Cash & Carry (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 4) by Jerusha Jones Read Free Book Online

shrug. “Depends. Not if you’re smart. They’re not going to get jobs in Woodland. You know that.”
    I hated it, but he was right. Chet and his family were obvious foreigners and unemployment was already high in the area. And only Chet could speak passable English. They would not be received with open arms at the union halls and would be viewed with suspicion by smaller employers.
    “I already spoke to the old lady—Auntie—about it. She’s got the eye. Can spot a mushroom growing under leaves almost before I can.” Dwayne nodded proudly.
    Obviously, he’d done more than spoken to her about it. He’d probably had to demonstrate since she was full of gap-toothed smiles but was a woman of very few words.
    “This—” I poked the lumpy rucksack, “is yours. Apparently you know that I’m not short of cash at the moment.”
    Dwayne grinned at me again. “I’m watchful.” He undid the cord and pulled out a packet of bills. “These are no good to me. Not marked, but recorded.” He fanned the twenties, pointing at the serial numbers blurring by with a rough finger that had dirt permanently embedded into the cuticle. “$193,600. I lost the rest. That’s all I’m saying, but Tarq will fill you in if it comes to using this for something—something for your situation.”
    I frowned. “Is it stolen?”
    Dwayne clucked his tongue. “You want me to ask questions about that stash in your icebox? Consider it a favor, safekeeping for a friend.” He replaced the money, wound the cord again and shoved the rucksack along the counter toward me.
    I’d run out of arguments and nodded.
    “They think you did it?” Dwayne asked.
    It took me a minute to realize he was referring to the fresh bones in the cemetery. “There have been some hints that direction. Did you know about it?”
    “Nope. That one slipped by me,” Dwayne said. “But I know how they did it.”
    I grabbed a five-gallon bucket full of dirty rags from under the sink and flipped it over. I had to sit down for this.
    Dwayne propped a narrow hip against the counter and held his mug against his chest. As he talked, the tip of his beard came perilously close to dipping into the coffee in his mug.
    “When you were kidnapped, your assailants were on ATVs, right?”
    I nodded.
    “They’d clearly been scouting prior to taking you, right? Because they knew exactly where they were going afterward?” Dwayne must have studied philosophers in college, because he was very good at the Socratic method.
    I nodded again, following his train of thought. Even at the time, I’d been struck by how assured the men holding me had been. They’d done their homework, certain they wouldn’t be discovered, that my interrogation by Numero Tres, Giuseppe Ricardo Solano, wouldn’t be disrupted.
    “You know that peppermint field where you were held?” Dwayne lifted his mug to shoulder height, sloshing a little brown liquid which dripped down the side. He spread his other hand wide and positioned it below and slightly to the side of the mug. “Here’s the cemetery. Where’s the mansion?”
    I jabbed a finger at a level with his belt buckle.
    “Yep. Not a perfectly straight line, but close, and this path—” he snaked his hand along the trail between the locations he’d marked in the air, “is the easiest route to take with ATVs. No major gullies or obstacles, not too much in the way of grade changes. They knew what they were doing.”
    “And they took me right through the cemetery.” I’d been blindfolded and it had been dark, so I hadn’t realized that I actually had been in the cemetery previously, if only for a few bumpy minutes while held in the tight arms of the man driving the ATV.
    “No reason not to come back to finish the job,” Dwayne added. “Someplace quiet, extremely secluded, and where there were already lots and lots of human bones.”
    “I just don’t understand why Joe was the job and not me. Did his lackeys turn on him?” I asked.
    “I