Who: Hanna Pulaski and Frankie Lawson Where: Gold Mine Pawn & Guns When: The day after undead craziness Rating: Low
Hanna was just getting out of work when she got Frankie’s text, and she put plans for an early dinner on hold. She’d wondered how long it would take him to track down a similar weapon to the one she’d been looking at, but it had only been a week at most. She waited until she finished counting the day’s gratuities, folded them into a tight wad and put it in her belt pouch after turning in her clipboard. It had been a light day, probably because of all that nuttiness she’d seen on the eleven o'clock news.
Most of the mess had either been cleaned up or sank back into the dirt where it came from, and she parked her bike in the same spot she’d used the first time she’d come by. There was a meter maid this time, but the bicycle didn’t even attract a second glance. Hanna shut the padlock with a definitive click, looked at the headlines through the Plexiglass of the newspaper box.
The bell over the door jingled, and she stepped into the cooler interior of the pawn shop. “Hope I don’t wake you up from your afternoon doze this time.”
Frankie looked up and smiled. It was a rare afternoon that he wasn’t lagging, but he was still a little overdosed on adrenaline from the real-life creature feature he had lived through and starting to feel a little twitchy with the coming of the moon, so he had been well alert for the entirety of his shift.
“Nah, wide awake, swear it!” Frankie called cheerfully. The day had done well to alleviate his early morning irritation at the world at large and its ability to ignore its own reality; he’d made a tidy sum on a long-shot at the OTB and managed to get the mess out of his clothes at the laundromat. All in all, it wasn’t a bad day.
Hanna’s appearance was doing well to improve it even further. “How’s it going out there, Hanna?” he asked in a friendly tone. “Stayin’ safe on the roads, I hope.”
“Quiet, all things considered. Saw a big pile of something that looked like slag on the way over, but it had been cordoned off for public sanitation. From what was on the news, I thought they’d have to call out the National Guard or at least give the cops riot gear.”
She was the only other person in that afternoon, and she rested one elbow on the counter near the register. “One of my upstairs neighbors got chased through the parking lot by something that looked like a cross between a puma and a gecko. He finally made it up to his apartment since it was too big to manage the stairs.”
A pause, then; “Surprised you called so soon. But I brought the first payment, as promised.”
“Yeah there was a… a weird dog hounding me for a while last night,” Frankied agreed, unsure how deep he should get into it. That she had even noticed what was happening and it registered with her was a good sign; Frankie couldn’t let himself become friendly with someone too far out of the know.
It would just get too messy.
“Hey, I live to serve,” Frankie said, and ducked beneath the counter to find the case containing the weapon she had been looking for. It hadn’t been difficult to source, and a friend he had made at the LVPD through his handler had run the serial number to make sure it was clean. Everything was on the up and up.
He popped open the case to display it for Hanna. “Take a look,” he said. “Unloaded, of course.”
“Of course.”
She picked up the gun by the butt, a little more confidently than she had the first time she was there. Popped out the empty magazine and checked the slide, then the chamber. It had just been cleaned, she could smell the faint odor of gun oil. There was a shooting range not that far from where she lived. She was planning to buy some time there.
The magazine clicked back into place, and she put the gun back in the soft-shelled case. And she wasn’t planning to ask him where to get ammunition. She could tell he was still a little uncomfortable with the whole business of selling guns, even if he was going to make a profit off of the deal. And he seemed, if not entirely knowledgeable about the things that crawled around in the dark, then at least aware that they existed.
Hanna dug a slightly wrinkled envelope out of her back pocket, put it on the counter next to the case. Being a messenger was never going to make her rich, but she still had a good portion of her enlistment bonus available. She’d been raised with an above average work ethic, appreciated the value of money. She pushed the envelope towards him, just past the case’s strap.
“I do like a man that’s efficient.”
Frankie opened the envelope and counted the cash quickly and efficiently. It was the hallmark of his trade to work with large amounts of cash and the task was something with which he was well acquainted. Still, it surprised him; working on the level for a change, he had assumed he’d be getting a money order or cashier’s check. Not that it mattered much -- money was money, and so long as it was going in his pocket, Frankie was happy.
“Everything checked out, with the background check,” he said, then frowned. “Uh, not that I thought it wouldn’t. Just sayin’. No weird blips. In case, you know, you were worried about that kind of thing.”
He fought the urge to just faceplant in the glass top counter and stay there until Hanna went on her way. Ugh.
“Hey, I get it. I could be anybody, right?”
She watched the green bills disappear, burying the smile at all that adorable awkwardness. She would not embarrass him, but the last few days must have jarred something loose, and not in a bad way. It might have even been the weirdness from the night before. If there were enough people who noticed these sorts of things, enough of them that it made a news story, she could get through this. At least once she was finished with what she’d started.
