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    The Finisher Series: Job
    The Finisher Series: Job
    The Finisher Series: Job
    Ebook180 pages2 hours

    The Finisher Series: Job

    By Bert Marshall

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    Ever since I can remember, folks called me Dickey. Word is it was after the famous guitar player Dickey Betts. Never mind that my name is Harold James Parker and I look nothing like the man. It all started when I was 8 and got a kid’s plastic guitar. Supposedly I was spotted trying to trade licks with the axe man on You Tube. Someone said I was a natural, just like Dickey and that stuck on me whether I liked it or not.

    I was a clumsy enough kid but put a guitar in my hand and I could flat play slide like Warren Haynes, Sonny Landreth, or even Derek Trucks; at least that is what everyone said. I never believed it. I had a couple other passions that I later took on after I busted a tendon in my left hand bailing hay on my Uncle Elmore’s farm near Liberty, Texas.

    To say my guitar playing suffered because of the injury would be an understatement, as I simply could not get my finger placement on the frets. I was 14 years old and it was the summer between 8th and 9th grade. I would have been lost without Uncle Elmore’s support. He had been in the United States Marine Corps and limped from being shot in the right thigh during the invasion of Iraq. He loved guns and taught me to hunt and shoot and how to harvest an animal, fish, or bird for sustenance.

    He also taught me to grapple to help strengthen my messed up left hand. He never talked much about the war or how he earned his 3rd degree black belt in Small Circle jujitsu. Dad and Mom were more than happy to let me stay on his farm, as we never had much of nothing. Dad drank a lot, if I remember correctly – as he was never home. Mom had a boyfriend and he and I didn’t see anything in common other than we both wanted momma to ourselves. I lost out. I didn’t even realize this until I was in boot camp, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

    The Finisher Series is book sixteen, titled Job and features reoccurring characters along with a bevy of bad guys and gals and adult situations. Dickey lives in the violent underbelly of society and will take you along with him, if you dare to follow.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBert Marshall
    Release dateMar 6, 2019
    ISBN9780463211489
    The Finisher Series: Job
    Author

    Bert Marshall

    Bert Marshall lives in Baytown, Texas and is a Baytown Sun Columnist, Blogger, martial artist, geocacher, PC repair specialist, Jeeper, hiker, indoor cycling instructor, past Texas State Emergency Care Attendant, Hunter education instructor, and a USAF Vietnam Veteran with two tours (651 days in-country).

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      Book preview

      The Finisher Series - Bert Marshall

      The Finisher Series - Job

      By Bert Marshall

      Published by Bert Marshall at Smashwords

      Copyright 2019 Bert Marshall

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. 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 Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Ever since I can remember, folks called me Dickey. Word is it was after the famous guitar player Dickey Betts. Never mind that my name is Harold James Parker and I look nothing like the man. It all started when I was eight and got a kid’s Rock Star plastic guitar. Supposedly I was spotted trying to trade licks with the axe man on MTV. Someone said I was a natural, just like Dickey and that stuck on me whether I liked it or not.

      I was a clumsy enough kid but put a guitar in my hand and I could flat play slide like Warren Haynes, Sonny Landreth, or even Derek Trucks; at least that is what everyone said. I never believed it. I had a couple other passions that I later took on after I busted a tendon in my left hand bailing hay on my Uncle Elmore’s farm near Liberty, Texas.

      To say my guitar playing suffered because of the injury would be an understatement, as I simply could not get my finger placement on the frets. I was fourteen years old and it was the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I would have been lost without Uncle Elmore’s support. He had been in the United States Marine Corps and limped from being shot in the right thigh during the defense of one our embassies, but I can’t remember which. He loved guns and taught me to hunt and shoot and how to harvest an animal, fish, or bird for sustenance.

      He also taught me to grapple to help strengthen my messed up left hand. He never talked much about the war or how he earned his third degree black belt in Small Circle Jujitsu. Dad and Mom were more than happy to let me stay on his farm, as we never had much of nothing. Dad drank a lot, if I remember correctly – as he was never home. Mom had a boyfriend and he and I didn’t see anything in common other than we both wanted momma to ourselves. I lost out. I didn’t even realize this until I was in boot camp, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

      Sure I was clumsy, but constant martial arts practice and Uncle Elmore was very diligent to hold me to it plus hard farm work changed me both physically and mentally. Uncle Elmore’s leg kept him from doing a lot of physical things, but he had me and I was more than happy to do the hard work. Between chores in the early morning, then school and afterward more chores, I pretty much only had spare time for martial arts training and shooting guns. Of course when deer season started, we were hunting every spare minute and then there was fishing and all.

