Tough Money

By Rikki Fortune

Bridget Money has always dreamt of being a famed chef in her own fancy, cosmopolitan restaurant. But after a series of setbacks, she finds herself back in her hometown of Hideout Bay, where she conjures a plan to get back on her feet once and for all. She gets a job with the largest and most stable employer in town: the men’s state prison. She is hired as a Supervising Correctional Cook, but she won’t be hosting any highbrow parties behind bars. In fact, this place is for the worst of the worst of the California penal system. Bridget never expected to find love at her new job, but when she meets handsome C.O. Dade Louis, she can’t help but appreciate his good looks and charm. Between maintaining control over inmates and steering clear of corrupt prison employees, being strong isn’t just a job requirement—it’s the only thing keeping Bridget alive. Will she let Dade into her heart or will her tough exterior make her a prisoner of loneliness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483465319

Book preview

 Peace

1   Walk Like a Man

A Level Four prison houses the most dangerous inmates in the California penal system: murderers, rapists, repeat violent felons. Most inmates in a Level Four prison will never get out. Today, Bridget Money will walk into a Level Four mens’ prison for her first day at her new job as a Department of Corrections Supervising Correctional Cook.

All in the service of a dream.

From her dreams and hopes in culinary school, to the crush of losing her first business - a gourmet pastry cart on the wharf - she stands now, in front of her bedroom mirror, ready to take the first step toward rebuilding her dream.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the toughest of them all?

It’s me, she says to herself, looking herself in her mirror eye, it has to be me.

Dressing for her first day, she is scared. Excited and scared. She is about to find out just how tough she really is, inside and out. Trial by fire is coming her way. She puts on her new uniform: short sleeve khaki shirt, loose-fitting to downplay her figure, bearing a Department of Corrections emblem above the front pocket, and an embroidered banner with her new job title. The shirt is tucked into dark brown trousers, also loose. Her belt holds keyholders, an alarm case, a whistle, and clips with chits that she will trade for keys when she checks into Central Control. The chits are already engraved with her name: Money. The alarm will be her only defense against these killers who will be her crew.

Her shoes are black leather work shoes with non-slip soles. No makeup, perfume or jewelry. Nothing that shows individual expression, nothing that enhances her natural beauty. Her Department of Corrections ID hangs from a lanyard around her neck.

She pulls her long brunette curls away from her oval face, twists and folds them into a tight bun at the nape of her neck and pulls on her hat, a brown baseball-style cap with the same Department logos as on her shirt. Step back, take a good look at her new self.

I look like a Barbie in a boring brown uniform.

None of that matters. She has no choice but to pull this off.

If Bridget had to pick one word to describe her life so far, the word would be longing. She has spent her entire life in a state of longing.

When she was a little girl, she longed to escape her parents’ fights. She was too young to remember her father, Rhino, before he became a Correctional Officer, when he was the sweet and fun man her mother fell in love with. A man she never knew. The only Rhino she has ever known is someone she longs to escape. As a teenager, even after her parents divorced, she longed for the independence and autonomy of adulthood.

Longing breeds longing. Like all things, independence and autonomy come at a price, and for Bridget that price was hard work. Her mother didn’t have much money, and Bridget would rather starve in the gutter than ask Rhino for anything. And Rhino never offered.

She longed to fulfill her passion for cooking and creating in the kitchen, and thought that chef school would fulfill that longing. Chef school was hard work, cutthroat competitive, and the restaurant world after chef school was even more cutthroat. There she was, in San Francisco, working as a waitress to support herself and pay for the culinary academy, longing to be done with school so that she could fulfill the dream of her passion. But even before she graduated, she was already starting to learn the cold realities of the restaurant business, especially in a city like San Francisco, where the competition for restaurant dollars is off the charts. Where a popular restaurant can go under overnight, no matter how good the food. No matter how talented the chef. Her first job in a real restaurant kitchen was a disaster. Observing the kitchen as a waitress does not prepare one for actually working in it, no matter how smart you think you were in school. The executive chef at her first kitchen job was a locally renowned but nasty-tempered man who reduced Bridget to tears on her first day, and on day two fired her in front of the entire kitchen staff. It was the biggest shock of her life. Furious with herself, and determined to keep hold of her dream, she found another job at another restaurant, working for another tyrant, and then another, and another. Her culinary dream was in danger of becoming a nightmare.

