“Then how did you find it in the first place?”

  “That’s the complicated part. You know I don’t like the law meddling in my affairs.”

  “I don’t either.” Walter and I were on the same page there. “Blaze is family, which means I haven’t got a choice. Otherwise I wouldn’t associate with him.” So true. Blaze is an ongoing nemesis, but family is family.

  “You and me, we go way back,” Walter said. “I know I can trust you to keep this from him, but I need to hear you say it.”

  That was easy. “I won’t tell Blaze.”

  “He’d be all over me if he knew anything about my drone.”

  That perked me up. I was about to say that a drone was a non-issue with Blaze, that he hadn’t believed that one was involved.

  But before I had a chance to respond, Walter said, “I checked that truck out on the ground. But I first saw it from the sky.”

  Chapter 10

  The Trouble Busters reconvened at my kitchen table a few hours later over hot cups of coffee.

  “Walter can place the truck Joe Oja was driving in the vicinity of the meth dump we found,” I told them. “Walter didn’t say anything about a meth dump, so he must not have seen it, or if he did, he didn’t know what it was.”

  “Joe Oja was part of a meth gang?” Cora Mae asked.

  “Or he accidentally discovered it,” Kitty suggested. “And they took him out to protect their operation.”

  “Anything is possible,” I said. “But we now have a link between what happened to Joe and what we found in the woods.”

  “How did Walter know about the truck?” Kitty asked.

  I went on to tell them about Walter’s drone and how he’d been flying it when he remotely discovered the truck in the woods. “He thought it was abandoned and went into the state forest to see if it ran. But while he left to drive his own vehicle home and catch a ride back, somebody took off in it. We can assume that somebody was Joe. This was all just before Joe showed up to give you two concealed carry target training yesterday morning.”

  Cora Mae was chewing gum. She blew a bubble then said, “What if Walter used his drone to bomb Joe? Maybe he did it because he didn’t end up with the truck? He could be a really sore loser. He drinks too much too. It could affect his mind.”

  Kitty snorted. “Walter isn’t a bad loser and his mind is just fine. That’s the weakest theory I ever heard.”

  While Cora Mae’s reasoning was more than a little flawed, there are people around here who might agree with her if they didn’t have all the facts.

  I enlightened these two, “Walter’s drone is white. He says a white one is harder to spot in the air. And since the one we saw was black, he had nothing to do with the bombing.”

  “Walter should go to Blaze with what he knows,” Cora Mae said.

  “Since when do we ever tell Blaze anything?” Kitty pointed out. “Where is Blaze anyway?”

  “No idea,” I said, perfectly happy without him hanging around, messing up our plans. “Sleeping at his desk at the jail?”

  Kitty put her elbows on the table, cradled her coffee cup in her hands, and eyed the bag that Cora Mae had placed on the table. “Isn’t that the bag of goods Gertie stole from Joe’s bedroom?”

  “Borrowed,” I corrected her. Then to Cora Mae, “What did you find?”

  Cora Mae turned the bag upside down and an array of objects plopped on the table. Mostly bits and pieces of paper. I recognized several receipts from Ray’s General Store.

  “Hair comb, keys, probably to his car, condoms…”

  “I don’t see any condoms,” Kitty said.

  “He isn’t going to need them.” Cora Mae retorted without a hint of embarrassment. My friend is discerning to a point, but not overly. At least she is smart about her health.

  “Look at this one,” I said, staring at a store receipt I’d picked up. “He bought camping fuel.”

  “So he’s a camper,” Cora Mae said. “That’s not unusual.”

  “He purchased ten large cans of the stuff. Nobody needs that much to go camping. And he bought a bunch of batteries.” I picked up another receipt. “This one’s from last week. He bought big bags of fertilizer.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Cora Mae asked. She might be experienced with female wiles, but she was pathetically ignorant when it comes to drugs.

