They Sold Me For Rice

Chapter 6: The Ring That Burned

The warehouse agent was called Gary Pruitt, and he arrived forty minutes late in a car that smelled of fast food and cheap air freshener.

"Sorry, sorry," he said, jogging across the cracked asphalt with a ring of keys in his fist. "Traffic on the bypass. You said you wanted to see the old cold storage place?"

"I did."

Gary looked at him properly then, at the duffel bag, the creased shirt, the face of a man who had not slept well. His smile wobbled. "Right. Well. Let me warn you, it needs work."

It needed more than work. Lucas stood in the yard and looked at it, and what he saw was exactly what the photographs had promised. Weeds up to his knees. A chain link fence sagging in two places. Rust bleeding down the loading dock doors in long orange tears. The building itself sat in the middle of all this like a grey tooth, flat roofed and windowless on three sides.

It was beautiful.

Inside, it was colder than the air outside, which was the whole point of it. Gary's flashlight swung across concrete walls nearly a foot thick. Three walk in freezers, doors hanging open. A raised office with a staircase. A drainage channel cut into the floor. Somewhere above them a pigeon shifted in the rafters and went still.

"Eleven months on the market," Gary said, his voice echoing. "The owner's in Arizona, wants it gone. Asking one eighty five, but honestly, between you and me, he'd listen to offers."

One eighty five thousand. Lucas had thirty one thousand, four hundred, and nine of that was already sitting in the hidden account.

"I can't buy it," he said.

"Oh." Gary's shoulders dropped. "Sure. No problem. If you want to look at other units, I've got a place by the rail yard that's smaller—"

"I'll lease it."

"Lease." Gary blinked. "He's not really set up for leases."

"He's been set up for nothing for eleven months." Lucas walked to the nearest freezer, ran a palm along the steel frame, felt the cold bite into his skin. "Eighteen hundred a month. Three year term, with an option to buy at the end. I'll pay six months upfront, in cash, today."

It was a lot of money for a man in a wrinkled shirt. Gary clearly thought so too, and for a moment Lucas saw the suspicion cross his face. Drugs. Laundering. Something.

"May I ask what you plan to use it for?"

"Storage."

"Storage of what?"

Lucas turned and looked at him, calm and patient. "Does it matter?"

It was the way he said it, perhaps. Gary hesitated, rubbed the back of his neck, and pulled out his phone. "Let me make a call."

The call took twenty minutes. The owner argued, Lucas gathered, then sulked, then accepted. By the time Gary hung up, the sun had slid low and gold through the broken windows, throwing long bars of light across the floor.

"Twenty one hundred," Gary said. "And he wants a year upfront."

"Nineteen hundred. Six months. And I want the keys tonight."

They settled at two thousand a month and eight months upfront. Sixteen thousand dollars, nearly half of everything Lucas had. He counted it out of the hidden account with his thumb hovering over the transfer button, and for one cold second he thought: what if you're wrong?

What if the sky never cracked open? What if it was all a dream, some stress breakdown, a sad little fantasy of a man worn out by his in laws?

Then he reached into the air beside him and pulled out a pen.

Gary did not see it. The agent was too busy squinting at his own phone. But Lucas felt it against his fingers, solid and real, the proof that he was not insane, and he signed the lease with it.

The keys were heavy and cold. Gary shook his hand, wished him luck, and drove away fast, as if afraid the offer might be withdrawn.

Lucas stood alone in the yard until the dusk came down.

Sixteen thousand for the building. That left fifteen thousand and change, plus the car sale, plus whatever else he could scrape together. Not enough. Not nearly enough to fill a building that size with everything the world would need.

He needed more money. Fast.

He looked down at his left hand.

The ring was still on it.

Plain gold band. Five years old. Vanessa had picked it out herself, and it had cost him three weeks' wages, and she had called it perfect. He had worn it every day without once taking it off, even in the shower, even when it caught on things, even when it began to leave a faint pale groove in his finger.

He turned it slowly with his thumb.

The metal was warm. Of course it was warm, it was resting against his skin. But in the cooling air of the yard it felt hotter than it should have, as if it held a small coal inside it, and when he closed his eyes he saw the doorway again. The rain. Her arms wrapped around a sack of rice.

He pulled.

It resisted at the knuckle, stubborn, five years of habit holding it in place. Then it slid free all at once, and he stood there with the ring in his open palm and the skin of his finger bare and pale and strangely tender.

The jeweller on Tanner Street was a thin man with a magnifying lens screwed into his eye. He weighed the ring, tested it with a drop of acid, and named a price without looking up.

"Two hundred and ten."

"It cost eleven hundred."

"Retail always does." The jeweller shrugged. "Gold's gold. You want it or not?"

Lucas thought of Vanessa's face the day he gave it to her, bright with tears. He thought of her standing in that doorway, empty of everything.

"I'll take it."

The notes felt light in his hand, ridiculous, a handful of paper for five years. He folded them into his pocket and walked out into the street without looking back, and the bare skin of his finger stung in the evening wind.

His phone buzzed as he reached the corner.

Vanessa. A message this time, not a call. Short, and she had not bothered with an emoji.

Two men came to the apartment asking for you. Dad's friends. They said it's about the loan. What did you do, Lucas?

He read it twice. Then he stood very still under the streetlight while the traffic roared past, and felt the first real thread of danger pull tight.

Richard had not waited until tomorrow.