Hard Luck
Page 1
SUMMARY
After serving five years at the Women’s Correctional Institution in Diablo, California, Elizabeth Taylor Bundy has been transitioned into a halfway house in San Francisco called Omega for six months of community service. On May 31, 1996, if all goes well, Elizabeth will be released out of Omega and placed back into society as a free woman.
Free to do what? Free to work a mind-numbing, dead-end job for minimum wage? No, Elizabeth has a better idea of what to do when she gets out. It’s one last con, and then she’ll have enough money for the rest of her life. It’s the perfect plan—until it isn’t.
For fans of Hard Fall: A McStone and Martinelli Thriller, Hard Luck picks up where Hard Fall ends. For readers who wonder whatever happened to Elizabeth, Hard Luck provides the surprising answer.
HARD LUCK
AN ELIZABETH TAYLOR BUNDY THRILLER
HARD LUCK
AN ELIZABETH TAYLOR BUNDY THRILLER
Pascal Scott
SAPPHIRE BOOKS
SALINAS, CALIFORNIA
Hard Luck - An Elizabeth Taylor Bundy Thriller
Copyright © 2019 by Pascal Scott. All rights reserved.
ISBN EPUB - 978-1-948232-82-1
This is a work of fiction - names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the publisher.
Editor - Tara Young
Book Design - LJ Reynolds
Cover Design - Fineline Cover Design
Sapphire Books Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 8142
Salinas, CA 93912
www.sapphirebooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition – November 2019
This and other Sapphire Books titles can be found at
www.sapphirebooks.com
Dedication
For all of us who survived foster care.
Acknowledgment
Thank you to Josette Murray, my wife; Tara Young, my editor; Christine Svendsen, my publisher; and the entire Sapphire Books family.
Prologue
“Who torches seven million dollars?” Annabelle asked.
Inside the Women’s Correctional Institution in Diablo, California, Annabelle Watson Cook was doing a nickel stretch for armed robbery after she and her husband tried to hold up a Brink’s truck in San Francisco. Elizabeth guessed that Annabelle’s IQ was no more than ninety at the most—Elizabeth had tested at the genius level in high school—but when you were stuck in a nine-by-twelve with no one to talk to, you had to accept conversational stimulation where you found it. Annabelle and Reginald hailed from Fresno, which Elizabeth thought helped to explain their failure as grand theft masterminds.
It was August 13, 1990, the first day of Elizabeth Taylor Bundy’s six-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter. Her cellie Annabelle, on her third year of five, had just finished telling Elizabeth more than she had ever wanted to know about “bad money.” Annabelle was explaining that bad money was what the suits at the Fed called worn paper bills that needed to be taken out of circulation.
What Elizabeth learned from Annabelle’s rambling monologue was this: Once a month, bad money was collected at banks throughout the country and sent to a designated facility for disposal. West of the Rockies, it was delivered to an impenetrable building in the Financial District of San Francisco. For states on the West Coast, old currency was air-freighted in to SFO, where it was picked up by Brink’s. Once the shipment was loaded safely into the Brink’s armored vehicle, it was transported to the Fed’s reinforced concrete-and-steel fortress at the northeastern end of Market Street. There, the paper bills were dumped into a furnace and burned. Each year in the U.S., hundreds of millions of dollars were burned like trash.
“That’s just a fuckin’ waste,” Annabelle said.
“It is,” Elizabeth agreed.
“Seven million bucks was gonna go up in flames. We figured we could use it better than that. Ya know?”
Elizabeth did know. She immediately thought of a dozen ways she could make good use of seven million dollars, including getting the hell out of California, maybe off to the French Riviera, or better still, some Caribbean island that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
“But how do you jack a Brink’s truck?” Annabelle asked rhetorically.
You don’t, she concluded. Not unless you’re willing to die. Reginald had bled out during the gunfight that followed the attempt.
“I used to wanna off that bitch who shot my Reggie.”
“It was a woman? A female guard?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yeah, Michelle Forrest, that was her name. They put her picture in the paper like she was some kinda fuckin’ hero. I wanted to off that bitch.”
Elizabeth’s eyes squinted as if she were trying to see something more clearly. “What did you say her name was?”
“Michelle Forrest. It was all over the papers.”
“Did this happen in Los Angeles?”
“Nah. San Francisco. At the airport.”
“Huh. Must be the wrong one. I used to know a Michelle Forrest. But she lives in LA.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to off Michelle Forrest. But not now. When I get out, I’m goin’ straight. Fuck this shit. I don’t ever wanna be back in Diablo.”
“I hear you.”
Michelle Forrest.
How do you rob a Brink’s truck? You don’t.
Not unless you know an inside man.
Part One
Chapter One
The first time Elizabeth saw them together after she got out of prison, she wanted to kill them both. They were sitting inside the Omega Café, and Miss Edie—the six-foot-two-inch server with a voice like honey and hands the size of beehives—had just set down the plated Saturday night special of soul food gumbo. Elizabeth was still on dish duty back in the kitchen. She hadn’t earned her bones yet and moved up in culinary duties, according to the strict house rules enforced by the Omega Foundation.
