Juicy Secrets Forbidden Tales of Lesbian Love

A quick recap of the Story Thus Far: Rural paramedic Nettie Hastings finds herself in the middle of a flurry of unexplained overdose calls and, with the help of her best friend and former lover, Terry Wilder, has begun putting clues together linking the source to her own hometown. Some suspect Terry’s involvement, as his ex-wife is a convicted drug trafficker. A DEA agent named Bridgette Ramscone is brought in to work the case, and she takes a special interest in Nettie who, in the meantime, has entered into a clandestine affair with Terry’s preteen daughter Halee. After a late night sex party at Nettie’s, Halee accidentally discovers that her long out-of-the-picture mother Kathryn is involved in the overdoses. She slips out on her own, intent on confronting her mom. Nettie and Terry follow, but the three of them are captured by Kathryn and her gang, and in the melee, Halee is shot. Kathryn is persuaded to let Halee go, along with Nettie to take care of her, but she holds onto Terry as a hostage. Halee survives surgery, and Nettie meets an anesthesiologist named Hannah, who recognizes Nettie’s passion for young girls. As it transpires, Hannah is a lesbian, one who has a very special relationship with her underage daughter — a fact she is quite pleased to share with Nettie.

For a more detailed breakdown of this story’s chapters, please consult the Chapter Links.

by Rachael Yukey

It was a little after nine when I crossed the Franklin County line, the knowledge that I was only fifteen minutes from home easing some of the tension in my gut. A heavy overcast obscured the moon, leaving my headlights as the only source of illumination. The overall effect was heightened by the leaden doom of Black Sabbath, issuing forth from the speakers at a much higher decibel level than could possibly have been good for me.

The world is full of kings and queens, who’ll blind your eyes and steal your dreams… it’s Heaven and Hell! Ronnie James Dio proclaimed in his full-throated roar.

You got that right, Ronnie, I thought.

And they’ll tell you black is really white, the moon is just the sun at night, and when you walk in golden halls, you get to keep the gold that falls… it’s Heaven and Hell!

It felt like the perfect metaphor for the kind of mother Kathryn Wilder had turned out to be.

My mom had Terry’s two youngest girls at her house for the night. Naomi was staying with Chelsey, who was still crashing at her grandma’s house. I’d already decided I would return to my apartment for the night, then collect the youngsters in the morning. But as I neared the point at which County Road Two intersected this stretch of state highway, I found myself slowing, signaling right, and turning onto the gravel in the direction of the meat locker. What was I looking for? No idea.

As I crested the rise leading up to the entrance, the same one I’d passed through with Terry in an ambulance a little over a week before, I let off the gas, allowing the vehicle to coast down. I came to a stop and got out, leaving the car to idle behind me on the road.

Using my phone’s flashlight, I picked my way forward. The foliage covering the old entrance was much more beaten back than it had been the previous week; clearly, the DEA people had traveled in and out of here more than a few times. About ten meters in, a swinging gate with a padlock had been placed, with yellow police cordon tape disappearing into the woods on either side. I wondered if Bridgett had made some poor bastard run that stuff all the way around the outside of that substantial piece of property.

Turning around, I made my way back to the car, got in, and drove on. The last song on the album I’d been listening to was just kicking off, the somber tone and lyrics an eerie companion on this dark, empty stretch of road.

It’s a long way to nowhere, and I’m leaving very soon. On the way we get so close to the back side of the moon.

“Lonely is the word, Ronnie,” I said out loud. My own voice startled me.

About a quarter mile from the driveway leading to the meat locker, I reached the junction to Merlin Creek Drive. Signaling right, I eased onto the badly maintained minimum maintenance road. I slowed almost to a stop as I passed the point at which Terry and I had plucked Darren Sanders from beneath his rolled ATV only days before. Then I accelerated again, easing along the crappy little trail at about twenty miles per hour.

The road wended downhill in the opposite direction from the valley where the ugly old meat locker squatted, skirting Merlin Creek at a distance of about one hundred yards. Between the road and the creek were small residences; cabin-sized houses and a handful of mobile homes. It was almost exclusively the territory of snowbirds, but not the rich kind. Most of the residents were elderly, and throughout the course of the upcoming summer, I knew the ambulance would be down here half a dozen times or so.

