Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) (6 page)

I nodded. “Because it’s bigger than just him. Lots bigger.”

CHAPTER 7

If there was one person on the property who could help me with something illegal and not bat an eyelash of conscience, it was Dwayne Cotton. Dwayne makes moonshine for a living. Not a great living, but I guessed he was at least in his eighties, so his occupation had provided sufficiently for the meager essentials he required.

He was an undocumented tenant of the poor farm with an undeclared but mutually understood non-interference pact with Walt. They waffled between looking out for each other and ignoring each other as needed. Basically, Dwayne was squatting, but had been so long it was like he was grandfathered in.

Eli, on the other hand, idolized Dwayne, and was in the process of learning heaps of mountain man skills from the old codger. Things like disappearing without a sound, tracking, navigating without a compass, and whittling. Both Walt and I hoped that distilling wasn’t on the educational agenda.

I detoured off one of the many rutted tire track lanes on the property and headed into the bush, letting my feet land where they may and creating plenty of crackling and stomping advance warning. Dwayne has a rusty old shotgun and isn’t afraid to brandish it about. To the best of my knowledge, he’s never actually fired it, but if he did, the results on both ends could be disastrous.

I approached his hut and yoohooed.

“I hear ya,” a firm voice called from inside.

Dwayne stepped onto his porch — wood pallet slats sunk in the mud with a partially supported overhang. I say partially because one of the posts tilted to a degree that belied physics. But the whole thing was flimsy enough that it probably wouldn’t cause much more than a concussion if it collapsed on Dwayne’s head. Just the same, I preferred to stand out in the open.

Dwayne was wiping his hands on a filthy apron tied around his waist. With his long, scraggly white beard and gnarled fingers, he could have been an old-timey blacksmith or cobbler. Since none of his clothing was worth preserving and already well past universal standards of cleanliness, I wasn’t sure what the point of the apron was.

“Afternoon.” Dwayne nodded. “Heard you were in a bit of trouble yesterday.”

I deflated. Posting my itinerary on a billboard wouldn’t tell my neighbors anything they didn’t already know. “Can you help me?” I pulled the property map from inside my jacket.

“Depends.” Dwayne sidled up to me and peered at the map.

“I need to know how to get over here—” I pointed to the Gonzales’s plot, “without driving and without going out on the county road.”

“Ahh.” Dwayne’s bushy brows lowered. “This have anything to do with the serious folks surveilling out front?”

I bit my lip and realized for the first time that my FBI watchers must have put a damper on Dwayne’s movements as well. He’s not terribly keen to encounter law enforcement officers, for obvious reasons. Yet another way I was a burden to my friends.

“Come on in.” Dwayne stumped into his cabin, ducking his head to fit through the low doorway.

I spent as little time under the porch overhang as possible and darted through the opening after him. Dwayne spread the map on a table in front of his homemade wood stove and pulled up a three-legged campstool for me.

A pencil stub materialized from somewhere — a shirt pocket? behind his ear? — and Dwayne deftly stroked dashed lines, X’s and O’s on the map. Then he explained his simple legend and the pros and cons of each trail, where they merged and diverged and how long I could expect each one to take, provided I was a proficient hiker.

Then he brought up a subject I hadn’t considered. “Time of day? It’ll be the new moon and overcast the next few days.”

Meaning it would be pitch black after sunset, and the landmarks wouldn’t mean anything if I couldn’t see them. At my blank look, Dwayne stabbed the pencil at one of the trails. “This one, then. It mostly follows a small creek bed down in a holler that should prevent a flashlight beam from casting too far past where you need it.”

It also happened to be one of the more direct routes. I nodded. “Much obliged. How’ve you been? With this cold snap?” I stretched out a hand toward the faint warmth of the stove.

Dwayne grinned, revealing a few gaps from missing teeth. “I’m not a tenderfoot like you. Besides, that boy, Bodie, has been around, done some chopping for me. Walt sent him, but he’s cheerful enough about it.”

“He’s been talking to you?” Hopefulness crept into my tone.

Dwayne’s bottom lip protruded as he reconsidered. “Wouldn’t call it talking, exactly. Bits here and there, but I get the gist of it. Parents got no right treating their child like that.” A steely glint flashed behind the cataract clouds in Dwayne’s eyes.

I squeezed his hand. “Thank you. I’ve been hoping he’d come out of his shell.”

