Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #25: Racketeering

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR SHOES ARE KNOCKOFFS

Many famous brands of athletic shoes are not only marvels of engineering that protect your foot from strain and injury during exercise, but serve as status symbols.  Many a famous actor or actress has been spotted wearing a famous logo on their feet while being snapped by the paparazzi! It’s well known, even if it’s not logical, that putting on a new pair of well-known kicks can boost your ego as well as your performance. That’s not to say that expensive shoes aren’t really worth it—they are! Authentic shoes from well-known brands are safe and extremely comfortable, as well as stylish.

However, expensive athletic shoes are expensive. Those of us who aren’t rich and famous can find ourselves at the online store for an expensive shoe brand, thinking, “If only these shoes weren’t so expensive!”

We often find ourselves turning to our search engines to find a better deal.  Nobody wants to pay full price!

Unfortunately, what happens is that customers often end up at scam websites!  Cheap knockoff versions of expensive brands are all over the place.

Besides being cheap, those knockoff brands are often badly built and uncomfortable, and can lead to injury. Beware!

Here are five tips for determining whether your shoes are the real thing:

1. Beware of inexpensive shoes!

The first thing to beware of is shoes that are unreasonably inexpensive.  Even a used pair of expensive, authentic shoes can be more expensive than a brand-new pair from a cheaper brand.

2. Compare the photos of the shoes with the authorized versions from the brand’s website page.

Often, manufacturers of knockoff shoes will make a version of the shoe that doesn’t quite match the authentic one.  If it looks fake, it probably is. Some details may be skipped, or be a slightly different color, be in the wrong position—or be from an outdated version of the shoe! Always check for the manufacturing date 🙂

3. Check the packaging and tags.

Counterfeit shoes aren’t necessarily sold on big-name retailer websites. Sometimes they’re sold one pair at a time, on e-commerce, message-board, and used-clothing websites. Counterfeit shoes sold that way are often marked “New without box” or “New without tags.” Counterfeiters have already done all the work to produce cheap shoes—they don’t want to take the extra step to make the boxes and tags, too!

Counterfeit shoes will often arrive in a plastic bag with no box, in an unmarked shoe box, or in a cheaply made “brand-name” box that doesn’t hold together very well.

Another good thing to check on the box is the item’s SKU number, or Stock Keeping Unit number.  Knockoff shoes will often have last year’s number!

4. Check the materials.

If your shoes have stood up to the tests so far, the next step is checking the materials of the shoe.  Brand-name shoes are generally made with the most expensive, high-tech materials available.  Knockoff shoes will often substitute cheaper materials, such as inferior grades of cushioning plastic, and pleather accent materials rather than genuine leather.  If your shoe doesn’t feel securely sewed and glued together—run!

5. Check the performance.

The last step is to put your shoes on.  Do they feel comfortable?  Do they fit your feet properly? Do you feel secure?  Before taking your shoes outside, try out several different stances, including standing, squatting, moving into and out of a runner’s pose, or even a few yoga positions.  Knockoff shoes will often feel flimsy, unstable, and, well…just poorly engineered!

Don’t be afraid to return uncomfortable shoes for a refund, even if the seller pretends not to understand English. You are not required to prove that the shoes are knockoffs in order to return them! If an individual seller gives you any trouble, go to the retailer’s website for assistance. Retailers are used to dealing with customer complaints about knockoff products, and have a standard protocol for getting you your money back!

In 2017, over $1.2 billion dollars of counterfeit goods were captured and destroyed by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, an increase of over 8% from the year before. Also, in 2017, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property says that the loss from the U.S. economy caused by counterfeit goods, software and other types of piracy, and theft of trade secrets may be up to $600 billion dollars a year!  China counts as the #1 world culprit, accounting for about 87% of counterfeit goods entering the U.S.  That’s a lot of jobs!

Most of those counterfeit goods come from Chinese factories dedicated to mass-producing knockoff goods.  In fact, there’s an entire town dedicated to making “replicas” of U.S. goods.  They are sold in large lots to American resellers, often college students or stay-at-home moms working out of their basements.  They’ll collect orders and the cash, then serve as a middleman for Chinese black-market sellers, who drop-ship the illegal shoes directly from China. It’s like a Mafia for knockoff shoes!

And most of these shoes are worth exactly what you pay for!  But, mes chiots, a little bird once told me that, when the authorized brand-name factories in China shut down for the night, they sometimes end up with a few more boxes of shoes than shows up on their reports.  Real shoes, made at the real factories, sold straight to the black market, can you imagine?

