Fatal Harvest

by Catherine Palmer

  “Urdu. That’s the name of the language. And no, I don’t. But if I had a son—”

  “Well, you don’t. And even if you did, he wouldn’t be anything like Matthew Aaron Strong. Believe me.”

  “I still think you ought to—”

  “Are you two gonna argue all the way home this afternoon?” Billy spoke up. “If you are, I’ll just stay with Granny Strong.”

  Cole fell silent—irritation joining his worry—as he turned onto his mother’s street and pulled into the narrow driveway that led to her one-car garage. Her powder-blue ’97 Chevrolet was parked in front, because the garage door was too heavy for her to lift. She refused to let Cole put in an automatic opener for her. He noted that her lawn was neatly mowed, as usual, and her spring bulbs were in full bloom—tulips, daffodils, even a few crocuses left.

  At this hour, most of the working adults in the neighborhood had left for their jobs, and the children were on buses headed for school. A couple of minivans and a newer model Lincoln indicated that only moms and retirees might be home at this time of day. Cole stepped out of the pickup and took in the stillness. He’d never been a suburban kind of man. And he could barely stand to spend ten minutes in Penny’s downtown Albuquerque condo. Too many people living too close together made him edgy.

  “I can’t barely walk, I’m so stiff,” Billy groaned. “Someone steer me to a doughnut.”

  “I don’t see Matt’s truck here.” Jill spoke in a low voice, joining Cole as he walked up to his mother’s front door. She started to add something, then fell silent.

  Cole shook his head. He had tried without success to figure out any other place Matt might have gone. This was it, he thought, pressing the doorbell. His wife’s parents had passed away years before he met her, and there were no cousins, aunts, or uncles on either side who were close to Matt.

  “Mr. Strong, ring the bell again. I need to use the bathroom.” Billy was stepping from one foot to the other. “Maybe it’s open.”

  Cole pressed the button a second time.

  He heard chimes from within, followed by silence. His mother rarely left home except to attend church, buy groceries, or play Skip-Bo with Irene. He glanced across the lawn at her best friend’s house. Odd. The door stood ajar.

  “Go check the neighbor’s house,” he told Jill. “See if Irene knows where my mother went.”

  He hammered on the door. Nothing. He tried the knob. The door swung open, and he stepped inside. Alarm pricked through him. Despite the quaint neighborhood, his mother never left her door unlocked.

  A blotch of blood on the tan carpet stopped him cold.

  “Mr. Strong!” Billy cried out, staring at the dark smear that had seeped into the carpet’s thick pile. A curved trail of droplets led away from it toward the front door. “Look—is that…is that…? I’ll go get Miss Pruitt!”

  “Mom?” A knot in his throat, Cole took off down the long, darkened hallway. “Mom, are you here? It’s Cole! Where are you?”

  Her bedroom was empty, yellow chenille spread neatly smoothed over the single pillow, Bible near the lamp on the side table. He jerked open the closet doors—clothes all folded and put away. Pale blue house slippers on the floor. Artificial flower arrangement atop a white, starched doily on the dresser.

  Beside the bedroom, the bathroom door stood ajar, and he slapped it open. Gleaming porcelain bathtub, sink, toilet. Matched pair of pink towels. Crocheted toilet-roll holder on the tank—a strange, wide-eyed plastic doll emerging from the frills. Fluffy pink rug on the floor. Dove soap, pink hairbrush, Crest toothpaste—everything in order.

  The spare bedroom across the hall always stayed shut until Cole and Matt came to visit. Cole threw open the door. The room was dark. Twin beds made, curtains drawn. That familiar musty smell.

  His pulse throbbing in his temples, Cole headed back to the living room. He poked his head into the dining room. Oval maple table and matching captain’s chairs. China cabinet with rows of pretty flowered dishes. Framed still-life prints of fruit and roses.

  “Mom!”

  Into the kitchen. Two chairs at the old red vinyl dinette. Skip-Bo cards scattered across the plastic tablecloth. Two glasses of tea sitting untasted, the ice long melted.

  “Mom!” he shouted again, returning to the living room just as Jill stepped through the front door.