Dwayne nodded and showed me to the door of his shack — the consummate gentleman.

While my legs launched into the hasty trek back to the mansion, my brain disassociated for a few minutes. It was crazy just how quickly I’d become accustomed to new situations. Not too long ago, I would have been horrified by the idea of moonshining, or laughed, thinking it was a long-dead, boys-will-be-boys hobby stamped out with the end of Prohibition. But here I was consorting with a moonshiner. Of course, I’d yet to see any hard evidence, like equipment in actual use. Even so, Dwayne’s alleged occupation so paled in comparison to the other dilemmas I faced that I considered him an ally.

It sure helped that he’d saved my life — and Eli’s. That one episode by itself overrode whatever remained of my flimsy conscientious objections.

oOo

Clarice would have given General William Tecumseh Sherman a run for his money in the mounting of a major campaign. By the time I entered the steamy kitchen, Clarice had four large pans of pear and cranberry crisp lined up on the big farm table. Two children — dark haired, dark eyed, petite and feminine CeCe and tufty fawn haired, crystal-blue eyed, freckled, new teeth growing in too big for his mouth Eli — knelt on chairs and leaned over the pans, inhaling. I grinned. Clarice’s philosophy on life is, if there’s any question about the outcome, cook in quantity.

“Huh-uh,” I warned just as Eli’s fingers, ready to pinch, hovered over the corner of the closest pan. “No snitching. You don’t want to see what happens to Clarice when you do that,” I whispered, making a face and wiggling my index fingers over my head like horns. I only took the risk because Clarice was shoulders deep in the refrigerator, her ample behind sticking out for all to see.

The kids giggled, and Clarice backed out, letting the refrigerator door slap shut behind her, a pound of butter in her hand. She scowled at us.

“The crisp should keep everyone down at the bunkhouse occupied tonight,” she grunted, giving me a pointed look.

My eyes widened. “You didn’t — uh, supplement the dessert? That’s not really necessary.”

Clarice snorted. “Of course not. What do you think this is — the first day of summer camp? They’ll be lying in their bunks moaning from the pleasure of a full belly, not dashing down the hall to — well, for goodness’ sake, girl. Not a bad idea, though.”

“It’ll be dark in less than an hour,” I said.

“Don’t I know it.” Clarice glowered at me, then clapped her hands like a command. “All right, sprouts. Get your stuff together. Five minutes.”

The two kids shot out of their seats and through the doorway to the rest of the mansion, followed by the reverberation of a trundling charge up the steps and down the distant hallway to the back bedroom.

“Finish rallying the gear,” Clarice huffed, pointing to the jumble of household accessories in the corner.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Clarice bundled the kids, CeCe’s overnight trappings, and the dessert into the station wagon and set off on the jouncing ride to the bunkhouse.

I stood over the pile of assembled tools and wondered just what Clarice had been thinking. A broomless broomstick, pruning shears, folding stepstool, miscellaneous screwdrivers and pliers, a hammer, paper bags, a box of plastic wrap, a Sharpie pen. I added two flashlights, duct tape, a brick, several dishtowels, a massive pair of rusty kitchen shears and twine. You just never know.

I hadn’t exactly done this before. My philosophy on life is, if there’s any question about the outcome, overpack. My second philosophy — ever since my husband hadn’t returned from a brief errand while on our honeymoon — is always assume the outcome is in question.

I packed the smaller tools into one of my rolling suitcases, loosely wrapping the metal instruments in the towels to keep them from clanking together. Then I wheeled out three more suitcases — my other one and two of Skip’s — and lined them up by the door.

I was dressed in my darkest, quietest clothes by the time Clarice returned, the headlights of the Subaru beaming through the growing gloom.

“Take the grand tour?” I asked when she finally shuffled into the kitchen.

“Pretty much,” she grunted. “Had to show me this, had to show me that, schoolwork, maintenance projects, skill development. Those boys are full of it. I will say one thing, though—” she peered at me quite seriously. “Walt has a way with them. Best non-father father figure I’ve ever seen.”

“Exactly what they need. Besides, being shown around is an honor. It means the boys like you —” I smirked, “or they’re terrified of you.”

“Let’s keep it that way, shall we? Load up.” Clarice marched out of the room, presumably to also change into her most invisible outfit.

