Mittens

It was ghostly quiet as he walked down the sidewalk. He saw the streetlight just slightly shimmer off an object that was slightly covered by the green shrubs on the side of the concrete edge of the Johnson’s Bank. He bent down, slowly, and only then was the deathly silence broken by his gasp. Holding his right side, where the bullet had pierced through him early, he slowly picked up the pristine black notebook. He stood there panting. The world wasn’t growing dark yet, but he sure thought it lost its shine. Pain does that, at least to him, distracts him. He looked down at the black notebook he picked up and strongly considered throwing into the water on the other side of the street. Surely this bound paper couldn’t be worth the pain he just experienced. Picking it up was clearly a mistake, although this made him consider the mistake he made earlier, in getting punched with a bullet in the first place.

He slowly slipped the book into his backpack, making certain to recover the slow bleeding beneath his coat as he pulled the backpack over his shoulder. He resumed his slow walk down the street, the sidewalk ended right after picking up the notebook. He chuckled to himself, a man could get killed walking on a street this narrow. That would just be a fitting end for this day’s events. Who gets shot walking down the street anyway?

He was simply minding his own business when the bank robbers went flying out of the bank, guns blazing. Typical cops standing in the street, guns pointed, every last one of them trying to be a hero. Wrong place, wrong time, and definitely the wrong person. Who knew a simple walk to the corner coffee shop would be so eventful? What a nightmare this day had been.

He naturally wanted to go to the police to seek medical attention. It isn’t smart to go walking down the street when he was riddled with bullets. Well, one bullet, but still it was gruesome. Of course, he couldn’t really go to the police and get help, not when he had the twenty thousand dollars on him from robbing the coffee shop. It was a complex situation to walk away from the cops while bleeding all over himself, pretending that he was just running away from gun fire.

One thing was obvious though, and that was that bank robbers clearly had no respect for the law or authority. He knew that much. Pulling off a stunt like that, in broad daylight. Completely inconsiderate. How was a proper thief supposed to avoid detection when there was open gunfire in the streets?

He neared the veterinarian clinic he had been walking to for the last several hours. It was a good thing he knew Annie. She would peel the paint clean off his hide, but hopefully she would plug the hole first. It was a small hope. He took a moment to consider if it wouldn’t be better perhaps to go deal with the cops. At the last minute he thought better of it. Annie might kill him, but hopefully she’d patch him up first at least. What were the odds she’d be working late again tonight?

“Annie? You there?”, he croaked as he pushed open the door. He didn’t realize he hadn’t spoken in hours, and everything sounded muffled, hoarse, and acutely raw.

“Jason? What are you doing here? We closed hours ago. I was just about to walk out! Some rich executive brought in her python, like we know what to do with pythons. Some people’s children!”

“Wait. Are you stumbling? Are you bleeding? Jason!” She dashed over to him as he made a noncommittal grunt. He was the strong silent type, or so he told himself. So, he didn’t collapse, he wouldn’t do that. He would describe at as a graceful flop into a waiting room chair. Annie, bless her heart, went right to work, ripping off his shirt and inspecting the wound. Turned out it wasn’t that big of a deal, a nice clean through-and-through. He could have done without the disinfectant that stung like the seven hells. All things considered though it was a small price to pay for getting appropriately stitched, bandaged, and bundled with animal grade painkillers. Those horse pills really do the trick in a pinch, don’t let anyone say otherwise.

Annie, having finished patching up our fearless hero, efficiently packed him into her car. Annie was nothing if not efficient. She got him bundled on the sofa and watched as he fell to sleep. She slowly looked at his backpack, wondering what could be inside. He held it in a death grip right up to the point where he fell asleep and dropped it on the floor.

Perhaps there was a moral dilemma of whether or not she should open the backpack. But not for Annie, that whole efficiency thing. Three seconds later she was in the kitchen dumping the goods on the kitchen table. Twenty thousand dollars spilled out onto the table, all small bills. Buried under the pile of loose money was a small black notebook. She might have taken a look at the notebook, but she spent the next fifteen minutes counting the twenty thousand dollars. Turned out to be twenty-two thousand four hundred thirty dollars, to be precise. What was Jason doing with that kind of scratch? She was pretty sure he did alright, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to have that kind of money floating loose in a backpack. Who was that kind of guy to have that kind of money just scattered in a backpack?

The money was haphazard and crumpled, as if someone had rapidly slammed it into a bag. But her attention was drawn to the unspoiled notebook. It almost looked brand new, still having that new shimmer to the cover. She finally picked it up and noticed the Johnson’s Bank logo in the corner, impressed cleanly on the cover. Subtle and delicate not to detract from the natural beauty of the book and its binding. Annie considered that someone had spent some coin on this simple, yet exquisite book.

