Page 30 of The Hard Way

According to the newspaper reports, Andy had graduated with an ag degree from the community college in Dieter’s Corners. Night classes. Night classes were big in these parts due to the daytime nature of farm work.

Zeus introduced us as insurance investigators who were looking into the Sunny Sisters salmonella outbreak, wanting to get the story.

Andy looked concerned. “I already talked to the FDA investigators and a zillion other people. You could probably get the story from them.”

“We need to establish the circumstances of the claim,” Odin said, which was just a bullshitty way of saying we were there to get the story, but Andy seemed to accept this more readily.

“Okay,” he said.

“You mind if we…” Odin gestured to the barn door. Wanting to get him back inside. My guys liked to question people inside of places when possible. Odin once said that when the subject looked at the door, that was a sign they were starting to get somewhere with their questioning.

Oh, how my kinky bank robbers loved their sneaky little tricks.

So did I, though I wasn’t usually on the world-of-hurt side of those tricks; I was usually on the world-of-pleasure side.

Not that I even knew all their tricks. I was fine with that.

Andy was back in the barn—it was the machine barn rather than the actual cow barn. From the looks of it, he’d been working on their tractor.

He tossed the rag onto the tractor seat. “So,” he said. Our eyes met just then, but he gave no sign of recognition, and then Odin gave Andy a business card. Maybe Odin didn’t like him looking at me too hard. “When did you first learn about the cooler loss of power? Were you the one to bring it to management attention?”

“I already went through this.”

“You’ll need to go through it for us. It could get to be a long, drawn-out process if we have to push it through the court system.”

“This is going to court?”

“Are you surprised?” Odin asked.

“I thought…no, I don’t know.”

Zeus scribbled on his clipboard just then, like what Andy had just said was really significant. Andy watched him, looking a little paranoid. I got the feeling he was fighting with himself, wanting to ask something, but fearing a potential trap. I was starting to feel a little bit sorry for him, cad that he was.

“Just go ahead and run through the story. There should be no problem.” Zeus said it as if there could possibly be a really fucking major problem.

Andy went though the story. Him getting in there in the morning and handling the deliveries. His family had a refrigerated truck, so it made sense to have him handle the deliveries instead of my sisters up keeping their own truck.

Under other circumstances, I’d be fascinated to learn about the systems Vanessa had instituted. She had him doing anything that involved heavy lifting, as well as some of the mindless, time-consuming work, like the wine smear on the Swiss cheese. I was very impressed by this last part. Vanessa was acting as the artisan and the main shepherd, Kaitlin was handling the marketing and the business end, and they had Candace in a really minor role because of school. When I’d been there, I had been making Candace do the smear and feeding the sheep.

They were paying him kind of a lot, but when I made a few quick calculations in my head, I realized it was money well spent.

Vanessa was outsourcing like a pro.

God, was my little sister better at running the farm than I had been? Making better decisions?

Apparently yes.

“I didn’t notice the plug itself out of the wall,” Andy said. “It was when I opened the cooler to pull out the delivery that I saw the light didn’t go on. That’s the delivery staging cooler, and I saw it was dark. And the crate of labeled ready-to-ship cheese was not at all cool when I pulled it out. I set the crate on the table and went around to check that the unit was turned on, and that’s when I saw the plug was out from the wall.”

“Kicked out,” Zeus said.

Andy shrugged. “Nobody would’ve intentionally unplugged it.”

“Had it happened before?” Thor asked.

“Yeah, but we were moving a table at the time. I don’t know how it got kicked out this time, but it was out, and I put it back in, and I texted Vanessa. She came down from the house with the girls and pulled out the rest of the cheese and checked it. She figured the cooler had been off all night, and she told me to toss all the cheese.”

“So that’s what you did.”

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