The Subaru’s liftgate was open, the dome light glowing dimly. I lugged the suitcases out and stashed them in the back, wedging the stepstool in beside them. I draped a dark navy blanket over the whole schmear and closed the hatch with a firm click. Then I plopped into the passenger seat to wait for Clarice.

For once in her life, Clarice drove slowly, lurching carefully over the final few potholes before the gate. “Getting a good look at us,” she muttered under her breath. Then she pulled sedately onto the county road, heading south.

Once we reached the Gonzales’s ranch house, we flew into a flurry of activity. Clarice parked close to Hank’s pickup. Gus had taken care of returning it from the general store parking lot after the crime scene was cleared. I yanked up the station wagon’s liftgate, pulled out the suitcases and tossed them into the bed of Hank’s truck while Clarice dashed into the house and turned on lights in almost every room.

I trotted up the steps and stuck my head in the kitchen. “Ready?” I hissed.

Clarice emerged from the hallway with an armful of stuffed animals which she shoved at me. “Put these in the car. I’ll get pans out.”

When I returned to the kitchen, it looked like a tornado had blown all the cupboard doors open. Pots, dish towels, a rolling pin, spice jars, mixing spoons — all over the place. Clarice stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene. “It’ll have to do.”

“How about the stereo or TV?” I asked.

Strains of twangy country music — loud, some song about drinking off the effects of a broken love affair — followed Clarice as she stepped back into the room with an evil grin on her face. “Pure torture, that,” she chuckled. “Serves them right if they check in on us.”

I rolled my eyes at her and grabbed the spare set of truck keys off the little hooked rack beside the door.

Hank’s pickup was unlocked — of course it was. Who in their right mind would steal an old, beat-up, half rust, rattletrap truck? Gus, like everyone else around here, knew it was safe and hadn’t bothered to lock it.

Besides, I was only borrowing it.

I took the turnoff to the freight terminal and killed the headlights. A couple semis with trailers were backed up to loading docks, but all the big garage doors were closed. I didn’t see anyone walking around under the halogen flood lamps that were too widely space to be completely effective in lighting the vast lot.

I coasted to the office entrance and angled the truck so the tailgate could be dropped open within a few steps of the door. I turned off the engine and took a deep breath.

“Here we go,” Clarice muttered, unlatching her seatbelt.

“You can still back out. No hard feelings,” I said.

“Are you kidding?”

“This suddenly doesn’t feel like a great idea,” I whispered.

“Gotta do something. Get off your fanny, girl.” Clarice reached up and switched off the dome light before popping her door open.

“Guess you could use my help then,” said a newly lower-pitched but supremely confident voice from behind the bench seat.

CHAPTER 8

When I started breathing again — what must have been several minutes later — I turned carefully and stared at the silhouette draped over the back of the seat. It was too dark to make out his features clearly, but I’d recognize those budding dreads anywhere.

“Thomas? What the—”

“Eli passed the news,” Thomas said nonchalantly. “He’s too little to know what he was seeing, but it sounded like a boost to me.”

“You — you — how’d you get here?” Clarice spluttered.

Thomas laughed. “Easy. Been sneaking into places since I was six or seven. Back seat of the station wagon, now back here.” I caught the faint movement of his shoulders shrugging. “My older brother taught me how to shoplift, pickpocket, hot-wire cars, pick locks, so sneaking around is nothing. It was the B&E that got me sent to the camp.”

“Thomas.” I didn’t have to force my voice to be stern. It came out hard and non-nonsense all by itself. “If you want to stay at the camp — instead of juvie — you have to keep out of this. You’d break Walt’s heart.”

“This is different, Nora. We all know something bad’s happening to you. What if you get kidnapped again?” Thomas’s voice turned to pleading. “I can help. I can get you in so you don’t have to break a window. No trace, if you’re careful inside. I’ll stay out here, keep a lookout — no problem.”

The kid had a better plan than I did — the voice of experience, apparently.

“How’d Eli know?” Clarice growled.

Thomas laughed again. “He notices everything. Plus he has hypersonic ears. I just cut him in. No sense in trying to work around him. Never pans out.”

I opened my mouth to protest — what? Everything. The general illegality of what I was doing, of what Thomas did and was doing, the worry about what Eli was part of. There was no way Walt could know every second what every one of his eighteen — now nineteen with Bodie — boys was doing. I’d figured they didn’t have opportunities for crime and drugs and gangs out here in the boonies. But their creative energies seemed to have found alternative expressions.

