Chapter 58

The patient was real enough, but old dying people were easy to find. She was a black lady dying from a kidney disease. She was already on dialysis and her time was limited. I explained to her that our pot was edible. She should have one cookie in the morning which should stop the pain until after supper. Of course we couldn’t guarantee it, but it usually worked like that.

I also explained, “Some people, who are trying to stop us from providing the service, might call wanting to know details of our operation. If you answered their questions, we will have to pack up and stop making our product available to you and the many others we help.”.

One thing I didn’t tell her about was an audio scrambler and wireless Jammer I had in my briefcase. It was the only technology available to us to prevent recordings from being made. Gerome was out in his car with a frequency scanner just to be sure there was no signal emanating from the house.

I hadn’t wanted the meeting to be indoors. I wanted it outside the first time. I agreed only so that we could check to see if anyone was running surveillance of us. Tommy was out driving in the neighborhood looking for suspicious vehicles. The report was that everything appeared normal. Either Marge’s gut was wrong, or the Sheriff was slow playing us. He would try to get someone into the circle of customers, then try to get us to further incriminate ourselves. The DA would be afraid that the lady buying cookies from us, would die before she could testify. It would be dirty pool, but I expected John would delay the case long enough for that to happen.

“Ed, if we knew they were opening a case on us, we could feel the DA out,” Tommy said.

“Tommy don’t do anything except set traps until someone trips one. We will know then if they are looking at us. That is the time to take our shot at them.” I explained.

Meantime we put a card inside each bag of cookies explaining pretty much what I told our newest client. ‘

We are not going to call you to ask for information. Any information you give to anyone about us may cause us to close. I was pretty sure nobody wanted to lose the service’.

It was my first foray into the legal system since my retirement. I guessed the DA’s office would decide that I had joined the other side. I didn’t much care what they thought. I wasn’t planning to make an issue of what we had done, unless the Sheriff did. I had a couple of ideas, if we had to make the DA’s life miserable.

It looked as though we were going to escape jail for the present. It was quite possible someone had decided that the cops were stretched to thin to waste resources on us. Naturally I agree with that mind set.

Like other things in my life when I decided I had done all I could do, I moved on to the next item on my list. Find a new piece of land.

I started to read everything about local Vicksburg land for sale. I was in a hurry, but also looking for something unusual. Most of all it had to be safe from prying eyes. I was leaning toward a five acre island in the Mississippi river. It should be wooded so that the aerial view would not be any more dangerous than that of the habitat parcel.

I could arrange to go out to work on our crop by boat. The perfect island would not have a pier. and I didn’t plan to build one. That in itself would discourage idle visitors.

I asked people everywhere I went to stay on the lookout for an island in the river for sale. “I want about five acres,” I said to each of them.

It was after Christmas before anyone came up with a name for me. I called the young man who told me he had inherited it from his grandfather’s estate. It was eight acres and covered with a stand of stunted pine trees and scrub brush. In other words it was only good to hold the earth together.