The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

been under extreme duress. But she’d left one at the first farm she'd been at, before she saw Jerry. She’d left one at the edge of the field and basically tagged herself at each turn.

She probably hadn’t covered as much ground as she’d like to believe she had… so it wasn’t a stretch to think the Larkins might come across one of her arrows as they searched. Given that they’d seen virtually no one else so far, and that the arrows were an indicator that someone was hoping to be found, it wouldn’t be hard to connect that to the people who had been in their basement with their cocaine.

But there was nothing she could do about any of that now. She whispered to Jerry. “That first farm we were at—are they involved with the cocaine running?”

He nodded this time. They'd skirted this conversation before, but now he clarified, “I think. I don't know for sure, not like with the Larkins.”

Well, they both knew for sure about the Larkins now.

“But Tommy, he got a new truck last year.”

Joule almost laughed. In this area, new trucks were the measure of misplaced wealth.

“But then he got another new one this year. And the farm isn’t doing well. Not at all, not enough for that.”

“Interesting, for a farm that’s not producing,” she whispered back. Her own understanding was that the inability to hide the money got a lot of criminals caught.

“Interesting for a family farm around here at all,” Jerry replied, and she followed as he explained. “Farms pass a lot of money through—lots of cash, lots of credit, lots of e-transactions. Some very big and some very small.”

She must have frowned at him, because he continued to explain.

“They do contracts whenever they can. Large batches of produce to a single distributor or buyer can bring big money in. But then there’s large amounts out for farm equipment and supplies. It runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes.”

“Really?”

Jerry nodded. “But the margins on a farm are slim—very slim most of the time. It's easy to be negative a couple years in a row, even though the farm made close to a million dollars or more.”

Had she ever heard that?

“If a farm is profitable, maybe providing something no one else does,” Jerry said, seeming to appreciate being the one in the know for once, “you can make bank. But right now, that’s organic and heirloom produce. Not many around here going that way. They cling to the old methods that don’t work anymore.”

Joule didn’t comment about him not appreciating the irony of that statement. He just went on…

“But it's gotten harder and harder for family farms to be profitable at all. The commercial farms took over. Lots of these families have been living on a few tens of thousands of dollars a year, even though hundreds of thousands are passing through their fingers.”

Joule was starting to see a pattern. “Do you think they're money laundering?”

That seemed to surprise him. He shrugged.

She added, “I don’t know all the details of money laundering, but I know the more cash you move and the more transactions you have of a wider variety, the more easily you can hide the extra. A failing farm sounds like a prime operation for somebody who needs their money laundered.”

“Interesting,” Jerry said.

Joule was growing even more concerned about what they'd stepped into. This might not be just a family distributing cocaine, but a network. Then again, while pot could be run as a solo operation, no one was growing coca plants and running the vats to create the powder around here. The very fact that there were plastic-wrapped bricks in the cellar was enough to indicate a full network.

When she’d first woken up after the first tornado dropped her in a field, Joule thought her sole job was to find people. Instead, she discovered that finding people could be her worst nightmare. She reminded herself that she'd not survived a tornado to get caught and murdered by drug runners. But she was more than aware that absolutely was an option.

It was up to her and Jerry to keep themselves out of the hands of the people whose business they'd already disrupted. With what Jerry had added, she was now very concerned this was a bigger and more entwined network than just the Larkins and the other farm up the street.

“Do you know anyone else who's involved?” she asked, her voice low.

He shook his head, shrugged, and replied, “I have my suspicions. But I don't know anything for certain.”

Absorbing that, she nodded. This time she threw the blanket aside and stood. It was time to get going. They no longer needed to find people. They needed to find the right people. One or two of a very limited set of people that either she or Jerry could absolutely trust. Her task had just gotten infinitely harder.

As Jerry stood up, the hay bale crinkled underneath him, and Toto darted over to attack it. Joule stretched and was trying to think what she needed to gather to leave when she stopped still.

The barn door slowly creaked open beneath them.

53

Cage steered the sedan around the fallen trees with much greater ease this morning. The roads weren't miraculously cleared, but it was obvious others had been out and about and had moved the biggest hindrances out of the way. It was also helpful that no other tornadoes had swept through and undone the work that people had put in.

The day was clear and bright. If he only looked up, there was no evidence of the mayhem that had come through yesterday. Now if he could only find his sister…

He and Deveron headed north again, weaving their way through the debris. As he pulled slowly around a particularly large, fluffy tree top that covered three quarters of the road and blocked his vision, Cage hit the brakes. The tires squealed in protest and Dev reached forward to brace himself against the dash.

“What?” his friend