Stealing Taffy

  Tanyalee nodded, understanding completely. She would be a big-sister figure to Fern, and the volunteer hours would get Temple Smathers off her back.

  This was going to be a snap.

  Chapter 7

  Dante took his seat next to O’Connor at the Cataloochee County Sheriff’s Department conference table. The last time he’d been here was a few days before the Spivey bust, the night he’d been forced to knock a dozen hillbilly heads together to prevent a riot at the meth lab. He’d succeeded, but got himself clocked in the process and O’Connor had driven him to the ER in Winston-Salem for a CAT scan, then brought him here to update Halliday.

  Nothing like a good fistfight to clear the sinuses.

  “Special Agent Dante Cabrera, let me introduce you to any members of the task force you may not have officially met.” Halliday recited the name of everyone gathered around the table, from the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the state police, the FBI, and the local and federal DA’s offices. Halliday addressed the group. “As you know, Dante was our undercover presence during the Spivey investigation, and he’ll be coordinating on the Possum Ridge case from here on out.”

  Dante nodded.

  “And of course you all know DEA Special Agent in Charge Kelly O’Connor.”

  “Hi, again,” she said with a sweet smile.

  Honest to God, Dante didn’t know what to do with his boss now that she was in a good mood on a regular basis. It occurred to him that he was probably just jealous—he wanted to be in a good mood, too, and he wanted Pink Taffy to take him there.

  Dante closed his eyes. This was getting out of control. It was almost as if he could smell her at this proximity, and it sure as hell didn’t help that the object of his obsession had ties to nearly everyone in this small town, including some of those in this very room.

  It had taken just minutes of research to uncover the connections. Tanyalee Marie Newberry was the sister of Cheri Newberry, publisher of the Bigler Bugle. The editor-in-chief was Cheri’s new husband, J.J. DeCourcy, who also happened to be Halliday’s lifelong best friend and Tanyalee’s ex-husband. Cheri’s BFF was Candy Carmichael, Sheriff Halliday’s fiancée. Candy had just hired Tanyalee to work at her new bakery. And Candy’s mother lived out at Cherokee Pines, the ritzy retirement home where Bobby Ray Spivey’s son, Gerrall, had worked before he was killed in the raid.

  This small-town incestuous shit was why Dante had to get back to a city—anywhere with a population over a half million north of the Mason-Dixon line would work. He wasn’t picky. He’d even go to Philadelphia if it were absolutely necessary. But he couldn’t stay here. Because in Bigler, a man couldn’t trim his toenails without it becoming common knowledge, let alone debauch Tanyalee Newberry with a modicum of privacy.

  Well, technically, he would be continuing the debauchery, since he’d already gotten a real good start. Suddenly, Dante swore he really could smell her … that heady mix of her sensual perfume, hot, sweet female skin, girl juice, and clean sheets. Damn. His head began to spin. His palms started to sweat. His breath was too shallow.

  O’Connor glanced his way, her eyebrows raised impatiently. Had he missed something? Had someone asked him a question? Since everyone’s eyes were now on him, he figured the chances were good he’d been thinking about Taffy when he should have been concentrating on the task force.

  “Cabrera?” O’Connor looked truly pissed. It was reassuring to see that even regular sex hadn’t permanently altered her personality. “Can you offer any perspective on what we might be looking at on Possum Ridge?”

  “Absolutely.” Dante sat straighter in his chair, forcing himself to get his mind off that woman and onto his job, since a transfer to Arkansas wasn’t exactly what he was shooting for. He was grateful that prior to the meeting, O’Connor had thoroughly briefed him on what information had been obtained while he was at Quantico. “I’ve worked cases similar to this, though not in this region of the country. It seems to be a fairly sophisticated setup, with a complex irrigation system. My guess is the open acreage and greenhouses are part of the overall operation, and the farmhouse probably has an indoor growing space in addition to curing facilities.”

  “How many total plants?” asked the federal prosecutor.

  “A conservative estimate would be about five thousand, but that’s based on what we can see out in the open and what I’ve dealt with in previous busts. We won’t know for sure until we execute the search warrant as they prepare for shipment.”

