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    Lucky Leprechaun
    Lucky Leprechaun
    Lucky Leprechaun
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Lucky Leprechaun

    By CJ Hawk

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    About this ebook

    Light hearty funny mystery with quirky characters and laughable discretions. Chick Lit General Audience meets Funny Mystery.
    Lucky leprechaun charm my bootie patootie. This year had been a bomb and not in the sense that someone farted in the room. I am talking nuclear destruction to my life. Last year, about this time a man at a bar gave me this metal lucky charm of a leprechaun and told me it would bring me luck.
    Well if luck is wrecking your uninsured car, losing your job, not a single date all year and canceled credit cards then I am one lucky lady.
    My first clue should have been a strange man in a bar giving me a lucky charm. My second clue was that he was drunker than a skunk and I was two sheets with him.
    Sometimes luck gets turned around, so what does a gal have to do in this town to get it back? Fired from her secret government job seemed like the tip of the iceberg in her streak of bad luck. However that was nothing compared to the business of leprechauns, frozen bank accounts, credit cards, and having to drive an eighties green Gremlin car around town.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCJ Hawk
    Release dateMar 6, 2011
    ISBN9781458125422
    Lucky Leprechaun
    Author

    CJ Hawk

    I am an independently published author that finds scraps of time to write with intentions to escape the perils of a working life while owning and operating three small businesses with my husband, raising teen boys, sixteen paws (yes four shelter dogs) and a tank full of fish that keep multiplying on their own every time we look for baby fish – free fish anyone? For all of the chaos, testing of mental fortitude, strength and intuition I have endured, I have a lot to be thankful for.Recent years have put my dedication to writing time on the back burner. There were a few major surgeries within my immediate household, to then have major changes in life in general. As of 2015, I lost my mother to the final battle of Ovarian Cancer. She was a strong independent woman that I loved deeply but often saw things quite a bit differently, yet only a mother knows, you love your child no matter what - and that love will always find a way.Between our business, teens, my mother’s cancer battle and life, I have found a renewed sense of what makes me content when the tides are trying to drown me... and that is to be creative in any whimsical way that nudges me. I am back to writing full force when time allows, painting, gardening, taking pictures, knitting or my all-time favorite thing that helped me morn my loss, scrapbooking. All of these things are so very therapeutic and to be able to share with others, gives me joy.I hope you like my books, not perfect as they could be; but life is not perfect and is meant to be enjoyed nonetheless. – CJ Hawk

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      Book preview

      Lucky Leprechaun - CJ Hawk

      Lucky Leprechaun

      Chick Lit. Mystery General Audience

      Published by Smashwords and Copyright 2012 CJ Hawk

      Discover other titles by CJ Hawk at hhtp://www.cjhawk.com

      https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cjhawk

      This is a revised edition of a previously published book in 2011. This version contains added content. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and strictly fictional. All persons, places or incidences are creative endeavors of the author. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this independent author. Please keep in mind when converting to various ebook formats some typographical errors may occur. If this book is being used as a promotional book at the author's discretion, it may not be republished without the author's permission.

      This book is dedicated to the Irish women in my life.

      Synopsis

      Lucky leprechaun charm, my bootie patootie. This year had been a bomb and not in the sense that someone farted in the room. I am talking nuclear destruction in my life. Last year, about this time a man at a bar gave me this metal lucky charm of a leprechaun and told me it would bring me luck.

      Well, if luck is wrecking your uninsured car, losing your job, not a single date all year, and canceled credit cards, then I am one lucky lady.

      My first clue should have been a strange man in a bar giving me a lucky charm. My second clue was that he was drunker than a skunk, and I was two sheets with him.

      It was almost Saint Patrick's Day in a much warmer region of the United States, a place older people usually flock to escape the cold of winter. A place that, to me, was sunny and warm year round. Which would make just about anyone happy except, I would be alone again on my favorite Irish holiday. Alone, unless you counted the second of the 'two for one' beers in front of me. I already downed the first, long ago. The holiday wasn't too far off, but I was just alone now as I had been all year.

      It had been almost one year since last Saint Patrick's Day, and my luck was no closer to being lucky now, as it was then. In fact, it was worse. I am sitting at that very same bar, alone. I had just worked a long and lonely day in the backroom of the human resources department of our local government. I was the well-employed government personnel that found creative ways to say 'you're fired'. Allowing the government to get out of giving the employee severance and future benefits, which would save them boo-coo money. They stated almost proudly budget cuts and all, my ass. Money was still leaking out the port holes of their sinking ship. My upper management's income was ten times that of mine, and I was getting paid a measly portion. Those folks I was finding creative ways to fire, got paid measly portions as well.

      It was the new, bad economic, government way of eliminating high-paying jobs without severance, health care benefits and saving them major bucks. Then the government would only rehire someone in the same position for less pay as a contract employee. Yes, I was also in charge of coming up with creative job titles and job descriptions to those new contract positions. It was double duty I suppose, but I was gainfully employed and that was something, wasn't it?

