3 A.M.

By Bruce Linkov

Blake is an adept Lead Programmer at work. But at home, his wife Deirdre is only interested in getting away from her blue collar roots. She splurges on fancy cars, bigger homes, and country club memberships— landing them in debt. When she divorces him, Blake has to figure out how to climb the mountain of debt left over. Desperate, he makes a snap decision to steal a diamond necklace.

The stress of the theft and trying to keep up with his day job is killing Blake. When he meets someone who offers him a chance to perform a Bitcoin heist, which would solve all of his problems, the offer is too good to refuse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098316235

Book preview

© Bruce Linkov 2020

ISBN: 978-1-09831-622-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09831-623-5

All right

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reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

To Teri

You are my world

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 1

Blake opened his eyes and stared at the alarm clock. Right on time, 3 a.m. as always. He closed his eyes and started counting his breaths, an attempt at meditation. Still wide awake at 100 he gave up.

He looked around and remembered he was in the guest room. It had been a week. He still wasn’t used to waking up here instead of the master bedroom.

He passed the master where Deirdre was fast asleep. He wanted to smash in the door and scream at her. Screaming hadn’t helped a week ago when they had it out. It got ugly very fast. Not surprising, it was way overdue. He went to the basement and parked himself in the old recliner from his bachelor days.

He fell into his nightly routine. Picked up the yellow legal pad and starting making lists. His salary and stock options (years away from vesting, unfortunately) and then the bills, loans and debts. Nothing changed but it was therapeutic. It helped avoid doing this mental math at work. Bottom line: things were past the tipping point. He couldn’t even cover the minimum amount owed each month and have any cash left for monthly expenses. The credit cards were maxed out. His credit rating was almost zero. Bankruptcy was coming up fast. Trying to keep ahead of Deirdre’s spending had become overwhelming. Trying to get Deirdre to understand the situation was impossible.

Over the last year there had been more and more skirmishes about her spending. Each one escalating in anger and volume, but nothing changed. The breaking point came after she opened a line of credit with an outrageous interest rate. Forging his signature, she had taken out the maximum cash advances allowed. He should have done something sooner. Placating her was always easier than confrontation. Blake paced as he waited for her to come home that night. When she walked in, he pounced on her screaming, Did you think I wouldn’t find out about this as he waved the new bills at her face. Bet you thought you could just slip this past me? Hope you have a plan to pay this because I sure can’t!

Deirdre walked past him and put her packages down in the kitchen, turned around and yelled back. How do you expect me to live this way! It’s not my problem that you make such a lousy paycheck! Why don’t you go out and get better job or a second job? This is your problem, not mine!

Blake wondered how his salary of close to $200,000 could possibly be considered lousy.

From there it escalated until they were both screaming and neither was listening. Deirdre picked up a candy bowl and threw it at Blake. He ducked as it hit the wall and broke into pieces. There was nothing more to say as they glared at each other.

Blake spoke first. He told her that he’d placed a total freeze on his credit. She was now locked out of all the accounts.

Deirdre reached her limit. I’m filing for divorce! I’ve had it with putting up with you, you’re pathetic. To think I wasted five years of my life with you.

She stomped her way upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. For Blake it was almost anticlimactic. He knew for months that he should have put the brakes on hard. His inaction let it get much worse.

Since the blow up they had barely talked. He decamped to the guest room and would have moved out of the house in a heartbeat, but he couldn’t afford the rent on a separate place to live.

After the fight, Blake called Steve Waring, a casual acquaintance from the country club who just went through a divorce. He got the name of the attorney Steve had used, Jack Stiler. It took a couple of weeks to get an appointment. When they met, Blake asked every question he could think of. Jack explained that an uncontested split was not only common but not that complex especially where there were no children involved. Jack told Blake he would be in touch once he had put all the information together and they were ready for court.

Blake put the crude financial summary aside and relaxed in the old recliner. His life felt like that movie Groundhogs Day where Bill Murray relived the same day over and over. Blake worked, came home, worried about the bills, slept a little and went back to work.

He finally drifted off to sleep around 4:30 a.m.

In the morning, Blake found Deirdre sitting at the kitchen island with her iPad in front of her like a fortress.

Deirdre tore herself away from the screen and gave him an ambivalent look. She barely acknowledged him and went back to her iPad. He sat at the other end of the island while he drank coffee. The court date couldn’t come soon enough to please either of them.

