Three

 

Perko gunned the ATV out of the forest and into the barnyard. He dismounted with a groan. As wide and cushy as the three-wheeler’s seat was, nothing could make the ride through the bush comfortable. He hated the backwoods trail, but it was critical he never be seen entering the farm’s front gate. He maintained complete arm’s length insulation from the grow operation that was, in every way, his baby.

The day before, he had called the punk farmer and told him, “Time to go buy beer and groceries. Get the fuck out. Don’t be back before dark.” He checked the spot between the ancient pickup on collapsed tires and the rusted out baler. No car. The punk was a good listener.

The farm looked like every other halfway-abandoned homestead in central Ontario. For nearly two decades, the owner had let the land run to scrub after many lifetimes of careful pasturing. No self-respecting cow would be caught navigating the stone, rubble, and low-lying juniper. A handful of poplar trees and some spruce had taken hold but no hardwood yet, except in the woodlot and even it was overrun by brambles and saplings around the edges. Before Perko’s operation had moved in, nobody at all had lived at the farm for at least three years. The hayfields lay across the road and had long been rented to a nearby farmer. Perko knew the geezer must have noticed the recent tenant in the front farm house, but he didn’t worry. In the no-smoke-no-fire book of rural etiquette, he counted on him and every other neighbor to respect the “Mean Dog” sign he had tacked to the front gate. Farmers could be every bit as nosy as they were helpful. The flipside was that people in the country knew how to mind their own business as long as nothing too loud or funny-smelling was going on.

Perko’s tenancy was a strictly cash deal, struck with the eighty-seven-year-old owner. The widow nearly choked on her teeth when he paid eight months’ rent up front. She still had enough gumption to ask for a damage deposit which Perko was convinced she immediately blew at the Great Horned Owl Charity Casino. They ran a shuttle four times a day to and from the retirement villa.

The barn was easily a hundred twenty years old. It leaned slightly to one side, but the long grey timbers looked as solid as rock from a distance. It was tucked conveniently behind the farmhouse and further screened by a spur of the woodlot.

Perko headed around back to a bright aluminum garage door wide enough to accommodate a tractor. He unlocked the padlock and rattled the length of old chain through the door’s handles. Inside he was greeted by a press of air so thick with organic dust he could feel it on his teeth. A shiver of anticipation ran down his spine as he spread his arms wide and beamed at his masterpiece.

The tumble-down barn’s cavernous interior was all twenty-first century. Thirty-mil black plastic lined the inside walls. Styrofoam insulation was glued and tacked to the plastic. Scaffolding erected right up to the roof created four floors where once there had been two. A mosaic of chrome, wire, white and black plastic tubing and hoses ran in every direction, all of it shimmering under a metal halide dawn. Each level had aisles of hydroponic basins, filled with slow-flowing nutrient-enriched water that bathed the roots of row upon row of pungent marijuana plants.

The man-made central nervous system created the ideal growing environment for some of the most potent cannabis the world had ever known. And it was all his.

That his creation looked like a massive fire hazard wasn’t lost on Perko, but the smoke his operation was intended to produce would be far sweeter than the toxic mess that would occur should the barn itself ever burn. He had overseen the installation himself, using the Libidos’ regular crew of off-duty city and hydro workers—the region’s best experts on bypassing power meter monitoring. He paid the men cash and fed them beer and pizza during the overnight build-out sessions. It took less than a week to complete the installation. Perko himself cloned cuttings from two other Libido grow ops.

He used Frederick, one of Nancy’s Nasties, to hire a guy to babysit the plants for the sixteen weeks until harvest time. Frederick’s great-great-aunt had been the Nasties’ matriarch, Nancy Nickerson, a gin-swilling grandmother of six hardcore repeat convicts who ran the original show. The two remaining grandsons were in walkers by now and what was left of the gang had fallen on rough times. Still, it was critical there be no connection between Perko and his pot farmer so that if the place ever got busted, the punk couldn’t rat anyone out.

The plants had grown quickly, the Himalayan Gold outperforming the Texada Timewarp, and both crops starting to flower in just under two months. Once a week, he called the resident farmer from a pay phone and told him to leave the property: “Payday. Time to get lost.” Week by week, the plants matured, and he walked the aisles like a botanist, pausing here and there to crumble a leaf between his fingers and smell its sweet spice.

Today, things were looking different. A back corner had been sealed off with a black plastic curtain behind which the mother plant cuttings for the next crop were rooting in their little trays, nearly ready to be transplanted. The black curtain served to block out ambient light, ensuring the babies received exactly twenty hours of artificial daylight—no more, no less—from the overhanging light racks. The punk farmer was doing his job well, not that it would ever occur to Perko to tell him as much.

Stacked near the tractor door were dozens of bales of dried pot, each wrapped in burlap and plastic, and weighing in at twenty-five pounds. Perko drew a deep breath, eyes gleaming, and admired his first harvest.

On the other side of the door, he noticed a charred empty oil drum stuffed with odds and sods of plastic and framing materials. It looked like farm boy was using his noggin and doing the barrel burn indoors rather than sending a thick black smoke signal up from the yard. He’d have to tell him to check the HVAC filters to make sure they weren’t getting clogged.

Done inspecting the barn, Perko walked over to the house to leave an envelope containing sixty twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. On the envelope he scrawled a note: “Tuesday night, make yourself scarce. The Boss.” Then he underlined “Boss” because it made him feel good.

On previous visits, he had nosed around the house a bit to get a sense of his employee’s at-home behavior, looking for evidence of parties, or girlfriends, or anyone other than the farmer himself. Visitors were strictly forbidden. Based on his snooping, Perko was satisfied that the only company enjoyed by his charge was a lizard that occupied one of the rooms on the second floor. It had to weigh nearly twenty pounds. Perko made another mental note to find out just how big lizards could grow—he didn’t want to wind up ambushed by a dragon.

Today, he noticed a few bags of dried bud, more than his farmer could possibly smoke on his own. Clearly, the guy was selling a little on the side. Perko shrugged. Selling factory leavings was against the rules, but he was willing to let it slide. When you were growing over a million dollars’ worth of marijuana and some poor sod was fool enough to shoulder the personal risk of incarceration, it was best not to quibble when he sold a little plant waste. If the punk got busted dealing, he had nothing to gain by confessing to running a factory-scale pot farm, never mind the fact that he didn’t have a clue who he actually worked for.

Riding back into the bush on his ATV, Perko smiled with pride at the elegance of the operation. He’d learned a hell of a lot with the Libidos. They were so smart, he figured they ought to be running the whole damn country.