Leaving the line of dilapidated summer housing behind, the road twisted back again in the direction of the meat locker, trending gradually uphill until it terminated at a dead end on what appeared to be an abandoned farmstead. It occurred to me that I’d never before been this far down Merlin Creek Drive, and hadn’t even been aware this place existed. All the buildings were collapsed except for the house, which looked as if it was likely to drop at any second. The moon was finally poking its way through the cloud cover, and I could see better now.

As I pulled up into the yard, my headlights fell upon some modern tillage equipment. Clearly whatever cropland attached to this old homestead was still being cultivated, and a farmer was staging machinery here. But more than that, there were recent tracks heading back into the woods that looked about the right spacing to have been made by large ATVs, such as the Ranger that Darren Sanders had gotten himself pinned under. I came to a halt, killed the engine, and got out of the car.

Wandering around by the light of my phone, I discovered two ATV trails. One led off further in the direction I’d been heading which, if my orientation was right, would eventually come out on a stretch of county blacktop. The other headed straight down into the valley toward the meat locker.

All of this tallied with what Bridgett had told us. The trail heading vaguely northwest would be the path through private property Kathryn’s people had been using as an access point. The one going straight west led down to the meat locker and auction grounds. Both sported newly placed steel gates, with crime scene tape extending off in either direction.

I was standing in front of the gate that led down to the locker when the bright glare of a powerful flashlight blinded my eyes. I stumbled backward in a blind panic, landing on my ass. Then the light moved to my left, still illuminating but no longer dazzling me.

“Nettie Hastings?” someone said. It was a male voice, cracked with age, a voice I knew but couldn’t quite place at first.

The figure holding the light stepped forward. My fear was already subsiding; there was no menace in that ambling shuffle. The man stood over me, extending a hand. I took it, surprised at the strength of the grip, and got to my feet. Finally I was able to identify the stoop-shouldered old man standing before me.

“Adam Bixley,” I said.

A grin cracked the seamed, aged flesh, but there was no humor in it. “Big as life, and twice as ugly.”

My mind flipped rapidly through its catalog of small-town family interrelationships, and came up with an answer in seconds. This man was the great-grandfather of Jason Bixley, the boy who had died in the car crash that had set all of this into motion.

“I was so sorry about what happened to Jason,” I said automatically.

“Not as sorry as I was,” the old man replied, “but thanks. I heard you worked real hard to save him. Thanks for that, too.”

He looked me up and down, searchingly. “What’re you doin’ out here, Nettie?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I was just coming back from Minneapolis, and…”

“The Wilder girl’s in the hospital down there, ain’t she?”

“Yeah. That’s why I was there.”

“And those bastards who shot her have your man.”

I nodded. Terry wasn’t exactly “my man”, but it didn’t seem worth pressing the point.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked him. “And how’d you even get here? I didn’t see another car.”

Again, that humorless grin. It was the grin of a man forced at gunpoint to eat shit and smile about it.

“Oh, I parked my four-wheeler off in the edge of the woods. You wouldn’t have seen it if you weren’t lookin’ for it. Didn’t bring the love wagon, ‘cus I didn’t figure on meetin’ a pretty girl like you out in the middle of nowhere.”

He flashed me the first genuine-looking grin I’d seen from him thus far, one that, in other circumstances, might have pushed certain buttons in me, even in a face as aged as his. I’d heard that Adam Bixley had been a real ladies’ man in his day, and standing here in the woods with him, I glimpsed the force of personality that made it so.

He turned away from me to face the gate. “As for the other bit,” he said, “why, if we were to cross this police line, we’d be on property that I own.” He made an expansive gesture in the direction of the forest.

“Wait… what?” The implications flooded my mind. “You own the meat locker?”

Bixley looked back over his shoulder at me, that pained, humorless smirk on his face once more. “Ran the place for twenty years. And mostly lost money. By the time I bought it, most people were already just buyin’ meat at the grocery store.”

He turned back to face me. “I’ve been comin’ out here most every night for the last week. Every time I stop right here, think for a bit, then turn around and go home. Never quite have worked up the sack to wander on down there. You know, I haven’t been back to that valley since I shuttered the place, and that’s thirty years gone now.”

