.

A knock at the door, and Huddy walks up front and sees a pawner and he yells to him from the middle of the room, “We’re closed.” He hears a muffled reply, and he shakes his head and hand, not to say or hear more through glass. The mail lady can come in, but the rest of the outside world stays on the street. He turns around to the loan counter, where the newspaper is hidden, and he’s not gonna search online for an update. He imagines Joe hearing the story somewhere and not knowing his involvement—unless Harlan called him to get out of jail. Otherwise, it’s just some crazy, anonymous AK shooter, a danger to the community that’s not his.

Huddy walks back to the larger room and sees a problem form already set aside, the agent hunched over with his elbows on the table, scribbling a sentence at the top of a clean pad. There’s no way you can keep years of forms without errors. Huddy doesn’t necessarily mind if there’s a few mistakes (not a lot, but maybe enough so they can yell at him for that, make his life hard
that
way, feel good about making a showing)—as long as they’re small ones. Clerical errors that are easily fixable,
Call this guy, he needs to come back and sign here
. But Huddy doesn’t want some important box left blank, a forgotten X or one X-ed wrong,
Yes, I’m a fugitive from justice.

“When was your last audit?” the agent asks, and they already know the answer, so he’s asking the simple question to register how he talks truth and see later how he deviates.