Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

was the kind of hunch that Shane didn’t want and couldn’t ignore.
    And whatever was wrong, Risa was dead center in the middle of it.

Chapter 19
    Las Vegas
    November 2
    Early afternoon
    S ocks left his neon purple baby in a parking space at a burger joint two blocks away from Joey Cline’s pawnshop. Backpack over his shoulder, jeans sagging around his ankles, Socks strolled past businesses whose windows were about as clean as the gutters outside.
    A wadded-up cigarette pack blew along the cracked sidewalk, driven by a hard, dry wind. The cloudless sky was taking on a brassy sheen that would have been smog in Los Angeles but was just dust in Las Vegas. Socks didn’t really notice any of it. He’d seen it all before, too many times. He’d grown up four blocks from Joey’s pawnshop. Nothing had changed since then except the number of cracks in the sidewalk.
    Nothing much was different in the pawnshop’s windows since his last visit to Joey either. Behind the dusty glass and iron bars there were guitars, amps, Indian jewelry, rifles, TVs, VCRs, DVDs, dirty handguns, and a violin with three strings waiting for someone to get lucky again. Socks gave the pawned handguns a look, but they were all small-caliber. He didn’t want a girly gun. He wanted something a man would be happy to stuff in his pants.
    A friendly little bell tinkled when he opened the front door of the pawnshop. Experience told him that a much less friendly bell was going off in the back room and a video camera in front of the store had started running just to make sure a guy didn’t help himself before Joey came out of the back room to greet the customer.
    The front part of the shop was clean but otherwise like the sidewalk display window—narrow, dingy, and unwelcoming. The light was bad, the counters were old, most of the glass was chipped or cracked or both, and the goods inside the cases were exactly what a cop would expect to find pawned by losers riding the downward curve of their luck into desperation.
    Socks wandered off to the left side of the shop, where he knew the camera couldn’t reach. He leaned over a scarred wooden counter and pressed a button. Two things happened at once. The camera stopped recording, and a panel no wider than his butt opened at the end of the counter. He slid through before the panel could close again.
    “Hey, Joey, it’s Socks!” he hollered.
    A sound came from the back.
    Socks took it as the invitation it probably was. He opened a man-size cabinet that held racks of shotguns and rifles so dirty they would have jammed or blown up on anyone fool enough to load and fire them. He reached between two worn stocks and pushed. A concealed latch at the rear of the cabinet snapped open, the back panel swung aside, and Socks walked into the real business center of Joey Cline’s pawnshop.
    The weapons here were clean, modern, and large-bore. The best of them were cold—untraceable by any cops from city badges all the way to the FBI. Next to a case full of shiny weapons there was a bulletproof display table whose contents would have done credit to Tiffany’s. More than one second-story man had discovered just how little money on the dollar stolen jewels would bring from Joey Cline. On the plus side, Joey paid in cash and didn’t talk to anyone about anything that went on inside the back room, not even his wife.
    Dressed in a dark, oil-stained denim shirt and jeans, Joey emerged from behind a worktable covered by the various lubricants, rags, and tools of a gunsmith’s trade. Joey’s first love was fixing guns until they were as oiled and eager as a hot woman.
    “Hey, Cesar, been a long time,” Joey said, pushing his magnifying goggles up on his head and smiling big enough to put creases on either side of his wispy mustache. “You got something for me?”
    Socks winced. He hated his given name. Everybody called him by his street name except people who had known him before he did time. Joey was one of those people. He and his father and his grandfather had fenced stuff for Socks’s family for years. Ripped them off for years, too, but that was the way it was in this part of town. If you couldn’t steal from strangers, you stole from friends. When it got down to the really short strokes, you stole from kin.
    “Yeah, I got something,” Socks said. “If you make me a good offer, I won’t shop it over at Shapiro’s.”
    Joey shrugged and wiped his hands on a rag that was as black as his hair. “I give you