      My uncle knew a lot of veterans and fairly often we’d have some kind of gathering of his buddies. Out of this came a few things I really looked forward to. The first was beer. I didn’t drink it, but the men and their wives and girlfriends did. A big poker game would begin and it would last into the early hours before folks either crashed here for the night, or drove home. What I liked about beer was some of the men would want to show me martial arts techniques they used to actually kill people overseas. Some of it I had been taught, but a whole lot of other techniques now began to make sense. This is the beauty of beer. These normally secretive and reclusive men, in the right atmosphere would open up and I hate to say it, but they would act, well, normal. Yeah, normal. Nothing of this type of warrior mindset is normal. They are secretive and aloof ninety-nine per cent of their civilian lives, but under all of that is a dangerous pressure-cooker mentality that hopefully remains hidden. Most would be considered a threat to society if they ever went rogue.

      Uncle Elmore would always quiz me when I would best him while we were rolling. I’d confess who taught me what and then he would tell me their service history. Green Berets, Delta, Force Recon and on and on and on. Years later I was looking through his stuff and saw he had been awarded the Silver Star and was indeed a Force Recon Master Gunnery Sergeant who gave his country twenty-one years. He had been quietly retired due to his left leg being drilled by an AK-47 bullet in a mysterious place I never heard of - Somalia.

      The farm was one hundred and eighty acres and maybe ten of those acres were swamp. This is where we ran our catfish lines and when we were fishing, it would take me two hours every evening to harvest and clean these three to five pound channel cats. Uncle Elmore was big on cleaning, as it didn’t require him to be mobile and he had two big chest freezers I kept stocked with ducks, deer, squirrels, rabbits, and best of all fresh catfish.

      The second aspect of beer at these parties was fairly often there would be some hanky-panky going on outside and this led to my first experience with a woman – a married woman and Asian at that. Her name was Leilana Crenshaw and her hubby was an ex-Special Forces sergeant name Hank and a nicer guy I’ve never met. I guess I was fifteen the first time I saw her. I later learned she was Laotian and a nurse and had fallen in love with Hank when she was working at the VA hospital in Houston. He is missing both legs and one eye and wears a black patch making him look like a pirate.

      He was wounded in Iraq by an IED and everyone around him was killed. You would never know he was without all of his body by his attitude though and he told the funniest jokes. She was drop-dead attractive to me and I felt like amongst all these warriors I was probably viewed by her as a child. I was five-five and only two inches shorter than her and other than her husband, the shortest guy at the party.

      Being a nurse, she didn’t engage in the normal conversations or the poker game and by maybe 9pm, I found myself alone with her when she joined me on the back porch. Being socially awkward around girls she quickly picked up on my innocence and shortly before midnight on top of a bale of hay in the barn, she made me a man. Afterward, she gave me my first real French kiss and left me sitting on a bucket.

      I felt light in the head and giddy and I knew if I went inside the house there was no way I could hide my grin. After a respectable amount of time, I made my way to my room, took a shower and fell asleep listening to the men laugh as they drank beer and played cards.

      Maybe her husband knew and maybe he didn’t, but over the course of the next three parties, Leilana would be the perfect loving caregiver to her paraplegic husband and before the night was over; she would give herself to me. It was about this time that my body really began to change. To be honest, I was in love with her and she remained my only relationship I had with the opposite sex. Years later I realized the Asian woman was desperate to feel a man’s touch and I provided it for her, nothing more.

      What started as sex for me, turned to just another broken relationship when my Uncle told me Hank Crenshaw had killed himself. Leilana no longer came to the farm.

      By the eleventh grade, I began to grow and grow and grow until Uncle Elmore had to look up to see my face. I was bean pole thin and maybe one hundred and seventy pounds on my six-five inch frame. The coaches wanted me to play sports, but I couldn’t leave my Uncle’s farm and I would never forsake him.

      I took over the duty of driving and soon his Dodge Pick-up was like my own and when he needed to go to the VA, I took him, even if it meant missing school. That was something Uncle Elmore always hated because he put so much stock on education. So much so, that only one person of the two hundred and twelve graduating students had a higher GPA than me and only by one point.

      My entire existence by the time I turned eighteen did not involve a relationship with the opposite sex other than those four times with Leilana and graduation night I saw her in the audience. My heart leapt in my wide chest and she smiled at me as I walked across the stage. She was lost in the crowd of well-wishers and I never connected with her. I didn’t even know where to begin. She was there and then she wasn’t and as Uncle Elmore and I drove home, I confessed.

      My mentor laughed for five solid minutes until I was laughing too. Son tonight is your night. I watched as he dialed a number and then began to speak very softly. I loved when my Uncle called me son because in my mind, he was my real dad. Even though I do almost all of the driving, he could handle the truck just fine and directed me into town to a house on Seventh Street. I remember this night like it just happened and to say this woman schooled me, would be an understatement.

