Rant

Blatant fakes. An 1804 silver dollar or Lafayette dollar. I put a Confederate 1861-O half-dollar under a lens and look for coralline structures and saltwater etching, “shipwreck effects” that might tell me more than the kid’s letting on. I check for microscopic granularity that might come from sea-bottom sand.
    We’re talking coins that haven’t been whizzed and slabbed. Raw coins. Some with nothing except bag marks.
    Allfred Lynch ( Exterminator): Vermin control is not your chosen field for most, but Rant Casey took to it like a roach to cat food. The kid would crawl under houses, into attics, didn’t matter if the job was vampire bats. Snakes, bats, rats, cockroaches, poison spiders—none of it made Rant Casey break a sweat.
    Funny thing, but his physical exam came back positive for rabies. No drugs or nothing, but he had rabies. The clinic took care of it and updated his tetanus booster.
    Todd Rutz: Believe me, I was only pretending to check the blue-book values. I tell him, the Barber Liberty Head half-dollar he’s got, the 1892-O, when Charles E. Barber first minted it, newspaper editors wrote that the eagle looked starved to death. The head of Liberty looked like “the ignoble Emperor Vitellius with a goiter.” While I’m feeding the kid my line, really I’m going over the stolenproperty bulletins for the past year.
    The kid’s looking out my front window. He’s shaking the sock to jiggle the coins still inside. He says his grandmother died and left these to him. Offers that as the only pedigree for his collection.
    Allfred Lynch: Only single problem I ever had with Rant Casey was, every month or so we do random lunchbox checks. As the guys are headed home, we ask to look inside their lunchboxes. Our guys are alone in people’s homes, sometimes with jewelry and valuables sitting around. A random check keeps everybody in line.
    Never found Rant stealing diamonds, but once we popped open his lunchbox and the insides was crawling with spiders. Black widow spiders he’s supposed to been killing that day. Rant says it’s by accident, and I trust him.
    I mean, who’d smuggle home a nest of poison spiders?
    Todd Rutz: The deal ended up, I paid the kid fifteen thousand out of petty cash. Gave him every bill I kept in the safe. Fifteen grand for the 1933 gold twenty, the 1933 gold ten, and the 1879 four-dollar piece.
    When I ask his name, the kid has to think, look around at the floor and ceiling, before he tells me, “I ain’t decided yet.”
    Believe me, it didn’t matter if he lied. Didn’t matter that he refused anything except cash payment. Or that the kid’s teeth he used to untie the sock, his teeth are stained black. Jet-black teeth.
    My point being, just that 1933 gold Saint Gaudens Double Eagle, that’s an eight-million-dollar coin.
    17–Hit Men
    Lynn Coffey ( Journalist): The poet Oscar Wilde wrote, “Each man kills the thing he loves…” Each man except the smart ones. The ones who don’t want to serve time in prison, the smart men used to hire Karl Waxman.
    Tina Something ( Party Crasher): How’d I know what Wax was up to? I couldn’t know. The first night he Tag Teamed me, that Honeymoon Night when Echo ditched me, Wax pulled over to the curb in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT. Painted dark red, Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Rosewood panels in the dash. The headliner is sewed out of Alcantara suede, and the heated seats actually give your butt muscles a constant Swedish massage.
    Wax buzzed down the electric window on my side. I’m still standing on the curb in my pink bridesmaid gown, and Wax waves something floppy and white at me. That’s how Wax introduced himself.
    “Before you touch anything, baby,” he tells me, “you put on these.” It’s latex gloves.
    Lynn Coffey: It’s tragic. Young people seldom purchase these exotic sports cars, certainly not professional basketball or football players. They could never fit in the bucket seats. No, almost all such cars go to older-middle-aged or elderly men who seldom drive them. These Maseratis and Ferraris and Lamborghinis sit garaged for years, like lonely mistresses, hidden from direct sunlight.
    Jarrell Moore ( Private Investigator): As per my investigation, nobody’s 100-percent sure who runs Party Crashing, but it can’t be any single individual. That guy would have to keep track of fouls for every player. Anybody calls three fouls on you inside of two
    months, and you stop getting notified about the next game.