24 hours ago, the moment Sarah’s car had pulled out of the driveway with Buster, Mary’s frail, defeated grandma persona vanished. She locked her front door, walked into the kitchen, and pulled on heavy-duty rubber chemical gloves and a pair of plastic safety goggles. On her stove, she had boiled down a massive batch of home-grown ghost peppers into a hyper-concentrated, entirely clear liquid extract.
Using a medical-grade flavor-injector syringe, Mary had spent two hours in the orchard, meticulously injecting the fiery, capsaicin-loaded serum deep into the cores of the fruits left on her trees. She had purposefully harvested her actual competition fruit days prior and hid it safely in her indoor pantry freezer. She hadn’t left her garden unlatched out of weakness; she had engineered a trap. She wanted Arthur to steal them, knowing his desperate, last-minute rush would override any caution.