Oath of Office

CHAPTER 34

Cap pulled off the road and onto the gravel shoulder about a mile from the Kings Ridge police station. The heavy sense of loss among them had taken over. George, who had done a remarkable job of maintaining his composure, stumbled out of the car, dropped to his knees, and pounded the ground, sobbing. Then he vomited. Afterwards, he washed out his mouth from a bottle of water that Lou had accepted from William Chester, and cried some more.

“They shot him,” he sobbed. “They fuckin’ shot him, and now Notso’s gone forever.”

Lou crouched down and set a comforting hand on the young man’s shoulder. Then he helped him back to the Prizm.

“We don’t know for sure that he’s gone,” Lou said. “Maybe they took him somewhere. He could be a prisoner-a hostage.”

“Who’s they?” George shouted.

“Well, if you believe Chester, it’s somebody who doesn’t work for him.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe Chester at all,” George said. “That guy’s a liar. He wouldn’t last five minutes on the street without all that money to protect him. People would see through him in a second.”

Daybreak was approaching. Scudding clouds concealed the bright moonlight. Only the drone of nighttime insects broke the otherwise heavy silence.

Lou thought about his own family. He and Graham were not that close-certainly not the kind of friends George and his cousin Notso were. He wondered how he would react if Graham had violently died. He would certainly demand answers and would likely stop at nothing to get them. Lou and George might have come from different worlds, but for them at least, the language of family was a constant.

Headlights from an approaching car illuminated the roadway behind them. Reflexively, the three of them dropped down beside the Prizm. Lou tensed while Cap reached for a rock to use as weapon. The car rumbled past them without slowing. Lou felt his tension ease. He took out his smartphone and went straight to Google.

“Wish you didn’t turn that gun over to Chief Stone,” Cap said to George, dropping the rock.

“He asked for it and he’s a friggin’ cop. What in the hell was I supposed to do?”

“You did right. Sorry, pal. I’m a little short on sleep.”

“When did Stone want us back here?” Cap asked Lou.

“He said eight. Do you guys want to go home and shower, then come back?”

“That’s only a few hours from now,” Cap said, checking his watch. “I can call someone to open Stick and Move. What do you say we go back to those fields and do some more searching on our own.”

“I’m in,” Lou said, stifling a yawn. “I don’t have to be at the ER until tomorrow.

“What are you looking up?”

“Corn.”

“Learning anything?”

“Maybe. Back at the house you asked Chester about the number of ears on a stalk. It says here one or two-three at the very most. But I can’t find anyplace that says four or five, and look, there’s a five right there.”

“They look like torpedoes,” Cap said.

Lou broke off an ear from the top of a stalk, stripped it, and snapped it in two at the center. Then he started counting kernels.

“This is incredible,” he said. “It says in this article here that because of the way an ear develops, there are always an even number of rows of kernels-usually fourteen or sixteen. This one has twenty-four. Multiply the number of rows by the number of kernels per row, and you get how much corn there is per ear. This article says between four hundred and six hundred, depending on whether the ear has fourteen or sixteen rows. Well, this monster has about fourteen hundred.”

“Plus all those extra ears per stalk,” Cap said.

“Exactly. That’s a powerful lot of corn.”

“It’s more than that,” George said. “It’s Frankencorn.”

“What?”

“Frankencorn. I did a paper on the genetic modifications in the fishing industry, and they used the term Frankenfish to describe these genetically engineered humongous salmon.”

“So that’s what you think these ears are?”

George snapped off an ear, peeled the leaves, and held it up, turning it from one side to another. “That’s it, exactly,” he said. “I’m sayin’ it’s Frankencorn. Freaky corn. I’m sayin’ it ain’t natural. GMO, baby. Genetically modified organism.” George flipped the ear aside disdainfully.

Lou went back to his smartphone. “It says GMO is pretty common now in the corn business. In fact, it’s the rule more than the exception, but mostly because the ears have engineered resistance to the pesticides that are sprayed on them. Same for most agricultural plants. Whatever it is, it certainly seems as if this Frankencorn isn’t the result of some superfertilizer like Chester claims.”

“But if GMO is so common,” George asked, “why would Chester lie about it?”

“That’s what I’m asking myself,” Lou said. “Why would he lie?”