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Chapter Two
Dillon
Charlie Sawyer looks like a guy who could clean up his act. He’s about a hundred pounds overweight, shaking a little from lack of his first drink this early in the day, and kinda gray looking from the perpetual cigar he seems to have installed at the corner of his liver-lipped mouth.
The trouble for me, and him right now is that his act seems to be doing pretty well for itself.
Better than mine, which isn’t hard right now.
I need a job and I need cash. Aside from using my body, the only thing I can think of in a pinch is to do what I do best, look big and scary.
Security.
Oh, I have my own business, doing really well too.
I mean. I had my own business.
They say never work with animals or children.
So what do you do when your business partner in a security business is a childish ape?
I should have known better, but when said partner is a friend so old, each of us with so many oaths sworn to each other since we were kids ourselves… It’s hard to beat myself up over it.
Even harder not to beat him up over it all too. Taking the rap for his fuck up’s. Too many times now, and for the last time.
That’s my oath to myself.
And the judge.
On probation for fraud and tax evasion I knew nothing about, my oldest friend and newest adversary Matt Diamond is the real reason I’m here.
Charlie Sawyer leans in over his dark wooden desk, his red-lidded eyes scanning me from head to toe.
He looks suspicious.
“It’s twenty-five an hour. Half cash, half on the books,” he drawls, leaning his bulk back in his chair which creaks.
My eyes narrow and I fight the urge to tell him to fuck off.
I don’t usually get out of bed for less than three zeros a day. Twenty-five bucks an hour is like showing me a picture of my mom and telling me he fucked her.
If I had a mom. If this guy knew how to fuck too, that is.
I feel my heels tense, my whole body turning to leave out of reflex.
It’s an insult is what it is.
But I know and he knows that I’m screwed without this job. Without his signature on that slip of paper.
He lifts the pink form, the probation office has been in touch.
For some reason shit seems to run downhill, pooling from the probation office into places like this.
A Gentleman’s Club my ass. The guy’s a fucking crook, but if I don’t have ‘gainful employment’ by the end of the month I’ll be before the judge again.
It’ll be bye-bye house and truck, hello cellmate called ‘Bubba’ who has a thing for tall tough guys that fight back because he likes it rough.
Any other month, any other year, I’d be working for myself. Running my own business, but that’s all changed now.
My best friend changed the locks on the business and the bank accounts. I don’t how he did it, but I went to work one day and was greeted by the IRS fraud division.
Matt wept, real tears I thought. He begged me to just admit to it otherwise he’d lose his house and family.
He’s married with a kid.
I never bothered with that.
I took the rap for my old friend, figuring we’d weather whatever storm he cooked up for us both, but no.
He started singing loud and strong once I was taken in, generating enough paperwork to make it look like I was stealing from him.
Fucker.
So here I am, straight from the frying pan into the fire, with a slob of a man who’s figured out how to juice the system so they actually pay him forty an hour to hire me while he pays me twenty-five.
I watch Sawyer’s lower lip flapping, brown stained shards where teeth once lived drowning in a sea of foaming spit and nicotine.
My mind shows me a movie. The one where I lift him up by the throat, my other hand crushing his tiny balls before I toss him down those fucking stairs outside.
But not today. Not ever.
Dillon Maxwell has to be a good guy from now on.
I need to eat, pay my taxes too. But most of all I need to clear my name and make sure my onetime best friend pays for the ultimate betrayal.
Pays for his lies. For breaking the trust we had.
“If I sign this,” he drawls. “You’re the employee and I’m the boss. Got it?” he clips, a single pearl of sweat forming at his temple. His eyes darting to the cabinet by his desk.
“Whatever you say, boss,” I tell him, deadpan. Glancing at the cabinet myself, seeing what it is he’s really needing.
He scratches his name at the bottom of the pink form, that handshaking worse by the second now that he’s thinking about his bottle.