What she really longed for was to open her own restaurant, something small, hip and intimate, where she could be creative and in control without the need for tyranny and drama. Bridget loved San Francisco, but the cost of supporting just herself was killing her and the cost of opening a restaurant of her own was so far out of reach that her only hope of achieving her dream was to win the lottery. A really big lottery. Saving money in a place like that was impossible and she had no collateral for the kind of loans it would take. The harder she worked, the farther her dreams slipped out of reach, and the more unhappy she became in her beautiful adopted city.

And then her mother died, killed by a texting driver. Bridget, already depressed, was devastated by the loss of her mother. As her mother’s sole heir, she returned to Hideout Bay to settle her estate and as soon as she got home, she wished she had never left.

Immediately, all of the stress of her city life fell off of her like chainmail dropping to the ground. She had no idea how heavy it was, how it weighed on her, how worn out she was, until it dropped. She inherited her mother’s house, a little bit of money, and she never went back to San Francisco. When the tears of her grief began to clear, she looked around at her hometown and saw it from a completely fresh perspective: a picturesque seaside hamlet, charmingly situated on a far-flung but breathtaking edge of the Northern California coast, with still enough of its fishing industry left to maintain that yesteryear charm for the tourists, and fire up Bridget’s culinary imagination. Fire up the passion that had taken a severe beating during her time in San Francisco.

She took a hard look at herself as well. Happy though she was to be back home, now there were two huge, gaping holes in her life: the hole of her elusive career ambitions, and the hole created by the loss of her beloved mother. Was it enough to blame her failings on the insanity of the restaurant business in a city like San Francisco? Probably not. Right alongside her longing for professional success was a longing for love, for comfort and companionship with someone who shares her passion. Longing breeds longing; at what point does longing become lonely? In the past, she has allowed herself to become distracted and confused by her longing for love, leading to disruptions that affected her work. Her so-called career. There were some humiliating lessons against mixing business with pleasure, from which she could only conclude that love and ambition do not mix.

There were also boatloads of mixed signals from Bridget herself. She longed for love, but in what form? Marriage? With the poor example of her parents’ marriage, she was pretty sure marriage was not what she wanted. She was much less clear on what she did want. Everlasting passionate love, isn’t that what everyone wants? Yet so many feel it should come with a binding legal document. But if the love is eternal, shouldn’t the legal document be a logical part of that?

She wanted more, she wanted less, and it drove her crazy. It drove crazy the men she tried to love, and the men who try to love her. The seesaw of emotions in a relationship made her feel off-balance in all aspects of her life and back home in Hideout Bay, grieving the death of her mother, this was another long, frank mirror-look that Bridget forced herself to take. The way she had let romantic relationships and the pursuit of romance interfere with her professional development made her feel like an immature schoolgirl. Needless to say, all of these relationships failed.

Her first love, Travis, graduated high school with no more ambition than to see the world, Deadhead style. Bridget loved Travis, everything about him was the polar opposite of Rhino and she was fooled into believing that this was enough to form a foundation for a lifetime of everlasting love. After high school, a lifetime was one year. Bridget and Travis waved a defiant goodbye to their families and their childhood lives and took off in a fifteen-year-old van, confident of their ability to get by on roadside sales of Travis’s handmade ceramic flutes and Bridget’s homebaked goodies. Some very hard lessons were quickly learned: the average roadside traveler has no need or want for a handmade ceramic flute.

Living in a van, Bridget had no place to bake anything to sell unless they could afford a motel room with a kitchenette, which happened exactly once. No one wanted to buy baked goods from a hippie on the side of a road, or in a parking lot, unless they contained marijuana. They were regularly searched by cops, who went through everything they had, looking for drugs, confiscated whatever baked goods they had and examined every one of Travis’s flutes for contraband, breaking as many as they pleased to make their point. Living in a van, Travis had no place to make more flutes and no money for supplies or kiln rent. When Bridget insisted that they pick a place to settle and get jobs, at least temporarily, until they could save a little money and regroup, Travis exploded and accused her of selling out and abandoning their dream. The only settled life, even temporary, that he was willing to consider was the life of a marijuana farmer.

Bridget had grown to hate hippie life anyway. Days without a shower, weeks - months without a real bed, never sure where the next meal and the next tank of gas would come from, the harassment from the authorities, the constant worry about and hustling for money, the uncertainty of it all. Travis clung to a belief that things would magically fall into place if they just stayed true to their dream, so Bridget let him have his dream all to himself and went home to her mother in Hideout Bay.

After the Travis fiasco, she enrolled in community college forty-five minutes from home and got a job as a waitress in a coffee shop near the campus. She focused on culinary arts classes, and an old passion was inflamed and stoked with a newfound love for the science of cooking, as well as the structure of her learning environment. She parlayed her coffee shop experience and her natural charm into a job at a white linen restaurant and made enough money to move into a small apartment with a couple of roommates while she finished her AA.

