Free Bad Blood by S. J. Rozan

right through some of the farms that had looked so timeless and sure from the hills. Not a few farmers had retired to Florida on what the state had paid for the fields I was driving through. Asphalt was a cash crop, up here.
    I turned off 30 onto a narrow road that lead up into the hills past Breakabeen. The shop I was headed for was a few miles outside town. Town was a post office, a bar, a grocery, a Mr. Softee, and a dozen houses strung out along a crossroads.
    Just beyond the point where the last of the houses disappeared behind me there was a road leading up to the right—probably a driveway masquerading as a road, like mine. Faded script letters on an arrow-shaped sign told anyone who cared to know that The Antiques Barn was a half mile up.
    The first hundred yards was respectable, but after that the road was badly kept, full of potholes and mud. The Acura had good suspension—the old ones did—but I wouldn’t cut a diamond in it, even on the highway. I was glad to get out of the car onto ground that wasn’t moving.
    The Antiques Barn was a real barn, big, with flaking red paint and double square doors wide enough to drive a combine through. Those doors weren’t open. Neither was the person-sized door cut into one of them, but it gave when I turned the knob. As it opened, it rang a set of sleigh bells hung on the jamb.
    I stepped over the high wooden threshold into a dusky, dank room where plates and pitchers, candlesticks and jewelry, walking canes, hats, boots, and thousands of books lay in piles on wooden furniture of every description. The piles had an air of having been undisturbed since time began. Each piece, including the furniture, bore a square ivory-colored tag with a number written on it in a spidery hand.
    The room went on forever, disappearing into the dusk, and it seemed I was alone in it. “Hello!” I called into the aged air. Nothing happened. Maybe in here nothing ever happened. I called “Hello!” again, louder; then went back to the door and rattled it, ringing the sleigh bells again and again.
    I stopped because I thought I heard a voice. I listened, ready to go back to my sleigh bells; but I was right. Faintly, from somewhere beyond a clutch of stuffed chairs in the center of the room, came words, and with the sound came movement, a figure shuffling toward me out of the primordial twilight.
    “Yes, yes!” it muttered as it inched along, placing objects from a pile in its arms onto bureaus and bookcases like a glacier depositing rocks. “My, my!” The figure came very, very slowly to stand before me. It was the figure of a man, round for the most part. His age was unguessable, as was the actual color of his hair, now a thick dust gray.
    He squinted up at me over dusty glasses that seemed to have been forgotten at the end of his nose. “You must learn to curb your impatience, young man. It will get you nowhere in life.”
    “I’ve been there already,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”
    He sniffed, “Well,” he said. “Well. An impatient young man like yourself hasn’t come here to browse. You’re looking for some particular item. Yes; you know precisely what you want. Not for yourself; a gift most likely, for someone who”—he peered at me intently—“who assuredly would rather have you at home by the fire than running all over hell-and-gone seeking out the perfect gift. But you won’t hear of it, so we’ll say no more about it. What was it you wanted?”
    I stared at him. “Old silver,” I said. “Was that just for me, or can you do it all the time?”
    “Some people,” he sighed. “Some people could benefit; but they won’t learn.”
    He turned and moved off with the speed of an acorn becoming a mighty oak. I followed. Luckily we were only going around a glass-doored breakfront to an alcove where wooden shelves were piled high with platters, plates, and carving knives, teapots and baby spoons. I don’t think it took us more than an hour to get