Guarding Autumn (Crimson Point Security #3)

Chapter Six

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TJ tugged the brim of his ballcap down lower on his forehead as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. As always, the men’s shelter was full. He’d been lucky to get a bed here again last night and didn’t hold much hope for one tonight based on the looks of things.

In either direction outside the front entrance and across the street, long lines of homeless men lined the sidewalks, the ones unable to get a bed huddled in doorways or sleeping out in the open next to their small piles of worldly possessions.

He would worry about tonight’s sleeping situation after his shift. And if he wound up having to bunk on the street again, well, there were worse things. These past few months, it seemed like he’d spent as many nights on the street as in a bed anyway.

Shoving his hands in his coat pockets, he kept his head lowered and walked north for two blocks before turning west and heading for one of Portland’s busiest waterfronts. The morning sky was blue overhead, but a cool mist had rolled in off the river overnight, covering the edge of the waterfront in a pale haze so thick that only the tops of the cranes were visible above it.

This construction job wasn’t steady work, but it was the best he’d had in almost a year and paid decently for a day’s labor. He'd been out here on Portland’s streets for more than six months now, but it felt like years. Every day, he passed by countless other homeless people, a disproportionate amount of whom were military vets like him. Every single one of them had a story and a reason why they’d ended up here. Abuse. PTSD. Mental illness. Depression. Getting hooked on prescription meds. Booze. Hard drugs.

They were the forgotten. Living ghosts. It was an eerie feeling to be invisible, for people to walk by without even seeing him. Like he didn’t exist. That had been the hardest thing to adjust to.

Life on the streets was hard. He’d learned early on to keep to himself and whom to avoid. Knew who most of the dealers and gangsters were and where they hung out. But even though he kept a low profile, there had been times he’d had to fight for his life out here while the cops looked the other way because they considered him and the rest to be unworthy of protection. And every day, more of them died out here, unnoticed.

Right on cue as he turned the next corner, he saw a fire crew and ambulance blocking the street. A group of first responders was trying to revive a guy sprawled out on the sidewalk while other homeless looked on without emotion and people in business suits crossed the street to avoid the scene, shaking their heads in disgust.

TJ moved closer. He stopped, recognizing the man lying there on his back. A local addict he knew. Not former military, but a decent guy who had wound up here after losing his job, home, and wife, and getting hooked on progressively harder and harder drugs to escape his misery.

Today he must have taken a hit laced with fentanyl. These days, there was no telling what was in the shit the dealers sold their desperate clientele.

One of the paramedics working on him stopped, shook his head and stood, stripping off his gloves. TJ edged closer as the other responders drifted away and paused to look down into the man’s face. He’d seen so many men die out here. Way more than in combat overseas.

Staring into his acquaintance’s face, he felt...numb.

“Can I help you?” a cop asked him brusquely.

TJ met his gaze. Saw the judgement and disdain in those hard brown eyes. Telling TJ he thought he was just another piece of shit, to wind up out here. Fuck him.

The cop jerked his chin at the dead man. “You know him?”

Not well. “His name’s Ritchie.”

“Ritchie what?”

“Holmes.”

“He got any family or next of kin?”

TJ shook his head. “Not that I know of.” He didn’t want to get involved. Ritchie’s troubles were over now.

Not for the first time, he wondered if one day he would wind up like this too. God knew he’d been tempted to exit this life many times over the past few years because death was the only real escape from the burden he carried every day. Instead, he was out here just going through the motions of living from one day to the next.

He told himself there was still a point to his existence, that he still had value as a human being, but at this point he wasn’t so sure anymore. Despite all the efforts to stop it, the drug scene up and down the West Coast was the worst it had ever been.

The whole country was infected now, the drug and housing crisis leaving a tide of homeless addicts left to suffer and die on the streets of American cities and towns while the dealers, runners, and cartels got richer by the day, along with the politicians and billionaires.

It made him sick and angry. Somehow he’d wound up here after serving his country with honor for the best years of his adult life. And for what? What was the fucking point anymore when guys like Ritchie kept dying day after day after day without any sign of it stopping?

He walked on, clearing his mind on the way to the river. Dan was waiting for him at the entrance to the jobsite, nodded at him. “Hey, man.” He looked rougher than usual, flannel shirt and jeans dirty and torn in places, a bruise under one eye and his beard in serious need of a trim. “Got anything extra to eat?”

“Sorry.” Dan had served in the Army before landing on hard times and had been on and off the streets for a few months now. He wasn’t a drug addict as far as TJ knew, but he’d been hitting the bottle pretty hard lately. Based on what TJ had witnessed during his time out here, it probably wouldn’t be long before Dan went for something harder to numb himself. And then only a matter of more time before he became another Ritchie. “You good?”

Dan touched the bruise under his eye and grunted. “Yeah, some stupid motherfucker thought he’d try and mug me last night. He got my phone and a couple twenties I had.”

They walked into the site together, collected hard hats, vests, and work gloves from the foreman’s trailer before punching in for the day. They both had ten hours of manual labor ahead of them before clocking out.

TJ didn’t mind. Most days he looked forward to the mindless work and the physical exertion that let him drop into a dreamless sleep later.

“Hey, you’re comin’ to the protests this weekend, right?” Dan asked.

TJ shook his head and tugged his gloves on. He’d seen all the security barricades going up around the big conference center downtown. Some elitist global political movers and shakers were coming to town to sit around and congratulate themselves for being better and richer than everyone else while deciding how the world should be run, and people here were pissed as hell about it. “Gonna pick up an extra shift or two if I can.”

Dan shot him an accusing look. “Come on, man. Those fucking rich hypocrites are all gonna be here. Liars and criminals who cover each other’s asses, every last fucking one of ’em. These out-of-touch assholes run the country, send people like us off to fight in shitholes around the world while they live the high life on the backs of the taxpayers they send overseas to die, then forget we exist when we come home, and leave us on the streets like trash. You seriously gonna sit back and let ’em get away with what they’ve done to us?”

He shrugged. Protesting wouldn’t do jack shit to change anything. The rich would just keep getting richer, and the poor would just keep getting poorer, flooding these streets with human misery. “Not my fight.” His fight was different and more specific. Although lately, it was getting harder and harder to remember exactly what he was fighting for anymore.

Dan shook his head in disgust. “The fuck it’s not. We need all hands on deck.” Seeing TJ wasn’t going to budge, he sighed. “Whatever, just think about it. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

TJ didn’t answer as he headed for his workstation for the day. No way he was getting involved in that shitshow. A blind man could see it was a powder keg waiting to go off.

He didn’t want to be anywhere near the city center when the spark was lit.