The Pawn of Winter

My name is Darrell Spock and I'm twenty-nine years old. I drive a crane at the port of New Bristow. Forty hours a week I sit in a glass box eighty feet up, moving containers from ship to shore. It's good money and it's boring as hell, which is why I got a side thing going.

The side thing is cons. Small ones. Nothing violent, nothing that hurts anybody who doesn't deserve it. I've been doing it since I was twenty-one, back in my college days, when I talked a pawnbroker in a college town into paying three hundred bucks for a class ring I "found." It wasn't mine. It wasn't even real gold. That was my first one and it went clean.

Since then I've done maybe a dozen. Pawn shops mostly. A couple of estate sales. I dress decent, I talk decent, I have a sob story for every occasion. Dead mother's ring. Dead brother's watch. Rent due, kid sick, whatever fits. I never use my real name and I never stay in one shop twice.

But this is the truth about me. I'm about to quit all of it. A month from now I take a crane job up the coast, better pay, and I figure I'm done with the grift. Age twenty-nine is too old to be sweating in pawn shops with fake papers. So I wanted one last score. One good one to go out on.

I found it at The Bitter End.

The Bitter End is a narrow bar squeezed between a pawn shop and a dead bakery on Carver Street. Long mahogany counter, worn smooth from forty years of elbows. The regulars all know each other's drinks. I started going there two years back because it was close to the port and the beer was cold.

The bartender is Louise Bryant. She's thirty-one, left some soul-killing retail job at twenty-four to tend bar, and never looked back. She's also friends with the woman who owns the pawn shop next door. That detail matters, so hold onto it.

It was a Tuesday in January. Cold enough out there to crack a brass monkey. I was three seats down from two women talking low at the end of the counter. One was Louise. The other was a woman I'd seen in the shop but never met. Dark hair going silver at the temples. Sharp face. Good hands, the kind that know work.

That was Fran Martinez. She was forty-eight, owned Martinez Loans & Gold since she was thirty-five. I learned all that later. That night I just learned she had a ring worth more than my truck.

"Three grand," she was saying. "Maybe thirty-five hundred if the auction goes right."

"Three grand for one ring?" Louise said. "Whose ring?"

"Old man Kerrigan's estate. His daughter brought it in. White gold, sapphire center stone, diamonds down both shoulders. It's the best thing in my case and nobody's buying it because nobody walks into my shop with three grand in their pocket."

"Put it online."

"I hate the online thing. Too many crooks." Fran laughed at that. I remember thinking, lady, you have no idea what's sitting three seats away from you.

I nursed my beer and listened. Two years of sob stories and fake papers, and here was a mark walking into my own bar. A ring worth three grand sitting in a case twenty feet from a barstool I already owned. It was like the universe handing me a going-away present.

The plan didn't write itself, not yet. I'd bring something in, get her to loan against it, then flip it. Or I'd tell a story that made her trust me and buy the ring low. Honestly, that night I hadn't settled the details. I just knew the ring was the target and Fran Martinez was the mark.

Sebastian Weaver was there too, two stools over, working his pension one beer at a time. Sebastian's fifty-two, retired crane operator, drove at the port from the time he was twenty-two. He knows every crane driver in this city, including me, and he never lets me forget I'm the young punk of the crew.

"You're quiet tonight, Spock," he said. "Quiet means trouble with you."

"Just tired, old man."

"Tired. Sure. You crane drivers, you push one lever and call it work."

"I push forty tons of steel around, Sebastian. What do you do, lift a glass?"

"Damn right, and I do it well!" He raised the glass to prove it.

Louise came down and refilled my pint without asking. That's the kind of bar it was.

"You ever been in Fran's shop?" she asked me. Casual, wiping the counter.

"Walked past it a hundred times. Never been in."

"She's good people. Best landlord I ever had, back when I rented off her. You need anything pawned, she's fair. Fairer than most."

"Good to know," I said. And I meant it in the worst possible way.

Fran paid her tab around ten and Louise hugged her at the door. I watched through the front window as Fran unlocked the pawn shop next door instead of heading home. Lights came on in the back. She was doing books, or sleeping there, who knows. A woman married to her shop.

I sat there another hour doing math in my head. Three grand. Maybe thirty-five. That's real money for a last score. Enough to fly out of New Bristow with zero in my savings and still land soft up the coast. The new job didn't start for almost four weeks. Almost four weeks to run one clean con and vanish.

Here's what I want to write down, because it matters later. That night, before I ever spoke to her, I built the whole thing in my head like it was easy. Sob story, fake ID, clean exit. I'd done it a dozen times. Fran Martinez was just another shop owner with a soft spot and a fat case.

That's what I thought, anyway. I want that stupid confidence on the page because in two weeks it would cost me.

I finished my beer and stood. Sebastian saluted me with his glass.

"Going home, punk?"

"Working early."

"Crane drivers. Always working." He waved me off.

Outside the wind came off the water and went through my coat like it wasn't there. January in New Bristow does that. You dress for it and it finds a way anyway. I stood on the sidewalk between the dead bakery and the pawn shop, looking at the dark window of Martinez Loans & Gold. OPEN 9 TO 6 painted in gold letters, peeling at the edges. Behind the glass, way back in the dim, a jewelry case caught the light from the back room.

Three grand. Maybe thirty-five hundred.

I walked home to my apartment on Dock Street with my hands in my pockets and my heart already running the play. Sob story. Dead mother this time, I figured. Mothers always work. A ring I needed to sell fast, she'd buy it cheap, I'd flip it, done. Or I'd sell her a fake appraisal and buy the Kerrigan sapphire for pennies. I had two weeks to pick.

The next morning I called the union hall and confirmed my transfer. January the twenty-eighth, I start up the coast. That gave me almost four weeks.