  “Joe might have been cooking meth,” Kitty said. “I looked up some details online. Camping fuel and batteries are meth lab staples. So is fertilizer. He didn’t innocently stumble onto this criminal operation. He was part of it. And he’d been out at their dump right beforehand and must have left Pebbles behind. Maybe he couldn’t find her and decided to go back for her after our class.”

  We stared at each other. I was thinking hard.

  “I didn’t see evidence of a pet at his sister’s house where Joe was staying.” I took a sip of coffee. “Not even a water dish. There would have been a water dish at least.”

  “He wasn’t even a certified concealed carry instructor,” Kitty pointed out. “And he lied about knowing Jeff. If he’s a drug trafficker, what was he doing out here? We’re missing something.”

  We might be missing a piece of the puzzle, but what I thought for sure was that somehow we’d managed to get caught in the middle of a drug war. Well, we weren’t exactly caught. We could un-insert ourselves from this investigation. Nobody would care, or even notice. We hadn’t been hired by anybody, so we had no obligation or monetary incentive. We could look the other way. And live to see another day, another week, another year.

  I scooped up Joe’s car keys and added them to my purse arsenal just in case I needed them. Then I crossed the point of no return, “We need to interview his sister and search through his car.”

  “I’m going home.” Cora Mae stood up. “Gertie, stay out of it.”

  “And then what? We let a meth lab operate in our backyard? Or maybe we tell Blaze what we’ve found out? Either he doesn’t believe us and nobody takes action, or I convince my son and he gets himself killed.”

  “I’m working the early shift at Herb’s Bar,” Kitty said. “I’ll be paying attention.”

  I knew Kitty wouldn’t let me down. I gave Cora Mae a steady gaze. “You could sit down at the bar and flirt a little. What harm would that do?”

  That had her attention. “I’m good at flirting. Not so good at getting hurt or killed.”

  “Nobody else is getting killed,” I told her. “It’s perfectly harmless. You just keep your ears and eyes open. It’ll be fun.”

  Not that Kitty and Cora Mae would come up with much. Did drug lords hang out at Herb’s? I guessed it was possible. They might enjoy a brew as much as the next guy. So maybe Cora Mae’s flirting for facts wasn’t as harmless as I made it out to be.

  “Just don’t leave the bar with anybody,” I advised Cora Mae. “At least until we figure out who is who. Like I said, nobody is getting killed.”

  After we’d dispersed with our assignments, I drove over to Ray’s General Store with Joe’s receipts to discuss them with Ray. I found him out in back dumping garbage. From our vantage point, I could see the jail building and the burned out truck next to it. Blaze’s vehicle wasn’t there, so he wasn’t taking a nap in a cell.

  After exchanging our usual pleasantries, I told Ray I was helping Blaze with the investigation.

  “Sure you are,” he said, chuckling as he closed the Dumpster lid and wiped his hands on a stained apron tied around his girth. Ray is hard to fool. He’s perfectly aware of the tension between me and my son.

  I showed him Joe’s receipts.

  “That’s what he bought,” Ray confirmed, handing them back.

  “Did he say what he was doing with all that fuel?”

  “Something about thinking it was for a boy scout camp out if I remember right.”

  “And how about the fertilizer?”

  Ray tilted his head and studied me. Then he said, “Joe Oja said all the items were for some delivery service he was working for, including the camping fuel. Said he was being reimbursed for the supplies and that he didn’t have any idea what the company wanted them for. He also was a hot head and got real snarly, telling me it wasn’t any of my business. All I was doing was making small talk.”

  “Okay.” Talking to Ray hadn’t gotten me anywhere.

  Except then he said, “Now the time before, when he bought almost the same supplies, he’d been drinking and started boasting about how he was about to strike it rich. He was doing some investigating, he said. And somehow it was going to pay off.”

  “Investigating what?”

  “Following somebody, I think. He was pretty smashed. In fact, I wasn’t sure he should be behind the wheel, knew for a fact actually, but like I said, he had a temper and I wasn’t about to cross him.”