Blake got ready for work. When he came down, Deirdre had left but she had sent him a text message. It read the party at Mark and Cindy’s - Saturday. I’m attending and can make an excuse for you if you want. Let me know. He was tempted to blow it off but figured why not. Pretty soon they would get their court date and no longer be on anyones invite list. They were all her friends anyway. He knew he would never see any of them again and that was fine with him. Since the move to Westport he had not really met anyone he could consider as a personal friend.

He texted back. He’d be there and offered to drive. She responded that she would accept the ride to keep up appearances. She requested that he not talk about the pending divorce. They were her friends and she would tell them when it was appropriate. He texted back Okay and then drove to work.

He spent his day trying to stay focused on his project and push Deirdre and finances out of his mind. His work at C7 was what kept him sane. The project was a sophisticated app called Rampart. Physicians entered the issues that a patient presented. Using artificial intelligence and connectivity to various medical reference sources it would offer a diagnosis and recommend treatment. Blake’s team was building the millions of lines of code needed. Recently they had passed a major milestone where the system had gone live. While some parts still needed to be built out, the primary tool for diagnosis was already undergoing user acceptance testing. UAT was the process where you tried out the software and determined what worked and what had issues to be addressed before it was fully functional. Years of work had gone into the project and Blake couldn’t wait to see it brought to market.

Driving home, he put the top down. It was early April and still a little chilly. The fresh air felt amazing.

C7 was his second full time job after college. Initially he had done contract programming work when he couldn’t find a full-time position. His first full time job was at Vemex in Stratford. He was assigned to work on a diagnostic tool that would give an early warning of a potential stroke. After a few years there, he got a call from a headhunter about the position at C7.

Blake had heard of them but didn’t know much about the company. He did some research before the interview to sound knowledgeable. From what he read; they were involved with a cutting-edge medical diagnostic project. He was very intrigued after reading up on them. They had him sign a confidential disclosure agreement before the interview. After discussing his background, the interviewer gave him a high-level glimpse at Rampart. Blake was blown away. It was light years ahead of anything being done in the area of medical diagnostics. Half way through the interview Blake was ready to ask, where can I sign up? before he was even offered a position.

The salary was a significant increase from Vemex. They also told him he would be supervising the coding group. Moving up to a management position at twenty-seven was something he didn’t expect to happen for years. People management experience was a must if you ever hoped to move up in any company.

The five years at C7 had flown by. The project demands and managing the team challenged him like nothing he had ever done before.

While the job had become so gratifying, life with Deirdre had gone in the opposite direction.

Chapter 2

Deirdre drove to the country club. The less time with Blake, the better. She knew the final break had been building up for months. His constant haranguing about the bills had made her furious. Does he expect me to live on $20 a week! She had told him that he needed to do better than just work for someone else, that he should have gone out on his own but he kept telling her that was not possible. She didn’t buy his excuse that he couldn’t go out on his own without getting investors. Her friends at the club all talked about husbands or friends that started their own businesses and were super wealthy. She felt that Blake was too afraid to make his own mark. She took pride in the house and the network of friends she had developed. He was not doing his part as far as she was concerned. If I left it to Blake, we’d still be in that tiny split level in Trumball. The move to the big colonial in Westport had been her idea and she knew it was the right move yet she had to badger Blake into agreeing. The divorce would mean having to sell the house and she was unsure of where she would live after that. She assumed her attorney would make Blake pay for something decent. In her mind, the entire situation was due to his failings, not her spending. Her beautiful life was being destroyed by his incompetence.

Now she would finally be done with him. She had grown up poor with a single mom who was in and out of work and in and out of rehab. Deirdre had started working during high school and no one at school encouraged her to try for college. Her guidance counselor wrote her off as blue collar immediately. After graduation she found a job as a dispatcher at a trucking company and made do. She was always thinking about how to break out of her meager existence and move up to a better life. Working for just above minimum wage, living in an apartment she shared with a couple of other women and staying in Bridgeport was never what she had envisioned for herself. She would drive over to Westport on her day off and window shop and dream of living in one of the palatial homes there. Westport was the next town over from Bridgeport but it might as well have been on another planet. She made marrying well her main motivation. She didn’t need a college degree, just an MRS – meet rich spouse.

