Location, location, location.
He knew suddenly, like a bolt of lightning had hit him from on high, what he wanted to do. He did the calculations and wondered if he would be able to handle it.
He saw the number written there in big black marker and he grabbed his phone, dialed it, and waited. When the voice on the other end answered, Mike expressed his interest and asked his questions. He received his answers, said thank you very much and hung up.
He did the calculations again, and came to the same conclusion as before. He couldn’t do it alone. He would need help, and preferably from the more sources the better. On the other hand, the more partners, the less profit for Mike and if he had any hope of making this work, maximizing his profit was the top priority.
His mind was suddenly filled with a strange parade of images and thoughts, predictions and hopes, something he hadn’t felt in weeks.
Maybe God didn’t hate him after all, he thought. Maybe everything had been leading up to this point. Maybe this was the purpose behind losing his job.
He called Keith first. Keith didn’t always answer, but he’d get the message and get back to him. And of the three of them, Keith would be the one most likely to say yes--he had experience doing the work, and he could afford the investment. If Mike could get Keith on board, the other two might be easier sells.
The phone rang four times and he thought it was about to go to voicemail, but instead Keith answered with “What’s uuupppp?”
“What’s up, man. What you doing?”
“Just driving back from Falls City,” Keith said. “Went up there to the bars last night and ended up banging this ugly chick named Julie out on a dirt road. She kept talking the whole time, so I booted her ass out and made her walk back to town.”
“She sounds like a nice girl.”
“Sunday school teacher,” Keith said.
“Awesome. Hey, lemme know when you’re free, will you? I got something I want to run by you, see if you’re interested in a little business deal.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“Now? Okay, um, well you don’t have a job anymore, and I don’t have a job anymore. I know you got money on the side you make, but I don’t, and I can’t find shit in this town, so I’m driving around today and I got this idea if we all four go in on it. And I know you don’t watch those shows, but you can make a shit-ton of profit.”
“What shows?”
“Those house flipping shows,” Mike said. “They show these people who, their only job is to buy shitty houses, spend a few weeks fixing em up, then sell em again and make about fifty to a hundred grand profit on em.”
“Hell yeah.”
“Problem is, you gotta buy the properties first. Then you gotta spend the money to do the renovation. But from what I’ve seen, I mean this is the only job these people have, not a side gig, and some of them are fucking loaded.”
“So you’re gonna start flipping houses?”
“I was kind of hoping we were gonna start flipping houses. All four of us. I just did some numbers and if we all kick in some and go into business together, we can start with one house, then turn it into a real company that does this for a living. I’ve even got our first house. I’m looking at it right now.”
“Yeah? Where at?”
Mike told him, described the house, a single story detached with bay windows. It was painted tan with an ugly red as the trim color. The yard was nothing special, but Mike had talked to a realtor and he was going to take a look inside it in a couple of days.
“Cool,” Keith said. “Take some pictures. It sounds like a good deal if you think it would work.”
“It would work,” Mike said. “And it’s a hell of a deal. A house like this, in this neighborhood, should probably be going for a lot more than it is, so it’s probably not going to be around for long before someone else grabs it. I’d like all four of us to get in on this. Brian and Steven won’t have as much time for it, but I got nothing but time. I can hire out the work, and some of it I’m sure I can do myself.’
He wasn’t sure at all, but he didn’t mind stretching the truth if it meant convincing Keith this would be a good deal.
“I don’t need help getting it done, I just need help getting it started. Then we split the profits four ways. If and when the business takes off, they can quit their jobs too and it’ll be a full time gig for everybody.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Keith said.
“So you’re in?”
“Yeah. Give Brian a couple days, though. He just called me before you did.”
“Yeah, I talked to him,” Mike said. “That’s some shit, man.”
“Yeah. Anyway, send me some pictures of it and tell me what you had in mind as far as profit and what we’re gonna need to put into it first, but if it works, it doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea.”
“Sweet,” Mike said. “I’ll get hold of them.”
“Alright, I’m about to hit a dead zone, so call me later.”
“Cool.”
Mike pocketed the phone and got out of his car and went up to the house.
The lawn was overgrown. He wondered how long it had been empty. The front door had three small windows across the top of it, but they were too high to see inside, so he tried to look in the living room window. It looked like there was plenty of space. Lots of nice old wood.
He made a circuit of the house, cupping his palms over his eyes to see what he could.
It didn’t look too dirty, just very very empty. And most of the rooms seemed to be in pretty good shape. As far as he could tell, most of what needed to be done was just cosmetic. Some new paint would be good for most of the rooms. The kitchen looked like it could stand some new cabinets. He’d have to wait to get inside and see for sure, but so far the place looked like it would be an easy flip.
All I need now, he thought, is the money and a name for the company.