  “Who was he following?” I asked, wondering how tailing somebody would make anybody rich. Surveillance hadn’t made the Trouble Busters anywhere close to rich. It didn’t even pay expenses.

  Ray frowned, trying to remember. “Some woman, because he said, ‘she”. Let me think. He said something about how she might be a threat to some enterprise, and they were going to pay him big bucks for proving it.”

  Ray grinned. “He could have been following you for all we know. The Trouble Busters could be the threat.”

  He was kidding, of course. Making a joke. However…

  I frowned in thought, visualizing a timeline. For me, last week started with Pearl’s missing shoe, which I hunted for out in the woods, right around the meth dump, although I didn’t know it was there at the time. The next day, we went to the gun show where Kitty ran into Joe, who offered to give her concealed carry training. After that, they’d met several times over the course of days to take care of the classroom training. Kitty and Cora Mae kept bugging me to join them. I’d resisted.

  Yesterday, the group was at my house. Joe was asking me a bunch of questions about our business. I’d puffed up the truth a bit. Maybe more than a bit.

  I smiled back to let Ray know that I appreciated his sense of humor, but my insides were churning and my mind was racing.

  “Is Paula working today?” I asked him.

  “She’s behind the meat counter.”

  “Would you send her out? I have a few questions for her.”

  “Sure, Gertie. It was nice talking to you.”

  Paula Oja looked a lot like Joe—same big, round face. She wore a white apron, which always makes me pause and ask myself, ‘Why are butcher aprons white? Shouldn’t they be black to hide the blood?’

  I introduced myself, explained that I’d been a witness to the tragic accident that claimed her brother’s life, then said, “I’m surprised to find you working today.”

  Paula shrugged. “Do you think I’d be better off sitting home alone, staring at my brother’s stuff?” She wiped her hands on the apron. “So you saw it happen? What were his last words?”

  “Um,” What should I say? Joe was pretty mad. His last words wouldn’t mean anything to Paula. So I ignored the question and proceeded to outline the events leading up to the explosion, casting a positive light over her brother. “He was a good instructor,” I finished.

  Paula frowned. “That’s news to me. Joe never said anything about teaching gun safety and shooting. But he wasn’t around much, so it isn’t really surprising.”

  “Did he have a regular job?” This was going to be smooth sailing. Paula obviously wanted to talk about him.

  “Nothing that lasted long. He did this and that, whatever would bring in some cash, so it makes sense that he’d do some paid teaching if he had the chance. Guns were a hobby of his. Why all the questions?”

  That was my cue. I whipped out my sheriff’s deputy badge. “I’m part of an investigation team,” I told her.

  “I was told that Joe’s death was an accident.”

  “Who told you that?” I expected her to name my sheriff son.

  Instead she said, “Ralph Hanson. He’s become a good friend and has been a comfort to me. Are you saying it wasn’t an accident?”

  “It probably was, but for insurance reasons we have to do some digging.”

  “Are you with the life insurance company?”

  I picked up on that. “He had life insurance?”

  “Not likely. Joe was always strapped for cash.”

  Which I doubted, considering his profession. Wasn’t the drug industry a cash cow? But I let it ride and said, “Just for the record, can you tell me where you were Monday morning around nine o’clock?”

  I expected resistance or at least indignation, but Paula answered without any display of resentment for all the questions. “With Ralph. I didn’t have to work until noon.”

  I nodded like she’d confirmed something I already knew, and said, “If the vehicle manufacturer was at fault, you might have a huge lawsuit. For starters, we need background on Joe.”

  Paula looked hopeful at the suggestion of a settlement, but why not? We all could use a windfall. “He worked odd hours, lots of late nights. Deliveries, he said.”

  “Did he use his own car for these deliveries?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure why it was at the house when he had the accident.”

  I stared off at the bombed truck. “The truck he was driving wasn’t his?”

  She shook her head. “It must have belonged to the delivery company.”

  Paula’s eyes darted off in the direction of the truck. “I better get back to work.”

