Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

the best deal I can and still stay in business. You know that.”
    “Uh-huh.” Socks knew that Joey gave him as little as he thought he could get away with. Nothing personal. Just the way things were.
    Joey knew the game, too. Dumb lumps like Socks were a big part of the pawnshop’s profit margin, but the lumps came back again and again because they were just clever enough to want to stay out of jail. Joey had never snitched off anyone. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was only to stay out of jail himself. Nothing personal. Just the way things were.
    Socks shrugged off his backpack and reached inside. The first thing he pulled out was one of the figurines that looked kind of like a buck with a nice spread of antlers. The designs on the body were so tiny they made Socks dizzy trying to figure them out. So he didn’t look at them.
    He held the figurine about a foot above Joey’s oily palm and opened his fingers. “What do you think of this?”
    Joey grunted as the surprising weight of the metal smacked into his palm. He knew right way it was either lead or gold. Nothing else felt that heavy for its size, yet almost soft to the touch. His heart quickened. He pulled the goggles over his eyes and flipped the figurine over in his fingers, looking for any sign that it was a gold-plate job.
    Even magnified, the etched designs were so dense that he felt like his eyes were crossing when he tried to look at them.
    He repeated the inspection. Slowly. It was like looking into one of those fractal screen savers his nephew loved, with a design repeated in smaller and smaller sizes but never ending, never still, and always staying the same. No beginning either. Just . . .
    He swallowed and closed his eyes so his head stopped spinning. Just plain weird was what the figurine was. But there wasn’t any sign of gold plate rubbed thin enough to show base metal beneath. Nor did he see any sign of the bubbles and pits bad plating often showed as it wore down over time.
    “So someone plated a lead figure with low-karat gold,” Joey said finally. “Big fucking deal.”
    But he didn’t offer to give back the piece.
    “Blow it out your ass,” Socks said. “That’s solid gold.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I just know.”
    “You just know. Uh-huh. Like when did you get to be a big-deal gold expert?”
    Socks had expected this. It was part of the bargaining process. And because he was just smart enough to know that he wasn’t as smart as Joey, Socks had lined up his arguments ahead of time. No way he was going to be sent off with a hundred bucks for all the gold and a pat on the head for free.
    “If you can’t tell real gold, that’s your problem. Gimme that. Shapiro knows real gold when he sees it.”
    Joey’s fingers closed over the figurine. Shapiro was a few short steps up out of the gutter. Joey often resold really high-end stuff to him at a hefty markup. Shapiro resold it to Nance or Cochran or maybe even Smith-White, who traded it off to New York or Dallas or L.A., where he could turn it around in one of his fancy shops for ten or fifty or a hundred times what the original thief had been paid.
    “Don’t go off half-cocked,” Joey said. “Maybe you better tell me what you think Shapiro will pay you that I won’t.”
    Satisfaction rearranged Socks’s dark features into the kind of smiling geniality that made his surges of brutality all the more unexpected. “Oh, I think he’ll go a yard on this.”
    “A thousand dollars for this?” Joey scoffed. “Man, you’re smoking crack.”
    “A yard,” Socks said.
    “ ‘A yard,’ he says,” Joey mocked. “Kiss mine. I’ll go three hundred, but only because we’re old friends.”
    That was three times what Socks had expected, but he was already reaching for the figurine and couldn’t pull back in time.
    Joey had no such problem. He jerked the piece beyond the other man’s reach. “Okay, okay. Four hundred.”
    Socks was so surprised at the price he couldn’t even talk.
    “What do you say?” Joey asked.
    Silence came while Socks tried to wrap his brain around the idea of four hundred dollars for this crap. Maybe Tim’s bitch knew what she was talking about.
    “Man, you’re killing me here,” Joey said. “Six hundred, and not one fucking cent more, and only because we go back so far, understand?”
    Socks nodded.
    The figurine vanished into Joey’s pocket. “Got any more, or was it a one-off?”
    Socks started to say he had been talking about