Curds and Whey Box Set Read online

  CURDS and WHEY

  Books 1-5

  Copyright © 2020 by G.M. Eppers

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  G.M. Eppers

  2064 Douglas Ave.

  Racine, WI 53402

  CURDS and WHEY #1: It’s All For the Cheddar

  CURDS and WHEY #2: A Shred of Dignitary

  CURDS and WHEY #3: Frankenstein’s Muenster

  CURDS and WHEY #4: The Caravane Connection

  CURDS and WHEY #5: To Havarti and to Hold

  CURDS and WHEY

  #1

  It’s All For the Cheddar

  by G.M. Eppers

  For Diane and Grace

  Copyright © 2017 by G.M. Eppers

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  G.M. Eppers

  2064 Douglas Ave.

  Racine, WI 53402

  Contents

  Solomon Grundy’s Dumber Brother

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  The Gross Grocer

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Gone With the Windy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Solomon Grundy’s Dumber Brother

  Chapter One

  The eight of us got out of the van and stood in front of the abandoned factory near the access door. The cracked and pitted asphalt seemed to grow both weeds and micro gravel, and a few cigarette butts that looked so old they might have been original equipment. The building took up the entire city block and was made of ancient red and brown bricks. It stood about two and a half stories high, with the only windows being an irregular row of horizontal transoms just under the roofline, all closed and caked with decades of dirt. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  Badger had his cell phone in his hand and was focused on the screen, showing his GPS tracking map of the area with a blinking red dot in the middle. “Unless a pigeon ate the tracker and is roosting in the rafters, Boyd’s in there,” he said. Aside from GPS, Badger is fluent in at least seven or eight European languages. He collects languages like a six-year-old collects wildflowers into a bouquet for his mother. His real name is Gerrold Collins, but people started calling him Big Bad Gerrold, which eventually got shortened to Badger. He’s of medium height with a nice build and a round cherubic face. He also has thumbs like lightning on his smart phone and is on a first name basis with Google.

  “Another abandoned factory? This is the third one this month!” I complained. There’d been one in Vancouver three weeks ago, and last week another in Darwin, Australia. That one at least had interesting squatters: a family of wallaby, but they ran off when we broke in. This one was practically in our backyard in a little-used area of Washington DC.

  Without looking up, he said, “I know. These guys show no creativity at all. Just once couldn’t they set up in an ex-bookstore or an old video rental place? There are tons of those. I think this used to be a brewery. I can still smell the alcohol.”

  Sylvia, who wears an eye patch, said, “Metalworks.” Sylvia Pendragon has only been on the team a few months, an addition Miss Chiff, our Director, considered necessary after a disastrous incident on the Arabian Peninsula when I misunderstood a sheik’s advances and decked him. He’d been reaching for my scarf in order to cover my head, not trying to grope me. Silly me and my reflexes. According to Miss Chiff, Sylvia lost an eye in the Persian Gulf and wears a patch to cover her scarred socket. Today she’s wearing it over her left eye, but I’d seen her wear it over the right eye, and neither one was especially scarred, though both eyes were a startling shade of emerald green. I mentioned it to her in private a couple of weeks after she joined the team. “I have to ask you not to tell anyone, you understand,” she told me. “It’s important that I learn which team members observe and which do not.” I got a ‘you’ve done well, Grasshopper’ vibe from her and agreed to keep her secret. She has a lovely heart-shaped face, very short brown hair, flawless olive skin, and a dimple in her chin. She had the patch on the right eye today.

  Badger challenged her. “How do you know?”

  She pointed to the roof. We could see various tubes and weird hardware sticking out of it. “That chimney is a Johnson SPOF12. It’s specifically used for foundry furnaces. Built to withstand a much higher heat rating than most chimneys.”

  Badger looked at Sylvia sideways, showing his skepticism, but had no argument. He turned back to his screen. “He’s moving around.”

  “We need to get in there,” said Avis.

  “He’s probably getting ready to torch the place,” said Agnes, her twin sister. They are joined at the waist like the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, but several degrees more flexible, with the highest rated belts in four different martial arts. Agnes and Avis Nicely are the muscle of the outfit, sort of, our experts in hand to hand combat. We all had to be able to fight, of course. The physical requirements of CURDS make Marines look like couch potatoes. We all also wore, were trained in, and were licensed with side arms. The Nicelys were no exception, but they almost never had to use them. You might think that being conjoined would make them unlikely fighters, but they had studied martial arts as a hobby since they were five, encouraged by their parents to instill confidence and to protect them from ridicule. They were both shapely, but compact, with short dark hair. Very aerodynamic.

  My son, Billings, stepped forward to try the access door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. “Any idea how to get in, Miss Observation?”

  “Yes, actually.” You’d think these people would have learned not to argue with Sylvia. I had that lesson down inside three weeks. “When we drove the perimeter on the way in, I saw a broken window on the east side. It’s small, but I think Helena and I could get through.”

  “It’s awfully high. You going to jump?” asked Sir Haughty, the British member of our contingent. Francis Maxwell Haughty IV. Excuse me. SIR Francis Maxwell Haughty IV.