  Paula went into the store. I walked back toward my truck.

  And remembered what had been bothering me about that first outing into the woods.

  I’d heard something that day. At the time, it didn’t mean anything, hadn’t triggered any alarms. I’d barely paid any attention. But I’d heard that same sound yesterday morning when the drone flew overhead. A sound like an active beehive might make. Was it possible that while I had been searching for Pearl’s shoe, a drone had been watching me from the sky? Had I come close enough to the meth dump to raise red flags?

  It made perfect sense. I must have been spotted, and they assumed I was snooping around. Joe had been sent in to watch me, to watch us, to assess the threat. Maybe he’d been offered a bonus for confirmation. Did I have a big target on my back?

  I almost laughed off my crazy thoughts. Paranoia, I almost decided.

  Besides, wouldn’t I be the one dead from a drone strike, not Joe?

  I almost blew off that idea as an overreaction.

  Except, a few minutes later, somebody threw me under a bus.

  Chapter 11

  The vehicle wasn’t a school bus or coach bus, but still…it weighed enough to crush me flatter than a Swedish pancake.

  I must have been loitering outside for a few minutes, thinking those thoughts about my own precarious position. I’d already decided that all I could do was wait and see, continue on as I’d been doing, but pay more attention to my surroundings.

  Instead of paying attention, I walked behind a Volkswagen camper bus, one of those oldies with artistic paintings on the side. A real custom job. The driver was definitely passing through, because nobody around here would drive something like that.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the backup lights, and took an evasive step back. Only instead of moving out of the way as intended, something propelled me forward where I dropped to my knees. My purse went flying and the bumper of the van banged into the side of my head. That sent me sideways to the ground directly in the path of the tires.

  Thankfully, the driver turned out to be young. That could have accounted for his great reflexes and his fast reaction. Otherwise I’d have been crushed. The moment I fell, he slammed on the brakes.

  “Oh, man, are you okay?” he said, climbing out, reaching down, and helping me into a sitting position. Blood ran down the side of my face. “You’re hurt. Help! Help!”

  I’ve learned from experience that head wounds, especially facial cuts, can really bleed. Even superficial ones, which this turned out to be. Pretty soon, Ray was out in the parking lot with sterile bandages and antiseptic. I was patched up in no time and back on my feet, with my purse slung over my shoulder and with a highly suspicious mind.

  “Did you see anybody behind your camper bus?” I said to the driver, absolutely positive that I’d been pushed.

  “I wouldn’t have pulled out if I had. I’m really sorry.”

  “I mean, other than me.”

  “I didn’t see anybody, not even you.”

  A few customers had arrived on the scene, piling out of the store to see what all the commotion was about. Including that boyfriend of Paula’s. What was his name? Ralph Hanson. I hadn’t noticed until now that his motorcycle was parked right next to my truck.

  “Did anybody see what happened?” I asked the crowd.

  After a momentary pause without anybody stepping forward, the driver said, “You’re going to sue me, aren’t you? You’re looking for witnesses.”

  “There’s a big bruise on your cheek,” one of the gawkers pointed out. “I can attest to that. Is there money in it?”

  A flash went off. “No photos,” the driver said, a little panicked.

  “What’s going on?” Ralph asked Ray.

  “This camper bus almost ran over Gertie, but she’s okay.”

  I didn’t feel so good. Either from the fall or from the fact that a person had tried to throw me under a bus. It took all of my willpower not to give Ralph one of Grandma Johnson’s evil eyes. And come to think of it, where was Paula? She easily could have slipped out the back door, circled around, and given me a big push. She’s a strong woman. And she’s a butcher. She knows how to make things good and dead.

  I waved off suggestions to have my head looked at by a doctor. Other than racking up a big bill that emptied my bank account, I couldn’t see an upside to a hospital visit.

  “You really should wear a helmet,” I advised Ralph. “Or you’ll end up looking a lot worse than I do.”

  “You look pretty bad,” he said.