Pawn Game
Billy Ray was, without a doubt, the absolute worst liar on the planet. A three-minute tale.
Geraldine walked into the Pawn Shop in Chester and pulled the police report out of her coat pocket. The pawnbroker was sitting behind the counter scrolling lazily through his phone. He didn’t look up. “Excuse me,” she said, “I am trying to find my guitar. It was stolen from my home on Tuesday.” She handed him the report.
“Well, I didn’t work Tuesday or Wednesday. My brother was here,” he yawned, appearing to be suffering from acute lethargy. “I’ll go take a look in the back.” He blew out a slightly irritated sigh, and lifted himself from his perch.
“It’s a Martin,” she added, “with one cracked tuning peg and a black leather strap.”
Late Tuesday evening, when Geraldine got home from work, she’d found the front door of her apartment slightly open. She’d cautiously stuck her head into the dark room. “Hello? Anybody in here? Hello?”
She called the sheriff’s office. “I want to report a robbery,” she said.
“Are you hurt, ma’am?” asked the deputy. “Do you need medical assistance?”
“No, I’m not hurt, but I’ve been robbed.”
“When did the incident occur?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t home. Sometime today. The lock on the front door was forced open and my guitar is missing. The thing’s worth over a thousand dollars.”
“Ma’am, just so’s you know, when someone enters a private residence and takes something, it’s called burglary. Robbery is when someone takes something from a person by force.”
Geraldine hesitated. “Um… thanks, but … well … I didn’t call for a vocabulary lesson here – I just need to find my guitar, that’s all.”
“Well, you just sit tight, little lady. Wait there in the house, lock the door , and we’ll send a couple a deputies right on over.”
After questioning Geraldine, the officers looked around her apartment and wrote up a report. “We’ll be in touch with you as soon as we have anything,” they said, not even trying to sound optimistic. After they’d gone, she just sat on the end of her bed a while, drinking a beer and fuming.
Thursday, Geraldine spent her day off driving around to different music stores and pawn shops in the Greenville area; she even went over to Logan and Chester. At the end of the day, she’d walked into the Chester Pawn Shop.
“Well, as I said, I haven’t been here for a couple a days, so I don’t know what’s come in. Give me a minute, though, and I’ll have a look.” He apathetically shuffled to the back room, apparently suffering from a terminal case of sloth. After a long while, he brought out a guitar, a Martin with one cracked tuning peg and a black leather strap. “This it?” he yawned.
Geraldine sat down on a chair and bawled like a baby, she was so relieved. She showed him a receipt as proof that it was, in fact, hers, and then handed him an 8 X 10 glossy studio shot of herself playing it.
“Says here on the tag, it was pawned by a Raymond White, with an address in Logan. You know him?”
“I have a good guess,” she said.
Friday morning, on her way out to her day-job at The Fotomat, she bumped into Billy Ray, her neighbor at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t look at her, he just mumbled, “How’s it goin’, Geraldine?”
She noticed Billy Ray was wearing brand new shoes — yellow high top sneakers, expensive looking, which didn’t seem logical, as he was chronically unemployed and was always complaining about being broke. “Looks like you got new shoes there,” she said. “They look pretty fancy. Air Jordans?”
“These? Oh, yeah … I’ve had these for a while. Just don’t wear ‘em much,” he said. That didn’t bear even the slightest resemblance to the truth.
She looked him right in the eye. “Well, that’s odd, Billy Ray, because they look brand new to me.”
He blinked a couple times, shook his head, fidgeted with his jacket zipper. “Well, gotta go,” he said. “See ya.” He rolled off down the sidewalk on his skateboard before she could say anything more.
Billy Ray White and his cousins were lazy ignorant weasels who never paid for anything if they could steal it. And Billy Ray was, without a doubt, the absolute worst liar on the planet. That’ll prove to be his downfall one day soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow, she thought, as she headed out to the Sheriff’s office with her guitar and a couple of solid leads.
There's a bunch of odd folks in your brain. Let 'em out or they'll start a riot.
))K
Sometimes we have to do our own detective work . .