A Thousand Tombs
waiting for him to figure out his pocket was lighter and come back to look. It got late. He never showed. So I packed it in and scooped up the bag and stashed it in my case. I grabbed a burger and headed for home. When I opened the bag, I found the money.”
    Mack pushed aside his glass and reached for the square of velvet, then dumped out its contents. The coin spun on its side for a second, then tipped over and lay still. He picked it up and examined it. “It looks old, all right. I wonder how old?”
    “Maybe Greek,” Gen replied. “Seems impossible, though, if it’s that ancient, that anyone would misplace it so carelessly.”
    “It’s Roman,” Luca said.
    “How do you know?” Gen looked more closely at the writing. “Do you know Latin?”
    “No.” He frowned. “Today I took it into a pawn shop. I’d been playing a few doors down from this place all week. They liked that I was there, I guess. Maybe I was good for business.
    “Anyway, I asked how much it was worth. The guys who work there were real interested and told me it’s an old Roman coin and probably looted. They both got intense and asked where’d I get it. I was bummed. I didn’t expect that. Took me by surprise, so I told ‘em the old man who walked by every day dropped it in my case as a tip.”
    “Then what did they do?” Gen asked.
    “The owner says I need to tell him everything I know about it, or he has to call the cops. He’s going to report me, he says.”
    “So he accused you of stealing,” Mack said.
    “That’s right. I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I just figured I better take it back where it belonged, and fast. So I grabbed it up and took off.”
    “That was today?”
    “Yeah, this morning. A guy who works in the pawn shop chased me a few blocks, but I lost him. But like I said, I’d been around for a while, and I worried they might know where I was hanging out. So I went and got my stuff and split.”
    “Where were you going to stay tonight?”
    “A place I know. I didn’t go play in my regular spot today, obviously.”
    “So who was chasing you tonight?”
    “Man, I have no idea. I went over to the old dude’s house to return the coin. I didn’t want anything to do with it, didn’t want anyone else to know I had it.”
    “Better late than never,” Mack said. “What happened at the house?”
    “I wasn’t sure how I was going to return it, you know? I thought maybe I’d leave the bag on the back porch or something. It was dark, so I walked around to the side and eased in behind the bushes and looked in a window.
    “These gorillas were there with the old man. They were having a loud conversation in Italian. And Mack, one of them went agro, yelled at the old guy. I blew it, tripped and fell into the bushes. One of them came over to the window and saw me, and he yells something about ragazzo .
    “I know enough Italian to know that means boy. So I took off running, and damn if two of the dudes didn’t come after me. You know the rest. They were gaining on me when I ran into you.”
    “It doesn’t make sense,” Gen said. “Why would a bunch of Italians break off an argument and chase a kid?”
    “Could be they were arguing about some unrelated thing, saw the boy, thought he was a prowler out to get the old man,” Mack said.
    Gen peered at him like he’d gone crazy. “Is that Detective Mackenzie Hackett talking? You’re the one always driving home the ‘there are no coincidences’ thing.”
    “Okay, you’re right,” Mack replied. “It’s more likely they either knew the kid had the coin because the pawn shop people told them, or the old man told them the kid still had the coin. The question is, why would they be rousting him about this coin in the first place?”
    “Either because they knew it was worth a lot of money and they were there to take it, or it was theirs in the first place and they wanted it back,” Gen replied.
    “The old guy would have been frantic to find it if the

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