  “No one’s over there, but it looks like—” Jill grabbed his arm. “Oh, heavens! Cole, it’s—”

  “Blood, yeah, I know.” He raked a hand back through his hair. “I can’t find her. She’s not in the house.”

  “Did you check upstairs?” Billy asked, panting from his run next door to fetch Jill.

  “There isn’t an upstairs—” Cole remembered the basement. Dashing back into the kitchen, he found the door. It was locked…from the inside. He yanked at it, tried to force the knob.

  “Whoa, Mr. Strong,” Billy said, edging past. “Leave this to me.”

  With a swift kick, the boy’s foot broke through, splintering wood. For a moment, his shoe stuck in the jagged hole. Jill grabbed his leg and jerked it, and they both tumbled backward, crashing into the table and spilling tea across the Skip-Bo cards.

  But Cole had already worked his arm up through the opening in the broken door to slide back the bolt. “Mom?” he called, taking the rickety steps as fast as he dared. “Mom, it’s Cole. Are you down here?”

  He tugged the cord that hung from a single lightbulb.

  “Cole?” The thin voice came from behind a large box labeled Ornaments.

  “Mom, what’s happened? It’s me.”

  “Oh, Cole! Thank God.”

  He dismantled a wall of Christmas storage boxes, one at a time, to reveal two elderly women huddled together on the concrete floor. His mother’s face was pinched, her mouth drawn into a frightened grimace, her skin as white and transparent as paper. She lifted a hand to him.

  “Mom, what’s going on? Is that Mrs. Williams?” Cole wrapped his arms around his mother’s small frame and helped her up.

  “Irene hurt her hip.”

  “I’m okay, Geneva.” The other woman’s voice was a whisper. Curled into a fetal position, she had folded her hands under her cheek. Her friend had covered her with a felt Christmas-tree skirt. “I’ll be all right. Don’t bother anybody now.”

  “Mrs. Williams, don’t move,” Cole said. “I’m going to get Mom upstairs, and then we’ll call an ambulance.”

  “Done,” Jill said, coming to his side. “It’s on its way. Mrs. Strong, I’m Jill Pruitt—can you walk?”

  The older woman reached out and laid a hand on Jill’s arm. “Miss Pruitt? Why, you must be Matthew’s computer teacher! He’s told me so much about you. How good of you to—”

  “Listen, Mom, what happened here?” Cole cut into the chatter. “Why are you and Mrs. Williams in the basement?”

  “We were robbed!” Irene piped up from her crumpled position on the floor. “Those men knocked on the door, and Geneva opened it—”

  “Well, I thought it was Matthew, of course, but it wasn’t. It was two men, both of them tall and—”

  “Big! And they marched right in without being invited. They said they just wanted to talk to us, but I knew it was a robbery, so I yelled for help.”

  “Irene took to screaming,” Cole’s mother said, “and I kept telling her to calm down, but these men were like a couple of big ol’ Simmental bulls. They sat us down at the kitchen table—”

  “Where we’d been playing Skip-Bo, waiting for her grandson, you know.”

  “And the men started to get angry, what with Irene hollering like that, and they were asking about you and Matthew, and when you were going to get here, and what I knew about Matthew’s schoolwork—”

  “About his schoolwork!” Irene repeated. “But it was all a trick, because they just wanted to rob us.”

  “I’ve been trying to convince her they weren’t robbers,” Geneva confided in a low voice, “but she won’t let it go.

  What th
ey really were was FBI.” As she said this, she gave Cole a firm nod.

  “How do you know they were FBI, Mom?”

  “Because they already had Matthew’s name, and where he lived, and who his teachers were—”

  “His teachers?” Jill spoke up. “Did they mention my name?”

  “It’s those Agrimax men,” Billy declared. “They’ve got everything tapped!”

  “And they were trying to rob us!” Irene wailed from the floor. “Only thing that saved us was Geneva’s Smith & Wesson!”

  “What?” Cole’s mouth dropped open. “You used your pistol?”

  “I sure as fire did. Winged one of ’em.” She stuck her hand down in the pocket of her pink flowered housedress and pulled out the handgun. “One bullet, that’s all it took. My daddy always said I was a sharpshooter. I saw one of them fall right there in the living room, and the other one stopped to check on his partner. It gave Irene and me enough time to hightail it down here. I guess we scared ’em off, because they didn’t follow us.”

