Touch And Go - Aiden Bates Page 0,5
the laptop under my arm and ushered him inside. “Just some bad luck. What’s going on with this piece of junk? Didn’t I tell you to get the RAM upgrade, like, last month?”
“It’s frozen, and I need it thawed, like, yesterday.” Of course he did. Big Ben needed everything done yesterday.
“Uh, sure, I’ll see if I can thaw it.” I was exhausted, but we didn’t exactly have the type of relationship where I could say no without it becoming a whole thing, so I stacked the laptop on top of mine at my desk, and flicked it open.
Ben stood over my shoulder, and his towering frame shaded most of the light from the bare bulb hanging down from the ceiling behind him. He bit his nails loudly near my ear while I tried some key combinations to unfreeze the screen that was stuck on a spreadsheet report in a program I wasn’t familiar with. I was happy my wrist didn’t hurt too badly while I typed, but none of my usual workarounds were working.
“What were you doing when it froze?” I kept trying key commands, but the screen remained stuck.
“Working,” he snapped. “I need to get it back in.”
“Calm down, I’m working on it—”
“Fuck, Seb! You don’t fucking understand!” His escalation wasn’t unexpected. When Ben wanted something, he wanted it now.
His tirade was cut off by his ringtone—a Drake song—and I slumped back into my gamer chair and took a couple of calming breaths, pumped my good hand into a fist while he answered his phone. I hated when Ben raised his voice, because my bouts of nerves made me feel wimpy around him. When he stormed outside to take the call, I was able to concentrate on what I was doing.
I held my breath and forced a manual reset, praying he’d backed up his work because if he hadn’t, it would all be lost, and he’d kick my ass. With a bright and happy ding, the screen repowered, and the spreadsheet looked exactly the same. I ran my good hand over my face with relief, and I was about to close the laptop when something caught my eye.
There was a spreadsheet tab beside the one that was open, titled Dummy. Not very subtle. It looked nearly identical to the one opened when Ben handed me the laptop, records of transactions from different bank accounts, manually created by Ben. He was an accountant and did freelance bookkeeping for a bunch of companies, and I recognized a few names of his clients he’d complained about recently—Galway, Inc., Maurice French PTY, LTD., and Kerning Trade… Big names tied up with serious shit in DC. But the transactions on the spreadsheet seemed off.
All the money seemed to be flowing through to a third spreadsheet that tallied the total. At the top of the third was a single ten-digit number. I was more familiar with 001 combinations, but I recognized this one—the account number on the deposit slips I used to put my paychecks into. Ben’s account. Ben was siphoning money from his clients.
My stomach clenched.
No way. He couldn’t be that stupid, could he?
I caught a glimpse of his bulky frame through a gap in the door, still on the phone as he paced in the hallway. Good, I had time. My heart was racing, and my leg started bouncing. I had to act fast.
With a deep breath, I bit through the pain in my wrist and keystroked my way into Ben’s hard drive with rapid-fire keyboard shortcuts, quickly searching for evidence he wasn’t seriously stealing cash from major players in DC. My stomach sank when I got into his bank accounts and found the opposite—the transactions were for real. He was cutting a little off the top of his clients’ accounts and accruing a hefty balance for himself.
“You idiot, Ben.” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair.
“I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
I jumped and shouted when his voice hissed from over my shoulder. “What the fuck? You’re stealing from your clients. Why would you do something so stupid?” I needed to hear him say it wasn’t what I thought it was, what my brain told me it was. I needed my brother not to be a thief on top of every other thing I already knew him to be.
“This is none of your business.” His chest puffed up and his hands clenched into fists as he looked me over. A vein pulsed in his neck. I shrank back, even though I