Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

changed out of her pajamas.
    “You sure?” she asked. “You know how much soap and everything?”
    “Mama, I’m over thirty. I can wash a few clothes.” He just didn’t like to. Most of the time he could sweet-talk Cherelle into doing it for him, along with the rest of the cleaning.
    “That lazy girl of yours is making you do your own wash, isn’t she?” Miranda’s voice was laced with a mixture of irritation and triumph that no woman treated her son as good as his mother did. “You’re out working two jobs to put food on the table, and she’s lying around eating chocolate and watching daytime soaps.”
    Tim ignored his mother.
    “Huh,” she muttered. “You should kick her out on her no-good ass and find a woman that knows how to take care of a man.”
    “They don’t make ’em like you anymore, Mama.”
    “Huh.”
    Smiling, Miranda hurried into the house, shooed the cat off the counter, and began cooking for her boy.

Chapter 17
    Las Vegas
    November 2
    1:00 p.m.
    R isa hung up the house phone, cursed under her breath, and headed for Gabriel’s Horn before another person with the wrong kind of gold artifacts to sell could interrupt her. She didn’t want to keep Cherelle waiting. Not only would it be rude, it would give Cherelle a chance to do what she did best—attract attention.
    Risa hoped that her friend would look better than she had the last time they met. She’d looked so poor that guilt had closed around Risa’s throat like a fist. She wondered if Cherelle had ever connected the hundred dollars in twenties stuffed into her car’s ashtray with the childhood friend who had taken her to lunch that day.
    If Cherelle had made the connection, she hadn’t ever said anything.
    “Hey, baby-chick,” Cherelle said, standing up with a wide smile when she spotted Risa. “How the hell are you?”
    Risa grinned, hugged her, and stepped back. “I’m just fine, mama-chick. Hey, you look”— worn, hard, angry —“just like you did the last time, and that was almost four years ago. What’s your secret? Women our age are supposed to look over thirty.”
    “Well,” Cherelle said, smoothing invisible wrinkles out of her tight jeans and winking at a nearby man whose eyes followed her hands, “the sex diet works for me.”
    For a moment Risa’s smiled dimmed, then notched up again. Cherelle had never made any secret of her men. Quite the opposite. It was as if she believed that every man she’d had made her that much better than any other woman. When they were younger, it hadn’t mattered so much. But that was many men ago.
    Risa wished that just one of them had made Cherelle happy.
    “I’ll have to give that diet a try,” Risa said lightly. She hooked her arm through Cherelle’s. “Come up to my office. I ordered some lunch for us, but I’ve got several calls out that I don’t want to miss. You want anything from the bar?”
    Cherelle hesitated.
    “My treat,” Risa said, signaling the bartender. If Cherelle’s wallet was as used-up as her clothes, she didn’t have money to spend on luxuries like eating or drinking in a restaurant.
    “Cosmopolitan. A big ol’ double,” Cherelle said to Slim John. When she’d first started drinking in bars, a Cosmopolitan had been the ultimate in sophisticated drinks. She knew that something else must have taken its place among the young and flashy, but she didn’t know what it was.
    The bartender nodded and looked at Risa. “What can I do for you?”
    “You’re new, aren’t you?”
    “This week,” he agreed.
    She smiled. “Welcome aboard. I’m Risa Sheridan, Shane Tannahill’s curator. Send the order up to my office. Sally”—she gestured toward a woman dressed in 1950s beatnik costume who was chatting up a customer—“knows the way.”
    “What about your drink?” Cherelle asked. “Or do you have a bottle stashed somewhere?”
    “I’ve been on short rations of sleep. If I had anything alcoholic, my face would be in my salad.”
    “Oh, baby-chick, what’s happened to you? Time was you could match me drink for drink.”
    “You were right. Education rotted my brain.”
    Cherelle snickered. “Told ya.”
    “You sure did.” Many times. Forget that nerd shit, baby-chick. Mama-chick will teach you all you need to know.
    For a while she had.
    But after Cherelle turned seventeen and left town with a drug salesman, Risa had discovered that she loved books, and especially loved learning about the world beyond Johnson Creek,