"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Sweet Young Things
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch




Art by Laurie Harden
****
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a published author in several genres but readers of
mysteries may not recognize her name since books in her private-eye series starring
Smokey Dalton appear under the pseudonym Kris Nelscott. The latest in that series,
Days of Rage, was published in February 2006 by St. Martin’s Minotaur. Ms.
Rusch, who is married to Dean Wesley Smith, is a former EQMM Readers Award
Winner.
****
Pawnshops were all the same. Crowded with junk, reeking of cigarette smoke,
they always had one guy who hadn’t bathed in a week sitting behind a glass counter.
The counter was the only thing that had been cleaned in twenty years.
Fala rested her palms against the countertop, feeling the warmth of the glass
beneath her skin. Old lights illuminated the jewelry inside. Some of it glistened. Much
of it was as worthless as the junk on the walls—old class rings, Masonic pins, cheap
rosaries—but some of it had possibilities. A garnet ring with emeralds on the side,
clearly 1950s. A Tiffany pin, all gold, shiny and complete. A grandmother ring,
ostentatious with its twenty different jewels, half a dozen of them small rubies.
Estate jewelry. Desperation jewelry. The last of a large lot.
“Sixty-five dollars,” the scrawny guy said, taking the Jeweler’s Eye from his
own. His fingernails were black, and his hair was matted against his skull.
She reserved her shiver of distaste for later. The ring he held was worth four
thousand, minimum. The diamond was an emerald-cut from the 1920s, rare these
days, and the setting was pure white gold.
“A hundred and fifty,” she said.
“Lady—”
“C’mon,” she said, trying to sound whiny. “It was my grandmother’s. I doubt
I’m coming back for it. At least give me something.”
 “A hundred.” The ring clinked as he set it on the countertop.
“I need a hundred and fifty.”
He wouldn’t get a deal like that anywhere else, but then again, he wouldn’t
turn it around that quickly, either. She knew how it worked, maybe better than he
did.
“You’re lucky I’m a soft touch.” He reached the shelf behind the counter,
tapped the old-fashioned cash register, and it opened with the ring of a bell. She
hadn’t heard that sound since she’d been in college.
He handed her seven twenties and a ten, all crumpled, all feeling slightly
greasy. She counted them, forcing her hands to shake as if she couldn’t believe her
good fortune.
Actually, she was making sure each bill was legit. The last time she’d done
this, in Detroit, she’d gotten two counterfeit twenties, all the “unduplicatable” kind.
But the bills she held in her hand this time came from the last century: none of that
phony-color Monopoly money stuff.
She shoved them in her right-hand pocket as he filled out the brown ticket