Four weeks to walk into that shop, charm a woman I'd never met, and walk out with the best thing in her case.

I spent the day in the crane box running the script in my head, one hand on the joystick, containers swinging under me like they didn't have a care. Down on the dock, the wind was throwing snow sideways off the water. The radio crackled in my ear. Business as usual.

But every time I looked down at the port, at the gray water and the cranes I'd been climbing for six years, I felt that itch you get before a big change. Last score. Then done. Then straight.

That's what I told myself, anyway. Straight after this one. A man my age should stop lying for a living, even part-time.

The crane box is a lonely place. Plenty of time to rehearse a sob story. By lunch break I had it down cold. Dead mother, sick brother, ring from grandma's estate, need cash by Friday. I'd name myself Alec Marvin and I'd wear the gray blazer I keep for jobs like this.

Four weeks. One ring. One last con.

I had no idea what I was walking into. But I'll get to that.

A few days later I went back to The Bitter End early. Off shift, out of the crane box, wearing civilian clothes and a good mood I didn't fully trust.

Louise saw me and grinned. "Well, look who's here before dark."

"Thought I'd spend some of this paycheck before the wind takes it."

Sebastian was in his usual seat, working on what looked like his third pint and it wasn't even six. He nodded at me like I'd passed some kind of test.

And then the door at the back of the bar opened. There's a door at the back that connects, see. Pawn shop on one side, bar on the other. I never paid it much mind before. Fran Martinez came through it carrying a cash bag, and she stopped when she saw me.

"So this is the crane driver," she said.

"That's me. Darrell."

"I know. Louise talks."

Louise suddenly got very busy with the tap handles.

Fran was forty-eight and she didn't look like she was pretending otherwise. Dark hair going gray at the temples and not apologizing for it. She took the stool two down from mine, not next to me, and I filed that away. A woman who leaves a buffer zone knows exactly what she's doing.

"Louise says you're new-ish," she said. "Two years isn't new. But she still calls you the new guy."

"Two years, yeah. Crane at the port. Forty hours a week in a glass box eighty feet up, and then I come here to feel short."

That got a smile. A real one, small, gone fast.

"Crane money's good money," she said. "What do you want with my shop?"

"Who says I want anything with your shop?"

"Everybody who sits where you're sitting and looks at my window when they think nobody's watching." She stirred her drink. "I've owned that store thirteen years, Darrell. I can smell a browser from here."

Sebastian snorted into his glass. "She got you, punk."

"I'm just admiring the architecture," I said.

"Sure you are." She finished half her drink and stood. "Come by sometime. Browse."

And she went back through the door like I wasn't worth a second thought. Which, I figured later, was the first move in a game I didn't know we were playing.

Louise leaned on the counter. "So. What'd I tell you?"

"You didn't tell me she was smart."

"I didn't think I had to."

I went into the shop that Friday. Nine-fifteen in the morning, gray blazer, briefcase with the props in it. The bell over the door did its little dance and Fran looked up from the counter and did not look surprised.

"Well, well. The architect."

"Alec Marvin," I said, and put my hand out. Her handshake was dry and firm and over in a second. "I'm not sure browsing is going to cut it today, actually. I've got something I need to borrow against."

"Loan shop. That's what the sign says. Show me."

I set the wedding cake topper on the glass. Old silver thing, little bride and groom under a plastic arch. My grandmother's, I said. Family piece. Also the ring that went with it, which I did not produce yet, because a good con always holds something back.

"Dead mother story?" she said.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You've got the look. Men with dead mothers come in here every week. Suits too nice, eyes doing arithmetic on my merchandise." She picked up the topper and turned it over. "This is silver plate, Alec. Sixty bucks on a great day, and the great day is not today."

"The ring that goes with it is real."

"Uh huh."

She set the topper down and folded her arms. She was forty-eight years old and I was twenty-nine and standing in her shop getting read like a cheap paperback.

"Let me save us both some time," she said. "You've got two kinds in here by ten a.m. Thieves and liars, and on a good day you're only one of them. Which is it?"

"I'm hurt. I'm just a man with a family heirloom and a cash flow problem."

"And I'm the Queen of Sheba." But she didn't throw me out. She rang up nothing, leaned back on her stool, and studied me. "Sit down, Alec Marvin. You've got a good blazer and a bad story. Tell me the bad story anyway. I could use the entertainment."

So I told it. Grandma, the estate, the ring, the Friday deadline. She let me get all the way through it, nodding in the wrong places, and I knew I was dead in the water by the second paragraph.

"Here's my counteroffer," she said at the end. "You bring me the actual ring, I'll give you actual money. If it's real. Which it won't be."

"And if I just walk out?"

"Then you walk out." She shrugged. "Door's right there. You're not the first and you won't be the last. At least you iron your shirt. Most of them don't."

I walked out and left the topper on her glass, because picking it up felt like admitting it. In the bar that night Louise gave me a look.

"She chewed you up," Sebastian said. "I can see it on you."

"Language was colorful," Louise said.

"Family establishment, I kept it clean." I drank. "She's good. Better than good."

"She's the best," Louise said, and she said it proud, like Fran's record was partly hers.

This is the truth I couldn't say out loud yet. I went home that night and instead of scrapping the plan I started building a better one. And somewhere in the middle of drafting a fake provenance for a ring I didn't own, I caught myself thinking about her folded arms and her dry handshake and the way she said come by sometime like a dare.

That should have been my warning. It wasn't. I'm slow like that.

The cold snap came the following week. Real cold, the kind that makes the port shut a crane line and send guys home. Wednesday, January something, I'm walking down Carver Street and every window on the block is dark except one. Martinez Loans & Gold. And through the glass I can see Fran