I bit my lip but couldn’t resist. “Cut him in on what?”

Thomas shifted, dropped a few inches until only the top half of his head was a dark bump above the back of the seat.

“We’re not moving until you spill,” I gritted out.

“Bookmaking,” Thomas mumbled.

“You’re taking bets from the other boys?” My voice may have squeaked a little.

Thomas nodded. “Just lame stuff, you know. Like how many times we’ll have mashed potatoes in a month, whether or not Wilbur will eat rancid tuna salad, which plaid shirt Etherea’s wearing on the day we go to the store for supplies. Eli always beats the house. He’d wipe me clean if I let him bet, so I cut him in.”

“Wilbur eats everything,” I said. Wilbur and his twin brother Orville are semi-tame pot-bellied pigs with the run of the poor farm.

“Exactly.” Thomas’s teeth flashed in a wide smile.

“What math are you studying this year?” I asked.

“Algebra.”

“You should try statistics,” Clarice grunted. “Speaking of which, the odds are, the longer we sit here, the more likely we are to attract attention.”

“Gotta watch?” Thomas asked. “Time me.” He squeezed from behind the seat and whisked to the office door, no more than a shadow.

He was back in under two minutes. “All clear. No alarm company stickers. There’s a keypad by the door and a couple cameras in the corners, but I think they’re dummies. No blinking lights.”

I almost congratulated him, then thought better of it. I was already setting a terrible example; I didn’t need to add verbal encouragement. “You’re staying right here,” I pounded a fist in the middle of the bench seat, “and not moving a muscle until Clarice and I are back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I ignored his cocky tone and hurried around to the back of the pickup. Clarice met me there and handed me a pair of rubber gloves and a flashlight.

“Go ahead. I’ll bring in the equipment,” she hissed.

“We don’t need much since Thomas unlocked the door,” I whispered back. “I wonder what other specialties are represented among Walt’s boys.”

Clarice grunted and followed me with two of the empty suitcases. I played the beam along the worn carpet of the entry area and made a beeline for the hall. I tapped the frame of the first doorway, and Clarice peeled off to set up our photocopying assembly line.

Divide and conquer. I went straight to Hank’s office at the end of the hall. The door was now locked. I’d left my purse and its attendant credit cards in the truck. I zipped back to the electronics boneyard.

The copy machine was already humming and clicking, warming up. Clarice looked ghastly, her face underlit by the green glow from the control panel, her blotchy shape lurking eerily in the dark room.

“I need a sheet of sturdy plastic, like a report cover or something,” I hissed.

“Got a three-ring binder here, the flimsy throw-away kind,” she replied.

“It’ll do.” I held out my hand, and she slapped it into my grasp.

And I was right — the plastic slid down the crack between the door and the frame like it was greased. The knob was sloppy, and I jiggled it hard while pressing my shoulder against the door. I few good thuds, and I was in the room, glad I hadn’t needed to call on Thomas’s services again.

I was sweating and shivering at the same time. Outside, I’d been oblivious to the tingly cold fog that had settled like dust into the landscape, leveling out the dips and hollows into a fuzzy, gray plain the truck’s headlights had skimmed over. Now, inside a building that had to be thirty degrees warmer, I shuddered with clammy stickiness.

I stuck a finger in the drip tray for the dead plant, found the key as Hank had promised, and knelt in front of the file cabinet. The bottom drawer was full — crazy full — files jammed, overflowing. I raked the flashlight over the labels, catching my other purple hand in the beam as well. Leave it to Clarice to select fashionable housekeeping/burglar wear.

Half the files were labeled with some kind of cryptic notation. It probably made sense to someone familiar with the workings of a freight terminal, but the words were a foreign language to me. The files also looked old — grungy and worn. I wondered if Hank had inherited these files when he took the job and had just been getting around to sifting through them when he’d come across the property records.

“Well?” Clarice rasped from the doorway. She’s patently incapable of producing a subtle whisper.

“Where to start?” I murmured. “There isn’t time to read through all these to find whatever it is I’m looking for.”

“Then we’ll copy all of them. We gotta move.” Clarice bent next to me, wedged her hands into the drawer and pulled out a thick stack of files. “Mark the spot so they stay in order — if they’re in order.” Her sarcastic tone made me smile in spite of my jangling nerves. Clarice does not believe in shoddy filing. “Keep ‘em coming.” 