The shape of it was already crystalizing in my mind. “If you did cross this line,” I said carefully, “what is it you’d be looking for?”

The corners of his mouth turned upward. “You’re a bright one, aren’t you?” He pulled the collar of his lined flannel shirt up, covering his neck, then looked to the heavens and let out a slow breath. Finally he lowered his head, meeting my eyes once more with the air of a man having come to a decision.

“Tell you what,” he said. “It’s getting damn cold out here. Let’s go sit in that car of yours, and I’ll spin you a little story.”

***

Once we were comfortably ensconced in my Kia, the heated seats toasting our asses, Bixley withdrew a hip flask from beneath his heavy flannel shirt, took a long draught, and then passed it to me. I tossed back a sip of the straight vodka, reminding myself firmly to go easy; I still had to drive home. Bixley took the flask back, capped it, and hugged it to his chest.

“I bought the meat locker and the auction grounds in 1971,” he said. “At the time it was still doin’ all right, and the cattle auctions were a big to-do. People would bring their kids out with picnic lunches and stay all day. Deals got made, neighbors spent time together, people fell in love at those things. Now, I knew small farms were on their way out, even if nobody else seemed to. But I figured that by the time it all went to hell, I’d have a nice, classic prohibition-vintage brick building that I could convert into something else. Never got around to it.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield and into the darkness. “Turns out, the business went south even before the little farmers started goin’ bust. By ‘75, you were already gettin’ to a place where farmer’s wives had to get jobs in town to make ends meet, and not many were buyin’ beef by the quarter or half anymore. Say, is there any way to turn this backside burner off?”

I switched off the seat heater on his side, and he nodded his thanks.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “it was right around that time… ‘76 or so… this young guy up from St. Cloud waltzes into my office. Had a smile that never quite got to his eyes. I didn’t like him.”

He wiped his mouth as if eradicating a bad taste. “So this kid tells me his grandpa was the guy who built the locker. Prohibition was goin’ on at the time, and it was only a meat processing plant up front. See, the sewage treatment lagoon was bein’ put in at the same time, and after handin’ off a little cash to get some construction bosses to look the other way, they built a tunnel leadin’ from there to the locker.”

Bixley turned his head to look at me directly. “It didn’t take a genius to see what the kid was sayin’. If you think a bit, you realize a place like that is the perfect setup for rumrunners. The lagoon is out in the middle of the woods, on a road that nobody travels except the maintenance men, and they’re only doin’ it during the day. Even better if you can get some of the maintenance people in on the action, but if not you still have all night to go in and out. So you have an entrance in the underground maintenance accessways at the lagoon, then a half mile worth of tunnel to get to your distribution point, which has vehicles carryin’ stuff out on the regular. Meat plant packaging is the perfect wrapper to hide damn near anything.  And you can use the tunnel for storage. It’s perfect.”

He chuckled. “Now, if you were livin’ in Bronning back in the seventies, there were still lots of people around who were alive during Prohibition, so you knew from hearin’ their stories that this town was investigated by the feds. Seems they had an idea that most of the booze filterin’ into Franklin County and the surrounding parts was comin’ through Bronning, but they never could quite figure out where. So the kid’s story made sense. Well, almost.”

He uncapped the flask, took another swig, and handed it to me. I tossed back another small swallow.

“Only one little problem,” he went on. “At that point I’d owned and run the place for goin’ on five years; hadn’t seen nary a hint of any kind of tunnel entrance. I told the guy that, and he said ‘You just come back here with me tonight, after all your workmen have gone home, and I’ll show you’. Now, I almost told the kid to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, if you’ll pardon my French… like I said, I didn’t like the little bastard. But then my curiosity got the better of me.”

Bixley ran a hand across his face, momentarily easing some of the lines, and I caught a brief glimpse of the younger man he had been. “So we come on back around elevenish, after the cleanup crews had done their bit and gone home. He leads me straight down to the basement like a man who’d been in and out of that building since the day he was born; I figured he had to have seen some blueprints or somethin’. Come up against the foundation wall at the end of the corridor on the west side of the building.” He paused, pursed his lips. “Y‘know, I should’ve realized there was somethin’ funny about that wall bein’ red brick when the rest of the foundation was poured cement, but I’d never given it a single thought.”

