by Matthew Iden
So, I’d grabbed some bottled water and a few pieces of fruit and decided to stake out one of the farms. It seemed as good a way to net some answers as anything else I could do. Neither farm appeared more likely than the other, so I’d chosen at random and headed for the property. The county was big, however, and even with my phone’s map and a printout of the MLS map I’d made at the library, it took me four tries to find the dirt road that led to the farm.
I worried some that my tracks would be obvious to the next guy, but the road was dry and as long as they didn’t come soon and see the plume of dust I’d left, I should be in good shape. I didn’t approach the farm directly. Once I knew I had the right plot, I turned around and headed back out, then looked for nearby roads on the map. After some careful study, I found a tiny road that overlooked the farm from about five hundred yards away. I pulled off into the shade, grabbed a cheap pair of binoculars I kept in the car, and settled in.
The farm was nestled in a small valley formed by a trio of low hills that tucked into each other like the folds of a blanket. A two-story farmhouse, once white, now grayed and peeling, sat beside a clapboard barn. Wide double doors on the barn were secured with a padlock big enough to see from a quarter mile away and stringy black remnants of old electrical wire ran to the house from the road. Green creeper vine smothered half of the barn, the broad leaves waving from a weak breeze blowing across the valley. Deeper into the property, I could see the remnants of what might’ve been outbuildings or run-in sheds for horses once upon a time, but were now mostly rubble. Untended fields, high with grass gone from green to straw-yellow in the August sun, were sectioned off with rusted barbed wire wound around the stumps of fence posts. Beetles and bugs buzzing past my car and through the fields were the only sounds.
I was in position by ten and was, reluctantly, ready to spend the next twelve hours watching the place. Watching for what, I wasn’t really sure. Movement, visitors, strange smells, explosions? A Vice cop or DEA agent would’ve known exactly what to look for, but I figured since I was staring at a supposedly abandoned farmhouse, anything more than a bird flying overhead should count as suspicious. Except for the presence of the padlock—which could’ve been put on by a real estate agent or absentee owner trying to protect what little of value the place had left—the place looked exactly like a deserted farm.
One little visit by a Brower was all I needed and the gamble would pay off. The trick to catching them, however, was staying awake. Every few minutes, I swept the place with the binoculars. They weren’t much better than my own eyesight, but it helped keep me awake and semi-alert when reciting multiplication tables and the list of U.S. presidents started to wear thin.
Two hours in, I knew every cracked board in the barn, every crumbling brick in the house. I’d named every president in order three times except whoever came after James Garfield. I missed that one on each pass. Multiplication tables were too easy, so I started doing square roots and naming capitals of European countries.
I was nibbling on an apple and sifting my brain for the capital of Latvia when I heard the distant, deep-throated chug of a pickup truck. I grabbed my binoculars and got ready to zero in on the farm. Nothing was visible for a few moments, then I saw a kick of maroon dust in the air coming towards the farm, fast. A red pickup came into view, its sides and fenders dented and scratched. It pulled around the house in a wide circle, throwing up a wall of dust, and came to rest right in front of the ramshackle barn. The cloud caught up with it, enveloping the entire truck for a few seconds before the wind carried it away.
The driver waited for the dust to settle, then hopped out of the cab. The sound of the door slamming shut reached me two seconds later. Whoever it was, he was skinny and moved with an easy walk. He went to the barn door but paused in front of it, head bowed, playing with a phone or something in his hand before glancing up and doing a quick circle. Looking for trespassers? Seemed a little late. I had him centered in the glasses, so as he completed his pirouette, I had a great head shot of good old Jay-bone, he of the trick shots and thrown billiard games and poor choice of friends. I grinned. Putting your time in at the library pays off, once in a while.