When she met Seth Harris, she saw a chance at the life she wanted. She was at a wedding of a friend when they were introduced. Ambitious, aggressive and so gorgeous. That year with him had been a roller coaster ride. He was always pursuing some new opportunity. He would be on top of the world one week, broke the next with Deirdre picking up the tab. She made the painful decision to let Seth go after she met Blake. While Blake offered a more orderly life, he was not quite the big earner she had hoped for. Nowhere near as gregarious and charismatic as Seth. Blake was dependable but plain. Seth had been so upset when she told him goodbye. She wondered what had become of him, did he ever hit it big?

Chapter 3

Blake came home on time knowing that Deirdre would probably be out. He changed into jeans, tee shirt and sneakers, ate his to-go dinner from the diner while he looked at e-mail from work. First, he looked at the bank statement and account balances to see if Deirdre had done any additional damage that day. Must have been a quiet day, not much in the way of new charges. He had allowed her to use one credit card that was not totally maxed out. Then he glanced at some websites to see the latest news (all bad). Taking advantage of the peace and quiet, he put on TV and flipped channels for a couple of hours. Deirdre came home around 11 and went directly to the master bedroom without saying a word.

Blake went to bed about an hour later but really couldn’t find a spot for himself. Back down in the basement he parked himself in the recliner. He started to review the finances again, but he just couldn’t keep repeating the same bad news over and over. He put the pad aside, plugged in his headphones and listened to some classic rock on his phone. Eagles were good but too sad. He switched to a channel with Santana. The Latin beat perked him up and improved his mood.

Why didn’t I see this train wreck coming sooner? He remembered meeting Deirdre at that noisy dive bar in Black Rock. He had tickets for a Journey concert at the arena in Bridgeport. A guy from work who was supposed to join him and pay for the second ticket was a no-show. Deirdre sat alone at the bar.

A big head of wavy black hair, green eyes, about 5 foot 6, wearing a tight-fitting short leather skirt, tall boots and a fiery red blouse. She had a gorgeous face and a figure right out of the swim suit edition of Sports Illustrated. Every guy in the place was either looking at her or trying to hit on her but no one was getting anywhere.

He didn’t think he had a shot. He didn’t know any clever pickup lines. While he always felt he had decent looks, he remembered one girl he had briefly dated in college. When she dumped him, she made a comment about him being just average. Just under 6-feet, brown hair and a friendly, casual demeanor, he didn’t think he could compete with the muscle-bound jocks and rich frat boys hanging around the bar.

Maybe it was the liquid courage of his fourth drink that propelled him to say hello to her. He made a joke about the last guy that hit on her being the first in that family to walk upright. That got Deirdre laughing and she said, You can stick around.

They had a couple of drinks and he asked if she was going to the concert. Deirdre told him she didn’t have a ticket and was just going to hang at the bar for the night. He asked her to join him and she wanted to know if he was stood up by his date.

He laughed and said no, a buddy at work asked me to pick up an extra and was supposed to meet me, but his loss, my gain.

She said Sure, that would be fun as she checked him out.

They talked for a while. He found out she was a dispatcher at a trucking company. She asked about him and he said he was in the tech industry and kept it brief. He remembered that during the time they were initially talking, she was always glancing around the room checking out the guys. When he told her about his job at Vemex in a little more detail, her interest perked up. She started paying more attention to him. As he thought about that night, he realized he should have picked up on her cues back then. It wasn’t him; it was the job. She wasn’t going to waste her time on some guy working at Best Buy. Her comments about wanting to move up and away from Bridgeport didn’t register. He was too blinded by her looks to put the pieces together.

The show was fantastic. The band played all their hits. Deirdre was uninhibited, dancing in the aisle, standing on her seat and singing along. She let out a piercing whistle after their final encore. Blake had never met anyone so free spirited.

They slowly made their way out of the arena after the last encore. She was singing as they drove back to retrieve her car. After getting her phone number and address and feeling confident, he didn’t bother with any of the dating rules. He just told her he would pick her up for dinner at 7 p.m. tomorrow.

She said Okay, goodnight and drove away.

He sat in the car for a few minutes thinking, Did that really happen? Did I just pick up the most gorgeous woman I have ever seen? Wow!

They spent every moment outside of work together. He learned about her life and he told