Ghost Electricity by Sean Cunningham

Author:Sean Cunningham [Cunningham, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Hawthorn Chronicles Book 1
ISBN: 9781999951504
Publisher: Falconbrook Press
Published: 2018-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17 – Rob and Julian, Thursday Night

At the age of fifty-three Brody had decided to become a criminal. Sometimes he worked for himself, while other times he did jobs for people like Jacob Mandellan.

He was a man who believed society and the individual within it had a contract with each other. Get a job, obey the law, pay your taxes and produce offspring that didn’t grow up to become thieves or murderers – that was the individual’s part of the contract. In return, society would try to keep you safe, maintain the roads you drove on, help you out when you were sick, take care of you when you were too old to control your bladder and not let too many foreigners into the country to steal your job.

Society, in his opinion, had not done such a good job of its end of things. Unions kept striking, bankers used the treasury to pay their debts, the public health service didn’t know the pointy end of a needle from the plunger end and there were a lot of East Europeans at the plant where he worked.

Brody no longer felt obliged to uphold his end of the bargain.

A life of crime was exciting. He was a gentleman thief in a brown leather jacket and shades, with a lad or two at hand who were clever with a crowbar. A daring break-in here, a truck hijack there, followed by haggling off the proceeds to a genuine shady character. Not those half-starved nutcase drug dealers but proper criminals like fences and knee-breakers. It beat Friday evenings at the pub with the usual crowd. Besides, the pub had started playing music he barely called music in an effort to attract kids who didn’t know how to pull their trousers up.

His little ventures helped put money away for his retirement as well. With bankers raiding the treasury to buy themselves new sports cars and Mediterranean condos, with politicians too spineless to stop them, only a daft old bugger would rely on the government to have a pension for him when that time eventually came round. Brody tucked his rolls of money in shoe boxes. It was a safer investment.

They were all good reasons, though he had never spoken them aloud. He thumbed through them in his mind in quieter moments, to remind himself that the bargain with society was a sham, but he left out the most important reason for his lifestyle change.

Brody had turned to a life of genteel crime because he was having a mid-life crisis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.