"How many barrels?" Rick asked. Stephen shrugged and said enough to look like a business rather than a hobby. He remembered the place because the barrels had been neatly grouped and protected rather than tossed behind a shed. He had not gone onto the property or examined the contents, but the sight had struck him as unusual. Rick thanked him and excused himself to make a call.
Denise answered before the second ring. Rick asked for the complete history of the arrangement with Marlene Tate, including the original agreement, the transfer records, and the cook sheets that had been copied for her. He listened while Denise found the files, then asked whether she knew how much material the farm had received. Denise told him the running total was substantial enough to fill several pallets of finished product if Marlene had processed it successfully.
The word successfully mattered. Rick had never visited the operation. He had accepted Marlene's paperwork because his company was giving away waste and had no reason to inspect a buyer's product. Now he was thinking about a different possibility: a nearby facility might have been doing the exact work his team had assigned to a rendering company that was no longer operating. He left the office after the audit, got into his truck, and drove toward Luling without waiting for his usual afternoon meetings.
The road narrowed beyond the highway, passing weathered barns, small cattle pastures, and houses set back behind pecan trees. Rick had been out that way before to inspect a restaurant site, but he had never followed Marlene's directions past the county road. He found her gate open and a truck parked near the milk house. The building was plain, the yard dusty, and the surrounding farm showed no sign of the polished enterprise he associated with a major food supplier.
What he noticed first was the order. Insulated receiving containers were kept apart from finished-product handling, empty barrels were organized on racks, and a handwritten traffic sign directed deliveries away from the clean entrance. A worker was checking the seal on a pail while another moved a labeled container on a pallet jack. The place did not have the scale of Plains Rendering, but it had the discipline Rick recognized from facilities that had survived years of audits.
Marlene stepped out of the milk house when she heard the truck. She wore a canvas apron and had a pencil tucked behind one ear. Rick climbed out, closed his door, and stood a moment looking from her to the building. "I thought I'd finally see what you were doing with my old kettle," he said, attempting a friendly tone that did not entirely hide his urgency.
"You picked a busy day," she replied. She did not seem surprised to see him, though her pulse had quickened the instant his truck turned up the lane. She had imagined this visit so often that the real man looked oddly smaller than the possibility he represented. Still, she did not rush to explain. She invited him to wash and follow the visitor procedures if he wanted to enter the food-processing areas.