Dragon(e) Baby Gone by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-05T16:49:47+00:00

Chapter Seven

Pecan Park Flea Market. The name should pretty much tell you anything you want to know. I suppose in places more refined and civilized than North Florida, it’s possible not to be exposed to quite that level of bumpkin. It could be romanticized as a place where the pure, unfettered capitalist spirit was free to trade and buy without the pesky interference of regulation. More accurately, it was a place that the law avoided when it could. It took more than bootleg DVDs, stolen appliances, and food prepared to questionable health standards to get the police on the property. The whole place was a sprawling array of huts and kiosks, spreading like mold from the central buildings. Originally it had been a self-storage facility, until somebody had started selling cheap tools out of one and everybody had seen the appeal.

Most large cities probably have a place like it. Sometimes, it’s more circumspect, a true anomalous market requiring a secret knock, an introduction, and cash money to find. Other times, it’s pretty small, maybe one or two shops in the whole place that can provide the specialty services of a wizard or witch. In Jacksonville, they just shoved these things right next to the bogus palm reader and the guy who would put a new stereo in your car for fifty bucks, no questions asked.

Lee Arnold had been in the business longer than I’d been alive. Hell, he’d been in the business longer than there’s been a Pecan Park Flea Market. Some of my contacts told me that Lee had shown up sometime in the seventies, on the run from some powerful people in China, and accidentally fallen into dealing with the occult. That’s right, Lee was nothing more than your average, everyday human being, complete with all the faults and weaknesses inherent in man. Luckily, I knew some of those weaknesses.

“Lee!” I said, forcing cheer through the fatigue in my voice. “How’ve you been?” I almost had to shout over the general din in his shop, which looked like a culmination of all Asian stereotypes crammed into the largest space the flea market had to offer. It must have once been the main office of the original building, and if it had ever been empty, it probably would be described as spacious. Instead, it was chock full of tchotchke. Of the worst kind. Cheap stuffed pandas, oriental dragons, and samurai filled a whole wall, with shelves of waving Japanese cats that doubled as coin banks. Undying plastic bamboo plants sat under their thick layers of dust, the plastic rocks around their base in desperate need of either painting or recycling. Under the yard-deep counter, visible through grimy plastic and about a thousand promotional stickers for various quick heating noodles and candies, were racks of samurai swords that probably would crumble to rust the moment they were exposed to humid air. The auditory nightmare came in the form of K-Pop on the radio and Chinese string ballads over the speakers above.

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