Spooky Sweet

by Connie Shelton

  Through the brightly lit kitchen window she saw Zoë washing lettuce at the sink. Darryl met her at the back door and enveloped her in one of his customary mountain-man bear hugs.

  “Beau should be along shortly,” she said, walking into the warm kitchen that smelled of green chile and fresh bread. “We were both running late with work today, but I talked to him about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I suppose his job never becomes any less hectic, does it?” Darryl took Sam’s jacket and hung it on a hook near the back door.

  “Never. And mine is … well, we’re going to talk about that later.”

  Zoë dried her hands and pulled Sam into a hug. “Darryl’s got some great ideas for you, but for now we’re just going to relax. There’s green chile stew and salad for supper and I made some of that jalapeño bread you like. So the big question now is—wine or margarita?”

  “Your margaritas are fantastic and I’d love one.”

  The sound of another vehicle reached them and Darryl went to the door to greet Beau.

  Drinks in hand, they stood at the bar-height counter snacking on the chips and salsa Zoë had placed there.

  “Thanks so much for this,” Sam said, halfway through her first margarita. “Until now, I hadn’t actually realized how totally preoccupied I’ve been with work—the holiday season that’s screaming up on me at lightning speed and the stress of handling all the normal stuff plus the new chocolate contract.”

  “Are you planning to split the two? The retail bakery and the stuff you’re shipping out, I mean.” Zoë scooped a chip into the salsa, her glance sliding toward Darryl.

  “I don’t know …” Sam said. “I’d been thinking that it should all stay together so I can keep an eye on everything. But that always puts my stomach in a knot because there’s no way to enlarge our current space since we’re in a strip shopping center, and if we move Sweet’s Sweets we may lose a bunch of customers. We’re just now getting known where we are.”

  Darryl spoke up. Evidently, he’d given this some thought already. “I wondered about that. I’ve got some rough sketches for you that would allow you to go either way.”

  Zoë spoke up: “Maybe we should eat before you get into all that. I know what happens once the drawings come out—it’ll end up midnight and no one’s had dinner.” She sent a wink toward Sam and Beau.

  “Good idea. We want to hear about what you all have been up to, too, you know,” said Beau, offering a hand carrying things to the table.

  They spent the next forty minutes, eating and chatting but Sam could feel her attention drifting as her mind flitted toward the possibilities for her shop. When the dessert flan had been eaten and the dishes cleared she was more than happy to see Darryl bring out some rolls of white paper.

  “These are only preliminary sketches,” he said, unrolling two pages and anchoring the edges with heavy pottery salt and pepper shakers and a couple of mugs. “Feel free to scribble on them, make notes, anything.”

  Sam looked at the precisely inked lines, not immediately making sense of them.

  “Okay, so this is a concept for a total move to a new location. You would find a piece of land somewhere and we’d build a facility large enough to incorporate your bakery at street-front and the manufacturing facility and shipping departments in the back. A location with access to a back street would work best, allowing trucks to pull up to your loading dock—” He pointed to what would be the rear of a fairly massive-looking building.

  Loading dock? Sam gulped. “We’re not close to that point—”

  “Right. Just throwing this out there as a vision for the future … maybe the place you’ll need as the chocolate-manufacturing side of the business grows. Who knows? You might soon be shipping your other baked goods as well. Cakes, cookies, breads …” Darryl looked up, reading her expression.

  “Or not. Maybe you’ll choose to stay just as you are now.”

  “It’s sort of scary, you know. Thinking of that level of expansion.”

  “And you had a very valid point,” Zoë said, “about not wanting to lose your current bakery customers. Your shop being just a block off the plaza brings in a lot of tourists as well as the locals who work and go to school right there in the neighborhood.”

  “True,” Beau said, giving Sam’s shoulder a little squeeze.

  Darryl rolled the top page away and revealed the second one. “Which is why I came up with an alternate. In this scenario, you would keep Sweet’s Sweets where it is and continue to produce all your regular stuff right there as you’ve always done. This sketch would be for the chocolate factory only and the scale could begin much smaller.”

  Sam saw a rectangular building divided into sections.

  “An office and small reception area up front,” Darryl said, pointing. “Big kitchen here. We can configure it however you need. I’m guessing more stovetop and worktables than you have now, no ovens?”

  She nodded.

  “Back here is storage. Over there is shipping.”

  She liked that.

  “We can still do the loading dock, or we can scale that back and just have an extra wide door that allows products to be carried or wheeled to trucks, or to your van, for delivery.”

  “This is more the size I’m thinking,” Sam said, liking the concept. “The big question, naturally, is cost. I don’t have any idea how much I can afford.”

  Darryl picked up a small calculator and began punching numbers. “Assuming we stick with fairly standard fixtures, flooring, roofing … and your specialized kitchen equipment, we’d figure out an allowance for that … everything done to city code …” He muttered a lot of alien-sounding phrases and scribbled little notes at the edge of the white paper.

  Sam looked up at Beau but he seemed as much at a loss as she was.

