Best Friend's Ex Box Set

“Mike! What’s up?”

“Could we speak privately in your office?” he asked.

“Everything alright?”

“Just got some information you might enjoy,” he said.

“Alright. Let me finish wiping down this bar for today, and then I’ll meet ya in the office.”

I was worried when Michael came in and asked to talk in my office. Mike was the kind of guy that always just hopped up to the bar and said whatever he needed to say, then kept his nose out of shit when he needed to back off. It was what I liked about him.

So when he asked to talk, and privately to boot, I knew he meant business.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I shut the door behind me and walked over to my desk, and when I sat down, I saw something morph in his face. He went from the laid-back farmer I knew him to be to the ice-cold lawyer I’d always assumed he was. I knew he had a background before he moved here and had dropped everything to become a farmer in a peaceful town, but since things had kicked up, I figured he’d probably done some work.

But the information he had for me was beyond anything I ever would have been able to find out on my own.

“I used a few of my old legal contacts to check into Bill,” he said.

“And?”

“He’s in an incredible amount of debt. Or, at least he was. Recently, he came into a great deal of cash.”

“Like a one-time transaction?” I asked.

“More like repetitive dumps. Enough to pull him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and single-handedly fuel the buildup of his farm,” he said.

“Holy shit. Where the hell’s it coming from?”

“Well, my contacts can only go so far since they aren’t the authorities or anything, but Bill had a great deal of debt regarding his farm. Banks were turning him down for loans, and his credit cards were through the roof. At one point in time, he’d taken out and maxed out twelve different card accounts for his ranch alone.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“As a heart attack,” he said.

I leaned back into my chair and tried to process all of that. I wasn’t an idiot, but that entire scenario reeked of something illegal. You don’t climb out of that type of debt in a short period of time, and it had to have been quick payoffs in order for Mike to come to me with it.

“How long did it take to—”

“He had the debt for four years, then paid it all off within seven months,” he said. “The entire thing smells of money laundering.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“If he’s been doing it for this long, paying off this kind of debt, and not raising any flags, then the money is coming from somewhere that looks legitimate. All that stuff is watched by the government, especially the large transactions he is making on a regular basis. For him to not have already been flagged and had an audit, it would have to have come from a legal source and all with a decent explanation that didn’t raise any flags.”

“Like funneling money from a charity into a personal account,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Does Bill happen to own any charities?” I said with a smirk.

“Like I said, my contacts can only dig so far before they start breaching boundaries of legality, but it’s some pretty serious cash.”

“I mean, that’s all well and good, but what would money laundering have to do with burning a barn down?” I asked.

“Still convinced it was him that torched your girlfriend’s barn?”

“Cheyenne’s not my girlfriend, and yes, it’s the only plausible explanation,” I said.