Trouble in Taco Town Read online

  Wendall’s son was a younger, geeked-out version of him. Genetics really can be pretty amazing. Harvey wasn’t quite as rotund—yet—and his hair was bright ginger without any grays. He wore perfectly round glasses with dark plastic frames and a tweedy jacket with elbow patches over a too-tight sweater vest. An impressive camera hung around his neck. “I was just out getting some shots of the new stop sign over by Fourth and Colby.”

  “Harvey works for the Taco Town Tribune,” Wendall said proudly.

  When Harvey got a load of the tomatoes, he did a double-take. “I thought you said your plants wouldn’t ripen!”

  Vanessa risked a small glance at her rain barrel, then said breezily, “Oh, that was just me being impatient. Obviously, this year’s crop is doing just fine.”

  “Fine?” Harvey said. “These are amazing. Look at that one—it’s as big as my bowling ball.”

  “I can’t take all the credit—I had a botanist’s help.”

  “The dark-haired guy, came through town last week? He was really something else. Actually finished a Taco Tornado—that’s an eating challenge of twenty tacos in twenty minutes—but he wouldn’t let me post his picture on the diner wall. Said he didn’t want to unseat the reigning champion. A real class act.”

  “That’s him,” Vanessa agreed.

  “Even if you turned to him for outside advice, it’s still your greenhouse. Can I get a picture for the Tribune?”

  Vanessa glanced toward the rain barrel again. “I don’t know….”

  “With you in it, obviously.”

  Vanessa blushed and patted down her pristine white coat. “But I’m such a mess.”

  “C’mon, Vanessa—you know how seriously the paper takes our produce. I’ll bet you and your tomatoes make the front page.”

  She primped her hair. “Well, if you really think so.”

  Ignoring Wendall, who was having a flailing-arm meltdown by the door in his urgency to get to his box, Vanessa allowed his son to pose her for the photo op. Harvey stood her in front of the tallest tomato plant, which towered over the petite postal carrier. He handed her a bunch of lush, ripe tomatoes, and instructed her to cradle them in her arms like she was holding a bouquet. All that was missing was a tiara.

  “That’s perfect,” Harvey said, “just perfect. Now, look over here—that’s right—and give me a nice smile.”

  The sun shone through the greenhouse, dazzling Vanessa, but she gave a tenuous smile. I stood tall and began to clap, cheering her on. And once I elbowed Yuri hard enough, he did the same. Although I don’t think he knew the slow clap had a sarcastic connotation in English.

  As we clapped and whistled, Vanessa gained confidence, shifting her shoulder to face the camera with a smile growing broader and more sure. “That’s it,” Harvey said as his shutter clicked. “Fantastic. Just wait till the town sees this.”

  The smile finally reached Vanessa’s eyes as a single leaf dropped from the towering plant. It floated down gently on a warm updraft, unnoticed by both the photographer and his model. But it seemed like such a strange time for a leaf to fall. Maybe it’s the Spellcrafter in me, but I can’t afford to miss any details. Yuri, too. I felt him stiffen beside me…right before all hell broke loose.

  Explosions on TV are loud. But gargantuan vegetables? They just make a wet squelching sound.

  The tomato directly over Vanessa’s head burst in a stunning explosion of ripe, red juice. It deluged her fair apricot hair, sliding down like something had been disemboweled directly overhead. The guts stood out vividly on her pristine white lab coat. But that single tomato was only the opening volley. Soon another burst, and another. Throughout the greenhouse in a series of squishy pops, the overstrained tomato skins gave up the ghost in a cluster of soft detonations. Harvey tried to backpedal, but he slid on the jellied insides of all the victims and tumbled inelegantly out of the way.

  The blowup lasted several long minutes. When the juicy red globes were finally done exploding, not a single plant was left standing. All was silent but the plunk and splatter of tomato guts dripping from the plastic ceiling.

  We slipped and slid and skidded over to Vanessa…who, in her shock, was moving in slow motion. Which didn’t make it any better to see the dismay registering on her face in excruciating detail. She burst into tears just as we reached her. Yuri recoiled as if he’d just now discovered his kryptonite.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, but tomato guts were dripping into my hair, her crop was ruined, and it probably wasn’t okay. I was just about to offer to help her clean up—but unfortunately, it looked like it would take a while. And we were so close to finding my uncle.