Between work and school, there wasn’t much time for dating during this period. Her roommates were also students who were more serious about studying than partying, but Bridget still found herself distracted here and there by men she thought were interesting. And they were, briefly. Like her, they were young and finding themselves and none clicked in the way that she craved.

After community college, she was accepted at a prestigious culinary academy in San Francisco. She loved working in restaurants and longed to develop her skills to the level of a real chef who could open her own restaurant. Chef school was grueling, brutally competitive, and the cost of living in San Francisco was astronomical. She and Carly, her best friend from college and now chef school, shared a studio apartment with four other girls, where they all slept on three sets of thrift store bunkbeds, none of them ever home long enough to do more than sleep and shower before running out to work and/or school.

It was a hard and discouraging life, but Bridget knew it was only temporary. As soon as she finished school, she could start to work as a chef, her star would rise and one day, she would have her own place. But she watched helplessly as the successful, trendy restaurants in which she and her friends worked closed, one after another, some with no more warning than a padlock on the door when they showed up for their shifts. One restaurant closes and two more take its place, so Bridget and her friends always found work, but it was a harsh and ongoing lesson on the fleeting success and lack of security in the restaurant business.

The hardest lesson of all came when she graduated chef school, feeling fired up and full of herself, and got her first kitchen job in a small but up-and-coming restaurant called Sarabande. Overnight, she went from being head of the class to being the lowest on the kitchen totem pole, where the wait staff and even the bussers got more respect than she did. And the pay was nothing like she hoped for, and needed in order to lift herself up. After being fired on the second day, she found another job at another place where she spent long, sweat-drenched shifts doing the most menial of prep tasks and being screamed at by the head chef. She sucked it up for six months, for the experience, then went to another restaurant, and another, each time gaining one more notch on her resume, each time getting a slightly better position, with bosses who were no better than the screaming maniac at Sarabande.

And of course, there were men. A restaurant is a hotbed of employee fraternization, and Bridget liked the thought of finding someone special who was on the same path as her. Plus, the only social scene available after the restaurants close are bars and clubs, not very conducive to finding true romance. But employee fraternization leads to workplace drama and Bridget found herself suddenly fired (again) when a flirtation with a handsome brown-eyed saucier turned into a screaming, jealous argument outside the kitchen door. He was fired, too, but he blamed Bridget and she never saw him again.

Humiliated, chagrined and unemployed again, she thought she had learned a lesson about staying away from workplace romance. But there was little time for any other kind. Restaurant kitchen work is long and hard, and in addition to some much-needed lessons in kitchen hierarchy, she was also learning a lot about the economics of running a restaurant. They were sobering lessons indeed. The reality of the cost of opening and running a restaurant in San Francisco was opening her eyes wider every day, and she was having a hard time imagining a future for her own dream in this town.

Then two things happened to open her eyes: her best friend Carly moved back to Hideout Bay to open a place of her own, staged by her absent but affectionately guilt-ridden father. Carly was much more willing to give up on the big-city dream than Bridget, and Bridget felt both jealous and abandoned, at the same time happy for her best friend. The second eye-opener was Rinaldo.

Ah, Rinaldo. He was the head chef and part owner of Tiger Eye Bistro, where Bridget was hired as a sous chef after being fired for her back-alley kitchen-door breakup. It was Rinaldo who interviewed her for the position and sparks flew the moment they met. He hired her on the spot and asked her out one week later. She was enchanted by his Latin good looks, his molten dark eyes, the way he wore his black shoulder-length hair, slightly curly, in a tight ponytail that she could grab and stroke while kissing him, the way his passion for food and art stoked her own, and the way he managed to run his kitchen without being a screaming egomaniac.

At first.

But like so many successful chefs, the ego was there, under the seduction and the passion she thought they shared. She was also impressed not only by the fact of his success as a chef, but as a restaurateur, which also relit her own dream of a place of her own.

Soon, she started to think in terms of a place of their own - she and Rinaldo side-by-side as owners, chefs, partners in every way. But when she expressed this to him, his reaction was not what she expected. She was stupid, he said - he actually used the word stupid, which stunned her to tears, in a stone-cold tone of voice that made her doubt he had ever had any real feeling for her. He told her she was stupid to think that she would ever be able to handle owning and running a restaurant. She was much too soft, he said, completely lacking in the kind of balls, not to mention brains and skill to do such a thing, how dare she think that she could be his equal in any such thing? And furthermore, she was delusional if she thought this little - whatever it was they were doing - was any more than an exercise in itch-scratching.