  The FBI agent scowled. “What’s the value of that kind of haul?

  “Bulk, maybe three quarters of a million, and at least three times that on the street. But it could be much more. We really won’t know until we intercept the shipment.”

  Halliday whistled. “That would be the largest seizure in Cataloochee County history, by a long shot. Can we tell how close they are to moving it?”

  Dante nodded. “Surveillance shows the outdoor plants are in flower now that the nights are getting longer. After harvest, the drying and curing process will take a couple weeks. So if everything goes well for our local entrepreneurs, I’d say they’ll be moving a large harvest in about four weeks.”

  “If what goes well?”

  Dante shrugged at the FBI agent’s question. “A lot of steps can go wrong between now and transport. If our small-business geniuses don’t keep the cartel happy, a few of them might disappear. A floater or two could make their way down Pigeon Creek to Paw Paw Lake.”

  O’Connor interjected. “Let me remind you again that the DEA doesn’t have anyone working inside, and we’re basing our conclusions on air and ground surveillance. There’s been no product shipment since we’ve had our eye on them, though there’s been plenty of car and pickup traffic going in and out.”

  An assistant federal prosecutor raised her finger as she asked a question. “How many suspects are on-site?”

  “Eighteen at last count, and we’ve ID’d all but a few,” Dante said. “Most have misdemeanor or felony drug priors, but pretty low-budget stuff. Two are in violation of probation, which might give us some leverage down the line. I’ll get a list to you right after the meeting.”

  “Thanks.” She gave him a flirty smile.

  Dante decided she was kind of cute, despite the fact that she couldn’t have been more than a few years out of law school and was clearly a Title IX type, soccer probably. Maybe tennis. She wasn’t tall enough for basketball or volleyball. Yes, she was cute, but that smile didn’t do it for him, because it wasn’t … dammit! He didn’t want to think about Taffy anymore! He didn’t want to remember her sweet scent or the soft brush of her flesh under his fingers!

  Dante felt the pointy heel of O’Connor’s shoe grind into his instep. He yanked his foot to safety. “Absolutely. Sure,” he said, hoping it was a sensible answer to whatever he’d been asked.

  “So what’s the plan from here on out?” Halliday rocked back in the conference room chair. “What’s our next step?”

  Dante answered as if his foot weren’t throbbing. “Surveillance around the clock. Even with all the agencies involved, we still don’t have the budget to follow the comings and goings of every person up there, every day. It’s hit or miss.”

  “Let’s hope we get lucky,” the U.S. Marshal said. “Maybe someone will eventually take us to Ramirez or Apodaca.”

  Dante nodded slowly. “More likely they’ll take us to the middleman, whoever has been hooking up Cataloochee County with the cartel. He’s out there somewhere, and it’s probably the same dude the Spiveys used. I don’t think a town this size could support more than one.”

  “Any thoughts on who that might be?”

  “Yes and no,” Dante answered the state police narcotics detective. “As I mentioned in my final field notes from the Spivey case, we never discovered his identity. In all my road trips to the Florida border with finished product, I only met up with low-level Ramirez men. Our tails on Bobby Ray Spivey gave us shit, and foll
owing Gerrall only led to his job at the old folks home and to small-time foragers selling raw ingredients.”

  “You really think this middleman is from around here?”

  Dante considered Halliday’s question for a moment, then nodded. “I do. The Spiveys called their contact the ‘Fat Man,’ which could apply to a good bit of the population of the state, I realize, but I always got the feeling he wasn’t an outsider.”

  “And why would you think that?” the federal prosecutor asked.

  Dante shrugged. “A hunch.”

  “Hunches ain’t evidence,” the deputy U.S. Marshal said.

  “This is very true,” he admitted.

  O’Connor folded her hands on the conference table and smiled at the deputy marshal as if he were soft in the head and didn’t know any better. “In Special Agent Cabrera’s career, he has participated in hundreds of raids and successfully gone undercover in twenty-six narcotics operations, obtaining evidence that led to the conviction of a dozen traffickers, keeping more than seventy-five million in illegal drugs off our streets, and saving countless lives. What might that tell you?”