Satisfied that he was alone, Jay took out a set of keys and fiddled with the padlock on the barn door. He pulled the door aside just enough to slip inside. The time was 12:13. I lowered the glasses and waited. He had to come back to the truck sometime. I worked the apple over, nipping bites all the way to the core. Just as I bit into a seed, I saw some movement and raised the ’nocs in time to see Jay exit the barn. His hands were empty. He closed and locked the door, then pulled out a blue handkerchief and wiped his face and blew his nose as if to get rid of something. He glanced at his phone again as he sauntered back to the truck. It rocked back and forth as he got in, then took off in another cloud of dust.
I glanced at my watch. 12:37. I looked back at the farm, thinking. The dirty red cloud of Virginia clay floated in the air, then settled to the ground. I had confirmation that my hunch was correct, that the Browers and their crony Jay were up to no good at an abandoned residence perfect for creating a controlled substance like crystal meth. I’d found the right farmhouse with some intuition and some basic detective work. And, now that today’s inspection was over, there was a good chance that the farmhouse would be deserted for the next twenty-four hours.
This would be a great time to call the Cain’s Crossing PD and give Warren my suspicions and deductions. He’d be so impressed, he might deputize me. Or run me out of town for continuing to stick my nose in places it didn’t really belong. On the other hand, he had to know the meth labs were there. If he wasn’t doing anything about them…well, I didn’t like where those thoughts led.
Still, I didn’t have any right to go snooping around. I’d already been explicitly told not to make trouble or play cop. So, the sane thing to do would be to call it in and let the chips fall where they may. Let the CCPD do their job—even if they did so in a lousy manner—and head back to town.
“Where’s the fun in that?” I said into the silence, then got out of the car and headed across the high grass to the farm.
Chapter Twenty-Three
If I had any doubts that I was approaching a meth lab, the smell clinched it.
It’s funny that you don’t have to own a cat to know what cat urine smells like. Ask anyone in the street and they’ll be able to describe it. It’s a pervasive, rather stunning odor that, smelled once, sticks. In my case, I didn’t have to imagine it, as I happen to own a cat named Pierre. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he agreed to share living quarters. Pierre’s a big cat and does whatever the hell he pleases, including living where he wants.
But even a cat his size didn’t have a bladder big enough to make the smell reaching me. From forty feet away, the acrid smell of ammonia was enough to make me clamp a hand over my nose. Keeping an eye out for a cloud of red road dust, I backed off and did a slow circuit of the barn. The grass was knee high everywhere except in front of the door and it was slow going as I passed through the strong, late-morning sun and into the shade of the old building. Grasshoppers took off in all directions like tiny springs being released as I waded through the grass. I brushed a few ticks from my jeans, grimacing as I plucked one off that had already latched onto my ankle. A tractor, no more than wheels and a chassis, lay rusting in the yard behind the barn. Two large oil drums, empty and pitted, stood guard in the back, but there wasn’t anything else to see until I found—as I thought I might—a burn pit holding the charred remains of rubber tubes and melted clumps of some kind of packaging. During my inspection, I’d come within ten or twenty feet of the barn itself and the smell went from nose-wrinkling to tear-inducing.
But you can’t prove a smell in court.
I stopped, thinking. The original owners had either long since given up on the place or were so absentee as to amount to the same thing. So B and E charges weren’t a problem unless a Cain’s Crossing cruiser pulled down the driveway just as I wa
s prying a board off the side of the barn. No, the real worry was that meth labs were notorious for their highly flammable contents creating explosions that would make an Army ordnance engineer proud. I didn’t relish the thought of having survived cancer to this point, only to be blown to bloody bits in the back-ass of Virginia. Or being poisoned. The labs that didn’t go out with a bang were often filled with the toxic gas of the chemicals used to bake the meth. Gasses that were heavier than air and settled in your lungs, silently drowning you where you stood.
With these dangers in mind, normally I would’ve turned around and left. But I’d just watched Jay spend nearly twenty minutes inside and live to tell about it. That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement—there were plenty of tweakers that weren’t smart enough to keep from getting killed in their own labs—but it at least proved to me that it wasn’t instantly fatal. And you don’t get evidence by standing around.