Keith Miller had Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods album blasting in his car on the drive home. Keith was the exact opposite of his friends. He stood just over five and a half feet and always had to look up when he talked to Brian. As for build, although he hadn’t had a job in a year, he worked his farm and kept himself in shape. He was the blonde of the bunch and kept his hair short on top with the back covering his neck in loose, natural curls. Mike gave him shit for his mullet all the time, but Keith’s attitude was that it didn’t stop him from getting laid, so who cared.
He was still thinking about Mike’s idea halfway back to Angel Hill, and had pretty much made up his mind. If Steven and Brian were in, he was too. He wasn’t so much interested in the money they could possibly make, although that obviously had its appeal too, but not having a job for so long, he was getting bored.
He sympathized with Mike over being fired. Keith had been laid off from Fett Technologies only three weeks shy of his ten year anniversary. But the severance package had been excellent and since his daughter Courtney had gone to college in Joplin on a full ride scholarship two years earlier, he lived a pretty Spartan life. His house was paid off, as was his car, and for the last five of his years at Fett Tech, he’d managed to save half the money he made, which had been substantial.
He often thought back to the years he’d put in at Burger King while he put himself through vo-tech school for the training that eventually got him hired at Fett Tech, those early years when Courtney was still young, after Keith and his wife had divorced, trying to be a dad, a student, an employee, and still manage not to lose himself in the mess of it.
He’d met Mike and the guys at BK and stayed in touch with them when he left. The last decade had solidified those friendships and while Keith had a lot of buddies, those guys were his friends.
If he were going to go into business with anyone, he would want it to be them.
He wondered, though, if Brian or Steven would have it in them to do something like this. He knew Brian wasn’t going to be in that headspace for a while, probably, and that was to be expected, bu
t there was no rush on this, at least not for Keith. Mike sounded pretty anxious to get moving, though, but Mike was a workaholic. He always needed to be doing something, that’s what made him such an efficient manager at Burger King, even if, at the time, Keith thought he could be a real dick sometimes. Keith, on the other hand, had been spending the last ten months taking it easy and enjoying the time off.
He worked his farm and sold sweet corn and tomatoes at farmer’s markets for quick cash, then spent every dollar of it at bars in Falls City or Rulo, picking up random women for the weekend. Sometimes he’d meet one he liked better than the others, and he’d bring her to town and spend a few more days with her, as he liked to describe it, “giving it to her Angel Hill style.” He always grew bored with them, though, and hauled them back home before Monday.
Still, something like this could be just what he needed. He had to admit to himself he hadn’t felt the same old excitement the last couple of months when it came time to head out to the bars. At first, he loved all the women, and he still did, but it just didn’t hold the appeal it had before.
No, that wasn’t it. Maybe it was his age setting in, but he just wasn’t finding the women as sexually attractive as he used to. Oh, he was still turned on by them and he still wanted to give it to them in his usual manner, but there were times he often thought he’d just as soon stay home, pull skin and read a book after.
But he went out anyway. Because what else was there to do? He would grow tired from a book after thirty minutes, and still have an entire night to fill. He would end up going out anyway, so he might as well cut out the middleman and just do it.
And that’s why Mike’s idea held such appeal. Keith was getting bored with his life and he needed something new to break it up. If he had another business on the side, something like manual labor, a physical task other than sex to occupy his week, he would probably be more excited about the weekends again, like he used to.
He wouldn’t be able to fund the entire thing, but if Brian and Steven were in, Keith was too.
He knew some would warn him not to mix business with pleasure, work with friendship, but if he were going to get rich or go broke on any kind of business deal, there was no one other group of people he’d rather do it with.
He’d call Mike tomorrow and see if he’d talked to the others. For now, he just wanted to get home and sleep for the next ten hours. First he needed gas. He decided to stop before he got into town, though; two Angel Hill gas stations had been robbed recently and he didn’t want to risk being in the third when shit went down.
Steven Larison went into the rear cooler where the boxes of hamburger, pork and steak were kept--Wal-Mart hadn’t cut its own meat in years--and hauled down the boxes he needed, stacking them on his small blue metal cart.
Back in the front cooler, it took half an hour, opening boxes, slitting open the bags and dumping the packages of two-and-a-quarter pound 80/20 or the boneless chops or the flat iron steaks onto the metal table, organizing them and lining them up so the tags were all facing up, then using the handheld scanner and printer to scan the barcodes on the labels and print off enough sell-by date stickers for each package.
Once the stickers were printed and each package was marked, he stacked them on the upright metal racks on white plastic trays, then went back to his blue cart and unloaded some more boxes. This was called scaling and it was the most relaxing part of his job. On heavy days when they had three people in the meat department, Steven could stand at this table all day and just scale meat for eight hours while Cody ran seafood, chicken and hams and Ashley pulled it from the cooler and ran it out to the wall.
He finally worked through everything on his cart, knowing that he was going to have a whole new cart to fill once he ran these.
