Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

the most impressive piece of gold.
    It was a heavy gold sculpture shaped like a bent totem pole. Its base started out as a man’s head repeated three times in a design that spiraled up from the bottom, which had a wooden core. At the point where the faces would have wrapped around each other to repeat the design, they flowed upward into another spiraling shape that suggested three long-necked birds or snakes, which spiraled into three wolves, and then the wolves flowed into a rutting bull three times repeated, always spiraling upward like a dream or a nightmare until the design ended in a bird’s thrice-sculpted head whose staring eyes were human skulls and from whose thick beaks dangled limp human figures.
    “Man, whatever they were smoking really fucked with their minds,” Cherelle said, rubbing the goose bumps on her arms. “Hooo- eee .”
    But the eerie, bent totem pole was gold. Even though half of it was filled with some kind of wood, the gold itself had to weigh four, maybe five pounds. That, and the gold neckring she had belted the old man with, accounted for maybe a quarter of the weight of the whole treasure. The golden knife with the odd curved shape and the gem-set gold sheath were no lightweights either.
    The rest of the gold was pretty much jewelry—armbands or bracelets, a finger ring for a woman with symbols incised inside its broad interior, fabulous pins as big as her hand. Only one of the pieces was set with stones. Others had enamel that gleamed as bright as any gem. Most of them had designs or symbols that made her head ache when she tried to follow them.
    She didn’t need that. Her head had been screaming like a pig since the channeling session with Virgil.
    She was grateful that other than being creepy, handling the gold now didn’t burn her the way she vaguely remembered being burned when she grabbed the biggest neckring and clobbered the old man. But she wasn’t going to think about that. She didn’t like remembering what had happened a few hours ago, so she concentrated on the treasure.
    The six collars or neckrings or whatever could have been choker-type necklaces, but they would have been a bitch to put on and take off. Then there were the figurines of animals or demons or body parts or whatever. Each statuette could have fit in her hand, yet the detail on some of them was enough to give her eyestrain trying to figure out what it meant.
    But the pieces of gold that really excited her were the heavy sculpture that reminded her of a totem pole, the piece that looked like a small gold jug with a hinged lid, the oddly curved dagger in a golden sheath, and the mask of a man or a god or a devil whose bleak, empty eyes always seemed to be watching her no matter where she stood in the motel room.
    Creepy or not, it was quite a haul. As far as she was concerned, the gold artifacts were as good or better than anything in one of Virgil’s books.
    That meant money, pure and simple and very sweet.
    Thinking about money, looking at the gold, she fiddled with a long blond curl that was part of her painstakingly casual hairdo—three-quarters swept up and the rest dangling, tempting a man to toy with the locks and the skin beneath. The curl she was winding around her finger usually lay in the shadowy cleavage revealed by the deep V neck of her red sweater, which strained over her chest until her sheer black bra showed through beneath the knit. The sweater was tucked into jeans so tight they should have split. The soles of her scuffed white sling-back heels were shadow-thin. She swore if she stepped on a coin she could tell the date it had been minted.
    Absently her fingers tested her belly and her butt. Gravity might be winning the battle of the bulge, but she still had a body that turned heads and made men happy to buy her a drink or a bit of blow. In fact, she could use more of the white stuff right now. Her head was killing her. Even some more cheap crack would be okay.
    Too bad the cocaine was gone to the last speck. Not that there had been enough of it for two anyway. Tim wouldn’t be happy that she had smoked it, but he would survive. He probably wouldn’t even notice until it was too late to get mad.
    She glanced out the window into the parking lot, where gaps in the pavement ran like thin black snakes across the sun-bleached macadam. Tim should be back with breakfast—and Socks—any minute. Then there would be hell to pay, and cocaine in any form wouldn’t have anything to do with