Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (best adventure books to read .TXT) đź“•
They had to have heard about my dad's death, but I hoped the word hadn't gotten about regarding my ill-gotten gains. It shouldn't have; I didn't tell anybody. Still, if everybody knows, I'd need to hire a bodyguard just to hold off the ironic requests for loans. I tried to imagine how much bodyguards cost; I remembered reading somewhere that a legitimate executive security firm charges about a thousand dollars per day. I could get a bodyguard for 500 days, and then I wouldn't need one anymore. Spending all your money to keep people from getting your money -- that should have been a Twilight Zone episode. Hell, it probably was. By the hundredth episode they had to have been rep
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- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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“He has a coffee mug from New England Federated on his desk.”
She grinned nervously and shook her head, picked up the handset and dialed the school’s primary phone number. As it started to ring she handed the handset to me and said, “You should ask for him.”
Outside the small room I could hear the phone ringing in the main office just a few feet away. I took the handset from Amy and asked why.
“They might notice if I call twice as two people.”
“Huh. Smart,” I said, putting the handset to my ear just as an office worker answered it.
“May I speak to Mr. Comstock, please?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Just a moment,” the voice on the phone said. I handed the phone back to Amy and said to her, “Connecting.”
Amy took the phone and nestled it to her ear with her shoulder and picked up the notebook and a pen.
“Hello, Mr. Nathan Comstock?” Amy said after a moment in the slightly modified voice we’d worked on. She crossed a line off of the notebook page.
“Hi, this is Sarah from New England Federated Bank’s fraud monitoring department. I’m calling today because our computer has flagged some suspicious-looking activity on your account.”
I swallowed hard. I really hoped he had an account at that bank and didn’t just collect free mugs. Amy’s eyes darted back and forth for a moment before she quietly sighed in relief and crossed a line off of the page.
“Okay,” she said into the phone. “First I’ll just need to verify your identity as the account owner. Could you verify the last four digits of your social security number?” She wrote something down.
She continued reading, “Thank you very much, Mr. Comstock. Now regarding the suspicious activity on your account I’m seeing two separate charges this morning at a Citgo station in Bowling Green totaling $53.49 together and then shortly thereafter a charge of $478.88 at a Circuit City store in the same town. Can you verify whether you authorized those purchases or not?”
She smiled. “You didn’t? Okay, sir, I’m going to mark this account for fraud investigation and for the time being we will remove these charges and restore the balance to your account. Are you near a computer? Okay, can you log into your account right now and verify these charges no longer appear?”
She nodded to me, it was working. I peeked out the window for a minute.
“Uh huh,” Amy said into the phone. “Great. So I’m going to get started on processing the investigation request for your account and we’ll cancel your current debit card and mail you a new one, but if you could go through your account history online for a few minutes, just looking for charges you didn’t authorize, that would be good. If you see any other unauthorized charges you can call me directly by dialing New England Federated’s toll free number and pressing extension 7129.”
She read him the 800 number I’d gotten from the phone book, reminded him to look right now for unauthorized charges, said goodbye, and hung up. She leaned back in her chair and sighed as though she’d given birth.
“That’s not easy!” she said.
“You did great,” I said, “Now just one more call to make.”
“And why can’t you make this one?” she asked, hand on the handset.
“Because I sound like a 17-year-old boy. It’s much harder to tell female ages based on voice than guys, and you need to be a parent for this one.”
She sighed again, picked up the phone and pressed Redial. When someone in the office picked up, Amy spoke into the phone with her “parent” voice, “Hi there, I was just at the school picking up my daughter for a doctor’s appointment and in the front parking lot, that’s the staff parking lot, isn’t it? Yes, mm hmm, well when I drove by it I saw a group of young men wearing football jerseys apparently vandalizing one of the cars. One of them had a hammer I think, and they ran away when I drove by but it looked like they were doing something to a grayish tan Sebring. I hope they weren’t–” and she trailed off, pulling the phone away from her mouth. Then she blew into the microphone, and then hung up.
“Damn dropped calls,” she said to me with a grin.
“Okay, I said. “It’s on. Just have to wait for the call and hope it comes soon.”
We both pressed against the door. A few seconds passed, then just down the hall a phone rang. A few seconds later, Comstock’s door swung open and he ran down the hall past us.
“Amazing,” I said.
“I’ll watch the door,” she said. “One knock means danger and two knocks means mega danger.”
We crossed the hall. I slipped into Comstock’s office and Amy stood in front of the door, blocking the window with her body. I stepped behind the desk and my heart sank when I saw a blank monitor screen. I sat down at the desk, and pressed the power button on the monitor.
The screen took a few seconds to cycle back to power, but the black screen soon quickly snapped to full color. Internet Explorer was open, and I was looking at New England Federated’s website. Comstock was still logged in.
“Bingo.”
