Thin Gray Lines Read online

  Until her family found out.

  Curiously, neither one made mention of the fact that Randall was married back in South Africa. Her mother took issue with Olive’s association with an employee. Her father expressed disappointment and confusion that she’d fall in love with a man of no means. Her mother threatened to cut her off — which Olive was prepared to suffer — but she’d also threatened Randall’s work visa.

  It was in the shadow of her greatest heartbreak that she’d slowly begun to see all that which she’d avoided and ignored in her family. What happened to old man Phillips had been like a key turning in a lock, opening a door in her mind.

  Olive threw off her wool blanket and put her smart red blazer back on. In the darkness, she walked toward the door then stopped. She needed a plan.

  She didn’t dare sneak into the house, but there were other places of interest, places that had only sprung up since the reversal of the family troubles. The largest and most costly had been the distribution center. It was half the size of a football field and four stories tall and crawling with workers, spinning with machines and sorting belts which had always scared her. She put her hair back in a pony tail out of fear of getting it caught and ripped from her scalp. It was an irrational fear, as workers with long hair entered the facility every day and never came out bald and bleeding, but still, her courage had limits. She would have allowed herself a suit of armor if it wouldn’t be so conspicuous.

  She pushed open the door and slid out into the fresh breeze.

  The limb-crack report of the farm’s varmint rifle rang out from somewhere nearby, but she couldn’t see where. She walk-jogged past the old horse barn and checked to her left for any sign of workers near the tractor barn or the house further off. Then she hurried across the open, hardened earth toward the rear quarter of the DC. She skidded to a stop by the unmarked side door, twenty feet from the rear of the building, scanned both ways, then tried the handle. It came open and she ducked inside, closing it behind her.

  Daylight tricked in from the bay doors on the other end of the building, and dim red lights lit the travel corridors, but the rest of the space was left to darkness to help the onions keep. The thrum of the sorting belts and the sifters was quiet, too quiet, then she remembered that it was spring and most of last year’s harvest had already been prepped and shipped. Hands out, she walked forward until she found one of the steel posts holding up the bins, the giant racks that stretched to the ceiling. Entire pallets of cleaned and prepped onions were hoisted and stored in the bins for months, until they were needed in Canada or Asian countries that couldn’t grow dry land crops and didn’t like to depend on China.

  From what she could see in the reddish glow of the safety lights, the warehouse was eighty percent empty. She stood in the middle of it all, creeped out by the nightmare lighting but mostly feeling out of place. Even though it was her family’s farm, she felt unwelcome, like an intruder.

  Olive set her jaw and forced her feet to move and her eyes to find anything of interest. Two big rolling doors in the rear of the building rattled when she pushed on them. This was where the semi-trucks loaded up the finished products for their journey west. She felt her way about a corner, stumbling over a pallet jack toward a row of safety lights fixed above gray metal doors. Each of three separate doors cautioned her to keep out. Something about risk of electrical shock. She squeamishly tapped one door handle, half-expecting a volt of electricity to fry her on the spot. Nothing happened. She tapped the handle a few times more, working up the courage to open it.

  The door opened with a sucking whoosh like a walk-in freezer, but the room was warmer than the warehouse. She turned on a light switch by the door. There was a dizzying array of control panels and thick gauge wires connecting one node to another, digital displays, needle gauges, and more metal cabinets warning of potential shock. In a full body shiver, she gave one of these cabinets a tap, and pried it open. It held nothing interesting, just more wires and circuit boards like in a computer, but she didn’t die, and not dying was a bit of a rush. She boldly pried the rest open but found nothing.

  Olive realized she was barely breathing and calmed herself with big breaths, smoothing her skirt and jacket out with her hands, but her face and arms still felt numb with panic.

  It was silly to think she could find anything noteworthy.

  “You don’t even know what the hell you’re looking at,” she whispered.

  Her heel made a slight clank as she stepped toward the door.

  A rectangular piece of metal sat in the middle of the concrete floor, all painted the same color. Its edges were so flush with the concrete it was barely visible in the dim light. She knelt and ran her nails about the edge. Fingertips finally brushed over a thin ring in a shallow recess. She pried it up and hooked her index finger through it. The door barely budged, but she yanked with all her strength and eased the panel up and away from the floor until it held itself up at an obtuse angle.

  She peered inside, heaving breaths at the effort, expecting more gizmos and electric widgets. But inside she found only another door. A hatch. And this hatch had a keyhole. She looked for a way to pry it up, but there was nothing to grab onto.

  She sat back on her heels and asked herself why a control room with hundreds of exposed wires and circuits would have a door in the floor and why this door would need to be locked.

  Her blood stopped in her veins as Arlo’s gruff voice echoed in the warehouse. The barrel-chested east coaster who worked for her parents barked instructions to someone. A forklift drove by, beeping, its noises amplified by the emptiness of the warehouse.

