Mercy

Chapter 11

For twenty-five hours a week and nine bucks an hour Cain operated a forklift loading packing crates onto tractor trailers. They wouldn’t allow her full-time work, because that came with benefits and other rights. All the guys there — she was the only female — were also part-timers.

She parked her Honda outside the terminal, put on her hard hat and protective shoe coverings and safety goggles, punched the clock, and climbed into her little rig. They could have gotten plenty of guys with heavy equipment operating licenses to do this, and who had been laid off in the recent downturn. But Cain was a lot cheaper and didn’t demand full-time work. People like her were a hot commodity in the free market right now. She was a worker who didn’t mind getting screwed: Employers loved her.

She liked the work because she didn’t really have to talk to or deal with anyone. She just climbed into her seat, manipulated her ride hauling the crates and boxes, and did her thing. Years before, she had earned a good living doing similar work. Then she’d been injured on the job and the painkillers had helped a lot, so she kept taking them. Then came the day when she couldn’t stop taking them. And then it wasn’t just painkillers. It was anything she could snort, swallow, or stick herself with. And there went her job and everything else.

Someone had suggested counseling. She had gone to one person but when he’d asked about any troubles in her past, she got up and left. It wasn’t worth it. Cain knew if she waded back into that, she’d just slit her wrists. There was only one way for her to go and that was forward. Some psych guy could write a book on her, but Cain would never read it. She had lived it. One ride through hell was enough.

Cain had never been to prison, only in jails for short periods for stupid crap she shouldn’t have done. Petty thefts, DUIs, drug possession, throwing a drunk accountant through a plate glass window for grabbing first her ass and then her breasts, only to have his buddies swear it was all her. Stuff like that. Shit happened; shit just happened to her more than to a lot of others, it seemed.

Each time she was arrested she’d been afraid that her ID and manufactured past would not pass muster and uncomfortable questions would follow. Yet she had found that the police in real life were not quite the stuff you saw on TV. The computers were old and boxy, the offices drab, the clothes they wore drabber still. There wasn’t an ounce of sexy among the whole crew, the morale was low, and the energy to go above and beyond on low-end cases like hers was virtually nonexistent. She was one piece of dull paper in a billion. Just shuffle her through because who really gave a crap.

Thank God for that.

She clocked out on the dot. She was about to get into her car when a new guy came up to her. His job was to fuel and detail the trucks, or at least she had seen him doing that.

He was lean — too thin, really — with a scraggly, ill-groomed beard, twitchy eyes, and a conceited expression, at least to Cain.

“Hey,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Hear you don’t like guys.”

“What makes you say that?”

He grinned. “’Cause you’ve never gone out with none of the boys here.”

“You talking about the one guy who has teeth, or all the others?”

“Hey, that’s bitchy,” he said, frowning.

“What the hell do you care?”

“I don’t know. Look, forget it. Shit, I mean, what the hell is your problem?”

Cain said, “I got no problem. Just here doing my job. And now I’m going to do another job.”

His expression changed from angry to curious. “Yeah? Where is that?”

“Why?”

“I make chump change here. I clean offices at night. But that pays shit, too, and it ain’t regular work. Look.” He glanced around nervously and then lit up a cigarette. His hands were shaky. “Look, I... I got me a kid. And my old lady ain’t doing too good. Rehab, y’know? Meth, it’s a bitch.”

She looked him over and decided his old lady wasn’t the only one fighting a meth addiction. Cain saw all the signs because she’d been there, too. “Detailing trucks and cleaning offices? Not much future. Same goes for meth. You don’t kick that, nothing else matters because it gets in your head and you can’t do anything else but worry about the next pop and how to get it.”

“Shit, I know that! So what else do you do?” he asked.

She looked him over. “I do group Lyft rides three times a week in the afternoon. My car’s not pretty, but it takes people who don’t have a lot of dollars where they need to go. Not great money, but it’s something. Then I go home and sleep. Then four nights a week I work security making rounds at a gated community a few miles outside of downtown. Ten to six in the morning. I’m on duty tonight, in fact. They used to have their own private police force, but then they outsourced it to save money. See, even the rich pinch pennies sometimes. It pays eight-fifty an hour, no real bennies, but there’s no heavy lifting. And you get a little car to drive around in. I’ve been doing it for six months and the only thing that happened was I had to roust some pothead kids out of a rich dude’s pool.”

“Security job! I can’t pass no background check and if I have to pee into—”

She interrupted. “They don’t do any of that. No pee cups. No tests, at least they never have with me. They’re supposed to, I guess, but the place that hired me? I went in for an interview at four in the afternoon and was on duty at ten that night. The only thing they asked me was what size uniform I took and whether I wanted a gun. They just want bodies riding around in a uniform looking like they know what they’re doing. Optics, they call it.”

“No training, really?”

“If they had to get people to pee or pass a background check they might as well close up shop. No Ivy Leaguers are applying for this stuff.”

He took a puff on the cigarette and slowly blew the smoke out while he stared at the ground. “I guess that’s right.”

“And anyway, all the homes have these fancy security systems and surveillance cameras out the ass. We’re just gravy on top of the mashed potatoes.”

“And did you want a gun?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“For eight-fifty an hour, I got a gun, they got a gun, they’re more likely to shoot me.”

“I think I’d go for a gun.”

She looked him over. “You know how to use one?”

“Sure. How do I apply for a job?”

She pulled out a piece of paper and pen from her glove box, spun him around, and used his back as a desk as she wrote a phone number down. She handed it to him. “Here. Tell ’em El Cain sent you. It might help. I know the extra cash comes in handy. After they take out taxes and crap it’s around two-twenty a week.”

“Shit, that’s more than I make here. They pay me under the table so it’s less than minimum, but they feed me lunch and there’s usually some leftover donuts for breakfast.”

“There you go. You can buy your own donuts.”

He looked at the paper and said, “Thanks, I mean it, really.”

“No problem. Hope it works out.”

He looked at her bruised face, apparently focusing on it for the first time. “Damn, what happened there?”

“Got in a fight.”

“Who with?”

“Some other chick. She ended up in the hospital to get her jaw wired and to hopefully think about something else to do with her life. I ended up going home and having a beer.”

He chuckled as though he thought she was kidding. “But do you like guys?”

“I like some guys some of the time. I don’t like most guys most of the time.”

He grinned and stuffed the paper into his shirt pocket. “You’re not like what they said.”

“I’m not like what anybody says, because nobody really knows me. And that’s how I want it.”