He stares oddly at my eyes and clears his throat. “What can I do you for?” he asks, with a joking smile.
I am having a hard time understanding him—both from his strange expressions and the fact that he speaks through his nose—so instead of talking, I lay my pack on the floor and crouch to dig inside. My fingers find the bag holding my brigand insurance. The objects I was told to use if I needed to negotiate with them.
I pull it out and, after opening the drawstrings, choose carefully and set a stone on the glass in front of the man. I watch his face attentively as he flinches in surprise and then draws a blank expression over his features. A term my father uses when we play cards pops into my mind: he is using a “poker face.”
“Well, now, what do we have here?” the man asks. He picks up the stone and fits a black spyglass type of lens to one eye. “A gold nugget”—he pulls a measuring stick out from beneath the counter—“measuring almost two inches.” He weighs it in his hand and then places it on a metal contraption, squinting as he reads numbers off a little screen. “Weighs a hundred twenty-five grams.” He peers at it again through the lens. “Low to medium quality, I would say. Well, little missy, today’s your lucky day, because I have just the buyer for this sort of nugget, and I can offer you the top-notch price of five hundred dollars.”
There is something wrong with his face. I lay a hand across Neruda’s head, my thumb pressing one of his temples and my middle finger the other. I grasp my opal as I crouch down to whisper into his ear, “How do you feel about this man?”
The man chuckles nervously. “Do you always consult your dog for your business decisions?” he jibes, and a bead of sweat forms on his brow just below the black pelt.
I stare at him and feel the tingle as I connect to Neruda’s thoughts. Animals don’t think in words. It is my dog’s primal instincts that I Read, and Neruda’s instincts tell me the man cannot be trusted. My dog sees him as an inferior pack member that must be expelled to ensure the security of the others.
I stand and hold my palm out. “My nugget,” I insist, and wait.
The man’s hand trembles slightly. “Let’s not be hasty, girlie. I’ll check my charts and see if I can do any better on that offer.”
I pluck my nugget from his fingers before he has a chance to pull his arm away, and turn his scales around toward me. Placing the gold atop the scales as I saw him do, I read aloud from a shiny strip near the base. “Two hundred grams, not a hundred twenty-five.”
I nod toward a sign I saw when I entered the store. “That says you pay forty dollars per gram of gold. According to your chart, you should be offering me eight thousand dollars for this nugget.” I slip the stone back into its bag.
“Now just wait a minute here, missy. You have no idea what standards the pricing is based on. A gold nugget is not as valuable as gold dust, which is what is melted down to make this high-quality jewelry.” He waves his hand to display the ugly jewelry inside the case.
His eyes tell me that he is lying. That my nugget is rare, and that he desperately wants it. I think of Whit’s satisfaction whenever one of us finds a nugget in the Denali riverbeds. “That may serve us well someday,” he says before ordering us to take it to the shelter and stash it with the rest. Unlike plentiful opals and semiprecious stones, the gold nuggets are hard to come by, and this man’s excitement confirms their value.
“I saw another ‘cash for gold’ sign by the waterfront,” I say, and nestle the bag into my rucksack.
“Stop!” he shrieks. Sweat courses down the sides of his face. “Okay, I’ll give you seven thousand,” he says, pain audible in his tone, “as well as some valuable information.”
I hesitate. “What kind of information?”
“Someone is looking for you,” he responds.
We stare at each other in silence for a minute before I fish the bag back out of my rucksack. He ogles it and licks his lips.
“Talk,” I say.
He walks back to where a red plastic apparatus is attached to a wall. Telephone, I think, as I recall the picture of a similar one in the EB.
The man pulls a card off a board stuck full of scraps of paper and slaps it down on the counter in front of me. On it is printed a ten-digit number, and scribbled in pencil in one corner is “Girl w/star.”
“They were big guys. Dressed in camo,” the man says. “Came in here yesterday saying they would pay top dollar for information on your whereabouts.”
My chest clenches painfully. The man’s description sounds like Whit’s captors, the big men I saw in the fire holding his arms. Why are they looking for me? “What does this mean?” I ask, pointing to the scribbled words.