You’re forced to pay them.
And what do you pay them with? Let’s start by looking at the minimum wage. Where I live, in California, it’s nine bucks an hour. Nine bucks. That means, by the time you clock off from your shift on the first working day of the week, setting aside deductions, you haven’t even paid for your cell phone. People on minimum wage in my state work one and half days a month for their cell phone. Can you even believe that? Does it make sense? They spend another day and a half on their cable bill. More on their car insurance, gas, bank charges, credit card interest, utilities, and on and on. It’s a wonder there’s anything left for rent, or food, or even the things you actually like.
Now, I’m not pretending I’m some sort of Robin Hood. I’m not trying to make myself out as some sort of savior. What I do is against the law. I’m a criminal, and one day I could get caught. And I won’t fight the cops if they come. They put their lives on the line for the greater good, and I couldn’t fight them for it. But I can live with that. I can live with what I do, because I feel like it needs to be done. I steal from corporations, and I put the money back in the pockets of ordinary folks.
I break into these corporations, I take a fraction of the money they’re sucking up from poor, working folk every month, and I spread it back out among the people. Sometimes it gets complicated. Sometimes the people I give the money to end up wasting it. Sometimes innocent people who work for these big corporations end up getting affected by my actions. But for the most part, no one, not even the corporations themselves, ever miss the money I take.
It’s something I believe in, and I was taught it by a man I loved more than I even loved my own parents, Lacey’s father.
The job I was working on at the moment involved a lot of surveillance. I’d been working on it for months. There’s a financial company based in San Francisco that makes millions of dollars every month giving payday loans to poor people. It’s the worst kind of business you can imagine. They find the very poorest people in the city, the people who can’t even make it from paycheck to paycheck, and they give them an advance on their paycheck in exchange for a fee. These are people who can’t afford this type of service. The company is literally taking food out of children’s mouths.
They also happen to deal a lot in cash. So my job, was to find out exactly where they take the cash, how long they store it, how much they accumulate, and then, at exactly the moment when the safe is at it’s fullest, steal all the money. There would be millions of dollars in the safe, and because it’s cash, the company couldn’t even claim the loss on their insurance. You can’t insure cash, not the way these guys deal with it.
I hadn’t decided yet what I’d do with the money, but there was a school meals program in the Bay Area that I knew could use a helping hand. There was also a housing association for women who were escaping abusive situations and needed a place to stay with their kids. Those both seemed like they could do something better with the money than the loan sharks would. An anonymous cash donation, some meals in children’s bellies, some housing for vulnerable women and their kids, if that’s wrong, then I don’t understand morals.
But in order to pull off the job properly, without having to hurt the guards, I would have to know as much as possible about the company’s security measures. So I was sitting in the street outside their warehouse in an unmarked, white van, with cameras, infrared goggles, and radio listening devices all hooked up to recorders in the back. It was boring work, hours of listening to security guards talking about sports and what they were going to eat for breakfast after their shift, but it was important.
And then my cell phone vibrated. It was a text message, from an unknown number.
It read, “Club Viper. Help.”
That’s all it said, and immediately I had one single, all-encompassing thought.
Lacey.
Chapter 18
Grant
I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT KIND of guy hung out at Club Viper. And when I saw that text message, instinctively I knew it was Lacey, on that cursed date with some dickhead from the Internet. What had she said his name was? Rob? Rob something?
If that cocksucker so much as laid a finger on her, I’d break his hand. I’d break his arms. I’d break his legs. I’d break every fucking bone in his body.