  The deputy squirmed in his chair. “Um, well, that his instincts are good?”

  “No,” O’Connor corrected him. “It tells you that his instincts are impeccable. You know why? Because Special Agent Cabrera is still alive. If his instincts had failed him even once during the course of those twenty-six investigations, he would be in a box.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the room. Now this was the O’Connor Dante knew and loved, and he couldn’t help but smile.

  “Then our job is to turn Dante’s hunch into evidence,” Halliday said matter-of-factly.

  O’Connor winked at him. “Damn right it is.”

  The FBI agent raised an eyebrow at Halliday. “You know, Sheriff, if Bobby Ray and Gerrall Spivey hadn’t died in the raid, we’d have something more to go on than a hunch. Might’ve been nice.”

  It was Dante’s turn to be uncomfortably silent. He wondered how Halliday would handle this obvious jab. Everyone knew the primary objective of the Spivey raid changed when Gerrall took the sheriff’s girlfriend and the retirement-home administrator hostage. Their rescue was the priority. Bringing in suspects alive became an afterthought.

  Besides, it wasn’t Halliday’s bullets that killed the Spiveys. The father and son had turned weapons on each other before the doors to the trailer could be kicked in. It wasn’t like Turner Halliday could have prevented it.

  “Yes, it would have been nice,” Halliday replied diplomatically. “But that’s not how it is.”

  “Well…” O’Connor looked up from her folded hands and smiled softly. “We might not be completely lacking in witnesses.”

  Dante turned a narrow gaze on his boss. Was O’Connor referring to that kid, the only person from the Spivey compound who was still breathing and hadn’t lawyered up? That was almost laughable. If Dante didn’t have a clue who the Fat Man was, that skittish little girl sure wouldn’t.

  And even if by some miracle she did, how the hell would they get past the granny to get to the girl?

  “Agent Cabrera,” O’Connor said sweetly, “I think I’ll take you up on your generous offer to pay Miss Fern Bisbee a visit.”

  Dante raised an eyebrow. “I don’t recall offering—”

  “Meeting adjourned,” his boss said, standing. “We’ll reconvene in two weeks.”

  * * *

  “You’ve hardly said two words to me since we left the Girls Club, Fern.”

  The Newberry chick smiled from behind the steering wheel of the most ridiculous car Fern had ever seen. It was an old pink convertible as long as a double-wide, with fancy white leather dashboard and seats. She remembered watching reruns of an old show called Stanky and Crotch or something, and there was a dude on that show with a cane who dressed in a purple fur coat and a hat with a feather in it. This was exactly the car he drove. Fern was almost sure of it.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything? You were talkative enough a few minutes ago, when you were begging me not to report you for attempted larceny.”

  Fern stuck her bent elbow outside the open window and rolled her eyes. She was beginning to think she’d made the wrong decision, and that child protective services—and maybe even the juvenile detention center—would be better than hanging out with this lady. “So how many minutes a day do we gotta spend together?” Fern asked.

  “Minutes?” The Newberry chick laughed loudly and then smiled all fakelike again. Fern wondered why she did that. Did she think it made her look good? Because it didn’t. It made her look simple, like she’d been dropped on her head as a baby or something. But Fern knew girls like her always had a lot of boyfriends, and boys were so stupid that they probably couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and they probably told this lady she was pretty no matter what stupid thing she did or how fake she acted.

  Fern hated boys.

  “We will be spending two hundred hours in each other’s company, doesn’t that sound fun?” The lady lifted her nose into the wind, like she was Queen of Hollarville. “And we can spread it out however you’d like, say, two hours a day for a hundred days, three hours a day for two months, or whatever. We’ll just have to go over our schedules.”

  Fern felt her mouth fall open. She couldn’t have heard right. There was no way she’d heard right. Two hundred damn hours? With this loony-tune? God! And she thought Three-Gee was the fruitiest woman on earth—but that was before she’d met her new mentor.

  “What would you like to do together?”

  Fern closed her eyes against the wind and angled her face toward the early evening sunshine. Maybe if she just pretended to be hard of hearing Tanyalee Nutberry would leave her the hell alone.

  “I know you can hear me.”

