"They only took the blue ones," Wes said. "Three hundred and twelve boxes. Every one with my Stripe on it."
It was 5:40 in the morning. He was standing in a staging yard off a county road, and I could hear the wind, and under the wind, nothing. That was the part that got me. A yard full of bees is supposed to hum.
Wes kept bees for a living. Not jars-at-the-farmers-market bees. Eleven hundred hives on flatbeds, rented out every February to almond growers who need two hives an acre or they don't get a crop. He painted a blue Stripe on the back of every box so his crew could find his in a sea of white. This year his contract paid $205 a hive after bloom. Eleven hundred hives, $225,500. The biggest check of his year, the one he lived on until summer.
I'd funded him in December. $48,000 at a 1.38, $66,240 back, $460 every business day, so he could buy queens, patch frames, and pay two guys to drive at night. Good file. Ugly deposits, the kind you get from a guy who gets paid four times a year, but honest.
Now he was 312 hives short, with nine days until the grower counted.
"He docks me per missing box," Wes said. "Sixty-four grand, gone. And he can drop me for next year. My pull still comes out tomorrow."
$460 A day out of an account that was about to be $64,000 lighter than he'd planned.
I did what brokers do. I called the funder. The rep there was a man named Tolliver who answered every hardship with "the contract is the contract," and who I suspected had it printed on a mug.
"Stolen bees," Tolliver said. "That's new."
"It happens every February. Guys come in at night with a forklift and a box truck."
"Sure. Send me something in writing and we'll look at a modification in thirty days."
Thirty days. Bloom would be over. The grower would have counted, docked him, and moved on.
Wes called back at 10:15. His voice had changed.
"I hid trackers in eight of them," he said. "Little ones, under the lids. Forgot I even did it. Two are pinging."
He texted me a screenshot. A blue dot on a satellite map, sitting at the edge of an orchard forty miles north. Neat rows of trees. A dirt pad by the road. A pole barn with a green roof.
I knew that green roof.
I didn't know why I knew it, the way you know a song from the first two notes. Then I opened my pipeline and scrolled back three weeks to a deal I'd been proud of. A guy who'd called me out of nowhere, said he was "expanding into pollination," and needed $30,000 fast to cover a contract he'd just landed. Smooth voice. Clean credit. No other positions. I got him funded in four days at a 1.42 and made $3,000 on it.
The pollination contract he'd sent as proof had an address on it. I copied it into the map. The pin dropped on the green roof.
Then I remembered the photos. The funder had wanted proof of inventory, so he'd sent six pictures of "his" hives. The light was bad. I'd brightened them, cropped out a fence, and attached them to the file myself, because I wanted the deal to look clean.
I opened the third one.
Rows of white boxes in a staging yard. A county road behind them. And on the back of every box, a little smeared from a fast paint roller, a blue Stripe.
He hadn't been expanding into anything. He'd been shopping. He'd stood in Wes's yard, taken pictures of Wes's hives, and used them to borrow the money to rent the box truck.
And I'd brightened them so the funder could see better.
"You there?" Wes said.
I looked at the funder's name on the second file. Same funder. Same rep.
Tolliver picked up on the first ring.
"The contract is the contract," I said, before he could. "So let's talk about your other one."