She saw them as the door swung open, at table three. It was just a glimpse, but it all came back to her. The butch looked dapper with her hair slicked back and her dark eyes smiling. She had dressed up for the evening, and that was different. Elizabeth remembered her only ever wearing jeans or Dockers. The femme was in a silky black dress cut low, with a gold necklace that dipped into her décolletage, with matching hoop earrings. Her shiny black hair flowed onto her smooth, bare shoulders, ending in tight ringlets. Both of them had let their hair grow a little longer than it had been when Elizabeth had known them.
It was a flash, an image, the opening and closing of a door, but it was enough. Miss Edie followed her line of vision with a turn of her head.
“Ooh, sugar, you should see your face. If looks could kill.”
Elizabeth glanced at Miss Edie, at her true brown eyes under her false black eyelashes. Miss Edie opened the door just wide enough so that Elizabeth could get a better look.
“Baby girl, what did they do to you?”
Elizabeth regarded Miss Edie and then the couple.
Ruined my life. Sent me to prison. That’s all, she could have said but didn’t.
“Tell me something else, sugar. What do lesbians have against dresses?” Miss Edie asked, following Elizabeth back to the sink.
“One was in a dress,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, but the other wasn’t. I’ll bet that one has never put on a dress in her life. I just don’t underst
and why a woman who is born with a real pussy and perfectly beautiful tits would want to hide it all inside a sports bra and baggy-assed slacks. When she could wear cashmere, chiffon, lace, and silk, she puts on flannel, cotton, and denim. Now don’t get me wrong, honey, I love men and I love being a man, but if I were a woman, you would never see me out of a dress. Except in the bedroom. Or the backroom. Or a toilet at the gas station.”
Elizabeth turned her attention back to her dish duty. In the soapy water of the wash sink, she could feel the scalding heat through her rubber gloves. She pulled the spring-action faucet down and sprayed a greasy pan.
“Runner!” Lenny the chef yelled, sliding a plated dinner onto the long shiny surface of the pass.
Miss Edie picked up the order and used her hip to push open the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Elizabeth shoved her gloved hands to the very bottom of the dirty water.
Stone McStone and Zoe Martinelli. How fair was it that they could eat and drink and laugh while she worked her ass off in this hellhole of a halfway house? It wasn’t fair at all. She wished they were dead.
But that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to follow the advice her case manager had given her on the day Elizabeth was released from Diablo and boarded the prison bus waiting to deliver her to the Omega Foundation in San Francisco for six months of community service. Keep your nose clean; don’t fuck up, and you’ll be free after you’ve paid your debt to society.
Free to do what? Elizabeth felt like asking but knew better. To work at the Omega Café for minimum wage? Go back to exotic dancing? If she could even get a job at her age. She was thirty-one now. Club owners liked girls who looked like horny teenagers. Even though she still had a good body and the right attitude, Elizabeth knew she would be considered too old for that kind of work.
Elizabeth had always made the best of bad circumstances, and she was no whiner, bitching and moaning about every little thing. But looking at her life now, Elizabeth had to question where all that forbearance had gotten her. To prison for something she had been forced to do. She had killed Emily Bryson, her college roommate; yes, she admitted that. The court had found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, and that was right, too. Elizabeth hadn’t planned it; it wasn’t premeditated. Elizabeth hadn’t meant to kill Emily.
As for Zoe Martinelli, the femmie private investigator in the silky black dress dining tonight with Elizabeth’s ex—adding insult to injury—that case of attempted murder had been thrown out of the Georgia courts because of the arrest, which had been unlawful. The arresting officer had been an Atlanta cop who had driven out of his jurisdiction. The court had been right about that, as well. It was a bad arrest.
If Zoe had just minded her own business and not gone snooping into the disappearance of Emily Bryson, she wouldn’t have crossed paths with Elizabeth and come close to getting herself killed, too. The irony was that in both cases, Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to hurt either one of them. They had given her no choice. They had brought it on themselves.
Emily Bryson, Zoe Martinelli, and Stone McStone—each woman in her own way had done her part to kill Elizabeth’s dream of a career in academia. “Anchor to education,” that was what the administrators at the Cary Foundation had told Elizabeth when they had given her a college scholarship for former foster children. And she had. Elizabeth had anchored to education and charted her course toward a PhD. She had envisioned her future as a respected professor of women studies. Students would have filled her classes to overflowing. Later, there would have been publication in scholarly journals, and then books that garnered a review in the New York Times, praising Elizabeth’s “important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics and power dynamics.” Even her academic rivals would be forced to acknowledge Elizabeth’s impressive rise from throw-away child to academic star. It would have been perfect. They had ruined everything, Emily and Zoe and Stone.
