Classmate Murders

Classmate Murders

by Bob Moats

Chapter One

Turning 40 and then 50 years old didn't really bother me, but turning 60 was something I just couldn't accept. I ignored it the day it happened, and tried my best to do so despite my family and friend's attempts to make sure I didn't forget. Damn them.

I was now one month past 60, and it still bothered me. The only good thing about it, I was just one year and eleven months closer to social security.

I grumbled around my tiny room tapping the keyboards on my computers, bringing them out of sleep mode, and wishing I had something better to do with my life. Actually, anything at all would have been better since I was now doing nothing in the present time of my life. I was unemployed due to the stupidity of my former employers, an age-old problem for most good workers, and the state unemployment agency decided I didn't qualify for benefits. Maybe it's the fact that I had quit my job because I really hated it, possibly that was the reason I was denied compensation. I wrote a nice letter in response to their request for more info explaining that my former employers were jerks and they were just abusing my good nature and forcing me to abuse my car in the duty of my job.

I had spent the last 22 months as a security guard driving my car around a large suburban Detroit Cadillac dealership midnights from 7 P.M. until 6 A.M. the next morning, guarding car tires that were the main goal for addicts and the poor to steal. They would steal them right off the cars. It amazed me that they would haul in a heavy hydraulic jack, tire irons and concrete blocks to remove about 2-4 tires that they would sell for a couple hundred dollars risking being caught. I was a good little trooper and managed to stop two attempts at theft, being told by my employer that I would get a whole twenty dollars as a reward, which I never did receive. Not the first lie they told. My poor car, a twenty-year-old Ford Crown Victoria was slowly feeling the same ailments I was, old age. I had to do a number of repairs on it during the time I was working and the heater would give out, usually when winter hit here in southeast Michigan. Well, to shorten boring details, I had enough of the car abuse and asked for time off to get the car fixed properly. They gleefully took it as my resignation and I was out of a job.

My computers finally winked to life and I hooked the laptop to the internet dial-up connection and checked my email which usually consisted of spam and a number of forwarded jokes, dirty pictures and chain letters from Buck, my former co-worker and the only friend I have. I would delete the spam and the chain letters and then read the jokes, admire the nubile naked bodies of the women in the pictures from Buck, trying to remember the last sex I had about 12 years ago. It was fading from my memory banks, now a wistful image that I could no longer enjoy. Don't get me wrong, I have occasional sex, just not with another human being.

Buck was another guard that I worked with and he was not a person that thieves would want to have facing them down. Buck was a big, mustachioed biker who carried a nickel-plated .38 in his belt. We were not supposed to carry but he'd rather be caught with it than without it. Me, I just refused to get out of my car if confronted by criminals. Ok, I'm a coward. Buck was also a big teddy bear with a soft spot for others, he cared, a rare commodity in people now days. He would fuss over my problems and occasionally buy me a 30 pack of beer in exchange for loaning him my DVD collection of movies. Buck was my only friend that I had other than my computers and my beer.

I looked up at the wall clock, it was just now 7:45 in the evening and all was quiet in the house. My parents were in bed, they usually were in bed by at least 6:30. My Dad was ill and my Mom was his caregiver. I helped Mom with things she couldn't handle, like getting my Dad into bed, doing the shopping and odd jobs around the house. It was an arrangement that suited my Mom, but being an unemployed, beer drinking, 60-year-old man living with his parents, I wasn't exactly a prime candidate for any woman seeking a relationship. God, what a loser I was. I can see the profile in the online dating form: "Well, I live in my old bedroom in my parents’ house, poor credit score, over-weight, balding, gray beard, I drink at least 8 beers a night, I'm unemployed and I just became a senior citizen. I can be the man of your dreams; we just can't meet at my place."