  “Pretty much turnkey, here’s approximately what it’ll take, per square foot,” Darryl held out the calculator. “We’re talking three thousand feet …” He multiplied it and held the calculator out toward Sam again.

  The number made her eyes go wide and she actually choked on the saliva that suddenly washed down her throat.

  “Whoa. That’s way, way more money than I have to spend.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Darryl. I know you spent a lot of time …”

  He smiled and took her hand. “Only a couple hours last night, sketching out these lines. It’s okay, Sam. Really. You need to think about it. There are small business loans and such, if money is the big consideration. But you also want to think about how much expansion you really need. Maybe this is just too much at once.”

  She nodded. She loved his concept. Separate the kitchen from the shipping. An office space to meet with the client—no more stolen minutes in the midst of the busy bakery while cookie-munching kids trailed in and out. A desk where she could work without a sticky bowl of glaze getting dumped on important paperwork. It was a dream setup, for sure, but there was no way she could consider it.

  “Beau, we should go. I’m too tired to think clearly right now.” Her morning energy-burst from handling the wooden box had long ago left, and she suddenly felt overwhelmed and weary to the bone.

  Darryl rolled up the plans and handed them to her. Zoë seemed a little worried as she handed out their coats and gave each of them a hug. Sam walked out the door, more distressed over the decision than ever.

  Chapter 8

  Beau awoke at five a.m. sensing that Sam was finally sleeping peacefully. She’d had a rough night, he knew. Before they’d gone to bed, she’d said only one thing about the plans Darryl had presented after dinner.

  “I love his ideas,” she said, “but at this point I only have a one-year contract with Book It. I have to be realistic.”

  When he asked if she wanted to talk it over, she merely shook her head and crawled under the covers. But she’d tossed and turned half the night and he knew her disquiet went beyond the physical exhaustion that now threatened her. This was a tough decision, one that could potentially strain a dea
r friendship.

  He rolled over as carefully as possible and got out of bed. He knew Sam; she would work this out in her mind before she talked much more about it. He showered quietly and went outside to tend to Ranger and Nellie and the two horses. By the time the sky had begun to show light in the east his mind was back on the case of the mysteriously appearing cash and he was on the road.

  The A-1 Armored Car Company’s head office was in Albuquerque, but since the truck in question had been dispatched that fateful morning out of Springer that’s where law enforcement focused their attention. Yesterday, Tim Beason had suggested he and Beau question the employees together. Each county had a hand in solving the crime; both could potentially contribute something to the direction the questions would take.

  He met Beason at the O-Kay Diner at the outskirts of Springer, a town on the plains with a smattering of historic buildings and about a thousand people. It seemed to have hit its heyday in the middle of the last century. The little eatery where the lawmen met was almost eerily the same as Charlotte’s Place in Taos and he supposed every small town had one—the convenient coffee shop and hangout where the locals got far more of their daily news than the papers ever provided. In this case, the owner was a woman who bustled between minding the register, greeting newcomers, telling them to take a seat anywhere they liked, and delivering plates when the cook’s “order up” shout didn’t immediately grab the attention of the establishment’s one waitress.

  The two men drank cups of coffee while they brought each other up to date on the case’s developments in the past twenty-four hours. Tim’s men, so far, had primarily focused on the crime scene—the abandoned truck, the blood on the highway and what little forensic evidence they’d gathered: some tire tracks and footprints that might or might not have come from the robbers. He was hoping for fingerprints off the road barricades the men used; those had been appropriated from a real construction site two miles up the road.

  Beau assured his colleague the bag of money was safely stowed in the Taos County evidence locker. His own crime scene tech had dusted the bag for prints but nothing showed up. It was hard to get prints from fabric, and a single print from the handle provided no matches.

  When Tim questioned why the injured driver had been taken to Taos rather than the hospital in Colfax County, Beau said, “I asked that question myself. Tansy Montoya and her kids live in Taos and since the two facilities are nearly equal distance from the scene of the crime, the ambulance crew went by the identification in her wallet and transported her closest to home.”

  “Quite a commute for her to come over here for work,” Tim mused.

  “I gather the move is pretty recent, something about an ex-husband getting abusive and her needing to get farther away. I plan to ask her manager more about it.”

  “I didn’t see much point in being cagey with the employees at A-1,” Beason said, placing a five dollar bill on the table for their coffees. “They know we’re coming. The manager, a Phil Carlisle, assured me by phone they are every bit as eager as we are to solve this thing.”

  They left the diner, got into their respective vehicles and drove the three blocks to the building where A-1 maintained the satellite office that dispatched trucks to the small communities of northern New Mexico.

  The facility consisted of a standard metal building with pitched roof, the whole thing painted sky blue. A parking area out front held two vehicles—a white Chevy sedan and an SUV with the vanity plate 4FISHIN. Chain link fencing with razor wire on top ran from one front corner of the building, around a flat patch of ground about two acres in size, ending at the other front corner of the building. A second building sat at the back of the lot with wide garage doors, obviously a maintenance facility. A drive-through gate allowed access for the three armored trucks parked inside.