  “I brought my bat hook,” said Sylvia with a sneer. “There’s a metal fire escape not far from the window if we cut across the roof. No problem.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “You guys wait here. One of us will be down to open the door for you.” Sylvia and I started walking around to the opposite side of the building, leaving Billings, Badger, the twins, Sir Haughty, Roxy and Nitro on the asphalt. Roxy wobbled a bit. She was wearing a full-length red satin gown and high heels. I don’t know why. The rest of us were in comfortable clothes, and all of us had on what amounted to a CURDS uniform: a bullet proof vest with CURDS on the back, and a HEP belt with various sizes and types of modular pockets that we could each arrange as we saw fit to hold our handheld equipment,--at the moment a pistol, a walkie-talkie, and a stun gun.

  Sylvia, with her slightly longer legs, got ahead of me and I double-timed to catch up. As we rounded the corner of the building, I was looking for the fire escape. Instea
d, I noticed a tarnished brass plaque embedded in the brick. ‘Mason Metalworks’ it said in big block letters, and underneath in smaller letters: ‘Est. 1874.’ “Sylvia!” I shouted. “You cheated!”

  “I observed,” she said, heading straight for the fire escape. She had to jump up to catch the fold down ladder but got it on the first try. “Is it my fault they don’t? I should have made a bet.”

  We started climbing, hand over hand. “So there’s not really a Johnson SPOF12 chimney, is there?”

  There was a landing midway up and she waited for me there. “Nope. Made it up. SPOF stands for Superlative Piece of Fiction.”

  “You’re mean,” I told her, pushing past and taking the lead up the second part of the ladder. “Remember,” I added to get back on focus, “let’s not advertise. Tread lightly over the roof.”

  “Gotcha.”

  We dashed quickly across the roof on a diagonal. I had to give the lead back to Sylvia, since I didn’t know where the broken window was. On the way we passed a large skylight and I stopped to peer down. All I could see was a layered section of catwalk. I imagined Sylvia could have told where Boyd was by how the catwalk was vibrating, but she went past the skylight as if it wasn’t there. When I met her at the edge of the roof, she was already backing her way down, hanging on with both hands as her feet found the window. I could hear a light tinkling sound as she swung her feet to clear broken glass out of the frame. “Sylvia, when you get in,” I said before she could disappear, “you start tracking Boyd. Have your gun out. I’ll go get the door.”

  “Okay. You got it.” Her voice was a little tight from her exertion as she maneuvered through the window. Looking down to judge my own climb, I saw her land on a catwalk, pull out her gun, and walk to the right.

  I followed. Inside, the light was dim. Not much was getting through the caked windows, but there was enough coming through the skylight to show me where to go. I had a line of sight to the door from here, but it was going to take some time to get there. I moved down the catwalk, listening for Sylvia or Boyd. We wouldn’t confront him until the rest of the team could get in. Backup is NOT for sissies. Plus, we had to find the lab. Without evidence, Boyd’s conviction would never stick. I found a staircase and went down two levels, then had to walk several yards to the next one. I got to ground level much further from the door than I thought I would and it was mostly open space. In the middle of the factory floor stood three large metal tanks near a large worktable. Against the wall, seemingly half a mile from the tanks, were several industrial shelving units filled with boxes, metal containers and what looked like oil drums. We’d examine the set-up later. First I had to let my people in. I pulled my gun and looked around. I didn’t see any activity. After a moment, I made a beeline across the open factory floor and got to the access door. There was a bar across it that said an alarm would sound, but I ignored it. This was the third factory this month and we had yet to hear an alarm. I pushed it open, and my team quietly entered.

  “Spread out,” I whispered. “Use the walkie if you find him, but keep it quiet.”

  “I think we should block the door,” suggested Billings. “Badger, can you give me a hand? If he tries to run that’s the only way out, unless he knows how to open the bay doors in the back.”

  The twins volunteered to take care of the bay doors and trotted off in that direction, guns pointed at the floor and eyes scanning all directions. The rest of us went to examine the setup in the middle of the room. Nitro was looking at the contents of the shelving units. “Gallons of paint thinner, cartons of lithium batteries, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, antifreeze, iodine. It’s just a meth lab.”

  “Shall I call DCPD?” asked Sir Haughty. “There’s no Uber here.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “This is a huge building for just that little lab. There’s more here. There has to be.”

  Billings and Badger were using a hand dolly to move a couple of the heavy barrels to block the exit door. After placing them, Badger unscrewed one of the caps and sniffed. “Helena,” he whispered, “I think this is just plain water.”

  At the shelves, Sir Haughty popped open a cardboard box that had had the flaps irised together. He showed me a can of Red Bull. “This is powerful stuff, but I don’t think it’s an ingredient in meth.” We abandoned the fake meth lab and moved further into the building. Little did Boyd and his friends know that even if it had been a real meth lab, that wasn’t the kind of lab we were looking for. They could have been dealing in meth as well and made considerably more money. Ahead of us was a triple-decker series of offices accessed by metal staircases separate from the catwalk system. Each office was about 10 by 10 by 8 feet and they were stacked one on top of the other like a Japanese hotel. There was a poorly lit area to the right of the stack and I went toward it, prepared for Boyd to jump out of the shadows. But nothing happened. Sir Haughty had climbed the catwalk to the right and Sylvia to the left. Billings went up to check the offices for signs of life. Ahead of me I found another door. I knew it couldn’t lead outside. The back wall was dozens of yards away. Instead of an exit sign above the door, there were four screw holes just above eye level (or rather above MY eye level, which is lower than most) indicating where a sign had been removed. I tried the handle and it opened.

