Page 10 of Keys

“Hmm, I guess you’re here for the boring stuff then.” I laughed at the idiot then. “Me too, unfortunately. One of these days, when I have nothing left to lose, I might try it out though.”

“What? Bank robbery?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged his shoulders as he grinned at me. “Why not?”

“I could think of a few reasons, and they start with a stiff prison sentence.”

“Well, that’s most likely because you’re thinking of the traditional bank robberies with masks, guns, and possible harm coming to innocent bystanders.”

“And you’re thinking of non-traditional robberies, where people wear tutus, clown makeup, and squirt one another with flowers pinned to their lapels?”

“Do you have a circus fetish that I should know about?” He asked in such a teasing manner that I started laughing again. Then a throat clearing caught my attention and I turned to see that a teller was free and waiting on me to pay attention. I moved in her direction ignoring Quickshot as I did.

I wondered briefly what kind of bank robbery he had in mind, but then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Obviously, he wasn’t planning on robbing a bank. He had just been doing his usual thing and making ridiculous conversation. Come to think of it, he may have done so to throw me off the fact that he was once again in the same place, at the same time, as I was. We lived in a small town. Once may have been a coincidence, but twice and I started to pay attention.

“What can I do for you today, Sarah?” Madeline, the teller who had been around for the past five years, asked me. She had once questioned me about what she had to do to join our club. When I told her that she had to ride a motorcycle, her interest dried up. She had been hoping that hanging around with us would enable her to catch a man who rides. It was obvious she had missed the memo that we were an all-female club.

“I need to check on my account. For some reason, my card didn’t work earlier.”

“Sure, let me just pull that up for you.” The only reason I used this bank was because it happened to be the one where my blackmail money had been set up all those years ago. Granted, I had transferred most of that money into other accounts over the years, but I still maintained a decent sum in the original. “Hmm, that’s odd, it appears to have been locked for fraudulent activity.”

“How in the hell is that possible?”

“Well, sometimes, if you go out of town and make a purchase without letting the bank know, or too large a purchase, different things can flag an account.”

“Madeline, I don’t use this account for purchases at all. There’s no way anything could have flagged it.”

Madeline glanced up at me, momentarily shocked. “I think you’ll need to speak with Howard about this,” she explained. “There’s only so much I can see on my end as a teller.”

“Well, tell Howard I’m headed to his office then.”

“You need an appointment for that.” Madeline’s voice met my back as I walked toward the area where there was a hallway lined with offices on either side.

“I just made one,” I called back over my shoulder to her. “Better let him know.”

I didn’t miss the fact that Quickshot was watching every bit of that interaction as if my banking troubles were the most interesting thing on the planet at the moment. Howard came out of his office and met me in the hallway, a few steps from his door. “Miss Keys, I really don’t have time right now. You will have to set up an appointment and-”

“Did you set up an appointment with me to discuss locking my account and flagging it for potential fraud?”

“W-what? No. We don’t do that.”

“So, you think you can just lock someone away from their money, without explanation, and not tell them that you did it? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t come in to find out why?”

“Well, we didn’t think you would even notice as you rarely use that account.”

I scrunched my nose up and narrowed my eyes at him. This little pipsqueak had just tipped his hands. “So, you froze an account because, as you say, I rarely use it and therefor wouldn’t notice? What the fuck do you think you’re doing with my money?”

Quickshot walked up then and stood just to my left and two steps behind. “Everything okay here?”

“No. No, it is not.”

“Sir, this is a private matter. You should move along before I have to call security.”

I laughed loudly then, attracting far more attention to what was happening in the hallway than Howard would have liked. “If you think this man is the one that you’ll need to call security for, you’re even more stupid than I gave you credit for.”

Quickshot laughed. Howard did not. The man looked as though he was about to piss his pants when a security guard finally made his way over to us. “Howard?” He questioned. “Everything okay over here?”

“Y-yes. Miss Keys just had some questions about her account.”

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