\u201cMmhmm, and what kind of weapon do you carry?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWeapon?\u201d Cleo asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah-huh, your gun,\u201d the bored controller seated on the other side of the desk elaborated. \u201cYou can\u2019t rob a bank with just a mean face.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really more of a burglar than a-\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYa still need a gun, hun.\u201d The controller clicked her mouse of a couple times. \u201cLook, go out, buy a gun, and come back tomorrow. I can save your application, but I can\u2019t activate your account if you ain\u2019t got your equipment.<\/p>\n
\u2014
\n
\n\u201cI have more than enough to buy it,\u201d Cleo said. \u201cI don\u2019t see what your objection is.\u201d It was a combat shotgun, the most intimidating-looking weapon in the racks at EZ Pawn. It had a sloppy, jagged engraving on the receiver that read \u201cNasty Gal\u201d. Cleo considered the inscription damage and felt it should\u2019ve made the weapon less expensive. The elderly shop owner thought the narrative it created increased its value however.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy \u2018objection\u2019,\u201d the elderly pawn shop owner said, making finger quotes at Cleo\u2019s use of too fancy a word, \u201cis that this ain\u2019t a weapon for some Ivy League rich girl who won\u2019t appreciate what she\u2019s got. This was used as a prop in Black Beignets<\/i>, held in the hands of Trini St. Romain, with a certificate of authenticity. It says Nasty Gal on it and you ain\u2019t no nasty gal.\u201d<\/p>\n
His refusal to sell was utterly ridiculous. She had the money, she would certainly pass the background check. And yet, she couldn\u2019t buy the stupid gun because she wasn\u2019t \u201cnasty\u201d enough.<\/p>\n
Cleo would have debated, argued, and charmed until she brought him around to her way of thinking, but what could she really argue here? That she was, in fact, going to use the gun to get up to some nasty shit? He probably wouldn\u2019t even believe her. And even if he did, she probably still wouldn\u2019t be robbing banks in a nasty enough fashion for his liking.<\/p>\n
No, there was a much simpler and more direct way to get what she wanted.<\/p>\n
Cleo rolled her eyes and left.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/p>\n
She then spent the rest of the day waiting for the shopkeeper to leave, watching the shop from her rental car in an alley across the street,<\/p>\n
She could have just bought a gun somewhere else. She should<\/i> have. But now she wanted \u2013 had to have \u2013 this one. Cleo just couldn\u2019t abide a world where she was denied access to anything, especially when she had the money. She knew this was ridiculous, that she\u2019d let herself feel the same way to a prop from a movie she\u2019d never seen and assumed was terrible as she would an artifact in a museum, if only because someone else was keeping it out of reach. She did feel that way though, and a mere pawn shop was not going to keep her out.<\/p>\n
Cleo waited until the last shop on the street closed down. Then she pulled her car around to the back of the pawn shop. She reached up and turned the domelight off before getting out of the car. She left the door open for a quick getaway.<\/p>\n
The front door and windows had bars, but in her experience, people didn\u2019t often think much about the back door. She figured there was a good chance the heavy metal door could be opened with nothing more than a piece of stiff wire. Work the wire into the jam, slip the latch and pull-<\/p>\n
The alarm sounded!<\/p>\n
No matter. She knew where the gun was. Cleo cast a quick glance around the shop floor, looking for something blunt and heavy, and landed on weight bench with loose weights sitting on top. She picked up one of the weight plates, dashed to the gun case, and smashed the plate into the glass. She used the plate to break more of the glass out of her way, then grabbed the Nasty Gal from the case. Her first smash-and-grab! Cleo ran straight back to the back door, but she stopped in the doorway. She reached in her pocket and threw a wad of cash totaling $2800 into the store. The wad exploded into a shower of bills and wafted down to settle on the floor and counters. With that, she threw herself in her car and got the fuck outta dodge.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/p>\n
The pawn shop owner arrived on the scene minutes later, having been alerted by his alarm system. It was obvious to him who did this. Only one thing was stolen and it had still been paid for. Petty thugs didn\u2019t leave you enough money for the stolen goods with change leftover to buy a new gun case. He rifled through the bills one more time, just to be certain of the amount. That\u2019s when he saw the the handwriting on one of the bills.<\/p>\n
In a tidy cursive, there was a note.<\/p>\n
Who\u2019s nasty now?<\/i><\/p>\n
The store owner chuckled at the cheek of it. He stuck the bill in his pocket. He still had to call the police since it was a firearm that had been stolen, but he decided to keep that bit of evidence to himself.<\/p>\n
This story was part of my 2019 TRL event.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have the suggestion verbatim, but it was from Paupers Run and it was basically \u201cWeapon backstories?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cMmhmm, and what kind of weapon do you carry?\u201d \u201cWeapon?\u201d Cleo asked. \u201cYeah-huh, your gun,\u201d the bored controller seated on the other side of the desk elaborated. \u201cYou can\u2019t rob a bank with just a mean face.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m really more of a burglar than a-\u201d \u201cYa still need a gun, hun.\u201d The controller clicked her mouse of a couple times. \u201cLook, go out, buy a gun, and come back tomorrow. I can save your application, but I can\u2019t activate your account if you ain\u2019t got your equipment. \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[209],"class_list":["post-4405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-the-take"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4411,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions\/4411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djangodurango.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}