  She closed the metal hatch with as much control and quiet as her thin arms allowed and pressed her ear against the door. Each time she thought she was safe to leave, she heard more voices. When it quieted down for a full minute, she peeked out, then sprinted across the floor, desperate to feel the cool breeze on her flushed skin which burned with anxiety. In the dim light, she made it through the forest of bin supports without smacking into one, but five strides outside in the open air, the sun blinded her, and she slammed into a big turgid belly that barely gave under her impact. Before she could open her eyes, the scent of Arlo’s cologne filled her nostrils.

  “Whoa, whoa, there.” He hugged her to keep her from careening to the ground. “Olive?”

  “Arlo. Sorry.” Her voice was pained and frightened. She couldn’t help it. She had no stomach for subterfuge. “Sorry. Sorry.” She wriggled to put some space between them.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” he said.

  “I’m not. I’m not here,” she stammered. “I’m just… I was just…”

  “Yeah, yeah. Looking for your foreign friend? I thought you two were no more.”

  “We are. Sorry, Arlo. I have to go.”

  She tried to walk away, but he held her by both shoulders. His grip, though not painful, promised it could do harm.

  “You never come here.”

  “I don’t find the time,” she said. “Nice place, though.”

  “You misunderstand me.” He angled close enough that she smelled his minty chewing gum. “You don’t ever come here. Never.” He held up a finger.

  She reeled back. “Excuse me? You can’t talk to me like that.”

  Arlo’s eyes narrowed. “I can. I really can.”

  Olive wanted to make a pithy retort and put the brute in his place, but in a state of alarm, she lost her ability to form words. She settled for spitting in his face, but her mouth was dry and only a few flecks of spittle found him. Arlo had probably taken worse accidentally in casual conversation.

  She reacted with more shock than he did, slipping into icy panic at what the slight would cost her.

  “I… I…”

  “You got salt,” he said. “Real estate is toughening you up.”

  It almost sounded like a compliment. That befuddled her more.

  She started crying and yanking her body away and was about to scream, but he sensed it first a
nd clamped a hand over her mouth, backing her up into the wall.

  Eyes wide, he spoke softly. “You listen to me, because I tell you one time. I run this place. Not you. Not your shit-headed father, not your bitch mother, not your little foreign pretty boy.”

  She kicked at his shins as hard as she could, certain he’d wince and shrink away. When he didn’t even register a reaction, she coughed out, “You-you-you really think you run this place?”

  Though her words were muffled by his hand, they seemed to get through. Maybe it wasn’t Arlo’s first time having such a conversation.

  “I don’t think so. I know so. I’m willing to do what no one else is, because I don’t have family here. Now who told you about the control room. Randall?”

  So, Arlo knew about her snooping.

  She shook her head.

  “Your dad get drunk and tell you?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Then who?” He pressed her head into the wall, and pain radiated from the rear of her skull.

  She shook her head again harder. “No one. I was just snooping.”

  “Snooping? What are you? Some kid looking for her Christmas presents? Tell me the truth or I’ll throw you in the cardboard baler.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Then make me believe.” He pulled his hand down off her mouth.

  “After the bag dropped through old man Phillips’ roof and killed him, I was the one who found him.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Then Randall found me. He brought me to a barn, probably ‘cause my mother and I would fight.”

  Arlo’s eyes grew beadier and more intense. “Did you see what was in the bag?”

  She shook her head against the lightening pressure of his hand.

  “And then you came here. Snooping.” He thought for a minute, searching her eyes, then dragged her back inside.

  She screamed, but he clamped a hand over her mouth just long enough to say, “I ain’t taking you to the baler. I ain’t hurting you. Now come.”

  He pulled her across the floor to the control room and shoved her inside. Arlo knelt down by the panel, pulling it up and inserting a key. The lock clicked, and the door swung downward, opening a shaft of darkness.

  She peered closer but saw only black.

  “Understand what this means,” Arlo said.

  It meant that whatever her parents had been doing — the real reason they needed a thug like Arlo to run a rural onion packing business — she’d be in. She’d be complicit.

  Her subconscious ignorance all those years hadn’t been simple disinterest or laziness. It had a purpose. It had been protecting her from this exact thing, protecting her from becoming a criminal just like her parents.

  She shook her head, crying softly. “I don’t wanna know.”

  “You already do.”

  Their gazes burned into one another. There was nothing she could say to deny it.

  He nodded at her and spoke in his gently terrifying way. “You wanted to know, but you didn’t want any of the responsibility. But knowing comes with responsibility.”

  She shook her head, unable to protest in words.

  “Olive, you get down there, or I’ll throw you down.”

  “My dad will kill you.”

  Arlo looked at her differently then, not with anger, but with emptiness behind his eyes. Where normal souls were crowded with warehouse bins, packed high and wide with rules and shame and morals, his was a cavernous void. He really would do anything he felt necessary, a man of his word. Honorable, if only to his instincts.

  She sat at the edge, and Arlo helped her hands find the top rung of the ladder. She felt oddly light as she descended into the darkness, then shot a glance upward, afraid he’d shut the door and leave her to die. But Arlo had only been waiting his turn to grab the ladder.

  At the bottom, she waited in darkness until Arlo’s boots hit the ground. A light switch clicked, and a dim light came on.

  The space she laid eyes on was about the size of the ladies’ locker room at her gym but windowless with bare concrete walls. A bunker. It held a variety of machines, supplies, tools, but something in the center of the room took up all her attention.