  Fern let her head wobble around on her neck, suddenly feeling too tired to sit up. “I hear ya.”

  “So? What would you like to do?”

  “Nuthin.”

  “Nuthin’s no fun, now is it?”

  “Sure it is. It’s my favorite thing to do.”

  “You’re a hilarious little kid,” the woman said, smiling again. Fern wished to God she’d stop doing that. Really. This chick was so annoying that Fern was tempted to whack her across her shiny, white-toothed, fake smile.

  “Well, now, if you don’t make a contribution to this conversation then I’ll be forced to select fun activities based on what I, myself, enjoy doing. That won’t be fair to you, of course, but unless you help me out here, I’ll have no choice.”

  There was only one thing Fern hated more than boys and that was child psychology. She sighed. “Yeah? Fine. Let’s see, I like jumping off roofs. I like shooting off the heads of snakes with my BB gun and letting spiders crawl around on the tip of my tongue so they can lay their eggs. And I especially enjoy wiping my butt with poison ivy leaves just to see what’ll happen.”

  Miss Goofyberry said nothing. Fern dared a quick peek and saw that all the color had drained from the lady’s face. She shoots … she scores … the crowd goes wild! Fern felt her shoulders shake with silent laughter.

  “Now, that was just plain mean.”

  Fern crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the windshield. She figured this car ride would only last a couple more minutes, since they were almost at Three-Gee’s house. Maybe if she just ignored everything the stupid chick said right up until they pulled in the driveway then she could jump out of the car, run to her room, and not have to deal with this crap anymore today.

  But Fern noticed the big car was slowing down. Goofyberry pulled into the gravel on the side of the road and cut the engine.

  “What are you doing?”

  Tanyalee leaned into Fern, and for a moment Fern thought she was going to hit her, so she ducked a little and pulled away.

  “What in the name of…?” The Newberry lady’s eyes went huge. “Did you think I was going to hit you?”

  Fern relaxed a
little but kept her distance.

  “Honey, I would never hit you.” Tanyalee got that overly concerned look on her face Fern had seen before, especially with the CPS people—the ones who weren’t burned out by their jobs, anyway. “You’ve been hit before, haven’t you?”

  “Whadayou think?”

  The Newberry woman frowned. “You know, Bitsy Stockslager said you’ve been through a lot, but no one has filled me in yet. Would you like to tell me?”

  “No, I would not. Can we just go to Gladys’s, please? I have homework.”

  “I want to be your friend, Fern. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Sure, but I also think it’s possible that zombies are gonna invade Cataloochee County while we’re all asleep tonight.”

  Fern watched as one of the woman’s eyebrows angled up on her forehead. “All right. We’ll play this your way. You hate me. You’re not going to loosen up and at least try to have fun with me. I get it. But you know what?”

  Fern shook her head.

  “It’s your call, missy. We can either sign those papers so I can mentor your skinny little behind or I can report your thievery so you can be sent to the protective service people.”

  Fern’s jaw opened. This lady was unbelievable! “Shit, Tanyalee, you must really like to volunteer,” she said.

  The car started up again and Tanyalee pulled out onto the road, making the turn to Gladys’s street. “Let’s just say I feel compelled to help our community in whatever way I can. And please do not curse. It is unladylike and disrespectful to me.”

  A few minutes later, Fern, Tanyalee, and Gladys were seated around Great-granny’s dining table, drinking iced tea and eating store-bought brownies with fudge icing. Gladys and Tanyalee got along like long-lost friends, which Fern guessed they kinda were, and it didn’t take long before all the papers were signed and Fern had herself a damn mentor. Tanyalee hugged Gladys—and tried to hug Fern—then said she needed to be going, adding that she’d pick up Fern from the Girls Club at the same time the next day. Fern escaped down the hallway to her bedroom and locked the door, so incredibly relieved to be alone that when she heard a loud knock on Gladys’s front door she decided she didn’t care who the hell it was. It could be Justin Bieber himself and she still wouldn’t risk going back out there and being forced into more conversation. She’d had more Tanyalee Newberry than a person should have to take in a day. And gee—only one hundred ninety-nine point five hours to go!