  “I fell!” Irene whimpered.

  “I dragged her over here in the corner and stacked up these Christmas boxes, and we waited it out all night. I knew somebody would show up, but I wasn’t sure who. Good thing I’ve got more bullets—”

  “Give me those!” Cole snapped as his mother drew a handful of ammunition out of her pocket. He held out his hand for the gun, as well. “Did the men threaten you?”

  “They were going to rob us!” Irene said.

  “They said they wanted every letter Matthew wrote to me in the past three years. And they wanted my address book and phone book and all that. They were just plain ugly about it. Rude, you know? I said, ‘What’s this all about, boys?’ They told me Matthew was in trouble for murdering somebody in New Mexico, and they were here to investigate. That’s when I figured out they were FBI.”

  “And you shot at them?”

  “I didn’t like ’em. Neither one, nor anything they had to say.” She shrugged. “I told them Matthew never did a single thing wrong in his life, and I wasn’t giving them blim-blam-doodly. They said I better get those letters and that address book quick, or there’d be trouble. So I said okay. Fine. I walked over to the silverware drawer, pretending to fetch my address book. Then I took my Smith & Wesson out from behind the dessert forks and turned around and told them to get their hides outta my house, or I’d show them what trouble really was. When they jumped up and came at me, I let ’em have it. Just like I said I would.”

  “I bet they robbed us blind after we came down here,” Irene added. “I left my door unlocked when I came over to visit with Geneva. They probably took my husband’s bowling trophies, all five of them. He was a champion, you know. And the microwave and the mixer. After it got quiet upstairs, I told Geneva to get back up there and call the police. But she wouldn’t budge.”

  “I’m no fool. They were probably lurking outside for a few hours, waiting for Matthew to show up. That’s what they do in the FBI. They lurk.”

  Cole let out a breath. “Jill, will you stay down here with Mrs. Williams, while I—”

  “Hello?” A voice called down from the basement door. “Anybody down there?”

  “It’s them!” Cole’s mother grabbed for her gun.

  “It’s the paramedics.” He lifted the weapon above his mother’s grasp. “Yes—come ahead!”

  In moments, four pairs of soft-soled shoes came padding down the basement steps. The team carried a stretcher and a bag of medical supplies.

  “Did you know there’s blood on the living-room floor?” one asked.

  “I tripped,” Irene said as the paramedics surrounded her. “It’s my hip. Don’t touch it! Oww!”

  Cole decided this would be a good time to escort his mother back upstairs.

  Someone was pushing Matt. A hand on his back, shoving him.

  “Okay, okay, Josefina,” he mumbled. “I’ll get up.”

  He forced his eyes open. But instead of a smooth white pillow, his head lay on damp dirt in an alley.

  “Huh?” Jerking upright, Matt heard a chorus of squeals and giggles as a group of ragged children scattered. Groaning, he hugged his laptop to his chest as he realized the miniature thieves had been trying to roll him over and steal it.

  Ugh…he felt awful. As if he was going to be sick again. As if he might die. The knot on the back of his head hurt again. Why had he even come to this godforsaken—

  Awareness shot through him in a shower of pinpricks, and he slammed his hand over his pocket. The lump was still there. The USB key. Thank God! He blew out a sour breath.

  Okay, he still had it, but this wasn’t going well. Miss Pruitt never had problems like this when she was doing God’s work. Confusion and fear. Hunger and barfing and fainting. She didn’t have people accusing her of murder or trying to rob her blind. She just trotted over to Afghanistan or wherever and served up healthy, nutritious food to grateful hordes.

  Matt checked his watch. Friday morning, 10:20 a.m. He hadn’t been out long. A movement caught his eye, and he swung his head to see the group of street children peeking at him around the corner of a building.

  “I’m not dead yet!” he hollered in the best Spanish he could muster.

  They shrieked and raced away, laughing at him again.

  To them, this was a game. Ha. Matt worked himself up into a sitting position and propped his head in his hands. His whole body shook with hunger. Smells of urine and vomit and rotten food swirled through the alley and wrapped around his head.