  Beau parked alongside Beason’s vehicle and saw a bald man in a business suit watching through the glass entry door. He held it open as the lawmen approached.

  “Gentlemen, thank you for coming,” Carlisle said, ushering them inside and leading the way past a wide-eyed receptionist to his private office. “I’ve put the two guards on leave for a few days and recommended counseling for them, but they know they’ll be required to come in this morning and speak with you.”

  “I imagine this has been a nerve-wracking experience for them,” Beau said, taking in the utilitarian furniture and lack of anything more artistic in the office than a couple of colorful safety posters.

  “We’re all very shaken by what happened to Tansy,” Carlisle said. “Rudy and Pedro always treated her like a little sister and it really hit close to both of them.”

  “How is Mrs. Montoya doing today?” Tim asked.

  “I called the hospital this morning. There’s been no change.”

  “I understand the reason Tansy moved to Taos was because of an abusive ex who lives somewhere around here? Do you think he could have been somehow involved in this attack?” Beau asked.

  Carlisle shook his head slowly. “Doubt it. If I can be frank, the guy hardly has the organizational skills to get dressed in the morning. He’s a drunk—a seriously, passed-out-on-the-couch type. Tansy tried to hide the details of her home life from us here at work, but this is a small town. It’s no secret. She showed up with bruises too often to have walked into that many doors. When she decided to dump the guy for good was when he whaled on their son for the first time. The kid’s only four, for god’s sake. And the little girl is about two. I have to give her kudos for at least considering their safety. She picked Taos because her mother is there to help out with the kids—only family she has. Sad.”

  Beau took down the name of the ex, although he saw by Tim Beason’s expression that the local law was already well aware of him.

  “So she commuted all the way from there every day? Has to be more than two hours each way.”

  “We were working on a new arrangement. The company has a Taos opening coming up soon so right now Tansy’s only having to come over here a couple days a week and then she’ll work out of Taos all the time.”

  If she survived.

  Carlisle seemed to realize Beau’s thought. He fussed with a little paperclip holder on his desk.

  “Let’s talk about the day of the robbery,” Beason said. “These guards, uh … Rudy and Pedro. Was this a regular route and were they the normal crew for that huge amount of cash being transported to the mine company?”

  Carlisle took a deep breath, getting down to facts.

  “Yes and no. The route is a regular one—we transport large amounts of money to and from the mine once a month. We try not to schedule the same three—it’s a driver and two guards—every time. And I don’t assign the crew any more than a day in advance. No one knows, when they report to work, where they’ll be driving or what they’ll be transporting. Of course, every employee has undergone extensive background checks before they ever get a job with A-1.”

  “Of course.” Beau scribbled another note. “So, how many people know exactly what’s in the bags?”

  “The bank, of course. The branch manager personally places the cash into the heavy canvas bags, runs a cut-proof cable through grommets in the top, locks the ends of the cable with a shrouded Sobo padlock, and labels the bags. The customer—management at the mine company—naturally knows what they are expecting—how many bags and such. For insurance purposes, I receive a manifest for every shipment. That’s it.”

  “The employees in the truck—those actually riding along with the valuables—they don’t know what’s in the bags?”

  “Not specifically. It’s not rocket science to figure out that shipments from banks are cash, but the bags often contain other items such as checks, coins, even paperwork. No one aside from the three I mentioned knows whether that’s a bag of pennies or of hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Has A-1 ever had an incident where a truck was robbed and it turned out to be an inside job?”

  For the first time, Carlisle looked a bit flustered. �
��Well, I couldn’t say ‘never.’ It’s a big company with a long history. But certainly not on my watch.”

  A buzz from his desk phone saved him from having to get specific and the young receptionist’s voice came through, announcing that Rudy and Pedro were here.

  “We’ll need separate interview rooms,” Beau told Phil Carlisle.

  “Oh, certainly. One of you may use my office and we also have a small break room.” He stood. “If that’s all you have for me?”

  “For now,” Beason said. “Depending on what these men tell us, we may need to clarify a few details later.”

  Tim Beason walked out of the office first, greeted the two guards and had Carlisle show the way to the break room. Beau turned to the remaining guard.

  “Pedro? Right this way, please.” He helped himself to Phil Carlisle’s desk chair and indicated the one he’d just vacated for the guard.

  Pedro Hernandez was tall and slim and met Beau’s eye with no problem. His coffee-toned skin was unlined—one of those men who might be anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five years old.

  “How’s Tansy?” Hernandez asked before Beau had the chance to formulate his first questions.

  “About the same, I’m afraid,” Beau said.

  Pedro shook his head. “Hard to believe, man. All the years she lived with that jerk, and now she gets hurt on the job.”

  Beau debated whether to follow the thread of Tansy’s ex—there might, after all, be something there—but decided he was better off getting Pedro’s account of the actual robbery.

  “Rudy and I are in the back, you know. Mainly we just sit there and shoot the bull during the ride but on those curving roads through the canyon I try to look out the little window slits, keep an eye on the road, cause my stomach gets all twisty. I hate those sections.”