Darkstar: Chapter One, part four.

2330 hours.
“Quiet one so far.”
Bill Masen smirked as he heard Wallace moan. He’d known this was coming for the last half hour, to be honest he was a little grateful for the distraction it was about to cause. The other two bouncers on the door, Saleh and Kircher both looked away, knowing what was about to happen.
Masen looked down, removing his Marlboro cigarettes from his jacket pocket and lighting one. Two left, ****. He still had three and a half hours to go and he was on his third last cigarette. “Steve, how long have you worked here?”
Wallace realised his mistake almost immediately but it was two late. “Eight months.”
“That’s right, eight months. You’ve been on this shift all that time, right?”
“Give it a rest asshole.” Wallace was pissed now.
“Just answer the ****ing question moron.”
“Yeah, I have. And no, we’ve never been busy on Tuesday nights.”
Saleh and Kircher were both openly laughing. “Good starter Steve.” Kircher commented, before turning to the fourth member of the group. “Ali, what you made tonight?”
It was common knowledge that the door staff at Club 61 wouldn’t report any drugs that they confiscated off potential customers. Instead, they often hung onto them and sold them themselves. Masen knew that the other three were in on it, and that they could make an average of three hundred dollars extra each on a busy shift. He’d seen them take more on occasion.
“Barely fifty.” Saleh, a Saudi immigrant who had worked at Club 61 for almost two years responded, visibly irritated by the lack of extra cash.
Masen didn’t really care much about the sideline business that they had running, he kept out of it. He’d spent five years as a cop; he couldn’t quite bring himself down to that level. He’d sometimes sample a bit of the merchandise, hell they all would. But selling it was different for him. Something good had to have come out of that time in his life.
Wallace was right it was pretty quiet, even for a Tuesday. The other guys on the door were all pretty decent, but still not the kind of people you’d want to spend six hours with day after day. He was bored of this job.
And if he left now this would be the seventh job he’d of left over the past eighteen months. Nothing had been able to tie him down since that horrible night, he just couldn’t stay focused. He’d tried labouring, bar work, security work, had spent a month or two putting together cell phones in a factory out of state. He just kept getting bored. And now the same thing had happened at the most exclusive and corrupt nightclub in California.
Saleh was bleating on about something again but he wasn’t really listening anymore. His mind was wandering again, as it had been so often the past two years. That bastard sure had changed things, whoever he was.
Masen had met Carmen Ramirez during his second year studying law at UCLA; he’d been dating a friend of hers. His roommate and best friend Scott Hardy had made Masen and his then Girlfriend, Lisa Tomwell to go to a house party in Lennox. Scott had just come out of a long term relationship and Masen persuaded Lisa to bring a friend along for him. Problem was, over the next few weeks that friend, Carmen had hit it off more with Masen than Hardy and it wasn’t long before he drifted apart from Lisa and started dating Carmen. They were married by the end of their final year.
Masen was all set for law school – problem was that it was 1990 and his Senator father, Nicholas Masen III had started thinking about a shot at the White House in 1992 or 1996. A popular democrat with a strong work ethic in public, he had an image to protect. Sure, he’d fund Law School, but only at nights. The PR machine thought it would be a fantastic idea if Bill were to train with the LAPD. It turned out that Bill did pass law school and the bar, but not before his father lost re – election in 1992 after it was revealed he was sleeping with one of his staff. It caused a lot of family friction, the Senators eldest son and deputy Chief of Staff Nick Masen IV went insane as he saw his ambition disappear, washed away by his fathers misdeeds. He drove his car into the Potomac two weeks after the electoral defeat. It was then that Masen had decided that the twin family businesses of Law and Politics weren’t for him, despite the successes his younger brother and sister were having. The LAPD became less of a way to fund law school and more of a career.
And that’s how it had gone, with his being fast tracked to Detective in 1994 (they liked the look of his Law Licence) and Carmen’s steady job as a receptionist at the DA’s office. All enough to get them a comfortable lifestyle and a nice house in a safe neighbourhood to raise Joey, their infant son born in 1995. A happy family unit, all shattered that 4th of July when someone had taken a lump of C4 and attached it to the boiler. He should have been inside with them, hell he was supposed to be inside changing the baby when it happened. It should have been him.