  Maybe I’m dead after all. Maybe I died and went to hell. It couldn’t be any worse than this.

  He thought of Josefina and her sumptuous breakfasts of fried eggs, frijoles covered with melted yellow cheese, freshly made tortillas spread with butter and fat, greasy sausage links all washed down with orange juice, milk and hot chocolate laced with cinnamon. Right now, he would just about kill for one of Josefina’s breakfasts.

  Instead, he had to figure out what to do, because he was stuck in Juarez, Mexico, with a USB key full of stolen secrets and a murder charge hanging over his head and two thugs trying to track him down and hurt or kill him. This was not good.

  Unbidden tears filled his eyes. He shook his head. He was sixteen and too old to cry. Too smart to sit here in an alley beside his own vomit. Too educated, too rich, too everything. But he couldn’t think what to do. Nothing made sense unless he was in his own room with his computer and modem and mouse and all the things he understood.

  Not this! Everything happening now was way bigger than he was. Bigger than anything he’d ever imagined when he sat on his soft bed and read Christ’s command in Matthew 25: Feed the hungry. How hard could that be? Using the research from his term paper, he had formulated a plan that involved the cooperation of major food companies. Agrimax hadn’t been the least bit interested in his ideas. But Mr. Banyon had. He thought it was a great idea, and he said he knew how to make it happen.

  With Mr. Banyon, everything seemed simple. All Matt had to do was buy the USB key and teach Mr. Banyon how to use it. Mr. Banyon would pull the right strings, and the hungry would get fed.

  How had Matt ended up being the one with the Agrimax secrets? This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen!

  Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he brushed them off as fast as he could, even though he knew no one could see him. No one except those stupid kids who were peering around the corner again. Laughing at him and pointing.

  “What?” he yelled in Spanish. “What’s so funny?”

  “Borrachon! Drunkard!” one of them called back.

  “I’m not drunk. I’m sick. I’m hungry.” He picked up a pebble and hurled it at them.

  They shrieked and scampered away again.

  Matt dissolved into full-blown sobs this time, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. What am I supposed to do, God? Where am I supposed to go? I came all this way to find Hector Diaz and give him the key so he could take it to Josiah Karume. Now I find out he
already left for that food convention in France. Why didn’t You tell me, God? Why didn’t You guide me better?

  If I go home, I’ll have to give Agrimax the USB key, and that will be the end of everything Mr. Banyon was trying to do. Everything You wanted me to do.

  His sobs turned to coughing, which stirred up his gag reflex again. The laptop slid onto the dirt as he rolled over onto his hands and knees and retched. Nothing came up. His stomach heaved and heaved, but his tears were the only thing to fall to the ground.

  Please help me, God! Please save me!

  Collapsing to the ground, he curled into a ball. If the kids stole his laptop and wallet and key, he might as well just die. Die for real. And here they came, three of them, creeping closer. Little street rats, all in rags with their filthy hair hanging down over beady black eyes.

  They stopped at a slight distance, elbowing each other and giggling.

  “Señor,” one spoke up. He thought it might be a girl because of the faded dress she wore, but he wasn’t sure. “Pan?” She held out a fragment of bread.

  Matt stared at it, his stomach whirling and his brain too fogged to think clearly. This street kid was offering food to him. Was it a trick?

  “Bread?” she said again in Spanish. “Eat it.”

  He clutched his laptop. “For me?”

  “Yes.” She took a step closer.

  Reaching out, he took the gift. The child jumped backward, as if fearful he might grab her.

  Breathing hard, he stuffed a bite of bread into his mouth. Oh, thank You, God! It was like manna! Melting in his mouth. Caressing his throat. Sliding into his stomach.

  He took another bite. Thank You! Thank You!

  The little girl smiled at him and tilted her head. “Good, señor?”

  Matt nodded as he chewed the last bite. “Thank you,” he said. “I am very hungry.”

  “You give us money? Dollars?”

  His heart sank. The bread hadn’t been a gift after all. They wanted his money. Of course, and why not? He was a gringo, and that meant he was rich. He had the computer under his arm. He had jeans and Nike shoes and everything that said wealthy American. Nodding, he drew out his wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill.