The Housewife Assassin's Garden of Deadly Delights by Josie Brown Page A

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