“The pawnshops back home were usually the first places the cops would look if there were a lot of robberies in the area,” she added. “Not everybody’s as honest as you are.”
“Chuck runs a pretty clean shop here,” Frankie reasoned with a nod. The owner of the Gold Mine had always been adamant that everything be above the board: sales strictly recorded, provenance sorted, backgrounds check, and the whole lot. What Frankie did on his own time, well, that was his business. He never laundered cash through the store and kept everything off the record. “Says he can make enough of a living off people coverin’ their debts by sellin’ off Grandma’s silver without having to do anything illegal.”
He leaned over the counter and frowned, reaching up to scratch at the stubble on his chin. “Guess that sounds pretty damn depressing, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe just a little bit.”
She rested her chin in her hand, half-mirroring his posture. Pondered the stack of microwavable meals in her freezer, how long it would take to get back home. Even with all the mess from the night before, people would be headed out for the evening. The loudest of wake up calls lasted only so long.
“So I had a weird idea.”
Hanna straightened up, rubbed a spot on her upper arm. “Would you want to go out sometime, get a cup of coffee? Maybe some dinner?”
Frankie’s blue eyes widened in surprise and delight. He had thought that, maybe… or he had hoped that perhaps… But he had been waiting for the right moment, thinking it would seem off if he had asked for her number -- for personal use rather than to jot down on a form -- before their business had concluded. But if Hanna was game, well…
He smiled, smooth skin crinkling into fine lines at the corners of his eyes. “I’d, yeah, that’d be… I’d like that. Very much.”
She was clearly having one of her good days, because when he smiled at her a small fleet of butterflies started flapping their wings in her stomach. How long had it been since she’d had a date, and a date she’d made the first move for? She liked what she’d seen of Frankie thus far, wanted to get to know him better. Hanna could feel her ears turning slightly pink as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“I could call you in a couple of days? I think I was gonna wait until you asked, but I’ve always been kind of impatient.”
She said it through a smile, a real one, slipped her phone out of her pocket. “We’re short at work for the week since some of the other messengers have decided to take a few days off. Something about discretion being the better part of valor, though if you ask me it’s just being lazy. So yeah, I’ll be busy until the evenings, but I could call you if I just had your number.”
Frankie fumbled under the counter to find a pen and a scrap of paper, dropping two ballpoint pens and a permanent marker in his haste and awkwardly tearing off a pawn ticket to the degree that half was stuck to the pad and the other half crumpled in his hand. He swore to himself under his breath and finally managed to get a good hold on a pink highlighter -- what was that even doing behind the counter in the first place? -- and the back of a flyer advertising a new used car lot.
“That would… I would like that,” he repeated, unable to keep the grin off of his face as he held out the flyer. “This is my personal cell number.”
She took the flyer out of his hand, letting their fingers make contact before drawing back to fold it carefully and tuck it into her belt pouch. Even if it was written in pink, she could read it just fine.
“We can go wherever, I’m not picky. Though there’s some really good ethnic places that serve imported beers. I’ve been trying to expand my palate so that I don’t get used to eating burgers and fries every meal. I asked, though, so you can choose.”
She was probably talking too much, or maybe her sudden loquaciousness was just a mirror of his fumbling around for something to write with. So maybe he didn’t mind.
Frankie immediately perked up. If there was anything he had a good line on in the city outside of the loosest slots and best bookies, it was a great restaurant. His family had been strictly meat-and-potatoes growing up and he had experienced some culture shock when setting out on his own and finding a much larger world of cuisine. He dove in head first and hadn’t surfaced since.
“Ever hit up Zaytoon?” he asked excitedly. “Middle-eastern food. Not the fanciest place in the city, kinda got a diner look to it and it’s inside a grocery shop, but you won’t find better baklava or falafel in the city.”
“Sure! Sure, that sounds...that sounds great.”
She hovered there for a minute, then reached for the case’s strap. Changed her mind before she grasped it, took Frankie’s hand instead. And she really must be having one of those good days, because the first flush of attraction had snuck up on her without her realizing it. No matter what kind of wreck she might still be, she hadn’t forgotten everything.
“I’ll call you in a couple of days. And I’ll bring in the second payment next week. Bye, Frank.”
Frankie gave Hanna’s hand a gentle squeeze and smiled. “Bye Hanna,” he said, glad for the moment that there was at least one thing in his life that seemed to be looking up. “I’m looking forward to that call.”
The bell over the door made its cheery noise as Hanna exited the pawn shop, and she unlocked her bicycle and put the chain in the limited storage space. The early evening sun was warm on her shoulders as she eased into the bike lane, headed towards home. Feeling lighter than she had in a while. One thing in her life that wasn’t fucked up didn’t seem like a lot to ask for at this point.