With some pairs of brand-name shoes going for U.S. $1500 and up as shoe collectors go to war with each other, everyone wants into the knockoff market!

But these knockoffs-of-a-knockoff shoes, if they even exist, are far and few between.

If your shoes check out, then congratulations! While there is no way to be 100% sure that you’re wearing the “real deal” with expensive, name-brand sneakers, with due diligence, you can be 99.99% sure—and for that other .01%, then at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that nobody else can tell, either!

Happy shoe hunting, shoe hounds!

Marie of La Chienne de Chausseur

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #24: Pyramid Scheme

SHARES IN DUTCH TULIPS

All a good pyramid scheme requires is shares in something, and a smooth talker to sell them. Or not so much a smooth talker as someone short-sighted enough to think the con will last forever.

“Here’s how it works,” I say. And I explain. You pick something that people can imagine they want, and can imagine buying low and selling high. The classic scams involve silver mines and stock shares. Futures are always good, like corn futures or pork futures. But I’ve heard of expeditions to dive for Spanish gold off the coast of Florida, or, one time, I kid you not, it was tulips. Shares in Dutch tulips. It has to be something risky but essentially legal. This all happens out in public. It’s so public that nobody can believe it’s a scam. That’s important. You want public opinion to sway your direction, to make it seem—among the core group of investors that make up your marks—like you’d have to be a fool not to get involved. There’s also something called a “Ponzi” scheme where each investor doesn’t have to actively recruit the next investor after them. But the lines get blurred, so let’s not quibble the difference. The government is supposed to protect investors against this kind of thing, but it always takes them longer than it should. What you want to do is throw as many delays in the way as you can, and run out the clock.

Once you have your material for shares, you get some word moving. Not a gale force wind of press releases and advertising, but a sly little breeze, the kind that blows right through a good mark. You have to think like a gossip. “Did you hear about so-and-so? I can’t believe it, but what I heard was—” Like that. And then you flash some cash while acting like you’re getting away with something. People will come sniffing around like bloodhounds.

When they do, you send them over to someone else. Never try to play all the roles in a pyramid scheme. Don’t short yourself on running the store. Don’t tell yourself you can get by without. The great schemes are time-tested. A mark should get completely screwed by one set of operators, yet still be hungry for more when the next con comes through. Don’t think of it as money lost in the split. Think of it as seeding the soil for future investments. When you get the right people backing you, you can more than offset the cost of splitting the profits with them, and shuffling around marks and investigators takes longer with five people than it does with two. See what I said above, about running out the clock.

So you send the mark to the second operator, who doesn’t want to sell. In fact they refuse to sell.

The first operator apologizes, and talks to the second operator. The second operator has to be convinced. Now, if you were running a simpler con, here’s where you get off the main track. The second operator can’t be persuaded to let the mark in on the big con. The first operator feels bad about it. “Sorry about that silver mine. How about I let you in on this smaller project instead…?” Many a good mark has been milked by such a bait and switch.

But for an actual pyramid scheme, you stay on track.

After some negotiation, the second operator reluctantly agrees to sell. Numbers get thrown around at this stage. The mark invests X, minus a cut off the top (percentage Y), as a transaction fee. The mark gets back returns Z as profit. The mark can either collect their Z profits and get their investment X back, or keep their investment X in the scheme and get their Z profits back, or take their investment X and roll their Z profits into their investment. Usually what happens is the mark invests X, collects profits Z, can’t believe their good luck, then comes back with profits Z to reinvest. A lot of them come back with more capital to add to X as well.  You pay your outgoing profits Z out of your incoming X investments. The exact math is tricky. You have to balance startup costs against giving the marks a deal that’s too good to be true.

Never let the mark negotiate the numbers. Use the same rates for everybody. That way, the marks will screw each other. Investor A will recruit investor B, and take a little cut under the table for the privilege. Just ignore it. It helps muddy the water, and it keeps investor A from going to the authorities. Investor A effectively becomes an operator for you, not a trusted one, but one who risks prison time if things fall apart.

Make it exclusive, too. Literally refuse to sell to people. Don’t always let yourself get “talked in” to letting someone join.  The more exclusive you are, the longer you can take to run out that clock.

But, eventually, that clock will run out. It might take thirty years, but it will run out. The danger of this business is that a successful operator always half-believes what they tell the marks. But your scheme will have always been a con, and it was never going to work out the way you told the marks it would.  Even the most perfect system collapses.  There’s just too much chaos in the world, and you can’t control it.