  Wendall slipped and slid over to Vanessa and took her by the arm. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.” And together, like a pair of toddlers learning to ice skate, they made their way out the greenhouse door.

  Once they were gone, Yuri muttered, “It’s bad enough Fonzo took their money.”

  “Wait, what?”

  He pressed his lips together is if he regretted he’d said anything.

  “No, go on,” I insisted.

  I didn’t actually think he would elaborate, but he squared his broad shoulders and said, “It’s one thing for him to promise something he can’t deliver, and another to completely destroy someone.”

  “Hold on, buster. First of all, we don’t know for a fact that this is anything more than an accident. And second, how can this be my Uncle’s work if he doesn’t have a quill?”

  Yuri’s eyes went hard. “We both know how far someone will go to get a quill.”

  Oh no he didn’t. I was a heartbeat away from cracking open a can of Penn family whoop-ass when Harvey called out, “A little help, here?”

  Yuri strode over to where Taco Town’s photojournalist was still flailing in tomato guts. Luckily, Harvey had landed on his butt, so his fancy camera was still intact. As if the full-grown man weighed no more than an empty tomato bushel, Yuri plucked him off the mushy ground and set him on his feet.

  I almost allowed my anger to crank down a few notches…but then Yuri said, “The stranger who ate all the tacos—do you still have his picture?”

  Harvey seemed puzzled, but since Yuri had just come to his rescue, he shrugged and took a look. “If I haven’t switched out my memory card…. Hold on. Yep, you betcha. Here he is.”

  Yuri looked down at the viewfinder, then at me—and by the look on his face alone, I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. But you never know. It could have been some other Spellcrafter. I stuck my hands in my pockets, crossed my fingers, and faced the music.

  The viewscreen on the camera was tiny, just a couple of inches, and the picture was somewhat confusing with all the piñatas and sombreros and Minnesota Vikings gear cluttering up the shot. But when I finally picked out the figure in the center of the frame grinning over an empty taco platter, there was no denying it.

  At least Uncle Fonzo looked happy.

  I was about to insist the photo didn’t prove a darn thing (despite the fact that it pretty much did) when Wendall and Vanessa made an appearance. Wendall had a stack of T-shirts in his hands with a Fajita Farms logo. He passed one each of us and said, “It’s too cold to go outside in a wet shirt.” Yuri nearly refused, and I’ll admit, I was tempted, too. I have my image as a natty dresser to consider—but I reckoned it was best to come out of the fiasco with my nipples intact.

  Even if I had no intention of letting a certain someone near them. At least until he apologized.

  Once we were all in our new Fajita Farms shirts, Vanessa took stock of the greenhouse with the glazed, stunned expression, then sighed and said, “Okay, Wendall, let’s look for your package.”

  Her mail truck was surprisingly full, but between the four guys, we had it unloaded before long. Especially since Wendall was working faster and faster the farther down he got without finding his box. But then, there it was, at the bottom of the heap. A battered box with one corner crunched in, the tape splitting, and a big oil stain on t
he bottom. A box marked fragile in at least a dozen different places.

  Wendall cocked his head. “Wait a minute….” He pulled out a pocket knife and slit open the box. Styrofoam popcorn scattered as he pulled out a snow globe, then peered inside. “I must’ve had my boxes mixed up. This is from a batch I ran last week. They’re perfectly fine.” He turned to Vanessa. “Got any tape?”

  “No can do. You opened it, it’s yours.”

  They both launched into some nonsense about postal regulations, but I had no desire to stand around and listen to them arguing—not when I was busy brewing up an argument of my own.

  I gave Yuri a cool look, then turned and headed back to the truck, fully expecting to lay into him once we were alone. But then Wendall snatched up the box of snow globes and came running after us. “Hold on! Can you give me a lift to my shop?

  And even though the annoyance was thick enough to cut with a fork, Yuri gave his head a small, dismissive nod, and said, “Fine. Get in.”

