The Housewife Assassin's Garden of Deadly Delights (13 page)

He holds up a finger, signaling us that he’ll only be a moment longer.

By his chuckles and comments, he’s being optimistic. “Yeah, boy, I hear ya…Yeah, boy, that was one whopper of a yield…the name of that waitress at Hot Wheels on Interstate 10? Wasn’t it Jolene?” He chuckles. “Yeah…you can say
that
again.”
 

He looks over at me, and gives me a wink.

How badly does he want to hold on to that eye?
 

When he sees that I’m not smiling, let alone winking back, he shrugs. “What’s that—the
Mustang Ranch
? Ha! You don’t say! Well, in hindsight, I wouldn’t doubt it. She could suck the chrome off of a—”

He doesn’t get to finish his overused metaphor because I’ve slammed the phone receiver into its cradle.

He tries to hide his annoyance with a grin that shows a bumper crop of bad teeth. “So, now, what can I do for you folks?”

Jack smiles back. I have no issue with him playing good cop—for as long as
that
lasts. “We’d like to buy some corn. Specifically, the corn that came from Clover Hill Farms.”

“Clover Hill?” Barnaby taps his forehead, as if the name escapes him.
 

“You know, the Clements’ place.” Jack’s smile stays in place, but I notice he’s balled his fists.

Barnaby must notice too, because he snaps his fingers as if his memory has suddenly come back to him. “Oh, yeah! Right! They grow some good ear up there in Dixon, don’t they?” He leans back in his chair—unfortunately, too far, because it almost tips over. He rights himself quickly. “I’ve got it right out back.” He motions to one of the silos outside the window.

“All one thousand and fifty bushels?” I ask.

Barnaby frowns. “You want it all?”

“Yes,” Jack and I say in unison.

He looks at us suspiciously. “What kind of business do y’all have?”

“It’s for…”
Hmmm.
Let me think fast. “A restaurant,” I say at the same time Jack says, “Food processing.”

Barnaby’s head turns from Jack to me to Jack again.

“We process a lot of food in our restaurant,” I explain. “People like to take home big to-go bags. So, we use up a lot of corn meal. We’re now making our own meal, from scratch.”

“Yeah…I get it.” Barnaby shrugs. “You must sell a heck of a lot of corn dogs.”

“The chef,”—I point to Jack—“is very particular about the ingredients. The Clements’ corn comes highly recommended.”

“So I hear.” Barnaby lumbers over to the file cabinet, comes up with whatever paperwork he needs, and sits back down. His knuckles roll across the calculator.
 
“Okey-dokey, folkies! We’re looking at five thousand five hundred bucks. Wanna pony up to the bar?” He looks up, expectantly.

Jack frowns as he cracks his knuckles. “Don’t you mean three-thousand six hundred and forty eight dollars?”
 

Barnaby winces, but is smart enough to recalculate. I’d love to see what is really on his calculator tape.
 
My guess is that the right figure is apt to come from a room full of chimpanzees diddling calculators before we ever get a straight answer from him.

“Why, what do you know?” he chortles. “You hit the number right on the head! We’ll take a check, and you can come and pick it up in three days.”

“We prefer to do direct deposit, and take it with us now.” Jack points to Abu’s truck.

Barnaby frowns. “Yeah, okay. Tell your driver to roll it under the number three silo, there.”

Jack heads out the door, while Barnaby gives me the bank number for the deposit.

A few minutes later, the deposit is made. “Nice doing business with you,” he hollers, as I run out the door.
 

Jack has already helped hitch up the truck bed to the funnel at the bottom of the silo—the hopper. Abu and Jack are already wearing facemasks and eye goggles, and gloves. There are some in the truck for me as well. After we’re done loading the corn, we’ll meet FDA agents at a truck stop off I-5 to hand off the truck, and go home from there.

All’s well that ends well.
 

Or not.

One of the husks of corn falls through the hopper only to bounce off the mound of corn in the almost-filled truck bed. When it falls to the ground I run over to retrieve it.
 

Something is wrong. The color—it isn’t right.

I wave my hands to get Jack and Abu’s attention. “This isn’t the right corn! Look at the color!”

They stare down at me, then back down at the almost-filled truck bed. Jack slams the hopper with his fist. “Damn it, you’re right! Why, that son of a bitch!”

He jumps off the truck and runs toward Barnaby’s office. “The son of a bitch is gone!”

I’m on the phone to Ryan. “Barnaby must be in on it. He gave us the wrong corn, and ran off, but he couldn’t have gotten too far.”

“Emma will text you his home address, his car’s make and license, and any surveillance video we find on him during the past hour.”

It doesn’t take long before Emma calls back. “We lucked out! He’s down at the bank branch where we wired the money. Go south on 99, until you get to Taft Highway, then make a right. You’ll see it on the right side—the National Bank of Bakersfield.”

“What’s he driving?” Jack asks.

“A brand spanking new Ford F150 XLT. It still has the dealer’s plates.”
 

“Thanks, Emma,” I say. “We’re on it.”

I shouldn’t let Jack drive when he’s so pissed. Suddenly, I feel sorry for Barnaby.

You should always look in the back seat of your car before you get in. You never know who’ll be there, waiting for you, perhaps with a gun.

In Barnaby’s case, it’s Jack.

He waits until Barnaby tosses a briefcase filled with cash into the passenger seat and heaves himself into the driver’s seat of his brand new Ford F150 XLT before sticking the barrel of his gun on the back of Barnaby’s neck.

I open the passenger door, grab the briefcase, and hop in beside Barnaby. “I suppose you wanted to get this money so you could hand over our refund. Let’s not play games, where’s the corn?”

Barnaby is white around the gills, but he’s still able to mutter, “It’s…it’s gone.”

“Where?” Jack asks.

When Barnaby doesn’t answer, he nudges the gun deeper into the base of his skull.
 

“Okay, okay! Just—don’t shoot!” He takes a deep breath. “I have to look it up in my records.”

“Slide over. She’ll drive.”

He doesn’t argue, but he groans when I gun the engine before sliding his truck in front of a fast-moving van.

“Don’t shit your pants, or there goes your new car smell,” I warn him.

As it turns out, Barnaby waits until we’re back at his office before he expels via a few choice bodily functions. I’m pretty sure that his pistol-whipping from Jack has something to do with it.

“Let’s be clear. You say some of the corn went to the Farris Ranch feed lot, and to something called TasTee Cereals in Pasadena? And that the balance went to Disneyland, for the corn-on-the-cob booth in Frontierland?”

It’s hard to talk when your mouth is stuffed with your own socks, but Barnaby was whimpering so loudly that it was a necessary evil.

The way he’s hogtied, he’s lucky Jack didn’t cram a corncob into it, or any other orifice, for that matter.

It’ll take the FDA agents another hour to get here. In the meantime, Abu stands guard while I’ve been rummaging through Barnaby’s file cabinet for the paperwork that verifies his claims. “Is there anything you’re leaving out?” I ask.

He shakes his head emphatically.

“Think hard,” Jack warns him.

“Mmmm!” Barnaby exclaims. “FIWZ!”

I look over. “It sounds as if he said ‘Fiwz.’’’

Jack shrugs. “Maybe he likes the taste of his own socks.”

Barnaby shakes his head again, but even harder this time. “Naaah! Fiwz Cowa—”
 

“Jack, he’s choking. Do something.”

Jack sighs, but pulls out the sock anyway.

It takes a moment for Barnaby to catch his breath. “Fizz All-Natural Cola! Santa Ana!”

“What does a cola company need with corn?” Jack wonders out loud.

Barnaby shrugs. “Fizz makes its own corn syrup from scratch. That way, it can claim it only uses all natural ingredients. ”

“There’s nothing ‘all natural’ about GMOs,” Jack snorts. “Why wouldn’t it use cane sugar instead?”
 

“Sucrose is sucrose,” I point out. “And corn syrup is certainly cheaper than cane sugar.” I move to the next file drawer and rummage through it. “Found it.” I wave the contract triumphantly.

Jack kneels down, so that he’s face-to-face with Barnaby. “How much did Wellborne pay you to distribute the corn?”

“A…mill—above my broker’s fee, of course.”

Jack nods. “Well, sure, of course.”
 

He crams the sock back into Barnaby’s mouth.

Barnaby moans deliriously as we walk out the door.
 

Farris Ranch is the largest feedlot in the West. Last year, Jeff did a report on it for his California history class. “Did you know over one-hundred and fifty million pounds of beef moves through Farris Ranch in a single year?” Jeff proclaimed to the family. “Over one-hundred-thousand head of cattle live on a thousand acres. They harvest hundreds of them each day.”
 

“They don’t ‘live’ there. They
die
there,” Mary pointed out. “When you say, ‘move through’ and ‘harvest,’ you do know those terms mean ‘slaughter,’ don’t you?”

“They kill cows at the stinky place?” Trisha asked. We’ve driven by it enough times that its signature scent—manure and urine—is indelibly embedded in her young mind. She looked down at the burger on her dinner plate. The tears fell fast and furious as she ran from the table.
 

She vowed never to eat hamburgers, ever again.
 

That lasted about a month. How soon we forget.

By helicopter, Farris Ranch is only a half-hour south, down I-5. As always, there is a constant flow of traffic heading to and from the state’s largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.

Until we’re a mile from the ranch.
 

Below us, cars are skidding to avoid a fourteen-car pile-up, and the cause of it: a stampede of cattle that has crossed the northbound expressway lanes. As they rampage through the center median and into southbound traffic, a Land Rover veers right to avoid the herd, only to collide with a tractor-trailer truck. The force sends the smaller vehicle flying—

Into the oncoming cattle.

It takes out the lead steers. The big rig rolls forward into the rest.

The whole herd disappears behind a curtain of dust.

From our height and with the thumping of the helicopter blades, I can only imagine the sound of screeching tires and crunched metal, not to mention the cries coming from the wreckage.

Eight cars skid into the mess, like bumper cars at a county fair.
 

The only good news: none of the herd survives.