The Silver Lake Murder by Gregg Matthews (read novel full txt) 📗

“Do you think you can continue?”

“Yes, let’s talk about the next day, July 3rd,” Kelly says.

“OK, I pulled into town on July 5th. I need to close the gap on the days leading up to July 5th.”

“Right, I can get you closer to that date.”

CHAPTER 11

Kelly takes a minute for herself. She is staring out at the water. She takes her time looking at the stars in the sky. She is crying uncontrollably. She regains her composure. She takes a drag off a cigarette, flix it into the water. She walks closer to the fire and repositions herself, standing in front of Blake, Billy, and Lester. Billy and Lester have thrown a couple of logs onto the fire, increasing its intensity and glow. Kelly continues to tell the story. Starting with July 3rd.

Cindy stepped inside the Lakeview Lounge atnoon. The extra office work Luke was going to assign her to help pay down the debt she accrued from after-work parties with drugs and alcohol. She walked over to the waitress station over by the stairs. She saw me behind the bar moving some bottles and glasses around.

“Hi Kelly, working already?”

“Hi Cindy, yes, always working. I need the money.”

“Is Luke upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks!”

Cindy quickly walked up the stairs into The Devil’s Den. Opening the door, she saw Luke sitting at his desk. Both of his hands had paperwork in them, there was a large pile of paperwork on his desk too.

“Hi, Luke.”

“Hey Cindy, the guys working downstairs in the Punchbowl have the orders all messed up. I need you to do a full inventory at each workstation. The disorganization down stairs is affecting today’s deliveries. If the deliveries get messed up, I’ll be in big trouble with my customers.”

“Okay, Luke,” Cindy said, taking a hand full of paperwork and a note book.

Walking down the steps and out the front door of the Lakeview Lounge, she saw the large barn, with the Punchbowl in the basement. She always wondered why they called it the Punchbowl. Today, she was going to find out why. As she walked up to the barn, she saw a couple of groups of Chinese men standing together on the side of the barn smoking cigarettes. As she walked by, she could tell they were talking about her, a couple of the men pointed at her and shouted something in Chinese. All the men laughed in sequence.

She was uncomfortable being around the strange men in this location. She didn’t know if she was safe. Her nervousness showed as she slightly tripped on the crushed stone parking lot. The Chinese men saw her trip, and they all pointed at her, laughing again. She quickly walked past them and into the barn.

There were several old, green with white trim, pickup trucks pulling in and out of the barn. The driver’s side door of each truck read, Lakeview LoungeDeliveries in white letters. A few of the men driving the pickup trucks gave her a dirty look, like she was not supposed to be there. She realized when the men are working, they are not friendly to her. There was a pickup truck inside the barn off to the side, with a rope tied to the bumper driving slowly forward and backward. The voice of a man could be heard shouting commands up from the basement. An older man walked up to her and said.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I work for Luke; I’m looking for the door to the Punchbowl.”

The man pointed to the back of the barn. She stepped deeper inside the barn and walked across the floor to the door with, Punchbowl written across the front of it with a black Sharpie. Sheopened the door and slowly walked down the long creaking flight of stairs.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was surprised to see the size of the Punchbowl. The rock foundation and dirt floor were eroding. There was a crew of several men reinforcing the foundation by adding rocks and cement. Another smaller crew of men were adding cement to different areas of the floor. They were trying to keep the barn together as best they could. The basement was at least ten thousand square feet.

A dumbwaiter was loaded with the prepared customer orders for Jackal drugs and alcohol. Once the orders were raised into the barn. The orders were loaded onto the delivery trucks. The operation was much bigger than she expected.

There were three groups of Chinese men working. A quick count told her there was at least thirty men working. There were local men who worked for Luke, mixed in with the Chinese men. The local men were telling the Chinese men what to do. To the right side of the barn, there was the moonshine workstation. On the left side, there was a workstation for brewing beer. More towards the center, there were multiple tables with different types of drugs on them. Punchbowl.

Reading the paperwork in her hand, the first workstation she needed to go to was for the Jackal Moonshine. She could see the ten moonshine stills, up and running. There were ten old wooden tables with Chinese men standing one per table. On top of the ten tables, there was a ten-gallon stainless steel pot. The pot had a few tubes coming out of the sides and the bottom. One of the tubes has a pump. The tube went in one side of the pump and out the other side. There is a white six-gallon bucket on the top of each table. Next to each workstation, there was a pallet with several white buckets on them. The buckets were used many times for different flavored Moonshine. Next to each table, there was a pile of apple cores and peach pits. There was one garden hose for water being passed around the ten tables. There was a local man walking around with a shovel and an old metal barrel shoveling the cores and pits into