Jack Macintosh: The Perpetual Carrot IV: The Teachers College & Midnight Deliveries

The low, dragging sound from the front of the shop stopped. A breath caught in my throat, a taste of cheap sugar and cold dread.

I put a finger to my lips, a silent command to Leo, who sat frozen by my desk. His eyes, wide as silver dollars, darted from the heavy wooden case to the doorway. The game wasn’t over. It had just walked in the front door.

The door creaked open, the old bell above it remaining silent, a testament to the intruder’s careful approach. But the figure that stepped into the office wasn’t a goon with a gun or a delivery man with an apology. It was John.

John was a big guy, built like a linebacker, with a low center of gravity and a quiet power that seemed to fill the room. He moved with a heavy, deliberate calm. He was my most reliable informant, a man who saw everything and said nothing. John was mute, and a lot of folks mistook his silence for ignorance. I knew better. He saw the case of whiskey and the terrified kid, and his eyes, ever observant, took in the whole scene before they settled on me.

He walked over to my desk, his footsteps making no sound on the old floorboards. He laid a small, folded piece of paper on the desk. The note was clean, crisp, and bore no scent of the street. I unfolded it. The message was short, to the point: Teachers College Cafeteria. Midnight deliveries. Lots of small wooden cases.

I looked at John. The words were a confirmation of what my gut had been telling me since the moment Leo walked in. The Teacher’s College wasn’t a random drop point; it was a delivery hub. The box on my desk wasn’t a mistake, it was a misdelivery from a regular, ongoing operation.

My eyes fell on the bootleg whiskey still in the case. A dozen bottles of evidence. It was too much to hold, too dangerous to keep. It had to go back. It had to disappear before anyone noticed it was missing.

“Listen, kid,” I said to Leo, my voice low and urgent. “This case… it was never supposed to be delivered to your dorm. That was a mistake. Now that it’s here, we’re not touching it. It’s hot.”

Leo looked at me, a question in his eyes. “But… what do we do?”

I turned to John. I didn’t need to speak. I pointed to the case, then to the door. My eyes met his, and he understood the silent command: get this back where it belongs. He knew the risk. Putting the box back meant walking into the heart of the snake pit. He also knew the consequences of not doing it. The Giovani family didn’t tolerate mistakes.

John’s eyes hardened with a silent understanding. He reached down, his hands, thick with muscle, wrapped around the case of bootlegged whiskey. He lifted it effortlessly, as if it weighed nothing more than a child’s toy, and turned to go. He walked out of the office, as silent and as unmoving as a ghost, leaving the shop door to close with a soft, final click.

“I’ve got to go,” I said to Leo, my voice low and urgent. I grabbed my fedora and put it on my head. “You stay here. You don’t move. They might be looking for you, but they’re not looking here. Not yet.”

Leo just nodded, his face pale, but he didn’t move. He sat there, a statue of a terrified kid, and I knew I couldn’t leave him. Not alone. I had to go to someone who could protect him.

I couldn’t go to the local cops in Cedar Falls. They were too close to the mess—maybe turning a blind eye for a kick-back. The Blackhawk County Sheriff’s office was a dead end. Not after their old Sheriff tried to kill me last year when I was looking into the Lapp case. They’d either dismiss me as a crazy bookstore owner or, worse, they’d be in on it.

No, I had to go outside the immediate jurisdiction. I had to go to someone who didn’t play the local games.

There was only one place I could go. Buchanan County. And there was only one man I could trust—Sheriff Larson.

I drove my old Ford like a man with a purpose and a hot poker in my gut. The drive was a short one, maybe thirty-five minutes due east of Cedar Falls to Independence, but it felt like a world away.

Buchanan County was a quieter place, with rolling hills and a slow, methodical pace that seemed to mock the frantic pace of the Giovani network.

Sheriff Larson’s office was in the center of Independence, a small, unassuming building with a large American flag waving out front. I walked in, and the bell above the door gave a polite chime.

A young deputy sat behind the front desk, his feet up, reading a magazine. He looked at me, a hint of suspicion in his eyes. He had the clean, fresh face of a man who hadn’t seen the world yet.

“Can I help you?” he asked, putting the magazine down.

“I need to see the Sheriff,” I said. “It’s important.”

He looked me up and down, sizing up the fedora, the wrinkled suit, the exhaustion on my face. He didn’t see a private detective. He saw a man on the wrong side of a bender. “Sheriff’s a busy man.”

“Tell him it’s Jack Macintosh. Tell him it’s about a cold case. The Penny-A-Page Press,” I said, leaning over the counter. My voice was low, and it carried a weight that made him sit up straight.

The deputy’s eyes narrowed. He looked at me, then at the closed door to Larson’s office. He picked up the phone, a small, knowing look on his face. He said a few words, his voice hushed, and then hung up. He pointed a finger to the door. “He’ll see you now.”

