Chapter 2

Sally drove a hard bargain, but we agreed on a price. Fifteen grand cash changed hands in front of my son John, who came up to visit his mother. The exchange was in Alma Bishops parlor.

I handed Alma three, five thousand dollar packages. Each package all one hundred dollar bills. Sally counted them then Alma signed the contract and deed. We left immediately after the signing for our celebration in Vicksburg. To Celebrate we met Lynne in Vicksburg for Milkshakes.

“John, give that deed to your mom to have it registered. She knows the registrar of deeds,” I informed him.

“I’ve already arranged to give it to her. It would be better, if I have mom do it. That way I can swear you never had it in your possession,” John said.

“Okay,” I said. I missed the days when two men shook hands and wrote contracts on scraps of notebook paper.

That morning started a couple of weeks of decision making, and bleeding cash. After two weeks in which I had a new roof put on my new home at a cost of $1,110 cash. Then it was a gas burner installed in an old pot bellied wood stove I found stored under the building. It wasn’t going to be the most efficient, but it would do for a while. That little bit of nostalgia was another $500. I paid it to a guy I busted for making liquor two years before. In the winter time he refitted wood stoves, so it was a no brainer. Then there was the portable 15,000 btu electric air conditioner. The unit was over $400 and it required an electrical update another $550.

Then there was the kitchen and bathroom plumbing renovations. Fixtures purchased and installed ran just over a thousand dollars. Everything was chosen to stay in keeping with the age of the building.

In the end I had something like $30,000 in the place. It would have taken all I could scrape together to pay cash for it. So I paid for the building and the back taxes for cash up front, then I used it as collateral for the $14,000 renovation cost.

My payments on the 10year mortgage were just under $200 a month. They were affordable, but were also going to be noticeable. I needed a part time job for sure, maybe even a full time job. I hadn’t worried about the job because I could manage the monthly nut on my pension, if I chose to cook my own meals, hunt and fish for my meat, do all those good old swamp rat things. I even knew how to do some of them. The problem was I just didn’t like doing them.

For thirty years I had wondered how moral a man I was. I mean I raised my kid right, and I refused to participate in anything illegal, but at that moment I had to wonder what I would do to make life easier as a senior citizen. I had less to lose at that moment, than I ever had before.

I put the word out that I was looking for something to do that was not to far off the reservation. Yet still something paying a decent amount of money and with a fairly low risk. I intentionally didn’t define low risk. There would be at least some risk to things I would consider. How likely was I to be injured, but also how likely was I to end up doing serious time. Since I had been involved in a lot of criminal prosecutions, I knew a lot about risk assessment. I figured I just might know enough.

The man who converted my potbellied stove to gas stopped by to ask me what I had in mind. I explained that I knew pretty much all the drink house operators, and he knew a large group of illegal liquor makers. I figured to buy product from the shine makers direct, then resell it to the liquor houses. That is if he was willing to sell to me and introduce me to his friends in the business. He made me an offer but I knew it wasn’t his best. He left but he came back three days later.