Chapter 8

Corbin

Sharon is a bitch.

She gets paid to be a bitch.

Dealing with guys like me all day long.

She’s my parole officer and I have to check in and let her know I’m being a good, decent human.

I’m not breaking any laws that she knows of or can prove.

Wanting to taste my ex’s cunt isn’t a crime.

My Katie girl is my plaything. She’s my toy.

Kind of like when a dog hides a bone somewhere and comes back to get it later.

I can still slightly taste my Katie girl’s blood too.

She listens well and will continue to do so until I’m done with her.

My name is called and I stand and walk into an office that’s quite literally a glorified cubical.

Sharon looks like she’s been chain smoking cheap cigarettes since she was about ten years old. She’s in need of a vacation, a bottle of vodka, and looks as if she needs about ten guys fucking her senseless for days straight.

I flex my jaw and plop down in the chair in front of her desk.

“Corbin,” she says. “How’s life?”

“Fucking wonderful,” I say.

“You haven’t been arrested yet.”

“How about that, huh? Shocking?”

“A little,” Sharon says. She folds her hands. She lifts an eyebrow. “Tell me what’s going on…”

I lean forward. “Well, if you need records, I can supply them, but I’ve got a job. A place to live. I’m settling right back in. At the family garage.”

“Right. I’ve looked into it already. Seems like a legitimate business.”

“I’m a lucky guy,” I say. “My cousin has been holding things down while I was gone. But I’m back. The garage is all but mine. Not trying to ruffle any feathers just yet.” I smile. It’s such a fake smile. Sharon knows it. But she can’t stop me from smiling. “There’s an apartment above the garage. I’m staying there. I had someone come and clean the place. I can give you the company’s name and show you the receipt.”

“Ten years and you’re now an upstanding citizen,” Sharon says.

“Hey, I guess the system worked this time.”

I knock on her desk and stand up.

She looks up at me. Oh, she fucking hates my guts. She can see through everything I’m saying yet she can’t do a thing about it. I haven’t done a thing wrong.

I used to be a criminal.

Now I’m just a shitty person.

For now.

I walk through the cemetery to find my uncle’s gravestone.

It’s a small stone for such a big man.

I crouch down and place my hand to it.

Lenny Harlice.

He used to bring me here when I was a kid and I’d wander around the cemetery and trace my fingers into the names on the stones. Never afraid. Always hopeful a body could actually come back to life and climb out of the ground.

The thing is, now that I look back, my uncle never had anyone here to pay his respects to. He always showed up and met people. There were handshakes, handoffs, and things like that.

“You sick bastard,” I say with a smile. “Conducting business in front of the dead. And you never got caught. Never once. I did. I had to take the fall. I had to protect Katie. Not sure you’d understand it, Uncle Lenny. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make it work.”

Today I’m wearing a ring on my right pinky. It’s a small, brass type ring with a green stone in the middle. It belonged to the biggest guy in prison. Everyone called him Zill. Monstrous in size and a really bad dude. He stood in the way of me and a little side business I had started. There were probably ways to work around him, but I preferred a good fight.

Which is what we had.

A good fight.

I took Zill down and took his ring. I walked away with three broken ribs, my left wrist broken, several fingers all fucked up, my jaw slightly cracked, and I wasn’t able to see out of my left eye for a good month.

I place Zill ’s ring on my uncle’s headstone and stand up.

If anyone thinks for a second that doing a decade of prison time has reformed me, they’re fucking dumber than my cousin Mutt.

I’m not reformed.

I’m just refreshed.

And I’m ready to get my dick sucked by my Katie girl.

I recognize the minivan in the last garage bay.

“Mutt,” I call out.

He quickly jumps up, tossing his phone to the counter, blinking fast, coming back to reality from the porno he’s been watching.

“What’s with the van?” I ask. “It was here already. Something else wrong?”

Mutt goes stiffer than my cock when I think about my Katie girl.

I watch him grind his teeth back and forth. He’s scared to death right now.

“What?” I ask.

Mutt shakes his head.

“What the fuck,” I whisper. “This fucking asshole won’t answer me.”

I step toward Mutt and he jumps back and reaches for a wrench and holds it out at me like it’s a magic wand.

“Wow, you should play poker for a living, Mutt. You’d do great. Never know you’re hiding something.”

He starts to shake.

I get closer and Mutt pulls the wrench back and takes a swing at me with it.

It’s a weak swing, but still…

I grab the wrench and twist fast, forcing him to let it go.

I then slam the wrench into his stomach.

He screams and falls to the floor, throwing up.

I lift the wrench into the air. “Mutt, you motherfucker…”

“No! Please, Corbin, no! Don’t hit me!”

“Then tell me what the fuck is going on around here,” I order.

Mutt looks up at me. There’s chunk of vomit stuck to his chin. Tears in his eyes.

“Pop had to do it,” Mutt says. “There was nobody else here to run things. Okay? He had to work out a deal with someone.”

“What kind of deal, Mutt?”

“It’s just a distribution deal,” Mutt says. “Not even that. We don’t even move a thing. We just package it. That’s right. We’re a packager. And it’s good money. Great money. Easy money, Corbin. I swear, I was going to tell you all about it. I wasn’t sure what you wanted to know. If you’re going, you know, straight these days…”

“Stand up and show me,” I order.

Mutt shakes as he climbs back to his feet.

I hold the wrench tight, ready to smash whatever little brains he has out of his head if I have to.

We walk to the minivan and he opens the sliding side door.

“Normal looking, huh?” Mutt asks. He reaches for the middle seat and lifts it open. “Until you dig around…”

I pull Mutt out of the way.

I look down into a secret compartment.

It’s filled with heroin. Fresh, beautiful bags.

My eyes scan in a hurry as I start to calculate the weight and the street price.

“You’re not moving this,” I say.

“No,” Mutt says. “We get the drop offs here and then break it up into others. It’s all fluid, Corbin. Nobody knows a thing. You know? It’s genius. Pop thought of it. It was the best plan he could come up with.”

I look at Mutt.

Of course my uncle had to do something like this. Mutt’s too dumb to take control of the real family business.

The garage has always been a front.

A perfect place to handle real business and launder money as need be.

“So you’re taking all this risk and splitting this up and hiding it,” I say. “For what kind of cut?”

Mutt’s head drops again.

Something tells me my uncle had a good deal worked out and the second he was tossed into the ground to rot, some guys showed up, roughed up my idiot cousin and he now handles this very expensive heroin for a fraction of what he should be.

I’ll tell you right now, if I wasn’t meeting up with my Katie girl tonight I’d handle this situation right now.

Instead I lift the wrench and touch under Mutt’s chin.

“Mutt, I’ll tell you when to make a call or two,” I say. “It’ll get a little bloody around here for a minute. But then it’ll be okay. If you get scared and you fuck this up, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

“Okay,” Mutt says, his teeth chattering.

I drop the wrench. It hits the concrete floor with an echoing thud.

I walk through the garage with my fists clenched tight and a scowl on my face.

I take deep breaths.

I keep thinking about the huge fat head of my cock pushing my Katie girl’s uvula out of the way so I can properly fuck her throat.

Fuck, I hope I can make her puke all over my cock.

Then she can lick my cock clean and start over.

I am in no mood for any more surprises right now.