But you can control who you pick as your smooth talker.  My advice here is to pick one of the world’s non-violent psychopaths.  If you know where to look, you can find a lot of them. No soul, no morals, no emotions other than a craving for “winning” at something, no awareness that they were always going to have taken the fall.  They’re the asshole in the limelight.

You’re just the accountant.

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #23: Prostitution

TWO SISTERS ALONG BASIN STREET, STORYVILLE, NEW ORLEANS

Sadie Broussard was one of the girls working Mahogany Hall, a famous house in New Orleans run by Lulu White. This was the days of Storyville, the red-light district down by the Vieux Carré. Sadie had a long face like a grayhound’s, fine dark hair, and arresting eyes, the old French sort of face which is, by turns, cruel and beautiful. When she was in a high mood, she wore a thin black ribbon wrapped around her neck and tied behind, so the ends lay down the track of her spine. Lulu always told Sadie she would be found dead in a canal some day: Sadie was the kind of girl who was made for trouble.

One day a nun walking along Basin Street, likely on her way to the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, saw Sadie at the third-floor balcony. Sadie was wearing a lace slip with one shoulder down, decently covered, and waving at the traffic along the street. The nun was wearing a habit like a racehorse’s blinkers and her mouth was soft and bowed, like a spoiled girl’s. When the nun turned her eyes up to Sadie’s, she shuddered and clutched at a crucifix lying upon a thin black ribbon upon her chest, giving a little gasp that echoed along the street.

The woman took something from within her dark clothing, and cast it at the bottom of Lulu’s long marble stairs. Then she slipped off with mincing steps and was soon out of sight.

Sadie slunk downstairs, throwing a wrap over her slip and putting on a pair of leather gentleman’s boots at the door, large enough that she could slip her feet in without tying them.

It was early, before noon, and she lifted her chin high as she descended. At the bottom of the stairs she found a tooled wallet the size of a cigarette case. Sadie fled to her room, which had a flowered rug on the floor, dark flowered wallpaper, and flowers carved in her dresser, mirror-frame, and Empire-style bed: and a tiny, dim window with colored flowers in the upper panes, too pretty to break and too small to climb through.

By the dim light of the bubbled glass, Sadie looked inside the wallet. It held an old photograph of two women in prim Victorian dresses and veiled hats. One woman’s veil was pulled back. She wore a thick ribbon around her neck, which was bruised. She faced directly toward the camera, and was perfectly clear. The other, turned toward the first woman and holding her stiff hand, was slightly blurred. In old photographs, only the dead are perfectly clear.

The dead woman had Sadie’s face, the live woman had the nun’s.

Sadie left her wrap draped over the end of the bed and went back to the third-floor parlor. The light was better there. Another girl, Chloe Sonnier, was sunning herself and drinking café au lait at the little wrought-iron table.

“What have you got there?” Chloe asked.

Sadie showed it to her, without comment.

Chloe gave a little scream and dropped the wallet on the table, crossing herself. “Where did you get that unholy thing?”

Sadie laughed and related the morning’s little tale.

“Whatever does it mean?”

Sadie shrugged. “That my double had her throat cut, and the other girl became a nun because of it, what else?”

Chloe crossed herself again, and went back into the house, leaving her café au lait behind.

Sadie leaned back against the wall of the house, holding the café in one hand and the memento mori in the other. Now she would hold it at arm’s length. Now she would bring it close to her face, giving the photograph a squint.

Her double, she decided, had also been the kind of girl who was made for trouble, and had been killed over a man. There had been a jealous spat, a straight razor, and—why not?—a luscious opera singer that both of them wanted. The other woman in the photograph was the good sister, the one who had been left behind. She had loved the wicked sister. The good were often not so good, but only afraid to be wicked. But Sadie had a feeling that the good sister in the photograph was truly good, the soft and wonderful kind of goodness that would bring the wicked sister back to her, time and again, for comfort, and to see the plain joy upon her face.

After the death of wicked sister, the good sister had gone to Louisiana to be married to a man of property, and had two daughters—one who looked like her, and one who looked like her dead sister, the wicked one.

One day, the wicked sister had run away, never to be seen again, very young. Or had she been kidnapped? The good sister had pined. Their parents had had other children—but the two sisters had never truly been separated. They were joined, as if by a long, black ribbon, which stretched from the Catholic orphanage that had raised Sadie, to the good sister’s girlhood in Broussard, the only word young Sadie could speak beside her own name, when she had been found.

