“Thank you for finally opening up to me. What’s your next step?”
“Finding a full-time job. Helping Flint at the Copper Penny has been great, but I think I’m ready to get back into the game.” The Copper Penny was the club’s bar and grill, and I worked as backup and on-call security whenever they needed me, but it was far from a stable, full-time job.
Nodding, he grabbed a newspaper off his coffee table and held it out to me. “To be used as a shield or a tool. Whatever you need, brother.”
Chuckling, I thanked him and accepted the paper before heading out.
In addition to Sage’s office, and offices for the officers, the club’s base of operations held a common area, an industrial kitchen, and the chapel where we held our weekly meetings downstairs. The second and third stories consisted of several sleeping rooms and bathrooms. The downstairs common room was wide open, but the furniture was situated to divide the space into five small living rooms. Each space had a sofa, a recliner, and a coffee table facing a flat screen TV. Everyone’s favorite sofa was a faded blue, overstuffed sleeper with worn arms and a small tear in one of the seats. It wasn’t much to look at and wasn’t terribly comfortable, but the back was pushed against the wall, and it was positioned to watch both the front door and the staircase. Veterans had a thing about being able to watch all entrances.
It wasn’t paranoia; it was vigilance.
The common area was deserted. Mid-morning on a weekday, most of the club was either at work or sleeping off last night’s bad decisions, so I got the favorite blue sofa all to myself. Plopping down to get the pleasure of a loose spring jabbing me in the right ass cheek, I slid to the side and opened the paper, flipping pages until I found the help wanted section.
My session with Sage had been surprisingly helpful. I’d never dwelt much on my lack of relationship with my parents, but now that I was looking back, I saw where it had influenced several of my decisions. They lived in Mount Vernon—which was only about an hour up I5—but I hadn’t seen them in well over a year. Hell, now that I thought about it, it had been months since we’d even spoken on the phone.
Looking back, my folks probably shouldn’t have had kids at all, but they were married in a time when breeding was expected. And my parents were all about living up to the expectations of their peers. They weren’t bad people, they just weren’t good parents.
I’d had enough of reflecting on the past, though, and was determined to figure out my future.Scanning the listings, I ignored the accounting and finance sections because I’d been there, done that, and had the arrest record to prove it. Searching for something more manually laborious and less mentally stressful, I narrowed my hunt down to maintenance jobs. Serving as a tank crewmember, I’d operated and maintained a fucking tank, so maintaining a building would be no sweat. But for some weird reason, all the jobs listed required two to three years of building maintenance experience, which disqualified me from applying. In fact, every job in the damn paper seemed to require experience. Even the custodial positions.
“How fucking experienced do you need to be to scrub toilets and mop floors?” I muttered to myself.
“What’s that?” someone asked.
Looking up to find a brother who went by the road name “Bull” heading into the common area from the kitchen with a friend of the club named Lily Perkins, I ducked. “Sorry.”
“For what?” Lily asked. “Swearing? I’ve heard and seen a lot worse than the F-bomb around here.”Since the Dead Presidents were a rowdy bunch, I didn’t doubt her claim one bit.
Lilywas a mousy brunette in her early twenties who stood maybe five-foot-five and might have weighed in at 120 pounds dripping wet. She was introduced to the club through Havoc, our sergeant at arms, who rescued her and beat the shit out of her attacker. Since she had no local family, the club had taken her under its wing. She often stopped by to hang out with Boots, the club’s service dog, and Bull, who I suspected she had a crush on.
“Hey, Lily, good to see you,” I said, standing.
She greeted me with a hug. “You too, Stocks. How’ve you been?”
“Can’t complain.”
Bull was right behind her to shake my hand. Also in his early twenties, he stood about six-feet tall and weighed close to 200 pounds. He kept his dark hair short and his face, clean shaven like he hadn’t been dishonorably discharged and was just home on leave. We’d served as prospects together, and had gotten patched in as members within months of each other. I liked the kid. He’d gotten a raw deal over some messed up bullshit, but he was a good guy.
“You lookin’ for a job?” Bull asked, gesturing toward the paper I’d dropped on the coffee table.
Retaking my seat, I nodded. “Gotta do something with my life. Fillin’ in at the Copper Penny isn’t enough to keep me busy.”
“You and me both,” Bull said, joining me on the sofa. “Always thought I’d be career Navy. Never worried about much beyond the service. It’s probably time I rectify that.”
Lily scooped up the paper and sat on the other side of him. “Maybe I can help you guys. Do you have any work experience, Stocks?”
“Yeah, but not in a field I want to get back into.” When I first came home from the Marines, most of my time was spent in physical therapy, conditioning my body to use the prosthetic leg they’d fitted me with. PT only ate up so much of my time, and it didn’t take long for boredom to set in. Boredom led to thinking, and thinking was exactly the kind of shit that someone suffering from my nightmares needed to avoid. Thankfully, an old high school buddy rescued me from my fucked-up mind and set me up with a job opportunity. After taking the necessary classes, I became acertified financial advisor and joined his employer’s firm.
It wasn’t my dream job or anything, but I finally felt like a productive member of society again. At least for a while. Then the market went to hell. The DOW plummeted and my clients lost their shit. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth panicked phone call from some entitled, rich asshole demanding that I dismiss my training and liquidate all their holdings into cash, I, too, went over the deep end. My memory of the incident is a little blurry, but according to the police report, I took my chair to the phone, the computer, and the security guys who tried to physically remove me from the premises.
“What field were you in?” Lily asked, looking from me to Bull.
“Financial planning. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good fit for me.”
Bull covered his laugh at my understatement with a cough.
Lily eyed us like we were fucking with her, but finally nodded and moved on. “What are your skills? Do you have any training?”
I glanced at the paper in her hand. “Nothing applicable. I mean, I can’t see much use for driving a tank and firing its weapons.”