He shook his head, as if marveling at his own ineptitude. “Turns out it was just doing a damn good imitation of a brick wall. Pieces of brick maybe half an inch thick, mounted to a steel panel. This guy asks for somethin’ to stand on, I get him a step-stool, and he hops up on it and works this latch up on top of the foundation between the first floor joists. You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look. It took a little doing to get the mechanism to work; it probably hadn’t been opened since the thirties. But that damn phony brick wall slid right off to the side, behind the actual foundation cement. And there was the tunnel.”

I could see where this was going now. “So what did you use it for?”

Bixley couldn’t quite seem to meet my eyes. “Well, first we had to get the other end opened up. The entrance at the lagoon end had been concreted over; that place has been completely rebuilt three or four times. It took a little cash gettin’ tossed around to get the job done, probably not too different from how it happened in the twenties. The little weasel from St. Cloud saw to all that. Then we started doin’ the same sort of thing they’d done during prohibition, but with different product.”

He drank again, then went on. “You see what I’m gettin’ at, don’t you? It started out with just pot, mostly. A little bit of magic mushroom, stuff like that. Nothin’ heavy. I didn’t really see the harm. You know, missy, I think booze wrecks more lives than just about any other drug there is, and it’s legal. Besides, the deal solved my problem in a hurry. By 1980 the meat processing business was runnin’ pretty heavily in the red, but it was just a front at that point.

He gave a heavy sigh. “But by 1985, it wasn’t just pot anymore. When we started I promised myself I’d never move the hard stuff, but you build up a tolerance, if that makes sense. Commit one felony, the next one is just a little bit easier. I still wouldn’t allow heroin, but I started lettin’ ‘em move some coke through there. I mean, coke’s safe enough, as the hard stuff goes, right? At least that’s what I told myself. And this is right around the time that the shirtail operators farming four hundred acres and milking thirty head were going tits-up left and right, so lots of folks were lookin’ for a little something to get ’em through the night. Then in ‘91, one kid died, and another came pretty damn close.”

He took another sip, laid his head against the headrest, and closed his eyes. “The coke didn’t get ‘em, not by itself. It was laced with some other shit. But it was coke that I knew damn well had come through my meat locker.” He offered me the flask again.

With a mighty effort of will, I shook my head. “Is that when you quit?”

“I confronted that little shit. Rufus Hellman was his name. Told me he had no idea what I was talking about, and when I threatened to go to the cops, he said him and his buddies could just dig a hole and pull it in over the top of them, and I’d get hung out to dry. I figured he probably wasn’t wrong. So I told him I’d keep my mouth shut, but I was out. Closed the place down, laid everybody off, never reopened. And that was the end of that. Leastways, I thought it was.”

“Until now,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said bitterly, “until now.”

“You never did answer my question,” I reminded him.

“You mean about what I’d be lookin’ for down there?” he laughed a dry old man’s laugh. “Sweetheart, I don’t even know myself, not really. But I’ll tell you this. Those DEA folks grilled me like a goddamn cheese sandwich. Can’t really blame ‘em, seein’ as how I own the place. But they never once mentioned the hidden door or the tunnel. Only way to explain that is they never found it. I want to know just what might be in there.”

“You didn’t tell them about it.”

“Nope. That’s a dead dog I’d just as soon let lie. Oh, they can’t come after me for it; statute of limitations on drug trafficking is long since up. But a man comes to value his good name, and wants to keep it. If the story gets out now, it could just as well go on my tombstone. Adam Bixley, cocaine dealer. ‘Cause that’s how people will remember me.”

I threw up my hands. “You could have just told them you knew the tunnel was there, but never used it for anything. How were they to know? There’s a good chance that Kathryn Wilder’s organization never found it, anyway, and nothing’s back there. But it needs to be checked.”

Bixley took another drink. “Yep,” he said, “I coulda told ‘em that. Except here’s where it gets a bit complicated. The only people in or around town who had any idea what I was actually doin’ in there were people who were directly involved, and let me tell you, honey, they weren’t many. Most of the workers that went in and out of that place every day had no idea what was happenin’ in the basement. One of those few who did know was my son Josh, who was in on the deal. You remember Josh?”

