Excerpt: A Bitter Vintage

The warehouse was dark and, although there were a few lights in the office building, it was several hundred yards away and he hadn’t seen anyone moving in it. The old man had been standing on the edge of the vineyards, hidden by the vines, watching the empty warehouse for some time. He had seen no movement and the only sounds were those of the occasional mouse or bird and a few insects. He glanced at his watch. It was time.

The last window on the left was open, as the caller had promised. The old man piled a couple of crates beneath the window and crawled through awkwardly, cursing his age as he got briefly hung up halfway in and half out. At long last, he was inside and he looked around. The metal fermentation tanks gleamed dully in the moonlight from the windows but there was no movement here either.

‘Meet me in the warehouse,’ the caller had said. But where was he?

The old man walked slowly toward the back of the building, looking for something anything to tell him he wasn’t alone. The silence started to make him uneasy. He heard a sudden scuttling sound and whirled around, his heart pounding in his chest. In the beam of light from the window, he saw a scrawny jack rabbit and almost laughed aloud. He exhaled, unaware he’d been holding his breath. He was breathing hard, but that wasn’t surprising since he was breaking and entering.

The rabbit seemed frantic to escape and hopped from wall to wall, looking for a way out, running this way and that. He’d never seen a rabbit act quite so strangely. Then again, he’d never seen a jack rabbit caught indoors either. Poor thing was probably just out of its mind with worry. And then the rabbit simply stopped moving. The old man frowned. That was odd, he thought.

It was the last thought he ever had.