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xvi. A Businesswoman Worth Her Salt
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Her and JJ Maybank's only job was to sell it.
He was an extremely good liar, he had a knack for all things pretend. Last year, he managed to negotiate them a free ride on the ferry to the mainland and she talked the owner of a temporarily closed-for-renovation diner into letting them use it all night for their own enjoyment. Really, they were more a match made in hell than heaven, but this was the Outer Banks; nothing is as it seems.
Like, for instance, if you stared at the chunk of gold they held between nervous fingertips, you would assume they got it off somewhere random. Played for it, maybe. Gambled. Perhaps they were digging on the beach and found it between handfuls of grainy, coral-lit sand. Blair saw an image of the flask and wondered if it had anything to do with it (it did, she knew who it belonged to, deep down. But her brain had blocked the realization from manifesting). Whatever. They're just kids. You would assume that they won it at some type of twisted, sick game.
Not that they dug up old ghosts by finding the gold of a sunken shipwreck in the basement of a blind, demented axe murderer.
Now, they had to pawn it. The rest had split the responsibility of melting the gold and trying to plan a way to extract it and Blair wasn't sure just who told Kiara that she was a good welder, but whoever it was deserved a life sentence in prison at the very least.
The melted gold was blotchy and shiny, wrapped in a thin and dirty cloth. It reflected the sunlight like a mirror and Blair wasn't proud to say she tried to stare at her own reflection through it a couple times, but Sarah would always end up rolling her eyes, amused, and grabbing it from her sister's sticky hands.
Their plan was fairly simple: cash in the few bars John B managed to shove into his still-reeking pockets at the Cut's most notorious pawnshop and use a portion of the riches to buy supplies in order to get the rest out. John B, JJ and Pope managed to design some poorly-drawn type of infrastructure that would lower someone down the well and bring up the bars of gold while Kiara and Sarah were fully intent on melting the gold all by themselves. (They had to somehow erase the wheat symbol, sigh of British gold, off them so they'd be eligible to pawn in the United States). All while Blair rehearsed a script over and over in her head, old drumsticks against the concrete playing a hazy tune. Cigarette-ash sticking to the inside of her lungs, though she hadn't smoked in days.
The Twinkie halted in front of an old pawnshop as John B parked it on the side. Kiara was the first one to jump out, followed by the rest of the eager pack. The curly-haired girl held onto the hard gold puddle tightly as Blair jumped out with her sister's help then slammed the door shut behind her.