Dumbfounded, she slunk back to her bunkbed hovel and spent a tearful night wondering if she should go to work the next day. When she did, determined to hold her head up, do her job and forget there was ever anything between her and Rinaldo, she was fired the moment she walked in the door. Once again, she was out of a job, once again, she had let a man trip her up and her restaurant career was as big a failure as ever.

And then her mother died and she was back home in Hideout Bay - jobless, motherless, and defeated. Staring in the mirror with the long, hard task of reinventing herself.

There was her mother’s beautiful little brick cottage in a hilly neighborhood with a view of the bay that she had worked so hard to acquire, and some insurance money. Carly, doing surprisingly well with her restaurant/bar, offered to take her in as a partner, but Bridget loved Carly too much to subject their friendship to that kind of pressure. She used some of her mother’s insurance money to buy a small bakery cart down on the wharf, where she could catch the tourist traffic and for the first time since coming home from the Travis fiasco, she felt like her life was finally on track. She was so happy with her little one-woman operation, where she was in complete control of every part of her business, and she saw an optimistic future ahead of her. She thought her mother would be proud. But soon, she was overwhelmed by the logistics of running a one-person bake shop, even one so small and mobile. When she wasn’t manning the cart, she was slaving in her small kitchen to keep up a fresh and varied inventory, while keeping her kitchen and cart up to health code standards. Tourist season does not go year-round and when it slowed, her business came to a full and hungry stop. After a year, she was as broke as she ever was in San Francisco. She no longer had the money to take Carly up on her partnership offer, and the thought of starting at the bottom in the local restaurant business, not nearly as vast or exciting as San Francisco, was crushing. Another long, re-inventive look in the mirror and brutally honest assessment of her prospects led to her plan to go to work in the prison, in order to save for her future. A good plan - solid, lucrative. She could do it. She had to do it. It was her last chance to finally make something of herself.

And here she stands again, on the cusp of another big longing. A very big scary longing. It will be hard work, but hard work is the last thing that scares her. Hard work, she can handle. And her longing continues, in all of its heartfelt forms.

Her father, Reynold Rhino Sanger, was aghast when she told him she was going to work in the prison. A retired Correctional Officer, she is Rhino’s only child. They are not close; Rhino had no problem bringing his work-tough attitude home to his family. The most damaging thing he brought home to his family was what Bridget’s mother called his inmate voice, the voice he used to command inmates. A husband and father does not need to speak to his wife and daughter in the same tone of voice he uses to command murderers and rapists, but Rhino did not see things that way. As a result, Bridget’s parents had divorced when she was a child and her relationship with him consisted mostly of listening to him go on about what a bad-ass he was, how people in general are mostly no better than the inmates with whom he spent his career, and the injustice of his forced retirement after being disabled by an inmate.

Rhino had plenty to say about her going inside. She explained her reasons - the security of a good paycheck and benefits, from which he himself continues to benefit, while she saves to open a little bakery and lunch café. "It’s not forever, I’m not making a career of this - God no! It’s temporary, Rhino, I’ll be fine. I’m tough - how could I not be tough, growing up with you as a father?"

Hmph, he said, unimpressed. Doesn’t matter if you’re there five minutes or 500 years, it’s the same messed-up cesspool with nothing but danger for a little girly-girl like you.

Dad, I’m not that girly -

Huh. Right. If you really think you gotta do this, he said, "you better learn to walk like a man and you better learn that real damn quick. Little girly-girl like you, all those scumbag murderers and rapists are gonna be slobbering after you like you got no idea. The more you can pretend you’re not a woman, the better. Never wear perfume, jewelry, nothing like that. Always wear your hair up, always wear loose clothes, and they don’t necessarily have to be clean. In fact, the less clean, the better, know what I mean? Stay away from them, don’t get close to them, don’t let them get close to you, ever. Make sure you always have someone with you, or that you’re in plain sight at all times. There’s supposed to be a cop with you at all times in that kitchen but I know how those peckerhead cops operate."

But Rhino, weren’t you one of those peckerhead cops? She laughed.

"This is serious, Bridget, this is the most serious stuff I’ve ever said to you and if you’re ever gonna pay attention to a single thing I say, you better pay attention to this. Those cops in the kitchen, they get bored and wander off, looking for food to steal, working the inmate bookie, chasing some female cop tail, whatever. They don’t think nothing about leaving you all alone in that kitchen with inmate workers who are just waiting for their opportunity to get their hands on you.

