I was hoping things would work themselves out without my doing anything, that if Earl was going to get caught, it would be someone else who turned him in, someone else who spotted something suspicious, like his fogged-up windows and the constant hum of ventilation fans.

Someone like Trixie, maybe. How would she feel, knowing something like this was going on across the street? I wondered if she already knew, had any inkling. Her house, after all, was directly across from Earl’s. Every time she looked out her window, she saw his place. Maybe she’d seen something, noticed him backing into the garage late at night, loading up his truck, heading off for a delivery. This couldn’t be good if you were in the accounting business, meeting with clients all the time, having an illegal pot operation going on a stone’s throw away.

It wasn’t just the nature of Earl’s business that had me worried, or that he had a gun and might use it if necessary. I’d seen stories in The Metropolitan about basement marijuana operations and the massive amounts of electricity they consumed. Earl had mentioned he’d had to do some rewiring, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the utilities people. Which meant that his place was probably a fire waiting to happen.

It was a safety hazard.

It was one thing to wave the red flag of guns and illegal drugs before me, but safety hazards, well, that was very difficult for me to overlook.

All Earl needed was one overheated wire to set the entire house ablaze. And once his house was engulfed, would flames spread to the houses on either side of him, or jump across the street to ours, or Trixie’s?

It was enough to keep one from finishing a chapter about busybody atheist missionaries trying to bring technological enlightenment to the rest of the galaxy. So I walked out the front door, noticed there was no car in Trixie’s driveway other than her own, and decided this would be a good time to drop by. Get her take on what was going on in the neighborhood, see if she had any inkling of what was going on across the street without tipping my hand, even get some tax advice.

And I’d be very clear. I wasn’t looking for free advice. I wasn’t one of those people who walk up to a doctor at a dinner party and say, “I’ve got this thing in my shoulder when I move my arm like this, you got any idea what that could be?” She could treat me like anyone else, charge me her regular rates, that was fine. The good thing was, I didn’t have to get out the yellow pages and start cold-calling accountants whose reputations I did not know.