  7

  YURI

  The You-Make-Um factory was a sprawling corrugated metal building with a pair of wooden Indians flanking the door. Apparently, political correctness was not a pressing concern.

  “Back when my dad ran the business,” Wendall said, “this parking lot would be full of workers. We’d make taco T-shirts, print taco postcards, and stamp taco fridge magnets. Nowadays, there’s no one around to fill all the jobs, and besides, it costs barely half as much to outsource and have it all shipped in. All we’ve got to make onsite is the snow globes—that’s our most popular souvenir. We’re the only shop in the whole country that manufactures a taco snow globe.”

  Imagine that.

  He let us into the building, which was crowded with machinery and supplies. Dixon was uncharacteristically quiet as we took in the layout, angry with me for speaking my mind about Fonzo, though as he took in all the equipment, his chilly annoyance began to thaw. Printing presses, silkscreen, embossing stamps—the work stations hugged the perimeter of the building, all of them silent and abandoned. All save the single large monstrosity in the center.

  “Here she is,” Wendall declared. “Globe-O-Matic. Taco Town’s pride and joy.”

  “I thought the Big Taco was the town’s pride and joy,” Dixon said.

  “Well, sure, aside from that. This is a close second.” The machine was a massive metal box, the size of my cabin, with a clear plastic hopper on top filled with colorful plastic beads. With a flourish, Wendall pulled a huge lever on the side, and the monstrosity chugged to life. As gauges swung back and forth and colored lights lit, the raw plastic was funneled down a confusing series of tiny chutes. “The base of the globe feeds in here, glass there,” he shouted over the noise of the machine, and gestured to a looping tangle of conduit. “And here’s the impressive part. Pressurized water flows through these lines. It cools down the hot taco and fills the globe—double duty! Then a robotic arm screws it all together, and they come out fully assembled.”

  He smiled expectantly while the machine groaned and wheezed and clattered. Dixon was fascinated. I was just eager to find the next road out of town before yet another person fed him a sob story he couldn’t resist. And when I thought the whole contraption would finally exhaust itself and fall to pieces, a chute opened up, and a snow globe rolled into a box of packing foam. Wendall pulled it out and handed it to Dixon, and said, “There’s something off about the taco, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  Dixon’s eyebrows shot up halfway to his hairline. After an awkward pause, he said, “Yeah, me neither.”

  Wide-eyed, he handed me the globe. Inside, the specks of sparkling glitter settled to reveal a plastic vagina.

  I handed it back and said nothing.

  Wendall said, “Quality control was so much easier when I had a bigger crew, and I could supervise instead of running the equipment. But now it’s just me, a couple of gals who moonlight at the call center, and Harvey when he’s not chasing down a story. I’m sure it just needs to be calibrated.”

  Something needed to be tweaked, all right, but I doubted it was his equipment. “Machines like these are delicate things,” I said. Americans find me very wise when I state the obvious, and Wendall was no exception. “We should take a look around and see if there’s anything you might have missed. A plugged vent, maybe, or a loose connection.”

  “Absolutely,” Dixon agreed. “Fresh set of eyes can’t hurt.”

  Another obscene snow globe tumbled from the chute. “You’d do that?” Wendall asked. “Take a look around? Thanks, guys! Thanks a bunch!”

  I can handle a screwdriver as well as anyone else, but when I got closer to the massive snow globe maker, I wasn’t looking for mechanical defects…I was searching for evidence of Spellcraft. Amid the vibrations and the steam and the chatter of the tiny nubs of plastic, I found exactly what I was looking for. When I looked at the machinery just so, the air around it wobbled as if I was viewing a reflection in a trembling bead of mercury. There was nothing mechanically wrong with the equipment. The problem was a Crafting gone wrong.

  Or, perhaps, gone right…depending on the intent behind it.

  Spellcraft might be technically legal here, but the government put more rules and regulations on it than legalized gambling. Any Crafting designed to actively harm, defame or impinge on another person was a serious enough offense to carry a prison term. Preferable to Russia, where large men in plain uniforms would simply come by and crush your hand. Still, nothing I would have risked.

