Page 37 of The Hard Way

We swung into the car, Odin and Zeus in front, Thor and me in back.

“Drive,” Odin said to Zeus suddenly.

“What?”

“We’re being watched.”

Zeus put the vehicle into gear and backed out. I could see my guys scanning the surroundings without appearing to. Zeus turned right onto the main drag, then took the first left. “What do you see now?”

“Just keep going,” Odin growled. “Straight.”

“What was it?”

“A feeling,” Odin said.

Zeus nodded in his noncommittal way. “Got it.”

I knew that nod and thatgot it. It said,I hear you, and I’m going along with you, but I don’t exactly see your point of view, but it’s too much energy to argue.Yeah, I knew the nod well.

Odin did, too. “Don’t give me that,” he growled. “I felt eyes on us.”

“You’ve been feeling eyes on us this whole time.”

“And usually I’m right.”

“Usually you have more than three hours of sleep over the span of three days,” Zeus said.

“I got more than three hours of sleep in three days,” Odin said.

“How much more?” Zeus barked. “Dude, you’ve been off. This small-town shit and that whole thing with Isis has you jacked.”

“Just because I’m jacked doesn’t mean I can’t feel ourfucking-gsurroundings. Feel eyes on us.”

“Deer and cupid eyes,” Zeus said.

I stiffened. Were they getting into a fight?

“Better safe than sorry,” Thor said, ever the peacemaker. “I’m not seeing anybody back there. But you know what? I bet wewerebeing watched. In that grocery store lot? They have to be nervous about their own liability.”

“What if they’re the ones who fucked up the cheese?” Zeus asked. “It could have gone bad in their store. But then again, that’s too much of a coincidence…”

“Yeah, and keep in mind,” I said, “if you start with well-made cheese from a clean operation, just letting it warm doesn’t guarantee there will be bacteria multiplying to those kinds of levels. Even Andy said so. I’m telling you. That’s the weird thing about this entire case.”

“Exactly,” Thor said. “A hell of a lot of food-poisoning bacteria have to be present to make a person ill.”

“What are you saying?” Zeus said. “So if we eat a little it’s okay?”

“Dude, you have no idea,” I said. “You probably eat it all the time.”

Thor snorted. “A lot of the eggs and meat and even peanut butter you eat already has salmonella in it, but it’s such a small quantity, it can’t do anything. It’s the amount that kills you.”

I slid my gaze to Thor. With his being a doctor and my being from a farm, we sometimes nerded out on genetics and food safety facts. I said, “The point of refrigerating foods below 40 degrees isn’t about killing bacteria, it’s about keeping them from multiplying to toxic levels if they actually are present. That’s why Andy assumes my sisters hesitated about tossing that much cheese. It was probably fine. Even after sitting in the warm cooler and then the garbage, the odds are still low that it would sicken somebody.”

Zeus turned onto the two-lane highway that would take us out of Baylortown.

Odin was glued to his phone. After a bit, he said, “Let me ask this: Who benefits from this outbreak? Let’s say the cheese was pulled from the dumpster and snuck into the store. Somebody wanted an outbreak. I’m sitting here thinking, two categories of people benefitted from what happened. One, the Millers, because they’d have the chance to buy your land. And two, a competitor.”

“The artisan sheep cheese business is not that competitive,” I said. “And anyone in the cheese business knows that pulling cheese out of the garbage and selling it isn’t a guarantee that it’s bad.”

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