The Caretaker

By Tyrone Vincent Banks

The story of "Shiloh"; an ex-convict who has been given a chance to redeem himself and to rebuild a life that was placed on hold.  Along the way he'll find a part of himself that has forever been a mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Dec 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9783739689791

Book preview

Tyrone Vincent Banks

The Caretaker

Dedicated to God, our Caretaker.

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

81371 Munich

The Caretaker

The Caretaker ©2006 Tyrone V. Banks

Where do I start? How can I explain how this beautiful woman came into my life and made it worth living once again? Perhaps, I could just start at the beginning. Yes, I’ll start at the beginning and work up to the chance meeting after months of watching her live and wanting to be a part of her life.

I had a life once before. I had a wife and two beautiful little girls. I had a large home in the suburbs and a job that paid me well as long as I sacrificed everything to carry out that job. That was the beginning of the end for me as I would watch everything fall apart, helpless and unable to intervene or stop the landslide that ended up with me in this place doing what I do.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in Finance I took a position as a Financial Advisor. It was a dream job and the world was on a platter before me. We were just a team of predators offering bad advice at a high price with plenty of disclaimers in place to watch our backs. I was just as guilty as everyone else, but, I had a conscience. That conscience caused me to take part in a large Sting operation that placed a lot of people, including myself, behind bars.

I was employed for approximately 5 years with this respected financial firm. My job was to open up small accounts and hand them off to the account executives to make them larger. I started to notice discrepancies in those clients’ accounts as large amounts of cash were passing through those accounts and ending up in a company operating fund. Upon further scrutiny I found that this money was ending up in the pockets of the executive board.

I opened my mouth and questioned this practice. And in my next paycheck I received a bonus of almost $10,000.00. I didn’t say anything and I used the money for a down payment on a luxury car that would have been better off left at the dealership. This fact the attorneys would mention quite often to implicate me as a perpetrator and not a Good Samaritan. In the end, I was sentenced to ten years in prison but I was paroled in five years for good behavior.

So, there I was, ten years of my life wasted between my white collar job and in prison. Needless to say, my wife, unfortunately, could not take the media scrutiny and the nasty looks from neighbors so she served me with divorce papers, was awarded custody of our children and left the country.

I couldn’t find another job because of my prison record and I was on welfare and food stamps for a while. Fortunately a small cleaning service hired me and I began to rebuild my resume one dead-end job at a time. My luck changed as my record was cleared when a mystery witness from the payroll department came forward, years later, and testified that the mystery money was planted by the executive board without my consent.

My record was cleared, but still, no one wanted me. I managed to gain employment with the department of sanitation. I would spend mornings slinging around trashcans filled with things that I’d rather forget. That job was short-lived as well and the city invested in an automated trash pickup service that caused at least five hundred sanitation workers to visit the unemployment office.

I collected unemployment compensation for a year and then my luck mysteriously changed. I was offered a job as a live in caretaker in an inner city housing project called Ward Village; those who are unfortunate enough to live there