"And let me tell you a few things about those inmates. The most important thing you need to know is the word NO. That’s your response to anything out of those damn inmates, NO. You gotta teach them on your first day that no means NO, each and every time it comes out of your mouth. They look for weakness, they can smell weak and vulnerable a mile off because they’re doing life plus-plus-plus and they got all the time in the world to figure out how to manipulate you to get what they want, and nothing to lose. Make sure you always have your alarm, that it’s working, that the batteries are always good. Don’t talk about your personal life at all, anytime, anywhere. Don’t tell anyone you’re my daughter. Don’t answer questions, don’t play favorites, any of them. Ever. They’re all scumbag pieces of shit, with correctional files taller than you are. They killed their grandmas, raped them with broom handles, and these are your workers. And none of them are gonna look like that, they’re gonna look like just fine, nice guys who happened to get caught up in something and wound up in prison, boo-fucking-hoo poor them. And they’re all gonna tell you they’re innocent. Slimy pieces of shit, every last one of them, so steer clear of them and keep them back away from you at all times.

When you walk in and out of the kitchen every day, he continued, "you’re gonna have to walk through the prison yard from the sally port gate to the kitchen door. I’ve seen it, don’t think for one minute that I’m making any of this up - no one could make this stuff up, it’s what really goes on in there. You got about two hundred inmates out on the yard and as soon as they pop that gate - and every inmate recognizes that sound - all 200 inmates are gonna stop what they’re doing to see who’s coming onto the yard. They’ll watch you and memorize your schedule and when they know you’re coming, they’re ready. It’s not illegal for them to try to talk to you, so that’s when they come up to you and try and start a conversation, and it’s never about what a nice day it is - it’s always about what they want from you, from outta your kitchen. I need this, so-and-so needs that, try and wheedle you by telling you their problems and hardships, all their bullshit excuses why they need something out of you. You gotta know how to handle yourself, how to handle them, how to say NO. As in NO, don’t even try to talk to me. Get away. Get back. No, no, everything is NO. As soon as you stop to talk to one of them, all two hundred inmates see that happening and now, they all know you’re weak. And that’s when they start working on you. You might not even know it, some of them are so crafty and manipulative that you don’t even know they got you wound around their finger, which means you’re in deep shit, until it’s too late. As soon as you do any little favor or them, they got you. They’ll come right back to you the next day and say, now I need this, and it’s a little bigger than what you did for them yesterday, but now when you try to say no, they got you. They got the fact that you did them a favor yesterday and they know that’s illegal for you, and they can take that right to the cops and get your little candy-ass fired.

"You have no idea how charismatic some of them are. Liars, every single goddamn one of them. Always, always watching, calculating, trying to figure you out, figure out how they can get something over on you. They’ll play on your female sympathies, try and get you feeling motherly. So you make sure when you’re walking across that yard, that you got nothing to say to any one of them, you got no time for any one of them, ever. They smell new blood and it ain’t pretty. All you ever want to say to them is how to do their job. They do anything they can to try to find some kind of conversational opening with you, no matter how trivial, and as soon as you start talking back, they got you. The more you talk, the more they listen and pretty soon without even knowing it, you’ve said too much and you do not need an inmate buddy. They’ll crawl inside of you pretty goddamn quick. If you got any of my brains at all, you’ll see it coming a mile off. You don’t need inmates batting their eyes at you.

"Just never, ever forget that from the moment you step onto those prison grounds, until you’re driving away at the end of your shift, you are in harm’s way. Every moment, always."

"I know, Dad, I know."

"Promise me. Swear to me that you will never forget that."

I know. I swear.

All that Rhino had said, and so much more, all of the Department training and preparation that went into this day and now, here it is. She is dressed, ready - as ready as she can possibly be for something like this - and braced. Is that really her under that uniform? Is she crazy? Stupid? She barely recognizes herself. She takes one last deep breath and pulls herself up to her full height. Steeled and ready to walk like a man.

En guarde, she says to herself. All woman, and en guarde.

2   Cry Like a Girl

R hino was not the only one who had advised her to keep their family relationship secret, for safety reasons. The Department of Corrections had also made the same recommendation. The inmate who had attacked Rhino, causing the injuries that ended his career, had been identified, charged and removed to another prison, but the attack had probably been ordered by another inmate, against whom no case could be proven. Rhino was convinced it had been ordered by an inmate named Fixx, so-called because he’s a high-up power player in the inmate hierarchy, the one they all tap to get things fixed. Nasty business, that guy , Rhino had told her, never touches anything himself so you can never pin anything directly on him. He just points and others do the dirty work so he can sit up above it, pretending he’s all clean . As Rhino’s daughter, that put her at possible risk, so she had