  A pallet stacked neatly with big, bluish bricks, each roughly the size of a cinderblock. The blue color came from the translucent plastic wrapped around the bricks. Benjamin Franklin’s face stared at her through it, sideways, upside down and right side up.

  Olive reached out to touch it then looked back at Arlo.

  “Do a belly flop in it for all I care. But I’m warning you, that cash is vacuum sealed and hard as rocks.”

  She picked up a block. It was indeed heavier than she would’ve expected. “It’s real?”

  Arlo laughed in a high pitch. “That’s hilarious.”

  “How much?”

  “This right here is twelve million reasons for you to realize what’s good for you. What’s good for all of us. Some of this could be yours one day, but by then it’ll have a different form. Businesses, stocks, bonds, sitting in a bank somewhere overseas. That is if your parents would get with the program faster.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to keep it down here? Here on the farm?”

  “It’s only dangerous if the people who know about it open their mouth.” He stepped beside her, laying a hand atop the stack. “Haven’t had any problems so far. If I do, I’ll know who to come for.”

  “You’ll come for me?”

  “You need me to say it? Yeah. Skinny little thing like you, I can dig your grave with the heel of my boot.”

  “And if I don’t say anything?”

  “That’s why I brought you down here, Olive.” He motioned to the pile. “Easy choice, right?”

  “But… Isn’t this also yours?”

  “This belongs to the operation. Your parents.”

  “You have twelve million dollars sitting underneath you every day, and you just leave it there?”

  “I got my cut,” Arlo said. “I don’t begrudge anyone else their profits. Besides, it’s only here because cleaning it ain’t easy.”

  “But you could steal it.”

  “One brick at a time? Up and down that ladder? With my fat ass?” He huffed a laugh, eyes squinting, then grew serious again. “Most people think running off with a pile of cash would be the end of their problems.” He waggled his chin. “But trust me, little one. It’s just the beginning.”

  TWENTY

  Corus lay prone at the crest of a corrugated metal roof, watching for movement. The southernmost outbuilding in the farm’s complex looked like it’d been slapped together some time in the Eisenhower administration, but provided the least obstructed view of the farmland.

  With no clouds in the sky, the sun had begun its daily arc, warming the tin and the nest of burlap sacks he’d laid down to protect him from the sharp edge of the roof’s apex. Sixty-seven degrees never felt so warm.

  He nestled in his sniper’s roost with 270 degrees of clearance. His eyes were good, but picking buff-colored ground squirrels out of the cracked leather landscape was tough without binoculars, and their shadows were shortening as the sun rose. Thankfully, the tilled soil hadn’t been tamped down by any watering yet, so they kicked up dust as they scampered. Also, their holes tended to cluster, so even if a rodent disappeared before he could shoot, it was only a matter of time before two or three more poked their little heads out nearby.

  He peered over his shoulder to keep an eye on the other workers, making sure they were all safely out of his field of fire and feeling guilty that he wasn’t with them. They appeared to be gathering rocks from the furrows and collecting them into a wheelbarrow.

  Corus couldn’t afford to feel too guilty, though, because matar ratas duty gave him a way to scout the terrain.

  A flash caught his eye, and he pivoted, leaning his right armpit painfully into the roof edge to train his sight on a target far to the left. The ground squirrel paused before ducking into a hole. A costly hesit
ation. Its body tumbled a short way across the dirt, like a sock in a clothes dryer.

  That made thirty.

  Corus caught a different sort of movement to the north. A female with black hair and a red blazer exited from a side door of the distribution center, then looked both directions before running stiff armed across open space. Once behind the next building, she slowed to a walk, almost as if she were using it as cover.

  Corus rolled onto his side and watched as she ran from building to building, always watching for something or someone.

  As she got closer, he worried she’d spot him, but she reached her destination without looking up and ducked into a building as dilapidated as the one Corus had perched upon.

  He blinked, wondering what he’d just seen, then brought his notice to the blue hatchback parked nearby. Many things about the farm had surprised Corus, so the vehicle hadn’t stood out initially. Now that he examined it, though, it did look out of place, way too far from the main house, but with no apparent utility for a thousand-acre onion farm.

  The remaining ground nesting rodent population of the Tanner farm benefited from this curious sighting, as it divided Corus’ attention. He was almost certain the woman he’d seen was Olive Tanner, but if so, why was she hiding in an old barn with bowed siding? Why was she skulking about, when her parents owned the property?

  Corus emptied the .22’s action and switched the safety on, then rolled to sitting and aimed the little 4x scope at the Phillips house. The hole in the roof was plainly visible. He gazed down at the hatchback again, then up at the sky. He caught a glimpse of a hawk circling high above the field and expected it to dive at one of the numerous free meals Corus had left for it, but the hawk just kept on circling lazily. Perhaps it was confused why so many rodent carcasses littered the field, some instinct telling it to stay clear of such an unnatural sight.

  He watched it for some time before settling back into sniping position. When he spotted the next runner, he held his fire and looked up at the hawk. “Come on. Take this one while he’s still alive.”