Chapter 7

The very next day I had bags of river gravel loaded onto my small trailer and even a few bags loaded into the back of my truck. I also had four twelve foot 2”x4”boards loaded on the trailer along with the river gravel. It sounds like a lot more shit than I really had loaded. I didn’t want to blow the tires on the small trailer, or the burn up the clutch in the old truck.

Lucy jumped right in to help me lay gravel in the 12’x12’ greenhouse floor frame. The flat loose stones would be the only marker for her Ex Jarrett. Lucy planned to have the small greenhouse up and complete as soon as possible. If she made it by harvest, she would have Jarrett to thank for it. The need to make his final resting spot harder to find was essential. It would be the whole reason for finishing the floor of the green house so soon. The rest of the construction would only take a couple of half days to complete.

Of course the lawn care, and landscaping business was doing very well. We were working into the night to improve the soil of our twelve acre field across the creek. I knew that it was going to be a hard season, and I was happy to have Lucy to help. I realized that between the two of us, we could handled a larger number of plants. So we almost doubled the number of plants in our field.

Since Lucy had more than twelve years experience working with the product in different aspects, I left it all up to her. During that sixth season, the work came to its full potential. Lucy worked the field and I worked the landscape business. Lucy even managed to finish planting the Prickly Ash around the fence. She encouraged the weeds to grow between them so they appeared to be wild.

Anytime I wasn’t doing lawn work, I was her helper. I knew how to do some things, but I learned to do others from her. Most of my experience was in the growing, so I learned a lot about curing the product that summer. Since it required lots of space to cure the product, I began rebuilding grandpa’s old barn as well as the loft in our new chicken house/barn. I consulted Lucy about all things like venting and the use of fans.

Most of the repairs to granpa’s barn was removing the rotten studs and scabbing new lumber onto them. I paid cash for the lumber and hired day labor to repair all the joists. Once that was done, I removed all of the old metal siding. I patched soft spots in the roof deck with chipboard. Then we applied new aluminum roofing. It made a small dent in the money I had laying around that summer. In the end my grandfather’s barn looked like a patchwork quilt of new and old metal siding. It saved me a few bucks and the building still looked like something it was not. By that time it was a well built building, meant to last twenty or more years.

I installed one large vent on each end. The vent could be opened or closed all the way and anything in between. I bought two of the Wind machine fans from Walmart. They were multi-speed twenty-four inch round fans with huge RPM ratings.

Season six was most likely to pay enough for both Lucy and I to feel healthy. I kept my Trina cover in place by doing clean up and carrying trash away from the small estate properties in a two county area. By the end of October we had the product ready for the distributor to market. He arranged to come with a larger truck, which we filled with black bags of product.

Lucy and I had a preliminary weight and so when the man picked up the load he left us an advanced payment for the product. It came to 132k. We had agreed to take the deposit based on our preliminary weight. There would be a further payment inside a UPS package of coffee, or it would be a bill for the adjusted weight. He included a copy of the weight correction without the bags. Lucy and I just had a weight based on 80% of the weight showing on the scales. There should be an additional payment of between ten and twenty grand. That was without the ten to fifteen grand from picking up and storing the mountain product until the distributor came for it.

When we made the pickup, It was easy for me to estimate half the value of the product. With the other half due upon verification of quality and weight. I would send the second half along when I received the full payment. Season six was to be my last season as a bootlegger. I was going to be more of a broker going forward. At least that was the plan.

“Amos could give the cops my name, if he decided not to go along. He couldn’t give any details of my operation, but the cops could always find our holdings easy enough. We might have to start over.” I said to Lucy.

“What if we stop growing, and just broker deals?” Lucy asked. “If we do that, there is much less chance of an investigation finding anything useful.”

“We would have to do something with the things we own now, but that is doable. Since we can’t spend the money we make now, it wouldn’t be any different. There would just be less money that we can’t spend. Since you are an expert on the product, you could help the growers make more money,” I suggested.

“Let’s Look for a buyer for the field across the creek first. That will get us out of the growing business entirely. We will have to move in order to keep our plausible deniability. Just to be safe if the grower who buys the field gets caught. Let’s not do that,” Lucy said out loud. “let’s grow and produce something else instead.”

“We can find some other place to store the mountain product and anything else we take on. We just need to have it in a clean place for the distributor to pick it up. If the law dogs get our names, they will check everywhere we rent and quickly know where to look for our stash house. This is getting too involved for me,” I admitted.

“You have to remember it’s like you told me. We are very low down on their priority list. They want the million dollar cocaine or heroin bust. They don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on us, when they can spend it on the hard drug dealers,” Lucy said. “Remember you told me that.”