      It was Leilana.

      I was pre-enlisted in the army and would be leaving in one week and this was my parting gift from the two of them and later understood it was preplanned. Other than doing the chores at the farm, I spent the next six nights in the arms of my lover, thinking she was the one for me.

      I reckon I wrote her at least a dozen letters before it became apparent that she would not be answering. It was my first real experience of breaking off a relationship and with the skills and experience I learned in the army, I became very adept at closing the door on friends who died, and women I’ve slept with.

      I had no idea that in twelve years the US Army would not allow me to continue because I had what was determined to be a dissociative disorder. Sitting in my Baytown apartment, I read the VA psychologist’s recommendation for the tenth time, as he defined my current condition.

      Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder: This condition is characterized by consistent, ongoing, or episodic emotional and experiential detachment from events in a person’s life. People who struggle with this disorder describe the sensation as watching their feelings, thoughts, and actions from outside themselves, as though watching a movie. Other people describe the experience as feeling like they were in a foggy, dreamlike state and that the world around them was not real.

      I think it’s a bunch of horse shit. I know who I am. I knew what I was doing when I killed that Afghani family two years ago. Every fight, skirmish, or confrontation I’ve been involved in was not something I didn’t understand at the time. I gave my country almost twelve years in the prime of my life and my country stuck it to me big time in appreciation.

      I have to be honest with myself and what this doctor told me is true – I know it is and my warrior brothers have described my behavior in a firefight to back it up. They call me a maniac and a war monger and I’ve been told I get a wild look on my face. Maybe that’s why I have three Purple Heart medals and should have died at least twice.

      Once I cleared basic training, I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for twenty weeks to become a 31B or a military policeman. It turned out I had a real aptitude for the crime scene investigation portion and according to my instructor, the highest score any recruit had ever scored. This singled me out and upon graduation; I was whisked off to Ranger School. I had no idea I was being targeted for a clandestine CIA program and would end up at Guantanamo Bay a year later as my first assignment working with military intelligence.

      After Ranger School, I went to sniper school at Fort Benning and was promoted to E-5 or sergeant and the post commander was pissed that a 31B was being crammed down her throat by the powers that be and a fucking country boy at that. She did everything short of having me drowned to get me to stop and quit, but I was raised on a farm and early on I could see her problem wasn’t with me or my MOS, but with authority trampling on her school.

      The CIA wanted a super soldier; one who could think and fight like the enemy and have the enemy’s skills, so back I go to Fort Leonard Wood to earn the Sapper tab of a bomb maker destroyer and I took to it like I did everything else finishing second in my class. My last school before being assigned to Cuba was to Monterey, California to Defense Language Institute to learn Arabic. Here I had been in the army for nineteen months and I was a staff sergeant and had never seen combat. I was four months shy of twenty years old and two days before I shipped out for leave, I got laid by one of the female soldiers in my class.

      She was married and being only the second woman I had slept with, I immediately fell in love. She was Jewish and ripe for my picking and she gave me everything she would give her husband, except it was a two times in one night thing and again, my heart was broken when that was that without repeat. Look, I was the shy type and I didn’t talk much around women, who I find mysterious and perplexing for the most part. When I interact with females, everything is normal, but if they take their clothes off, I am a bumble fuzzle. Once they get me going, I guess I do alright, but it’s the first part where I have to have conversation that stumps me.

      My wake-up call to war and its ugliness came after I witnessed an Afghani captain torture a known terrorist. I was allowed to sit in as a witness and it horrified me to put it bluntly. I’ve always been compassionate to suffering and empathetic toward any animal in pain.

      I became hardened to it after seeing it done about fifty times and frankly, knowing what these IED-making monsters did made me very hard in certain spots of my heart. In my year there, I never witnessed an American torture anyone. I saw plenty of Syrians, Pakistani’s, Afghani’s, Iraqi’s and others be subjected to hellish hours of no sleep or blaring death metal music for days on end. I decided right then that I would rather die than be subjected to such.

      If I only knew that my time would come I think I would have got out of the army after my first hitch and just became a cop.

      My role was getting inside their heads and I always wore a flat black mask and remained silent during the interrogations. When my CIA superiors believed the prisoner was at the breaking point, they would turn off the lights and when they came back on, I would be sitting in the room with them, silent as always. At my feet would be a three-quarters inch thick by three foot long length of rusty rebar.

      At first I was very uncomfortable, but my silent presence and the unsure aspect of what would come next would immediately cause ninety per cent to give up anything they knew and they would scream and whimper and again and again I would distance myself mentally until I just didn’t give a fuck if I had to use the rebar on them myself. They are the enemies

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