Keeping an eye on the road, I walked around front and checked the padlock. It was a brute of a thing, a Chateau disc lock that weighed a pound if it weighed an ounce. A hardened steel chain wound through two steel eyebolts that were riveted to the old door, not screwed in. I wouldn’t be getting in through the front.
I took another circuit of the barn, searching for weak boards, big gaps, anything while I rubbed the sting out of my eyes and tired to ignore the itch in my nose. Nothing. It wasn’t Fort Knox, but without a radial saw or bolt cutters, I wasn’t going to get in. On the second pass around the barn, however, I stepped back and inspected the building more critically, tracing the corners and following the pattern of the planks.
It was the back side of the barn that had been taken over by the lush green creeper vine. The vine was well away from the entrances, so hadn’t needed to be trimmed, but on the back, it literally hid the planks from top to bottom. But jutting from the peak of the gambrel roof was an old beam with a rusting pulley, the old block and tackle the farmers used for pulling up hay. And where there was a block and tackle on a barn, there was a loft door.
I examined the creeper where it grew at eye level. The stuff had been there since before I was born and was a gnarled and knotted vine as thick as my wrist. I peered at the leaves suspiciously. What had they told me in the Boy Scouts? Leaves of three, let it be? These had five points. I took a deep breath, then reached out and grabbed one of the thicker vines, tugging at it, leaning back, letting it support my whole weight. It didn’t budge.
I wedged a foot in a crotch of the vine, reset my grip, and started climbing hand over hand up the barn wall. There were plenty of spots to step, as well, or I wouldn’t have made it by arm strength alone. Moving carefully and testing every hold thoroughly, I was within arm’s reach of the loft door in less than a minute.
Bracing myself, I tugged and pulled and pushed and grunted, trying to open the door even a few inches. But the same vine that had made my Tarzan impersonation possible had also entombed the door, keeping me from opening it even a fraction of an inch.
I swore. The plan had been genius. I tucked my head to my shoulder to wipe the sweat away. I started back down, reaching for a wider grip for security, when I suddenly wobbled in place as—not the vines—but the boards underneath the vines started to give way.
I scrabbled for a better hold, found it, then peered at the loose boards. The vines were barely holding on to a rotten section. I followed the line of the plank upwards and carefully climbed until I was even with the loft door again. Reaching out ever so cautiously, I pushed at the plank. A whole section was punky and rotted, probably only held in place by the vines themselves. A thin shaft of sunlight poured through the gap I’d made, revealing that I was even with the loft.
I twisted and pulled and, with the sound of kindling being snapped, a three-wide stack of boards peeled away without giving away entirely. I slipped a foot away from the vine I was standing on and got it wedged in the opening. With more finagling I got most of one hand and arm inside. Then, with a deep breath, I pushed off and slid through the gap.
Once inside, I grinned, pleased with my innovative method of breaking and entering, but the grin turned to a grimace real quick. The cat pee smell wasn’t just strong, it was crippling. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth and held it there while I let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Vertical shafts of light squeezed through gaps between the wooden slats of the wall, providing the only illumination. Except for the hole in the roof, where a common household window fan had been duct-taped and clotheslined in place. A quick look around confirmed that I was, indeed, in the loft. Dust floated in the air and a scattering of hay still remained from years gone by of storing bales for the winter. But the real action was on the first floor.
Folding tables and plywood counters full of bottles, tubing, glasses, and funnels crowded most of the free space below. Propane tanks and kitty-litter jugs lay on their sides, while towers of coffee filters leaned at crazy angles on top of a cabinet. A huge red stain covered half of the floor. Hot plates connected to extension cords covered one side table.
I made my way along the loft until I found the built-in ladder leading from the loft to the floor. I climbed down and found myself in an end of the barn that had been given over to stalls unused in forty years. I poked my head in each, finding nothing but an ankle’s worth of hay littering all but one of them.
