Bluff City Pawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

just twitching roadkill. Sorry, Barnes, I’m leaving first. He reaches for the phone, but he’ll call Christie from the car. Tell her about Harlan, say sorry for interrupting Cody’s sleep. Forget dinner, but he’ll aim for bedtime.
    He eyes the street. Any danger or demand coming off it is smaller with Harlan here, just a nagging threat or test, only spare-change, peg-legged shakedowns. Here’s a quarter, go get your bang of coke. Just needy scavengers and addicts with diseased mouths and dead legs.
    “If these lights don’t go on, I’ma cut down Joe’s chandeliers.”
    “Maybe you’re supposed to clap ’em on.” Which Harlan does, loud.
    “Hey, quiet there.”
    “What, you scared? This is your place of business. Nobody’s coming anyway.”
    “Oh, yeah? They’ll come. And it ain’t gonna be the church bus.”
    “What you got for me? You got that ho line down the road. Lamar and Getwell.”
    “Oh, they up here, too. Twenty dollars’ll get you a big ol’ lip lock. Too bad y—”
    The lights come on, pieces of darkness burning away, the bulbs buzzing like voices, as if Huddy’s walked into a room where everyone’s saying surprise.

Three
    Joe has a water garden. He already had the pool, a kidney-shaped, in-ground beauty with fieldstone edging, but now the yard’s gone, replaced with pebble paths and paving stones and cantilevered decking and clusters of blooming flowers spearing the air with green. It’s some alternate universe, Huddy thinks, surveying the scenery from the patio, or like some twister had lifted the botanical garden in the city and flung it all the way out here.
    “Ain’t it heaven?” Lorie says, with her hands spread wide to this new paradise, and Huddy wonders if he’s supposed to applaud plant life. “Joe saw a picture in one of my magazines, and then he went out and got all these books on how-to and drew up the design and everything.”
    “When’d this happen?” Huddy says, his throat knotting.
    “Summer.”
    All these months Joe coming into the shop and never saying what got switched and assembled. Not after he looked for TVs—or before when he took a two-carat solitaire, which Lorie’s wearing now, or the ladies’ Rolex, also there. Or the bracelet, the earrings. Huddy looks her over, picking out Joe’s visits. Been married two years, enough time that she can’t wear all of it at once—unless she’s a pawnshop mannequin. Truth is, Huddy likes Lorie more than the other wives, but Lorie likes the jewelry more, so he should like her less. At least Huddy’s lucky with Christie; about the worst he gets is her buying all these trinkets from flea markets and thrift stores and Huddy’s always knocking them over in the hallway. Plus she gets the mall itch too much, but Huddy’ll explain he’s worked too long in a pawnshop to pay retail.
    But this yard project, this refuge. A refuge from what? He’s already in the suburbs, now he’s somewhere else twice. Already gone to White America and now on a private island inside it.
    “He’s setting under the pergola.” She points to the far-left corner, but the corner’s blocked by ferns and shrubbery and shade trees, Joe tucked snug behind the foliage. “Joe!”
    “Yeah?” they hear back.
    “You got your brothers here.”
    “That Harlan, too?”
    “Guess he can see us ,” Harlan says, and he brings fingers to his mouth and whistles.
    “What you doing here?” Joe shouts.
    “Came to smoke your cigars,” Harlan calls and Joe replies, but Huddy can’t hear the words, until he realizes it’s not just the acreage but a sound drowning it. The pool, only it’s too loud for the filter. A water noise, Huddy’s sure of that, past the pool, bigger than a trickle, some rush of water going over rocks.
    “What’s the water I’m hearing?” he says.
    “That’s the stream waterfall,” Lorie says. “It feeds into the pond.”
    “Pond?” Huddy pulls at the sides of his mouth, rubs knuckles against his teeth. Every day