That was okay. It was the times the wall was filled and he had to find something else to do that made the day drag. The coolers were kept at just around forty-one degrees, and while Steven hated the cold, he enjoyed the job itself. But it was just too cold to stand around waiting for something to do. Not to mention the cameras were everywhere, so he couldn’t go out to the back hallway where it was warm and wait out there.
Nowhere to sit in the cooler meant he was on his feet the entire day, and standing and waiting just made them hurt more. So he liked to keep as busy as possible throughout the day. If he ran what he had finished and found the rest of the wall was nearly empty, he’d be just happy with that.
Instead, what he found was Mike See meandering up and down the meat aisle with an empty cart, obviously waiting for him.
“Hey now!” Steven said.
“Steven,” Mike offered his usual greeting.
“You doing your shopping?”
“Shopping for business partners,” Mike said and Steven’s brow furrowed and he looked crookedly at his friend.
Mike and Steven had gone to high school together, but had never met until Steven was the maintenance man at Burger King under Mike, sweeping the lot, stocking the orange juice and milk cartons, keeping the bags of fries full and within reach. Mike knew how hard Steven worked, and he was always trying to get him to take an assistant manager position, but Steven always told him the same thing, “I’m fine where I am. I like to stay out of the way.”
“You going on break any time soon?”
Steven looked around at the wall, then said, “Let me put this stuff out here, then I’ll go find Cody and tell him.”
“Cool, I’ll meet you out front.”
Steven nodded and unloaded his rack while Mike wheeled his empty cart back to the front of the store.
It was another ten minutes before he was able to track down Cody and tell him, “I’m going on break.”
Cody, who had been pulled to the deli, nodded and said, “Everything looks good out there?”
“Good enough it can wait ten minutes.”
“Cool.”
Steven hung his white coat on the hook in the back hallway, then strolled through the store to meet Mike out front.
He found him standing in front of the RedBox, scrolling through the movies.
“You gonna rent something?” Steven asked.
“No, I’m just killing time. You’re on break?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool, I want to run this by you and didn’t want to wait til you got off later.”
“What’s up?”
“You ever seen that little tan house on Irving? Bay windows, it’s for sale?”
Steven searched his memory, trying to navigate Angel Hill and figure out where Irving was and what the street looked like.
He shrugged.
“I don’t know, I couldn’t say without seeing it.”
“Well, you ever watch those house flipping shows like ‘Property Ladder’, or ‘Flip Or Flop’?”
“I think I’ve seen ‘Property Ladder’. That’s got the blonde host, right?”
“Yeah. Well, a lot of these people who do this are just regular people who decide to try to get into business doing this professionally, but it’s not like there’s a course they can take, right? But they jump in, buy a house, fix it up, sell it for profit, and some of these dudes end up making a ton of money doing it.”
“Yeah?” Steven said. He brushed red hair back from his forehead with his fingers, then rubbed his open palm up and down the near-buzzed hair at the back. He liked the way it tickled his hand.
“That house on Irving is for sale. And it’s pretty cheap, considering the location and the size of the place. Keith and I were thinking of going into business as house flippers. We were wanting to know if you and Brian would be interested in being partners and sharing the profits.”
“I don’t know anything about flipping houses,” Steven said.
“You don’t need to. All you need to know is the right contractor to hire, and they take care of that end. All you, I, Keith or Brian has to know is what we want a house to look like in the end. I can tell you where to spend the most to get the biggest value, kitchens and bathro
oms. Buyers eat that shit up. I watch those shows all the time and it’s not uncommon to see someone spend a couple of months on a house and get an offer in the first week and walk away with fifty grand profit. That’s a good lump of cash, even split four ways. And all you had to do was help out with the financing upfront, then sit back and let your business partners do the heavy lifting.”
Damn, Steven thought, he’s really trying to sell this. I’ve never seen him push so hard for something.
“How much?” Steven asked.
“The realtor says the house has been on the market for four years. It’s been reduced four times and we can get it for seventy thousand.”
“That’s reduced? Shit, from what?”
Mike shrugged.
“But in this location,” he said, “close to the river, right across from the park, we get it fixed up and we can sell it for twice that, easy. I looked inside as best I could, and it doesn’t look bad.”
“Then why so long on the market?”
“That, I don’t know. And I’ll be honest, I’m curious about that, myself, and it will definitely need a home inspection before any papers are signed, but if everything checks out ... It doesn’t even look like it needs a lot of work, maybe some paint, you know, some new light fixtures. It’s gonna be an easy flip.”
“And if no one buys it?”
“If we all lose our houses, we can live there.”
“I doubt that’s a problem for me,” Steve said. Like Brian, Steven had never moved out of his parents’ house. Unlike Brian, it wasn’t because he was paying his parents’ bills, he just never saw the benefit. He had his family, he had his friends.
Mike had known to come to Steven, had known if he wanted to, Steven could help out with this endeavor. Steven had been saving money for years with no end goal in sight. He just didn’t feel the need to spend it as soon as he made it.
The Flip (An Angel Hill novel) Page 4