The last had plastic wrap and empty cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, while black foam cutouts, like the kind that protects phones and computer parts, were scattered on the floor. Figuring it was the packaging for the tubes and glasses, I only gave it a glance and was ready to move on when something, a peeling paper label on one of the boxes, caught my eye. I picked up the box, careful not to tip the rest of them.
The label was wrinkled and stuck to itself, but the flared wings of the eagle and the round logo were hard to mistake. As was the big lettering spelling out U.S. Customs and Border Protection. I turned the box over in my hands, studying the other markings. They were all in Chinese or some other Asian writing, but the foam cushions all seemed to be made to hold electronic parts. Pictographs of red Xs through water droplets and lightning bolts appeared to confirm my hypothesis. I put the box back and kept rummaging. Forty more boxes, precisely like the first, were stacked in the stall. I took out my phone and snapped pictures of the lot.
I backed out and moved carefully to the lab. The ammonia smell was bad, but maybe the hole in the ceiling was doing its job. Either that, or my sense of smell had been obliterated. I swallowed nervously. Rationally, I knew that if the chemicals they used in the lab were of the kind that were going to kill me, there’s nothing I could do about it. Probably couldn’t detect them, even. But I took shallow breaths through my shirt anyway, trying to taste the air to give myself a minuscule chance of surviving if the place turned out to be toxic.
Very little light reached the floor and I squinted, trying to discern details. I wasn’t really sure what more I’d find. A first-year rookie would know this was a sizable meth operation and would have beat a retreat by now so he could call in the cavalry. But I pressed on further. Maybe it was curiosity. After all, I’d been Homicide, not Vice. I’d seen some of the street-side results of meth use and meth dealing, but I’d never busted a lab before and only seen one in the flesh as it was being dismantled and scrubbed by a forensics team, long after the action.
I walked closer to the main production area, where the tables were spilling over with glassware, tubing, and strange contraptions held together by black electrical tape. I peered into a bucket filled almost to the brim with matchbooks and another one with the cardboard strike plates that had been stripped off those same matchbooks. Sweat rolled down my back and stung my eyes. The air was stifling and I was getting a splitting headache from the smell and the heat. I lifted buckets, took pictures, and scrounged with the utmost care, but after another ten minutes, it was clear I’d found everything worth finding. It was time to go.
Moving carefully, I retraced my steps through the stalls, up the la
dder, and out to the vine. Getting out was exponentially harder than getting in, and I was fatigued enough that, at several points, I simply held on to whatever was handy and closed my eyes to rest. If the Browers showed up, I was going to be about as easy to nail as a Marty Singer–sized piñata.
But no one appeared to knock out my stuffing and half an hour after I’d entered the barn, I was following my own trail over the driveway, across the yard, and back to my car. I thought about what confirmation of the lab meant and what I was going to do about it.
My hand was on the door handle when I heard a strange snapping sound from behind me, like popcorn just starting to pop. I turned and looked back. A lone second’s void of silence made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end…then the doors, walls, and bits of roof exploded outwards and upwards, sending bits of hundred-year-old planks into the sky and across the yard with the sound of a bomb going off. None of the debris reached the car, but I ducked instinctively and a second later a small shock wave washed over me.
When I looked up, the barn had been reduced to one ragged level. The remains of the second floor that I’d labored so hard to reach was now tilted and fallen into the stalls below it. Small flames licked what was left and a sickly gray cloud lifted off the pile like a spirit. It was no great conflagration, but the toxic chemicals released by the explosion were a bigger issue.
Fumbling for my phone, I jumped in the car and got the hell out of there. I dialed 911 as I navigated the dirt road, letting the nice dispatcher know she had a problem and where, then hung up. Hopefully, they wouldn’t bother with a cell tower trace until I’d straightened out some things in Cain’s Crossing. Or before the Brower brothers straightened out some things with me.
