29. Graham
GRAHAM
Aloha buzzed me in and I made my way across the old factory floor where he kept his cyber lab.
The building was on the south side of town, surrounded by the decrepit brick factories and warehouses that had once made up a thriving business center for Blackwell Falls, and I could almost see the machinery that had once filled the concrete floor.
Now it was empty, filled only with shadows of the past as I headed for the walled-off box at the back of the cavernous space.
I didn’t bother trying the door. Aloha knew I was there, would buzz me in when he was good and ready.
I thought about Audrey while I waited, and the little girl named Ella with Audrey’s eyes and crooked smile.
I shouldn’t be here.
I shouldn’t be involving myself in their business. Shouldn’t be exposing myself or the ranch to scrutiny.
I’d survived this long, had kept the ranch this long, by being careful.
By being steady.
No drama, no attention.
Easy as pie when it had just been me, Holden, and Ridge, Holden’s fascination with fire aside.
Turned out it wasn’t so easy with Audrey Sterling around, lighting the place up with that crooked smile, making me think about things I hadn’t let myself think about in a long while.
The door buzzed and I entered the steel box that made up Aloha’s cyber lab.
The place was like a call center, except instead of people on phones, the place was lined with work tables and computer monitors, quiet other than the sound of fingers on keyboards as Aloha and two others — a striking black woman with a bald head and a younger dude in a hoodie — worked their strange magic on the cyber world.
A leather jacket with the Blades’ insignia hung on the back of Aloha’s chair, and his bald head shone under the blue LED lights that rimmed the ceiling in the cyber lab.
Aloha swiveled his chair around to face me, then tugged on his long brown beard. “Never thought I’d see you here.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked.
I nodded. I’d already done all the thinking I needed to do.
“I’m sure.”
He turned to face the computer and I took a couple steps so I could watch over his shoulder.
A Red Bull sat on a coaster next to his keyboard, three computer screens lined up in front of him.
“That Reva’s chicken parm?” I asked, tipping my head at the plastic container next to him, the food half-eaten.
“Yeah,” he said. “The best right?”
“You need some barbecue sauce.”
He grimaced. “On chicken parm?”
“Barbecue sauce makes everything taste better.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He tapped at his computer and brought up a document filled with time stamps and addresses. “So this was what I wanted to show you.”
“You’re going to have to explain.” At a glance, none of it made sense to me.
“My deep dive into Ashcroft didn’t turn up anything new,” Aloha said. “Aside from those domestics, the guy is clean. So I decided to dig into the business a little.”
“And?”
“And there’s an anomaly in their routes around Blackwell Falls.”
“What kind of anomaly?”
He used his curser to highlight half the screen. “See, all of this makes sense. They’re routing the trucks near local highways. The highways lead to interstates, the interstates lead to other states, and sometimes, to ports where they load shit onto their cargo ships. Following me so far?”
“Yep.”
Aloha pulled up a map with a blue line routing from the Ashcroft Distribution headquarters outside of Blackwell Falls to highways and interstates leading to major cities and out of the state.
“Notice anything weird?” he asked.
I studied the map, following the blue line.
“Seems like they take a detour,” I said.
The blue line cut away from the highways and interstates about 60 miles outside of Blackwell Falls, then cut back.
“Boy, do they,” Aloha said. “There ain't shit out there.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, studying the line. “It’s outside Harrison.”
Aloha snorted. “Harrison has a population of twenty-five hundred.”
“Still.” It wasn’t unheard of for a company to operate in a rural area where land and labor was cheaper.
“I looked,” Aloha said. “Only thing out there is liquor stores, dollar stores, and two gas stations. Plus a defunct factory that used to be owned by Bluebird Machine back in the early 1900s, which just so happens to be the destination of Ashcroft’s trucks.”
That made me stand up straighter. “They’re routing to an empty warehouse?”
“Looks like it,” Aloha said.
“Where do they go from there?”
“Back to the interstate and their regular route,” Aloha said.
I scratched at my beard, my mind turning over the possibilities. “Find anything else?”
“That’s a negative.” Aloha leaned over to shovel a bite of Reva’s chicken parm in his mouth, then swiveled his chair to face me. “This was the only thing that tickled my spidey senses.”
“Can you send it all to me?”
“Already done,” he said. “Wanted to show it to you myself though, so I could walk you through the map.”
“Thanks.”
“No thanks necessary. It wasn’t a favor.”
“Money’s already sent.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Aloha said.
I nodded and showed myself out as he turned to face his computer.
I hated to think about what it meant that I’d paid Aloha for a deep dive into Dean Ashcroft. It wasn’t about the money. I had plenty of money thanks to the merchandise in the north barn.
It was the fact that I was invested in Audrey Sterling and her fight against her abuser. That I cared enough to pay Aloha. Cared enough to come to his lab, see what he’d turned up.
I shoved that down and thought instead about the Ashcroft trucking routes. Put together with Audrey’s suspicions, it spelled something criminal going on at the company.
I wanted to talk to Audrey again, run through what she knew for sure, separate it from what she suspected, put it together with this new information from Aloha.
I didn’t like that she’d run off after the altercation with Dean. I didn’t like that she still felt trapped by him.
Most of all, I didn’t like the fact that I was itching to see her again. That I’d implied a willingness to take out her ex-husband even though she’d lost the Hunt.
Because those things meant that Audrey Sterling was more than a Hunt girl.
The thought made me deeply uneasy.
It had been a long time — more than twenty years — since a woman had meant anything to me.
And look how that had turned out.