I nodded. Joshua Bixley had been a lifelong alcoholic, dead two years from cirrhosis of the liver.

“So, when I closed the place up, I secured the front doors with a big iron bar, and a lock nobody was gonna get through with a boltcutter. That was one of the things the DEA folks were interested in, because nobody hacked their way into the building. Somebody oiled the hell out of that lock, and opened it with a key. The bar and the lock were found off to the side of the building, but not the key. They wanted to see my key, and know who else had one.”

“So you’re saying Josh had the other one?”

“Yup, and when he passed away I never got it back. Didn’t even think to ask about it, truth be told. Mine was still on my keyring after all those years, and you could tell right away it hadn’t been used. I didn’t tell ’em that Josh had the other, ‘cause the man who inherited everything of his, and would have gotten it, was my grandson David.”

It all came together in a flash. “Jason’s dad,” I said. “Did he know about the tunnel?”

Bixley laid a hand on my arm. “Probably,” he said. “Joshua had an almighty guilt about it all; I guess that’s part of what drove him to drinkin’ so hard. Him and David were awfully close, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t let it spill at some point.”

I sat back and closed my eyes, staggered by the implications. If Adam Bixley’s key hadn’t been used to open the meat locker, then it must have been the one in the possession of his grandson. And had his great-grandson been mixed up in this too? I ran a hasty mental map in my head; the route that Jason Bixley had been on when he died was the logical choice if he’d been returning home from this semi-hidden back entrance to the locker.

I opened my eyes and looked to my right. Bixley’s hand was still on my arm, a cynical smile playing on his lips. “You see it, don’t you. It would explain what Jason was doin’ heading for home at six AM on a school day, wouldn’t it?”

“Jesus, Adam,” I groaned. “Why didn’t you tell all this to the DEA?”

Bixley met my eyes, his gaze suddenly a little hard. “You wait’ll you’re having to contemplate turnin’ in your own flesh and blood,” he said. “It ain’t as easy as you think. That’s why I’ve been tryin’ to work up the guts to go down there and get a look. You up for a little stroll?”

I shook my head. “We’ll never get close,” I said. “The DEA is bound to have security cameras with motion alarms set up all around the building.”

He rolled his eyes. “Damn computerized crap. I never even thought about it.”

“What about the lagoon side?”

“I’ve already been out there. Couldn’t even find the old entrance. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if ole’ Rufus shit-for-brains paid some local contractor to concrete it over and keep his mouth shut. It’s the valley or nothin’.”

“Adam,” I said. “Listen to me. The people behind everything that’s happened here these past few weeks stuck around after the raid, and we still don’t know why. One of them was checking something out when he rolled his ATV on top of himself. Now they have Terry Wilder, and his daughter’s been shot. The answer to all of that might just be in that tunnel. We have to do the right thing here. You know that.”

He nodded slowly. “Fine,” he said. “Make the phone call.”

As I lifted my phone, I noticed there’d been a text over fifteen minutes ago. From Terry. I realized that the phone was synched to the car, and I’d turned the car stereo off so we could talk. Cursing my carelessness, I opened the message.

Only getting a few minutes of privacy tonight, it read. The Dickweed Brigade is increasingly paranoid, and something is going to play out soon. We’re running low on rations. Info that might be of interest to Special Agent Tightbuns: there’s something hidden either in the meat locker, or in the immediate surrounding area. Something valuable, something Kathryn is terrified of losing. Don’t know what, but guessing it’s the reason they stuck around instead of vanishing in the wake of the raid. 

Thanks for the updates on Halee’s condition, on being there when she woke, and for everything else. Tell her that I do NOT blame her for this situation, and she shouldn’t either.

I sat back, stunned. Then I got my brain in gear and typed: That goes with other info I just got. On it. Keep holding on. Fumbling a little in my excitement, I pulled up Bridgett’s number.

***

Half an hour later we were standing out front of the lone building; myself, Bridgett, three of her subordinates, and Adam Bixley. I hadn’t been this close to the building since the summer before my senior year, having never gotten closer than the auction yards during the previous week’s raid. Bixley, who hadn’t seen the place in over thirty years, was staring up at the big double doors as if eyeing a malignant tumor. The old iron bar was back, but with a shiny new heavy-duty lock that sported a small keypad.

