Free JAXON (The Caine Brothers Book 4) by Margaret Madigan Page B

store. The dark windows of the store revealed it to be closed, and the tall, bright pole-lights cast haunting shadows in the empty parking lot.
    He almost asked why they were there, but she continued to drive past the lot and around the back of the store, parking just outside a covered area full of dumpsters. A bar and tire spikes blocked entrance by car, but anyone could just walk inside.
    Which, by the way Lily climbed out of the truck, was exactly what she planned to do.
    “Let’s haul the coolers and crates inside and get to work.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “We have a half hour here before we have to meet some of the other divers at PicMart.”
    “Divers?”
    They both collected empty crates and coolers and hauled them inside the well-lit space. Lily dropped hers near the first dumpster, then opened the lid and peered inside.
    “Dumpster divers. Grocery stores throw away unexpired or nearly expired or just expired food that’s still edible, so we go around and collect it for use by people who need it. This is a fairly new store. We haven’t been here yet, but I scouted it a week or so ago to check out their dumpster set-up. Tonight’s the first night diving here.”
    “You said there are other divers?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why didn’t they come, too?”
    “Because we don’t know if there’s security or if anyone will call the police, so we want to keep exposure to a minimum until we know. Give me a boost?”
    He crouched so she could step up on his knee and get a look inside.
    “Oh, wow,” she said, leaning head-first into the dumpster. “Look at this.”
    She reached around behind her with several packages of tri-tip steak in her hand. Jaxon took them from her. They looked good to him. One had maybe a tiny bit of brown around the edges, but the expiration date on all of them was tomorrow.
    “These are still good. They’re even still kind of cold,” he said.
    “They probably tossed them not long ago,” she said, shaking her head.
    “Why are they in the garbage?”
    She balanced her belly on the edge of the dumpster and looked back at him. “Now you understand. Look in here.”
    Jaxon was tall enough to see over the edge into the dumpster without a boost. That it was full of bags of trash didn’t surprise him, but a lot of the bags were full of food. He turned and surveyed the garage-like space. He counted five more dumpsters. “Are all the others like this one?”
    “Go look. I’m going to collect. Would you pull one of the coolers over here for me to step on?”
    He did as she asked and set a cooler where she could stand on it and lean in to work. Then Jaxon went and opened each of the other five dumpsters. One was empty, two were full of bags of gross garbage—nothing edible in there. But the other two looked like the store had swept half the food off their shelves into carts, wheeled them out to the dumpster, and shoveled it all in.
    “Jesus,” he said.
    “What? Did you say something?” Lily asked, her arms full of packages of bread.
    “I said, who the fuck throws away this much food?”
    She snorted. “Every grocery store and restaurant and household in the country. Okay, not all households, but we all waste a lot of food. Some grocery stores are better than others about donating.”
    “There’s a lot of wilted and rotten produce in here, but there’s a lot of food that still looks good, too.”
    “Yep. Like this,” she said, stepping off her cooler. She picked up an eighteen-pack of eggs and walked over to join him at his dumpster. “See this? They’re still cool, so probably got tossed after the store closed. There are three broken eggs in here. That means there are still fifteen good eggs. The expiration date is a week away. So these fifteen eggs get wasted.”
    Jaxon was stunned. “I had no idea stores did this kind of thing.”
    Lily shrugged. “We live in a wasteful culture that wants uber-fresh all the time. That means super-cautious expiration dates and lots of unused food.