With one look, that connection had been drawn taught as a piano wire, and tomorrow her sister would see Sadie, for one last time.

They would have their photograph taken together. By then, Sadie would be dead, her image perfectly clear, propped up in Lulu’s front parlor, next to her sister—who would swear to discover who had killed her, and take her revenge.

Later, the good sister would discover the name of the police officer who had arrested Sadie, then killed her. He would disappear, only to be found later, floating face-down in a canal. No one would suspect the nun. Sadie would be dead—but loved.

Everyone made up whatever stories they liked, in Storyville.

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #22: Probation Violation

PETROSINELLA (A FAIRY TALE)

Petrosinella had been born to a poor family over in the old country.  Her mother had traded her for some fresh parsley to an ogress, which wasn’t as bad a deal as it sounded, since it meant that the child would be born alive, and live long enough to get given up, which was longer than some children got.  The ogress often gave her family good food, even in the dead of winter.  Ogresses eat better than anyone.  No matter what you hear, it isn’t because they eat babies.  Why would they do that?  All they have to do is whistle, and rabbits jump into their snares, and fish into their nets.

The mother tried to hold off giving up her pretty little Petrosinella for as long as possible. The ogress was not the sort to take a child, even one she was owed, without permission.  She would stop little Petrosinella along the road and say, “Tell your mother to remember her promise,” which message Petrosinella would faithfully repeat. She wasn’t the least bit afraid of the ogress, and thought of her as a sort of holy sister, for the ogress would wear a nun’s habit to keep the eyes of cruel men off her, when she was out.

The mother always pretended she did not hear Petrosinella’s reminders, until one day she cried, “If you think that ogress is so gentle and so sweet,” for the ogress always gave the little girl bread, or sweets, or flowers, “you tell her she can take what is owed!”

The next day, Petrosinella told the ogress exactly that, and was swept up into the ogress’s arms and taken off to a tower far away from her village, where she was taught to read and to cipher and to say her prayers, which, I am ashamed to say, her mother and father had not taught her.  That is not to say that Petrosinella was imprisoned in the tower.  She spent most of her days in the forest with the ogress, learning to whistle up rabbits and fish, to name all the plants and their uses, and to make all sorts of elixirs and medicines.

Then, one night, a prince found Petrosinella’s tower.  Princes are like fleas, they get everywhere and bite you until you scratch.  He climbed the tower, found Petrosinella there, and had his way with her, leaving her behind to face the music.  He never offered to take her with him. She was only the daughter of a poor family and he could not have married her, even if he had wanted to.

The next day, the ogress asked Petrosinella what the matter was, and Petrosinella, in all innocence, told her, not knowing that the ogress had promised Petrosinella to an order of friendly sisters nearby, in honor of her friendship with the old Abbess. So you see that everyone has debts to pay, even an ogress.

The ogress tore at her hair, and cried that she had never seen such a fool of a girl.  The girl answered that she hadn’t meant to disappoint her foster mother, and hadn’t wanted the prince’s attentions anyway.  But it was no use: what was done was done, and soon Petrosinella began to swell about the belly.

The ogress wailed that she would never be able to pay her debts now, and that Petrosinella would have only the worst sort of life ahead of her, the life her own mother had given her to an ogress to avoid.

Petrosinella said that she would go, but the ogress forbade it.  She was not cruel or unkind, and had great fondness for Petrosinella, whom she considered her daughter.  The ogress made Petrosinella agree to stay at the tower as punishment for betraying her trust, then went to her bed, to weep such tears that the tower was soon surrounded by tall mounds of rue.

Long waited Petrosinella in the tower.  When the babe quickened, the face of the ogress darkened even further, and Petrosinella vowed to leave the tower and find the prince, so the ogress would be longer troubled by her disobedient foster-daughter no more.

And off she went, to look for the prince.

She was not blind, as some of the stories say, except in the way that young women are always blind to princes, and when she whistled, the rabbits leapt into her snares, so she wasn’t hungry, either.

The ogress followed after her, as soon as she discovered her foster-daughter was missing. She looked everywhere, only to find trouble at every turn.  Finally a villager came to her, and, thinking her a nun, begged her to help ease the birthing pains of a woman, although a sinner—at least come, begged the villager, and pray.

It was Petrosinella, and she was very close to death, for she had conceived of twins.

The ogress saved both her and her twin sons, and said, “And all this, after I forbid you to go.”