Bridgett stepped forward. She punched in a combination code, and two of her men stepped forward, lifting away the heavy bar.

As we stepped through the outer doors, Bridgett flicked a switch, and the place lit up. Bixley’s eyes widened in surprise.

“We have it on battery power, with a gennie that automatically fires up when the batteries get low,” Bridgett explained. “Lead the way, Mr. Bixley.”

I knew it had to be my imagination, but I could swear to God the place still smelled of cow. We took a left turn just past the entry doors, then down a short corridor to the basement stairway. The stairs were a tight wrought-iron spiral. “I’m guessing nobody moved product up or down this staircase,” I observed.

Bixley chuckled. He seemed somehow at peace, a far cry from his troubled demeanor in my car earlier. “Lord, no. There was a big pull-rope dumbwaiter at the opposite end of the building. I ripped it out and put in a motorized lift.”

“That lift still works, too,” Bridgett remarked.

We walked in silence from there, turning two corners. The big floodlights the DEA people had brought in were almost blinding in these narrow hallways. Finally we came to a brick wall at the end of one of those corridors, with doors leading to rooms on the right and the left.

“Now that you’re really looking at it, this does seem like a strange place for a brick wall,” one of Bridgett’s men observed.

“Especially considering that all of the other outside foundation walls are concrete,” Bridgett murmured. “Damn, I feel stupid.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” said Bixley. “I was down here two or three times a week for five years and never noticed.”

Another of the agents, a round-faced blonde woman almost as tall as me, stepped forward and ran a finger along where some mortar was missing between the bricks. “Look at this,” she said. “The steel backing is showing where the mortar flaked off. If we’d just looked a little closer…”

“Never mind that now,” snapped Bridgett. “Mr. Bixley, if you’d be so kind.”

“I’ll need somethin’ to stand on,” he replied.

An agent ducked into a room, and came out with a folding chair. Bixley clambered up on the chair, an agent on either side supporting him by the elbows.

He shrugged them away impatiently. “I’m old, but I’m not that goddamn feeble,” he snapped. Reaching up between the joists, he did something I couldn’t see from the floor. The wall visibly seemed to come loose, rocking slightly.

“Lubed up like a whore’s sweet pussy,” Bixley observed. “Beggin’ your pardon, ladies. Now, just push that panel back and to the right.” The two agents who had attempted to support his elbows obliged, and the door slid back and sideways, disappearing behind the concrete foundation.

The tunnel was very old, made of poured concrete that was starting to crumble. It was perhaps eight feet high, and ten feet wide. Large flashlights illuminated pallets stacked high with plastic bundles, set two-by-two and going back until the light faded.

Bridget nodded to the tall blonde woman, who produced a penknife and stepped forward. Donning medical gloves, she cut a slit in the top of a bag, and dipped a finger in. She turned back towards us, holding up a finger to the light. The blue glove was covered with a brown, powdery substance.

Bridgett and the other agents stepped forward for a closer look.

“Godalmighty damn,” said one of the agents, a compact man with black hair and a swarthy complexion. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Mexican Brown,” said Bridgett in reverent tones. “Holy shit. Holy shit! This is the biggest goddamned cache of heroin I’ve ever seen in my life.” She sounded slightly elated. Then her phone rang. Looking annoyed, she swiped the accept button and held it to her ear.

“Ramscone,” she said. A pause. “Yes… at what time? Uh… no sir, I don’t have any information from that quarter, but I have just made a major discovery at the meat locker, one that I can’t discuss over an unsecure connection, but is going to need a large security contingent.” There was another long pause. “Yes sir, I understand… of course. Please keep me informed.”

She hung up and turned to us. “Okay, let’s lock all this up, and get every available agent to guard both the building and the valley. We’ve been authorized to draw from county and state police forces as well. Meanwhile, we have a bigger problem.”

She turned her eyes to me. “There’s a situation in International Falls. I’ll explain on the drive back to town.”

An icy hand clutched my heart. Terry. Oh, my God.

On to Chapter Twenty!