  Spellcraft was obviously in play, but that knowledge didn’t help me locate the Crafting itself. I ran my hands around the frame, singed my fingertips on the metal casing of the plastic-heating element, but came up with nothing. As I began to worry how obvious it would be that I was just going through the motions of troubleshooting the machine, Dixon sidled up next to me. He pitched his voice barely above the rattle of the machine and asked, “Did I ever tell you how much I like corn?”

  “I don’t…think so.”

  “Well, I do. I love it. Crazy about it. Especially canned corn. There’s something about the bite, and the juiciness, and the milky, watery corn taste…anyhow. Mom used to get mixed veggies in these big, industrial-sized cans. Peas, carrots, green bean fragments, and corn. And whenever mixed veg was on the menu, Uncle Fonzo would sort all the corn out of his veggies, knock our plates together, and shove the kernels over to me. Claimed he didn’t care for it. But once I was walking down Main Street and I saw him in a diner—you know the one, with the big chicken wearing a hat painted on the window? There was this group of Spellcrafters he used to meet up with twice a month. I wasn’t spying. Really. I just happened to notice what was on his plate: chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and canned corn. And he was eating it. And not like he was just forcing it down, either. And I realized that all these years, he didn’t give me the corn from his mixed veggies because he didn’t like it…but because I did.”

  Maybe so. But all it proved was that the man could be generous with his corn.

  “Here’s the thing,” Dixon said. “Obviously, tomatoes don’t explode on their own. And, yes, I thought they seemed a little sparkly. And, yes, my uncle did come through Taco Town. But why would you presume he was sabotaging the city? He’s the one who taught me to Craft, after all. Maybe there was another Spellcrafter here before him, and maybe he was trying to set things right.”

  I couldn’t deny his argument was all very logical. But I also couldn’t deny the feeling I got: that something was just not right, and Fonzo Penn was written all over it.

  If any Spellcraft was hidden in the factory, I should be able to find it. It took focus, will, and always a bit of luck, but whatever it was that allowed me to paint my Seens also let me see the magic of Spellcraft dancing around a bit of Crafting. The factory was large, though, with a discouraging number of places in which to hide a small slip of paper. Dixon and I split up in hopes of finding the thing. We searched for most of the day, until our stomachs wer
e growling and our feet were sore.

  Unfortunately, if a spell was indeed to blame, we couldn’t find it. I was about to suggest we pack it all in and start fresh in the morning when Reginald the Postmaster skidded into the room and said, “Guys, you won’t believe it, but I think our luck has turned. The birds are flying away!”

  8

  DIXON

  I climbed into the truck, at a loss for words. The scrap of paper I’d found tucked inside the factory’s fusebox was heavy in my pocket. I couldn’t deny who’d done the Spellcraft—the Crafting was strange, but the penmanship was unmistakable, so I could hardly be mad at Yuri for being right. But Yuri didn’t know Uncle Fonzo like I did. If my uncle put a Crafting on something, there was a darn good reason. For all we knew, these people in Taco Town had a comeuppance due. Maybe they drove a giant sausage out of business. Or maybe a giant waffle. I had no idea, but I did know it wasn’t fair to point the finger at my uncle without knowing his side of the story.

  Salsa Lane was open now. We pulled up at the top of the hill beside Reginald. Yuri cut the engine, turned to me and said, “You haven’t said a word. All the way here.” He frowned. “What is it?”

  “Overwhelmed, I guess. All those coochie snow globes.” I forced a laugh. “Just…wow.”

  I don’t think he bought it, but before he could ponder my reaction too closely, Reginald staggered out of his car, then froze directly in front of us, staring up at the Big Taco. He stood perfectly still, transfixed. And then he fell to his knees and burst into tears. “It’s ruined!”

  My heart sank. “I know, I know,” I said to Yuri, low enough that Reginald wouldn’t hear it through the closed windows…and all the wailing. “It’s probably another Crafting gone berserk.” When Yuri raised an eyebrow and I realized I hadn’t mentioned the Crafting in the factory, I hastened to add, “Or the first Crafting gone berserk. Who knows which order they would have been done in…if there even was more than one, that is.”