In between shuttling batches of files back and forth from the copy room, I searched through the other drawers in the filing cabinet and Hank’s desk. Just the usual office stuff — an amazing stockpile of paperclips, rubber bands, ink cartridges, pens missing their caps, sheets of blank labels, etc.

A sweet photo portrait of Sidonie and CeCe sat on the desk. Tucked into the corner of the frame was a smaller snapshot of the twins that must have been taken at the hospital, their faces scrunched-up sleepy and wearing their matching newborn beanies.

The corkboard on the wall above the desk held a few message slips and business cards. I removed them and hustled down the hall so they could be copied too. Then I carefully pinned them back in place.

I turned on Hank’s computer, typed the word ‘password’ at the prompt, and the screen came alive. So much for security. In fact, the whole place was curiously unsecured. I guessed the warehouse portion had better safeguards, even though the freight didn’t stay long in one place.

Which is exactly what Hank’s computer confirmed. That day’s inbound shipments were listed — cheese in a reefer, Hon office furniture, Samsung electronics, a truckload of Levi’s branded apparel, giant rolls of paper from Georgia Pacific, machined parts for Boeing. The outbound list was similar. The place was hopping, a hub for trucked products — items moving from ports or manufacturers to distributors and retail stores. Or in the opposite direction — from factories to ports for packing into containers for the long ocean ride on a cargo ship.

Clarice was halfway through copying the contents of the bottom drawer when I finished rifling Hank’s office. She’d had to remove her gloves in order to get the touchscreen commands on the copier to work. I made sure she was well supplied with the next files in order, then snuck to the third doorway and tried the binder trick on Lee Gomes’s office.

Bingo.

If the abundance of coffee rings was any indicator, he wouldn’t notice if a few papers had been moved slightly. But there wasn’t time to be thorough. While his computer was booting up, I went for the less obvious — what was in his drawers.

Lee Gomes didn’t use his drawers, except to stash peanut M&M’s and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I enjoyed the fleeting relief that he didn’t appear to be a customer of Dwayne’s, since he bought branded whiskey and not stuff in a quart Mason jar. The state of his desk indicated he must be one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind people, not trusting himself to remember what he couldn’t see.

The computer beeped — an email notification. I clicked the message open and scanned it. Then I went back to the top and read it completely, the air squeezing out of my lungs. And then I hit print.

I’d spent too much time in the wrong office. Whatever Hank had found was nothing compared to this.

The printer on Lee’s desk blinked blue lights at me, the printhead clunking into starting position. It sucked paper from the feed tray and whirred into action.

I pulled up Lee’s contact list — names, email addresses, occasionally phone numbers — and printed the whole thing, twice. I’d have to sort through the names later, separate the criminal from the innocuous, if not innocent.

Those pages safely stuffed inside my jacket and down into my waistband, I scrolled through the other emails, noting his most frequent correspondents. They used the word ‘goods’ a lot. If there was some way to match up the dates of the emails with the shipment manifests for the dates surrounding the messages, I might be able to figure out what those particular goods were. But I didn’t have time for that. The only thing I knew for certain was that the goods weren’t always headed to their lawful owners.

“Finished with the copies,” Clarice hissed from the doorway. “We gotta go. Too long already.”

“Let me shut this down,” I said. “Did you wipe down the copy machine?”

“Don’t I always?” Clarice growled.

I made sure every program was closed and turned off the computer but not the printer, leaving them exactly the way I’d found them. I gave the papers on Lee’s desk the barest whisk of a shuffle so they didn’t look too tidy. I might have unconsciously fidgeted with them while I perused his emails, out of shock or nerves or pure disbelief.

Clarice and I wheeled the now heavy suitcases out to the pickup.

“Forty-seven minutes.” Thomas materialized at my elbow. “What took you so long?”

“None of your business,” I muttered. “No questions. The less you know, the better.”

“Right, boss.” Thomas’s tone was like an open smirk.

I turned back, locked the glass door and pressed it closed with a satisfying click. Then I hefted the two burdens and thumped them in the pickup bed.

When we were humming down the county road with Thomas wedged safely between Clarice and me, I asked, “Did the copy machine have an internal counter?”

Clarice grunted. “The last service sticker was dated January 2010. How much do you want to bet no one pays it much attention?” She scowled at Thomas. “Don’t answer that. We did use three-plus reams of their paper, though.”

“What’s a little pilfering among thieves?” I muttered.