Nathan Comstock was showing an account balance of $8,876 in checking, $43,605 in savings. That seemed a bit high for a school administrator. That was also as far as I probably had time to check while crouched in front of Nathan Comstock’s desk in his office in what could be described as a bubbling cauldron of law-breaking.
What I was after was his entire banking history, and fortunately modern banking websites make this easy by allowing you to download your transaction history log files to import into financial software like Quicken. I navigated to the Export option, selected an ambiguous filetype that wouldn’t be restricted to a single financial application, and downloaded it to the desktop.
So… now what? Shoot, I probably should have thought ahead about these kinds of things. I had to get the file out of there without leaving evidence. I could e-mail it to myself but that would leave traces, and I didn’t bring a USB drive or a blank CD with me. Could this PC even burn CDs?
I moved some papers out of the way of the desktop’s tower and examined the cover of the CD drive, squinting to make out the small emblems. DVD, Compact Disc, CD-R/RW.
“Bingo,” I said again to myself, soon thereafter realizing I need to stop saying bingo.
After some searching I found a blank CD in a desk drawer and stuck it in the CD drive. I started burning the file onto the disk; it seemed to be taking for-bloody-ever. I cracked my knuckles as I watched the progress bar drag across the screen. Amy was still standing outside the door, blocking the window. I saw her bobbing back and forth slightly, probably more nervous than I as she was on the front line.
While I waited I fixed the items on the desk that I’d disturbed; I was wiping the keyboard keys off with the sleeve of my shirt when I heard a light tap on the door. I stopped moving entirely for a moment, and then inched toward the door. A lady was talking to Amy; I couldn’t make out her voice. I heard Amy say, “-was supposed to talk to him about-” something, her back still covering the narrow window, she began tapping furiously on the door with a knuckle. This lady must want in.
Nowhere to go; the window looking outside didn’t open and there were no closets to hide in. My heart began racing as I darted around the small office. I heard the doorknob jiggle, so the only thing I could do was turn off the computer’s monitor and dash to the opposite end of the room, tuck myself against the wall that the door was now opening against.
The door opened swiftly, catching me off guard and pinning me against the wall. I grabbed the doorknob on my side and held the door open; if it closed I’d be standing there pressed against the wall of my principal’s office for no good reason. I heard papers rustling around the desk. I peeked through the door’s window and saw an office assistant hovering over Mr. Comstock’s desk, lifting documents and folders as if searching for something. I ducked away from the window, and noticed that to my right, through the gap between the inside end of the door and the doorframe I could see out into the hall, Amy was standing there looking both confused and nervous. I waved my free hand, as much as I could, to get her attention. Her eyes, darting around, finally met mine. Her eyebrows shot up and she covered her mouth quickly to mask a gasp. I tried my best to mouth “hold the door open” but she couldn’t read it.
I slid closer to the doorframe and waved her toward me. She stepped across the few feet between us and I whispered, “Hold the door open.” The recognition came over her face, and she stepped forward and leaned in the office and extended an arm to hold to door. I slowly released the handle and felt her take the weight of it.
After a few moments, Amy said aloud, “Is there something I can help with?” Her voice trailed off as she seemed to realize she might have made a mistake, if she stepped away from the door and it stayed open it might look suspicious.
“Not really,” the woman said, “just looking for Mr. Comstock’s wallet. He needs his ID for a police report.”
Behind the door, I was smiling but knew Amy wouldn’t be. Her voice shaking slightly, she asked “Did something happen?”
Papers stopped rustling for a moment. “Oh, nothing serious. Just his car was vandalized. Oh, here it is!”
A few seconds later, she was out of the room and the door swung shut. I uncompressed from the wall and finally began breathing regularly. Just then, the computer speakers made a slight jingle noise and the CD tray ejected from the computer. I grabbed the disk, returned to computer to where it was when I found it, and slipped out the door and fell into step behind Amy who was walking as casually as possible out of the office suite.
Returned semi-safely to the school’s main hallways, I was about to laugh when Amy turned on her heel and hit my shoulder with her open palm.
“Ow,” I said despite a general lack of pain.
“What the hell was that?” she grunted under her breath. “I thought she was going to go in there and catch you with your hand in the cookie jar.”
I rubbed my shoulder, as society seemed to demand, and said, “That’s not my fault. You did great, though. There and on the phone. That was really great.”
She stood there a moment, looking cross. “I thought the call about his car being vandalized was just a distraction,” said Amy.
I smiled again, “It was a distraction. But if it turned out to be a phony call it might have been suspicious coming just moments after a call luring him into logging into his bank account.”
Amy sighed, and started walking again. “So how did you know about his car?” she asked.
“That it was vandalized? It became quite clear to me after I threw a hammer through the rear windshield on the way into school.”
Back in the library, where none of the librarians seemed to care that we weren’t in class so long as we
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