Free Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) by Alyssa Day

was just getting so stressed out by the whole thing that I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. And you, you poor thing. I’m so sorry this happened. Are you okay?”
    She rushed over to hug me, and I smiled. Any minute she’d be offering to make me cookies. She and Aunt Ruby were firmly in the “food equals love and comfort” camp, and they were both always giving me recipes for casseroles that would feed twelve people. I’d eaten lasagna for a week and a half the last time I’d tried out one of Eleanor’s favorites, and I hadn’t even been able to look at a lasagna since then.
    “If you don’t want to talk about it…”
    I sighed. I really didn’t want to talk about it, but she had the right to know, especially since a murderer or murderers might be targeting the pawnshop. I sketched out the story, expecting her to get scared and quit any second.
    She surprised me—she got mad instead. On second thought, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The expression “steel magnolia” was coined for a reason, after all, and the women of Dead End personified it.
    “If some low-life murderer thinks he’s coming after us, he has another think coming. I’m armed .” She retrieved her giant purse out of the big drawer behind the main counter, reached in, and pulled out a Glock.
    Of course she had a Glock. My head started to hurt again. “You know how to use that properly, right, Eleanor?”
    “More or less,” she said vaguely, waving it around, which didn’t help my peace of mind one bit.
    I sighed. “Just put it away, please. The bus should be here any minute.”
    She started back for the drawer, but I held up a hand. “In the locked storage closet, please.”
    We had to have a secure place to keep customers’ items, and that room had a solid steel door and a very good lock, with a keypad, even. Jeremiah’s motto had been “You can never be too careful with OPP”—OPP being Other People’s Property.
    The pawn business was a pretty straightforward one, mainly specializing in short-term loans for people who don’t have the kind of collateral that banks want. If John Doe has a house, he can get a mortgage. If he has a laptop or Grandma’s pearl necklace or maybe even a taxidermied alligator, he goes to a pawnshop. We loan customers what we think the item is worth at resale value, and they leave the item with us for the term of the loan. Ninety days is the most common term among our customers, and usually around eighty percent of them do come in to redeem their property by paying us back the loan amount plus interest. If they elect not to come back, because they’d rather have the money than their items, or they just don’t have the ready cash to do so, we keep the item and sell it in the shop to recoup our investment.
    Sometimes, people just came in to sell us unwanted items that we could then sell, and most of the odder curiosities in the shop were from Jeremiah’s well-known penchant for buying the weird and the unusual. Don’t even get me started on how hard it was to dust some of that stuff. The voodoo doctor’s skull collection had creeped me out hugely when I was a teenager. I’d never been so happy to sell anything, even though we took a loss on it.
    There’s just not a huge market in used skulls these days.

Chapter Eight
    I heard the under-oiled brakes on the Golden Years Swamp Tours bus out in the parking lot, right on schedule. The GYST was a very popular day trip for senior citizens in Orlando with their families, who’d had more than enough of the theme parks. There was only so much giant mouse you could take when you were older than twelve.
    We had a deal with Mr. Holby, the gregarious tour operator, to swing by after their mornings at the airboat swamp tour place. We paid him fifty dollars every time he brought a bus by, and his passengers got to spend money on things they didn’t need and enjoy the “authentic Florida swamp town pawnshop experience.” And of course we