The Pawn Shop
Chapter 04 - The Pawn Shop
Daniel spent that afternoon tracking down the estate sale broker who had sold him the watch, a task that proved considerably more complicated than he'd anticipated, the broker having gone out of business six months earlier, records scattered across whatever secondary buyers had acquired the company's remaining inventory.
He finally located the original seller through an old invoice, a pawn shop on the city's east side owned by a man named Walter Combs, who had run the small, cluttered store for nearly thirty years.
"I remember that watch," Walter said, once Daniel explained why he was asking. "Good piece. Vintage, solid gold, engraved on the back. I don't usually forget the ones with personal engravings. Feels wrong somehow, buying someone's memory like that."
"Who sold it to you," Daniel asked.
"I'd need to check my records," Walter said, "but I remember the man clearly enough. Rough shape when he came in. Desperate, the kind of desperate that makes a man sell something he clearly didn't want to part with."
Walter pulled an old ledger from beneath the counter, flipping through pages of handwritten entries until he found the one he was looking for.
"Scott Bennett," Walter read aloud. "Sold the watch for four hundred dollars, considerably below its actual value, though I offered him more and he refused, said he just needed enough for a bus ticket and a few nights somewhere warm."
"Did he say where he was going," Daniel asked, feeling his pulse quicken.
"Not specifically," Walter said. "I remember he mentioned something about starting over somewhere nobody knew him. He looked like a man running from something, though I never asked what."
"When was this," Daniel asked.
"About ten months ago," Walter said, checking the date in his ledger. "I remember because it was right before the holidays. I felt bad about it for weeks afterward, buying a man's dignity for four hundred dollars because he had nowhere else to turn."
Daniel felt the timeline settling into place, matching almost exactly with Renee's account of Scott's disappearance, a man who had apparently left his family not out of abandonment, but out of some desperate, shameful circumstance that had convinced him disappearing was easier than facing whatever had actually happened.
"Did he say anything else," Daniel asked. "Anything at all that might help me find him now."
May you like
Walter considered carefully. "He mentioned a shelter, actually, when I asked if he needed help finding somewhere to stay that night. Said he'd heard good things about one downtown, run by a woman named Patricia Nguyen. I don't know if he actually went there, but it's the only lead I can offer you."
Daniel thanked him, already dialing the shelter's number before he'd even left the pawn shop, understanding that every hour mattered now, every hour that Eli spent believing his father had simply chosen to leave him behind.