“What are you doing?” She literally almost flew out of her skin. Had it been possible, it probably would have happened. She dropped the notebook spinning to stare Jason in the eye. He leaned haphazardly in the door frame of the kitchen, hand holding his side, with an obvious discomfort in his eyes. The horse pills effectiveness apparently could be debated.

“I thought you were giving me the good painkillers?”

“What? Oh, those. Yeh, those are for Mittens. I only gave you two, he usually takes four a day for his minor arthritis. It’s good to see you doing better, I can get you some acetaminophen.”

“You aren’t going to ask about the elephant in the room?”

“I haven’t seen it yet. Is it an African one or an Indian one? It better not ransack my apartment, I just cleaned this whole place.”

“Funny. I’d rather not talk about the money, let’s just say I was in the middle of an investment opportunity and leave it at that. I found the notebook on the street, I’m kind of curios to know what is inside of it, it caught my eye, I really couldn’t walk away without picking it up.”

“I thought the elephant in the room was the fact that you were shot, any enlightening details there?”

“It’s nothing. If you catch the news, you’ll hear about a bank robbery at McAllisters and I simply got caught in the crossfire. Wrong place at the wrong time.” He looked a little sheepish saying it, as her raised eyebrow clearly indicated she wondered why he came to her to get stitched up, then realizing he couldn’t involve the cops because of the loose money in his pack. The raised eyebrow turned into a furrowed brow as she pondered if he was behind the bank robbery. This slowly faded into a smile.

“Ha. I thought you might have robbed McAllisters, but then I realized you would definitely be in custody if you pulled off that stunt. Investment you say, fine. Investing sounds like a fine past time. I didn’t get a chance to read the notebook, you startled me.”

She bent down and slowly picked up the book, amazing no worse for wear after she pitched it halfway across the room when he interrupted her. What one might consider a casual drop in the circumstances, at least that is how she saw it. She flipped open the first page and it had “Dave Johnson III” engraved as a title page. He was the son of the current Chairmen of the Board of Directors for Johnson’s Bank, and coincidentally the current Chief Financial Officer.

“It’s the CFO’s of Johnson’s Bank notebook. It looks like it’s filled with some ledgers and notes. Not sure there’s anything interesting in here. Just a bunch of transactions.”

“Transactions? No bank is writing that down at the CFO level. All of that should be in an accountant’s spreadsheet somewhere, not written down in a notebook. Even if that is an exceptional looking pad of paper. Guys at that level aren’t writing stuff down with pen and ink. Let’s have a look.”

She handed him the notebook. He slowly flipped through it, casually wincing in pain. Mitten’s pills. She could have at least upped the dosage to a large dog at the least, a calf maybe. He thought he was taking the quality horse pills, but no, he got Mitten’s arthritis medicine. Just plain insulting that was.

He was quiet for a time as he read, but finally he broke the silence with some speculation. “I think these are notes on transfers of funds. I can’t really tell what I’m reading, but it sure looks like he’s either washing money for someone, or he is skimming other accounts. Perhaps it’s both. That explains why he is keeping it off the legitimate ledgers.”

“Huh. What do we do with that? Perhaps we just throw this thing away and pretend we never saw it at all. That might solve a lot of problems. I’m guessing you don’t want any questions about, hmm, your investing.”

“I really don’t need any heat, no. My investing should avoid the police, so should this wound. I might normally be tempting to just throw it out or burn it. But honestly, I just don’t think I could burn that notebook. It has an appeal to it, I don’t know how to describe it, like an inner sparkle. Cheesy right? I don’t know, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it, that’s why I picked it up in the first place. I couldn’t just walk away from it. But we still must turn this into someone. It wouldn’t be right to not let someone investigate this.”

“It wouldn’t be right?”

“No. There’s a principle here, if the CFO is swindling, someone should report it.”

“You know how that sounds right?” She stared at him with a deadpan glare.

“I don’t care. Here’s what we will do, we’ll just drop it off in the mail to your reporter friend. What was her name? Let’s just drop it in the mail to her, with a couple lines of notes about what it might appear to be.”

“Shannon? Yeh, we can send it to her. She’d at least know what to do with it. She would investigate it or send it to the police. Either way, it gets escalated.”

“Awesome, it’s decided then. Now, look, you mentioned something about acetaminophen a moment ago? Mitten’s pills just aren’t getting the job done.”