Fatal Harvest by Catherine Palmer

Author:Catherine Palmer [Palmer, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2003-10-27T20:00:00+00:00

Matt could not figure out what to do. He felt as if he was frozen in some kind of a space-time warp, and no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t make a decent plan. He knew the two men with Granny Strong and Billy were posing as USDA agents, but they worked for Agrimax. Three days ago, they had taken Matt out of class, threatened him, and then killed Mr. Banyon. They were murderers! But what could one unarmed kid do to rescue his grandmother and best friend?

After driving past Granny’s house, Matt parked the pickup at the far end of the street and turned everybody into mathematical integers. He lined them up on a scrap of paper he’d found in the glove compartment—Granny, Billy, Thug A, Thug B and himself. He gave each person a different letter of the alphabet, and then he started working on the problem. He put the integers into different formulas; then he factored in sets of variables in an attempt to predict the possible outcomes of actions he might take.

It turned out to be another one of his dumb ideas. People couldn’t be turned into math formulas, Matt realized after about an hour of this, because they were too unpredictable. One option he came up with was to drive his pickup right through the front door, then grab Granny and Billy and take off. But who knew where everyone was sitting inside the house? What if he plowed Granny and Billy down? Then he’d be charged with killing three people instead of just one. He couldn’t bear the thought of having any part in another death of someone he loved.

For a while, Matt considered calling Granny Strong’s house and pretending to be somebody else. But if Granny didn’t recognize his voice, how would he warn her to get out of the house? Even if he somehow managed to tell her what was happening, how could she and Billy ever slip past the man standing at the front door?

What about the back door? Matt recalled that Granny kept a spare key on the overhead ledge. Could he create a diversion at the front of the house and sneak Granny and Billy out the back way?

Matt looked again at his scrap of paper listing all the integers and variables. His eye fell on the juxtaposition of three numbers. 9-1-1. With a jolt, he sat upright and started the pickup. Telephone. He needed to get to a telephone.

A nearby convenience store had a pay phone outside, he recalled. Fishing in his pocket for change as he drove the four blocks, Matt rehearsed what he would say. He pulled into a parking space, left the truck idling, hurried to the wall-mounted phone, and dropped in the quarters.

“Two armed men have broken into an old woman’s home,” he blurted out after the dispatcher answered. He gave his grandmother’s address and then added, “The men kidnapped a teenager and murdered a rancher named Jim Banyon in New Mexico.”

“Sir, how do you know this?” the dispatcher asked.

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