  I entered another spacious room. The equipment here was much larger and overhead shop lights illuminated the entire area, showing huge rectangular vats and tanks that seemed more like water towers extending high above me. Pipes connected some equipment to others, and there were control valves and hoses. Way in the distance was a butcher block slab, but I couldn’t distinguish the jumble of smaller handheld items collected on it. Past that were the bay doors, and I could just make out the twins creeping around over there. There was still no sign of Boyd so I moved in closer. One vat appeared to be filled with milk. There was a tap on one end of the vat connected to one of the huge water tower tanks. In the center of the vat, an oven thermometer protruded. A second vat had a more thickened substance which I found repulsive, and another oven thermometer. We had our Uber lab. This would stick in any court of law as long as we found some rennet. I took out my cell phone and snapped a few pictures.

  My walkie came to quiet life. “I got eyes on him. He’s got a mixing paddle and he’s coming your way.” It was Sylvia’s voice, but I didn’t dare look around to locate her.

  I backed up to the nearest wall and tried to disappear. I’m usually pretty good at that, since I’m only five foot two. Then Boyd entered, confidently, swinging the mixing paddle like a pendulum before plopping the flat end into the milky vat. I pointed my gun at him and announced myself. “Freeze. I’m an officer of CURDS and you’re under arrest, Boyd.” At the same time, I stepped forward out of the shadows so he could see me. But not too close. I didn’t want to get within paddle range.

  I heard footsteps coming, lots of them, as my team assembled around me. But Boyd didn’t drop the paddle. He held onto one end, looking at us, watching for an opportunity. “You got nothing without the rennet,” he said.

  Nitro stepped forward where I could see him and held up two gallon size Ziploc bags filled with a reddish brown liquid. “I think I’ve got that covered, Boyd. I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll test positive for Uber. And there’s more where I found this, isn’t there? Drop the paddle. It’s over.”

  Boyd dropped the paddle all right, but he didn’t stand still. He made a dash for the nearest catwalk. This is why I hated abandoned factories. It’s always a freaking catwalk chase and those things are murder on your thigh muscles. Even the straightaways are hard to run on. Badger and Sylvia gave chase right away, letting the rest of us cover Boyd’s escape routes. The rattle of various types of footwear on metal grating echoed. But he had a head start, and, as I saw soon enough, a pistol he had hidden on the first landing.

  “5 . . .4 . . .3 . . .” I started counting.

  When I got to zero, Boyd had reached the top catwalk and turned to yell down at us, “Y
ou’ll never take me alive!” And he fired the pistol.

  The bullet punctured one of the milk tanks inches from where Billings was standing. My heart jumped, then calmed down when I realized he wasn’t hit. But milk began squirting out right at his face. “Oh crap!” He yelled reflexively, then sputtered as the forceful jet found its way into his mouth.

  “You will tonight!” shouted Sir Haughty as he returned fire at Boyd on Billings’ behalf, laughing playfully.

  Billings ducked away from the path of the milk and turned to fire but Boyd was no longer there. “That’s not funny!” he shouted back at Sir Haughty over the noise of the running milk.

  Sir Haughty moved closer. “Come on, man! A CURDS agent who’s lactose intolerant is hilarious.”

  Billings was searching for Boyd, still spitting milk out of his mouth. I could hear running feet and some shouts from above, but their forms were lost in the layers of catwalk. I wanted to hear how Billings responded to this, so I sidled over where I could hear better. “But that’s why I’m on the command track and you’re just a specialist,” he responded quietly. “You won’t think it’s so funny when I assign you to KP for a year.”

  That made Sir Haughty shut up. You don’t want to know what KP stands for in CURDS, but let’s just say it has nothing to do with the kitchen. I wanted them both to know that I’d heard the exchange, so from behind I said loudly, “Yes, I know. We’re all misfits. Could we get back to Boyd please?”

  Just then there was another shot above us. I looked up to find Boyd in hand-to-hand combat with the twins. He had fired, but the shot had gone wild. Avis was holding his gun hand over the railing of the catwalk, and Agnes provided a roundhouse kick to the side of his head. Then Avis lifted his arm and slammed it down on the railing twice, causing his hand to splay open, and the gun dropped about twenty feet into the second vat of congealed goo, producing a little volcanic eruption of thin white liquid and white rubbery chunks. I gagged and turned away. What’s funnier than a CURDS agent with lactose intolerance? A CURDS agent with a physical revulsion to cheese in raw form. The way people feel about sewage is how I feel about cheese. I also feel that way about sewage, of course. Nitro is just the opposite. Given a pile of sewage he would take samples, identify individual poopers, and list what each one had eaten the day before.