Petrosinella asked what her punishment was to be, saying she had never wished to have the ogress for a mother, and had not wished to be trapped in the tower forever, and did not wish to be punished for her mother’s cravings, or to be given to nuns: and so you can see that even a woman raised by the kindest of ogresses can sometimes lose her temper.

The ogress declared that Petrosinella was so free that she would have to invent her own punishments, and went home.

One day, a long time later, Petrosinella returned to the tower. It was after her sons were grown.  All was badly worn and broken, the garden untended.  The ogress came to the window and squinted at her, for her eyes were bad and her limbs were weak. In fact she could hardly whistle the rabbits into her snares anymore.

“I have come to face my punishment,” said Petrosinella, and gathered up some parsley, which had gone wild, to start on some soup.

THE END

Note: this story is based on the early Italian version of the tale more familiarly known as “Rapunzel.” Actual probation violations proved to be almost as depressing as second-degree murder charges, and I just couldn’t do it. So that’s why it’s a fairy tale today.

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #18: Manslaughter (Involuntary)

AT THE CARNIVAL, NIGHTTIME IS THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT

It’s one of those traveling carnivals that sets up in open fields or parking lots of dead shopping malls.  It doesn’t have a big top or sideshows.  It isn’t a traveling circus.  It has a single Ferris wheel with twelve topless double seats that creak as they swing.  There’s a merry-go-round with plastic horses on it.  Some of the paint is chipped all the way down to the gray plastic, but the fabric top is still immaculate red and white.  The music comes from a DVD player.  The whole carnival smells of diesel fuel and burnt sugar.  A million cords have been gaffed down to the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. You can get cotton candy, carmel apples, sno kones, popcorn, corn dogs, hot dogs, hamburgers, soft pretzels, and all kinds of big cold drinks.  It’s hot enough, and dry enough, that sweat tacks down the hair on your arms, straight onto your skin.

If you’re lucky, you win an orange stuffed orangutan. A sports jersey. Or a rubber duck.

That’s daytime.

At the carnival, nighttime is the same, but different.

The lights come on.

Some of the lights are regular lights.  There are regular socket bulbs, neon lights, fluorescent lights hanging inside the ticket booths, washing the color out of the ticket-takers’ faces.  Then there are the LED lights.  They sell hand-held mini fans with LEDs all around the outside edges of the fan blades.  The lights show patterns as they spin. More LEDs race each other around the outside of the tent awnings.  They dance between the hanging stuffed animals.  Frogs with their arms outstretched, zebras, pink bears with smaller stuffed animals, monsters mostly, behind a plastic window in their bellies.  All those eyes watching you, once the lights come on.  Some of the eyes have lights inside them.  At night the air turns cold, colder than it really is, so you end up wrapping your arms around your shoulders and shivering.  People are everywhere and nowhere all at once.  One second you’re surrounded. The next, suddenly you’re by yourself, everyone looking at you.

I have two tickets and no money.  The cheapest ride is three tickets, except for the kiddie rides, and I’m too tall for those.  Three tickets for the fun house.  I need four tickets for the Sizzler, or the Pharaoh’s Fury, or the Gravitron. I walk around the edge of the carnival, looking for someone who wants to get rid of their leftover tickets.  I’m shivering.  I’m wearing shorts and a yellow ramen-noodle t-shirt. I told my mom I wasn’t going to bring a sweatshirt. My friends already went home. I have to leave soon too, on my bike. Maybe I’ll find some other kid to give my leftover tickets to.

Then this guy pushes past me, wearing running shoes, no socks, black shorts, and a long-sleeved black t-shirt that sticks to his front.  He has a hemp necklace with cowrie shells on it and a goatee. He looks at me. He looks at me on purpose.

I hear something rattle on the asphalt. Then the guy jumps over the aluminum fence at the edge of the carnival and is gone.

On the asphalt is a curling coil of tickets.  I pick them up.

They’re sticky and dark.

I find a mostly-clean paper napkin and wipe them off.

A dozen tickets! With my two other tickets, that’s fourteen. That’s three four-ticket rides, with two left over.  Or two fives and a four, with nothing left over.

I walk to the Sizzler.  It pulls at me, swooping and turning.  It isn’t the most dangerous ride.  It isn’t the tallest ride.  But I like it.  It has three arms with four carriages on each arm.  It turns like crazy, throwing you back and forth and switching directions. Then, just when you start to get used to it, it starts throwing you up and down.  No seat belt, just a grab bar that fits in front of you. I get in line.

