Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

spent a lifetime throttling.
    “When you finally lose it, you really lose it,” Tim said, eyeing her warily. He bent over, picked up the thick gold neckring Virgil had given to Cherelle, shoved it in the wooden box, and slammed on the lid. “C’mon. We gotta get out of here before it’s light enough for people to see us.”
    “What . . . ?” She looked up, shook her head sharply, and glanced around. “Where’s Virgil?”
    “Where do you think? You hit him hard enough to knock him halfway down the trail.” He dragged her upright. “Why’d you do it?”
    She shook her head again, but nothing made sense. “Do what?”
    “Kill him.”
    “I didn’t!”
    “Hell you didn’t. I saw it. He handed you that chunk of gold, and you knocked him ass over teakettle.”
    “Chunk of gold? What the hell are you talking about?”
    Impatiently Tim reached beneath the wooden lid and jerked out a thick circle of gold. The light of dawn flowed over the braided chains of metal, light flowed around gold, into it.
    And it glowed.
    “This,” he said, shoving the gold under her nose.
    Slowly Cherelle focused on the neckring. Her eyes widened. She had seen pictures of jewelry kind of like this in one of Virgil’s old books. It was the sort of stuff museums loved, which meant it was worth money.
    Maybe a lot of it.
    Tim dropped the gold back beneath the wooden lid, put his hand between her shoulder blades, and shoved.
    “C’mon. We gotta get out of here.”
    Together they hurried down the steep, narrow trail. All around them the first spears of daybreak were pushing away the darkness. The sunrise didn’t make Cherelle feel much better. Between the fingers of bright light, stark pools of shadow remained. They were blacker than the bottom of a well.
    “You sure about Virgil?” she asked.
    Tim dragged her off the path, through the brush, and turned on the old man’s pencil light. “What do you think?”
    Pinned by the narrow beam, Virgil lay in a pool of shadow. He was on his back, eyes open, staring at the dawn he would never see. Brush surrounded him.
    “I think he’s dead,” Cherelle said as she edged back toward the path.
    One way or another, Tim had seen enough sudden death to know exactly what it looked like. “Oh, yeah. He’s meat.”
    She blew out a hard breath and forced herself to think. She really had killed Virgil.
    Shit.
    On the other hand, he wasn’t the first. She had skated on that other one. Cops wrote it off to a drug buy gone bad. She would skate on Virgil, too. Besides, she hadn’t meant it, not really, not either time. It had just happened.
    And by the time anyone stumbled over the body, there wouldn’t be much left. Coyotes howled from every ridge and prowled all the shadows for food.
    Oh, yeah. He’s meat.
    “What else is in the box?” Cherelle asked.
    “Nothing. C’mon.”
    “There’s gotta be something else. I know it.”
    “There’s cops, that’s what. You want to be caught with a corpse, you go ahead and hang around. Me, I’m gone.”
    “Wait. There’s gold. Goddamn it, there’s more gold!”
    He started to tell her she was nuts, saw the flat look around her eyes and mouth, and knew she wouldn’t listen to what he said.
    Fine. Fuck her.
    Tim headed off down the rest of the trail without looking back.
    “Boxes,” she muttered to herself. “Virgil said something about boxes. What was it? Think, damn it, think!”
    Not one of them could tell me what was in the boxes under my bed.
    Under his bed.
    Cherelle took off down the trail, passed Tim, and kept going with a speed that left him scrambling. The front door to Virgil’s cabin was unlocked. As far as she knew, it always had been. A man who rode an old bicycle to town and wore clothes a ragpicker wouldn’t own didn’t have any reason to lock his door.
    She shouldered her way through the opening and went straight to the bedroom just off the living room. From the look of the bed, he hadn’t slept in it last night. He wouldn’t tonight either, unless death was another kind of sleep.
    That thought was too close to her nightmares when she was surrounded by black nothing and yet still awake, still aware, screaming. With grim haste she went down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. Shoes, a tangle of cloth that could have been underwear or a washrag, dust.
    And two wooden boxes.
    She pulled out the first one, opened it just enough to see the gleam of gold, and slammed it closed.
    “What the hell do you think