I walked into Larson’s office. The Sheriff sat behind a large, oak desk. The room was neat, organized, and smelled of pipe smoke and leather. Larson was a man in his late fifties, with a face that looked like it had been carved out of a block of oak. He had a thick mustache and eyes that had seen too much. They were honest eyes, though. And that was the one thing I couldn’t find in Cedar Falls.

“Jack. Been a while,” he said, motioning to the chair across from him. “What’s this about the Penny-A-Page Press? That’s a strange thing to be working on. A writing contest?”

“Sheriff,” I said, sitting down. “It’s not a writing contest. It’s a front for the Giovani crime family out of Chicago. It’s an international money-laundering and bootlegging operation, running since ‘32.”

I laid out the whole story, from Leo’s hopeful inquiry to Mickey’s call. I told him about the stories, the strange grammatical errors, the missing punctuation. I told him how they were coded messages, telling a story of their own. I told him about Mrs. Perrywinkle, the local pillar of the community, and her role as the head of the Iowa operation. I told him about the London connection, about Shakespeare’s Pen, and how this thing was bigger than a few back-alley drops.

Larson listened, silent and unmoving. He didn’t interrupt. He just watched me, his eyes never leaving my face. When I was done, a heavy silence filled the room. The only sound was the slow, steady tick of a clock on the wall.

He looked me straight in the eye. He didn’t flinch.

“I’m going to ask you something, Jack. And you only get one answer. Can you keep a secret?”

The question hung in the air like Iowa humidity in August. It was a question of trust, a wager of loyalty in a world where both were in short supply.

“My lips are sealed,” I said, the words a promise etched in stone.

He took a long, slow breath, leaning back in his chair. “Jack, you just gave me the missing piece to a puzzle I’ve been working on for months. We’ve been tracking a bootlegging operation that comes in from Chicago, but we couldn’t figure out the delivery method. We had no idea it was connected to something bigger. This money laundering and the international connection… that’s a game changer.”

“A game changer?” I asked with a slight surprise in my voice.

He nodded once, a quick, firm motion. “The way I see it, you just gave us the map—decoded. It tells us where they are and what they’re up to. Where they’ve put the pieces on the board.”

The clock on the wall ticked on. The room was still and quiet. A few moments later, the phone rang. He picked it up, his face hardening as he listened.

“Yeah, this is Larson. Uh-huh. Slow down. You’ve got a what? Right. Thanks for the heads up.”

He hung up, and his voice was a low growl. “That was one of my men. He’s quietly working this case over in your neck-of-the-woods. An old lady was just found dead in her car in a parking lot by the docks behind the cafeteria. They found a confession on her.”

My heart stopped. An old lady. The docks. The cafeteria. All the pieces of the puzzle were coming together in a bloody, horrifying picture.

“What about the old lady?” I asked, my voice barely audible.

“She was found with a letter, typed up and addressed to the Sheriff’s office in Blackhawk County,” he said, his eyes drilling into mine. “A full confession. She wrote that she was the ringleader. She confessed to everything. She even confessed to taking out a hit on the kid who found her out. The whole case, it’s tied up in a neat bow.”

I stood up, the chair scraping against the floorboards. The smell of his pipe smoke suddenly tasted like ash.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That can’t be right. She was running the Iowa end of the operation. She wouldn’t have confessed. Not like that. She confessed to a murder that hasn’t even happened yet and hopefully never will. And Leo, he’s just a kid. A good kid. In college and not involved.”

Larson shook his head slowly. He held a look of pure, unadulterated fear.

My mind reeled. They had set up Mrs. Perrywinkle. They were framing her for a crime she didn’t commit, and they were putting her confession in the hands of the very people I couldn’t trust. It was a neat, clean way to close the case and leave no loose ends.

Larson stood up, looking me in the eye. “Jack, you got a problem. A big one. The kid is a loose end. And a crime family that stretched from Chicago to London doesn’t leave loose ends.”

He yanked up the phone on his desk and dialed a number.

“Billy,” he said, his voice low and firm. “It’s Larson. Listen to me very carefully. There’s a college kid named Leo Evans at The Written Word in Cedar Falls. He’s a key witness in a murder case. I need you to go there, in the unmarked car, and bring him here. Nice and quiet like. Now! Do not stop for anything. Do not call anyone. Just get him here. Understood?”

I looked at Larson, the silence now deafening. I thought of John, walking away with the box, and a cold certainty washed over me. The delivery of the case to Leo was never a mistake. It was a test. A way to see if he would cooperate, and a way to know where to find him if he didn’t. They had his name, and now they had mine.

The game was far from over—new players at the ta and the stakes just got higher.