And no one would ever accuse me of being the workaholic sort.
That was okay. I wasn't the kind to be in a rush, either. My grandfather would say that was because I was raised slow, lived a slow life. A southern type of life. Front porch sitting. Firefly watching. Nothing in haste, as my grandmother might say.
Shit would shake out.
It usually did.
If you gave it long enough.
My gaze moved around my shack, taking in the kitchen against the back room, something that predated me. The water that came out of the tap wasn't exactly clear. Not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom.
The linoleum parquet style floor that wouldn't have even fooled anyone when it was freshly laid down was scuffed and faded entirely to white in certain spots. I couldn't help but imagine they were spots scrubbed clean with bleach to cover some sin or another. No one scrubbed so hard just to mop up some pasta sauce.
There was no bedroom, just the living space, which came 'furnished' with a green and gray, cigarette-burn-hole couch, that acted as the makeshift bedroom. There was a TV cabinet wedged into a corner near the window that looked out onto the shared front porch that was actually just a slab of cement and an overhang. Good enough to protect me from the weather when I needed to hop out to get some fresh air while I smoked. An oxymoron, sure, but I generally preferred to smoke outside.
Cigarette smoke was bad for the paper I paid out the ass for. At least until after I got the ink and art onto it, that is.
I had some fair stacks of money lying around that would do. It would pass a highlighter test. But no one did highlighter or pen tests in general on fives and tens anyway unless it couldn't even fool the untrained eye. And if your shit couldn't even fool the untrained eye, you needed to look into a new profession.
It wasn't my best batch, though.
And I was a man who prided himself on his product. I'd been perfecting it for my entire adult life.
Would I sell this batch off to some random low-level criminal empire of the street or organized sort?
Fuck yeah, I would.
But if I wanted to get into the more reputable--irreputable--organizations, the shit needed to be top notch. It would need to pass an eyeball test, a pen test, and the ever-elusive counter.
Which was another thing I was trying to track down, finding it more difficult than I had in the past.
I guess more people than ever were trying their hand at counterfeiting money.
Ignorant idiots, all of them.
You didn't get into making fraudulent money like you got into selling guns or cooking meth.
This wasn't an area where brute force and a hunger to succeed would pay off.
You had to start out with basic skills.
Namely, artistic ones.
If you weren't sketching realistic people by middle school, there was no way you were going to be able to imitate the minute details found on cash money. Especially in the States where they had all kinds of sticks up their sleeves to try to make it impossible to pass off fake cash as real.
Tried.
There were still a handful of us who managed to get it done without getting caught.
Sure, I'd gone to prison.
But it wasn't for that.
As far as the feds were concerned, Finch Augustus McAwley was just your average under-achieving low-life, chain-smoking, beer drinking, drifter who never held a legit job for any longer than a few months at a time.
About five people in the world knew what I did for a living. Even my clients never knew who I was.
And that was how I liked it.
Making a name for yourself was great. Gave you a lot of pride, for sure. But with clout came recognition, came curiosity from the alphabet people.
Better to be no one.
Build your anonymous empire.
Retire young before anyone fucks you over.
Go to your grave with your secret.
Or pen your memoirs and leave it for someone to publish after you're gone, full of all the tales of how you gave the middle finger to a system that never would have worked in your favor, even if you had gone that route.
Little boys who grew up in rusted trailers with mostly-empty cabinets didn't often become mega-millionaires in giant estates. Especially when those boys and men had only three particular skillsets.
Drawing pictures.
Breaking rules.
And charming women.
I never excelled in science, but let's say I knew what I needed to know about biology.
I failed geometry, but I aced street corner arithmetic with flying fucking colors.
You had to work with what God gave ya'.
He gave me good hands and a lazy streak.
I turned that into what could be a comfortable retirement fund if I didn't live too large.
But before I decided to snag a cabana on a beach somewhere, I decided to give Navesink Bank a try. With so many big players in such a small area, I figured I could easily double my retirement fund in under five years.
And then it was all limes and coconuts and women in bathing suits that barely covered the essentials.
I figured I could sacrifice a couple years for the rest of my life in paradise.
I was young. Enough.
I could spare it.
Especially if the outcome meant my cabana could be of the luxury variety.
Current sacrifices for future rewards and all that shit.
Though, I had to admit, sacrificing a bed was proving hell on my back and neck, proof that I wasn't as young as I had once been.
I found if I popped a couple Ibuprofen and chased them with a few sips of last night's beer first thing in the morning, it made me forget the misery until I tried to fall back to sleep again the next night.
I would likely have to move out of this place eventually anyway. With all the right equipment finally obtained, I would barely have any room to move around with the money stacked about.
Just a couple more weeks, that was all it would take.
My mind was on those sorts of thoughts.
When the door to my room flew open.
And the woman of my goddamn dreams stalked in.
That was a bit over the top, even for me, but when the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood equivalent of the girl you've fantasized about in your head for a decade or more walked into your life, that shit had impact.
She was average height with wavy blonde hair and big bright blue eyes in a delicate face--all soft cheekbones and gently rounded chin, complimented by a set of pouting, slightly oversize lips.
And there was the body.
See, me? I had a type.
And that type meant I didn't want to see any bones when we were rolling around in bed.
This woman?
She was the perfect combination of abundant and fit, with her thick thighs, her round ass, and her chest that made me want to fucking weep
Beautiful.
Perfect, really.
I hated having to pull a gun on all that pretty, but a man in my position couldn't rule out women who might want to take everything I worked for. It wasn't just men these days who ran massive criminal empires. Feminism, and all that.
Those eyes of her--bright as a summer sky--were smart, all-seeing, moving around the entire place in one fell swoop, and yet I knew she had taken it all in. The stacks of fake money, the printers, the ink, the cobwebs in the back corner, the discarded snack pack of mixed nuts I hadn't thought to toss in the bin.
It was all of ten seconds later when two more figures moved into the room.
Ferryn, the girl next door. And Vance, the guy who technically rented the place, a member of the local MC, someone who had threatened me away from his girl.