I wouldn't ever beat him in a bidding war. "A thousand dollars,"
my mouth said.

"Ten thousand," Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere
in his exoskeleton.

"My Lord!" Billy's mom said. "Ten thousand dollars!"

The other pickers, the firemen, the blue haired ladies all looked up at that and
stared at us, their mouths open.

"It is for a good cause." Craphound said.

"Ten thousand dollars!" Billy's mom said again.

Craphound's digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier's counter,
separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy's mom.

One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over appeared at
Billy's mom's shoulder.

"What's going on, Eva?" he said.

"This. . .gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy's old cowboy
things, Tom."

The fireman took the money from Billy's mom and stared at it. He held up the top
note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic
stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial
number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and
started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he
counted them again. "That's ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very
much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?"

Craphound, meanwhile, had re-packed the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top
of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman.

"I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I
think I'm going to be making my own way home."

The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. "Aw, c'mon," I
said. "I'll drive you home."

"I think I prefer the bus," Craphound said.

"It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend," the fireman said.

I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only
half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and
went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a
desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a
derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area
weather control machine.

#

The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street.
I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took
a smaller commission than Soth