Chapter 17

Grant

I do a lot of jobs I don’t have to do. I do them for the pleasure of it. It’s fun taking all that money from large corporations who don’t even know what to do with it. Think about it? There’s a lot of theft that goes on in this country that is totally legal.

What goes through your mind every time you pay your cell phone bill? Do you even know what the average cell phone bill is in this country now? Seventy-one dollars. That’s seventy-one dollars that every man, woman and child in this country is sending to big corporations at the end of every month.

How much is your cable bill? Let me guess. Close to a hundred a month? That’s another hundred every household is sending to the men in the corporate offices.

Car insurance is another hundred a month. Don’t get me started on health insurance. Then there’s gas. Home heating. Home insurance. Home Internet. Electricity. Subscription services. Credit cards. Bank fees. The list goes on and on.

I’m not even talking about taxes, mind you. Uncle Sam pays for a lot of things we need. Sure, tax money gets wasted, but that’s a debate for another day. What I’m talking about is the money we’re all pretty much forced to hand over to the country’s largest corporations, every single month, whether we want to or not.

Petroleum, insurance, utilities, communications, banking, entertainment, call it what you want, but everyone has to pay it. There’s no choice. Try telling your kids you’re not going to have electricity, or heat, or internet, or cell phones. Try telling your boss you’re not opening a bank account, or having a credit card. It’s just not an option. You need those things to live in the modern world.

You have to pay those bills.

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 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 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 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 its fullest, steal all the money.

There would be millions of dollars in the safe, and because it’s cash, the company couldn’t 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 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.