When you came right down to it, the only thing Elizabeth had done wrong was to get caught. People broke the law every day, and if they had money and connections and privilege, they got away with it. If they were nobodies like Elizabeth, they paid the price. Society didn’t care about girls like her. Her only misstep had been to trip up and be careless. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Next time, she would be careful. Next time, everything would be perfect.
Miss Edie lifted Elizabeth’s chin and stared into her eyes.
“Where are you, Elizabeth darlin’? You’ve got that faraway look in those baby blues.”
Elizabeth brought herself back. It was the end of their shift, and she had finished loading the last of the gumbo-smeared dishes into the commercial washer. The Omega Café was closed for the night. Miss Edie had changed into an orange wraparound with matching high heels and was waiting for Elizabeth so they could walk back to the Omega Point together.
“Tell Mama,” Miss Edie said in her syrupy voice.
Elizabeth hesitated. If she was going to trust anyone, it would be Miss Edie, although she wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because Miss Edie was even more of an outlier than she was.
“I-I thought I knew them. Those two girls at table three. That’s all.”
Miss Edie tilted her head. In the changing room, she had slipped out of the waitstaff uniform: a white shirt with a black vest, black pants, patent leather shoes, and a thin black necktie. Over her kinky hair, which had been cut short by the in-house Omega barbers, she had fitted a red-orange wig, saying, “Big hair don’t care,” one of her throw-away lines.
“Who are they to you, baby girl?” she asked now.
Elizabeth considered. If life had taught her anything, it was that honesty didn’t pay. Honesty only made you more open to betrayal.
“Nobody. They’re not important.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“It won’t take me long to change. You wanna wait for me?” Elizabeth asked.
“Sure I do. You and me are sisters.”
Miss Edie followed Elizabeth into the dressing room and sat like a lady on one of the wooden benches parallel to the rows of lockers.
“You know, Ms. Elizabeth, I’ve known you for five months now, and I still don’t know your proper name.”
“You don’t? It’s Elizabeth Taylor Bundy.”
Miss Edie’s left shoulder dipped forward. “Elizabeth Taylor? Like the diva?”
“Yeah, like that. My mother thought it sounded glamorous.”
“Well, Ms. Elizabeth, that’s a very pretty name. It becomes you. I was born Tyrell Edward Williams thirty-six years ago in Savannah, Georgia.”
Elizabeth had taken off her kitchen-duty clothes—a short-sleeved white blouse and black pants—and was putting on what she always wore: a scoop-necked black T tucked into dark wash jeans that fell to the top of her white sneakers.
“Can I ask you something, sweetheart?” Miss Edie said.
“Sure.”
“You’ve got nice tits. Why don’t you do something with them?”
“You think so?” Elizabeth looked down at her breasts.
“Hell yeah. Show ’em off instead of hiding them inside those…” She flipped her fingers at Elizabeth’s shirt. “…monochromatic rags you wear. I wish I had a rack like that.”
Elizabeth shut her locker and twisted the dial on the padlock. Miss Edie stood, rising to six-four in her heels.
“Come on, girlfriend. It’s Game night. We don’t want to be late for The Game.”
“I hate The Game,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh, snap. But we gotta play to stay. And you know what it’s like for us ‘returning citizens.’ Nobody wants nothin’ to do with a sister who’s been incarcerated. We’re lucky to have Omega.”
Miss Edie put a muscular arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder and pulled her close. “Chin up, sweetie. Let’s you and me cut this dump.”
Chapter Two
The Omega Point was in a former Masonic lodge on Geary Boulevard that had been converted twenty-two years earlier into a sixty-bed
halfway house. Omega provided vocational training and corrective therapy to its residents and had graduated into society more than a thousand ex-cons, drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and homeless people, according to the foundation’s fifty-nine-year-old founder, William Dewey Brandt.
After being admitted to Omega at the end of last November, it had taken Elizabeth less than a day to see that Billy was a ubiquitous presence at the Point. He was there in the broadcasted messages that droned over The Wire, an in-house radio network piped into every room, including the single bedrooms and the communal bathrooms. He was there in profile in the black and white posters that hung on every wall and promulgated the motivational slogans of the program. Life is what you make it. Every end is a new beginning. God helps those who help themselves.
And of course, Billy was always there at each biweekly session of The Game. Tonight was no exception. Shirtless, in jeans overalls that only partially covered his pink flabby chest, Billy looked more like a farmer than a Vietnam vet and recovering heroin addict. He still wore his hair cropped military-style, but his doughy, battle-scarred, bulldog face now hid behind a scraggly, salt-and-pepper beard. A few years earlier, he had gone prematurely gray. By the time Elizabeth met him, his hair was completely white. His eyes were a crazy blue and had the capacity, with a single glance, of nailing a new admit to the wall.
From the twisted hammer loop of his dungarees hung a shiny steel snap hook; at the ring end dangled dozens of keys. At 10:02 p.m., Billy shut the door to the small, musty meeting room, locking it with a key from the fob. Pulling out a director’s chair, he joined the circle of eleven residents, making it an even dozen.