      I worked alone in a dark backroom that looked like a storage closet. My job title was unidentified and my co-workers nonexistent. My boss, I had only met once electronically, he would only communicate with me through the e-mail or phone messages. All paperwork from my end was nonexistent, unless you account for the electronic paperwork created on my laptop that never left my office. There were no USB ports or a disk drive on my government issued computer so that I couldn't copy anything from it. To top it all off, I tried to electronically send files to myself. When I tried to email a file I was working on, to my home laptop computer, I got an error message and then went home to find out my laptop had been stolen.

      The government had done a great job of hiding who I was and what I did. I rather liked that it made me feel like a secret agent. In my eyes, if no one knew who was behind all this, I was not to blame. I could not feel guilty for something that did not really exist... right?

      That was until some other higher up, unknown secret agent shmuck fired me. He even copied several reasons out of my personal handbook of excuses. My passwords were revoked, my information on what I had done in the past and all my great excuses, locked from my existence.

      Somehow, at one thirty this afternoon the words, 'Katie McAllister, you are fired', bounced around in my head over and over as some strange man with an official government badge stood in my doorway of my office. Standing next to him were two security guards. They fired me on the basis that my job was no longer of service to the government. Then, what the heck was the new shmuck doing? Oh yeah. My job. I never saw that one coming to bite me in the ass.

      Where was all this leading? I had no clue. I knew one thing for sure. I needed a job, a car, better karma and while I was asking, a man would be nice too.

      Chapter One

      I'll take your two-fer special on tap. I held up two fingers to the bartender at my favorite haunt, Shamrock Pub and Grill. They had the best dang fried pickles and corn beef sandwiches.

      I caught my sad expression in the mirror that lined behind the bar with all the expensive alcohol. I knew those bottles well. My long dark-brown hair was due for a trim, and my green Irish eyes were not smiling. My makeup had all been washed off from the tears I shed as I walked out of the state building. My five foot six-inch stance had shrunken to that of the size of a bug. Squashed bug at that.

      The government people that worked at that building looked weird at me, as they had no idea who I was and why I was crying. I knew this. Because every day I came to work at five am before the regular workers were there and snuck out at one pm as most of them were just getting back from lunch. Like I had said, my job was supposed to be nonexistent. My office looked like a storage closet and was locked from the outside, with only a pass key card entry. It was also down a long hallway of a portion of the building no one ever went to but the janitors, and they were always gone before I go there in the morning. And to think I left a cushy cubical office, located at the south state's building. Those three fabric tweed walls never looked so good as they would now.

      The bartender set down my light amber beers in front of me, and I smiled at my reflection in the mirror. Bottom's up! I said gleefully to no one in particular. It was two in the afternoon, and the bar was pretty, darn empty. By five o'clock, this place will be packed with state government employees.

      Little did those fools know that as they were slowly being replaced one by one with cheaper labor in different positions, the government was increasing the amount of employees they were hiring. Making them look as if they were hiring, making their budgets look good, and I put them there. I helped them strategically fire random unknown employees across the board in various jobs from different shifts, to not raise any red flags. Looking back, I found it rather odd how I fell into this whole scheme. I was offered to design a new financial budget for the nonexistent department, under very hush-hush terms. My business and accounting degree got me into the Human Resources Special Division in the first place. My desire to achieve and design something sinister and work alone got me there in the second place. Not such a smart move.

      Yep, looking back, I created a lot of bad karma, bad luck, and bad mojo. My time had come.

      I mean it was not really my grand scheme. It was the governments. I just took it to the next level to keep any red flags from appearing. They, the secret higher ups, told me that this needed to take place under a whole cloak and dagger type of situation. That if I wanted the lofty bonus, I would follow X, then Y, then Z. So I did.

      I can't believe that I left my south office in the high tower of HR, to this. The two levels down in the basement of the capital. I received a map to my new office along with a pass card key. It was eerie at first, and then I kind of thought of it like a video game and went forward to win the prize. Not thinking about all the lives I was devastating.

      They gave me a pay bonus with each percentage of cost I saved them. It wasn't huge, more like a point zero, zero, five percent. Maybe add another zero in there. My guilt would never let my accounting brain quite figure it out. My idea was that they fire unknowns, usually disliked employees who held jobs at high enough pay, once they were fired; they would not be missed. Then, I would either reclassify their position and make it a contract employee job, or I would find a way to take half their pay, divide it into two new positions and classify them as temporary jobs. This way, no benefits had to be paid or severance when we fired them later.

      I was beginning to think I deserved the lucky year I had. First, my car was blindsided. I was insured, or so I thought. I had sent my check in the mail to my local insurance agent Mr. Big Time State Insurance Company and did not think twice. Luckily, I walked away with only a neck brace and a bottle of pain pills. The day after my accident, I get a call that my insurance had been canceled, right after a police officer showed up at my door to inform me that they reviewed the city cameras. I had run the red light, which caused the other poor person to blind side me.

      So I was not only uninsured, without a car, had a permanent head and neck ache while

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