"Screams per hour," the man with the clipboard said. "Ballpark. For the file."
He had his pen ready. Hollis looked at him, then at me on her phone's speaker, then at the forty acres of dead corn behind her, where a chainsaw with no chain was revving somewhere in the dark.
"A lot," she said.
He wrote something down.
Hollis runs a haunted corn maze. Forty acres, one entrance, one exit, thirty-eight scare actors in rented masks, and a hayride that smells like diesel and cinnamon donuts. Five weekends a year pay for the whole farm. In October her deposits clear $180,000. In February they're about $3,100, and most of that is a guy who rents her barn for his band to practice.
That's what killed her last spring. A broker sold her $60,000 on a daily debit, $612 every business day, and in March and April that debit was the only thing moving through her account. By the time she found me she owed $41,000 on it and still had to make a final actor payroll on November 2.
I had a fix. A funder who understood seasonal money would buy out the old debit and pay for payroll. That's $85,000 at a 1.29, weekly payments that shrink in winter. The underwriter was a man named Kessler who sounded like he'd been born skeptical.
"Nobody pays twenty-six dollars to get lost in corn," he told me Thursday.
"Fifteen thousand people did last October."
"Then show me. Ticket scanner export, and photos of a full lot Saturday night. Offer dies Monday at noon."
Friday afternoon, Hollis got a call from a man who said he worked with Kessler. Field inspections, he said. Standard for seasonal files. He'd come out Saturday at 8, count cars, walk the property. The fee was $1,450, cash, paid on arrival.
She texted me: is this real??
And here's my confession. I was in line at a car wash, the deal was close, and I didn't want to be the guy who blew it over a fee. He knew the amount. He knew the factor rate. He knew the Monday deadline. I typed: probably, just get a receipt.
So at 8:04 PM Saturday, she handed him an envelope from the ticket booth, $1,450 in fives and twenties, and he gave her a receipt from a carbon pad and walked into the maze with his lanyard swinging.
At 8:30 I called Kessler to thank him for sending someone on a weekend.
Silence. Then: "We don't do field inspections."
"Your guy is in her corn right now."
"I don't have a guy. I have a guy who wants photos." He paused. "Who else had your term sheet?"
I knew before he finished. The old broker. Hollis had forwarded him my offer two weeks earlier, asking if he could beat it. He never wrote back. Now I knew why.
I called Hollis. She didn't scream. She picked up her radio.
"Everybody," she said. "Clipboard. Blue lanyard. Section nine. Nobody touches him. Nobody lets him find the exit."
Here is what forty acres of corn looks like at night with thirty-eight people who know every turn. He'd head for the glow of the exit and a girl in a nightgown would be standing in the path, so he'd turn. He'd find a straightaway and the chainsaw would start up at the end of it. The scarecrow on the pole by the creek was a real person, and he moved every time the man looked away.
At 11:40, when the last hayride came in and the floodlights went white, he came out the exit gate. Corn silk in his hair. Mud to the knees. No clipboard.
Hollis was standing there with her hand out.
He looked at her. He looked at the chainsaw guy, who had taken his mask off and was eating a donut. He reached into his jacket and gave her back the envelope.
The chainsaw guy handed Hollis the clipboard. He'd found it in section nine, and the man had actually done the counting. Two thousand two hundred fourteen cars in clean tally marks, five to a bundle, every row of the lot labeled.
I took a picture of the page and sent it to Kessler at 11:52.
"That's a lot of cars," he wrote back. He funded Monday at 10:02.
Out at the gate, Hollis counted the envelope under the floodlight, slowly, all of it, while the man waited for her to finish.
"Fourteen fifty," she said. Then she held out her hand again. "And twenty-six for the maze."
He paid in fives.