A big guy is taking tickets, the kind of guy who can throw a kid a hundred feet into the air all by himself.  I hand him my two clean tickets and two of the least yucky ones.  He starts to take them, then looks down at the tickets.  “What the hell did you spill all over these, kid?  I can’t be taking these.”

He shoves them back at me and pushes me out of line.  I howl in protest.

“They’re fake! Nice try, kid.  Next!”

He’s lying.  Those tickets are real.  He just doesn’t want to gunk up his ticket pouch.

Two guys behind me hand over their tickets.  They climb into a seat and pull the bar in front of them and put the pin in, even before the ticket taker comes.  For a second the music on the merry-go-round goes silent, and I hear one of them say, “But I know I got him.”

“He’s still moving,” says the other, banging his hand on the arm of the safety bar.

“We’ll find him. Time to start searching—” says the first one, and then the music comes on again.

A few seconds later, the Sizzler starts up.  The two guys are still talking.  Their heads lean one way, then the other.  They’re wearing matching dark-blue polo shirts and khaki pants.

I see something dull and silver lying on the ground where they climbed in.  The ticket taker sees the silver thing too, then does a double-take.

His hand moves for the lever, but it’s too late.

One of the polo shirt guys screams.  Then—

Nobody ever finds out how the guy on the inside end of the seat gets thrown, but not the one on the outside. It’s a freak accident. The big guy is arrested for involuntary manslaughter, but they let him go again.

I keep my mouth shut when they ask me.

Even though I never get to use the rest of those tickets.

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #17: Indecent Exposure

FLORIDA MAN EXPOSES HIMSELF TO NUNS

October 11, 2019 — PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Florida man found nude inside an after-hours ShopMart Halloween display is facing charges after being reported for indecent exposure by local nuns.

The Sun-Journal reports 34-year-old shopper Elwood “Eddie” Rigsby was arrested in the early hours of last Friday after closing hours of the local ShopMart after being discovered within the store’s seasonal Halloween display at approximately one a.m. by a search party constituting of over forty searchers, including several police officers, three shift supervisors, and the store manager, Hazel Knoblock.

Earlier the previous day, an emergency call was received by the Pensacola Police Department about a topless man who had exposed himself to several nuns who had been perusing the seasonal section.  The nuns, members of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Lidwina (CSL) were preparing to celebrate a Jubilee, or twenty-fifth anniversary of observing the religious life, for one of their members. The sister making the call reported that they had found the man hiding within the racks of adult costumes in the store.

The suspect was reported to have behaved in a “lewd and indecent manner,” and shouted at the nuns to “suck on it like a lollypop,” after which he was reported to have snatched a costume with a men’s short bolero jacket and sombrero and disappeared within the men’s clothing aisles.

But that was only the beginning.

Several officers arrived shortly afterward to search for the suspect, who eluded detection for several hours.  After closing, a more thorough search was performed; however, the suspect was not located for several hours, until a large display of boxes of Halloween candy and decorative streamers, shaped like an enormous jack-o-lantern, was disassembled.  The suspect was found to have created himself a narrow, cramped hiding spot within the boxes using a box-cutter, several rolls of adhesive tape, and a fleece throw quilt, decorated with Halloween themes.

Store Manager Hazel Knoblock stated, “The candy was shipped to us packed in Halloween display boxes, the kind where all you have to do is cut open the front.  You can stack the boxes on the shelves or build them up in displays if you want.  They’re pretty handy.  We have one employee who’s a genius at building seasonal displays for us, everything from football goalposts to thirty-foot beer gator.  He put a lot of work into that jack-o-lantern, and it almost makes you want to cry for the damage that [the suspect] did to it. It was like having a rat get into your pantry. Those boxes looked gnawed on.”

Rigsby was released Sunday on $11,500 bond and faces charges of indecent exposure, criminal trespassing, second degree petty theft, and criminal mischief. It’s unclear if he’s retained an attorney.

Of note is that the suspect returned to the same ShopMart location after his release to purchase the fleece throw quilt he had used earlier the previous week, calling it “the most comfortable blanket I ever passed out on.”

Store Manager Hazel Knoblock states that that type of quilt is currently sold out, but an additional shipment of quilts will be arriving soon.

Wireless Device Used to Hack Customer Records At Local Store

October 17, 2019 — PENSACOLA, Fla. — A customer database at a local ShopMart was hacked during the last week using a small wireless device that connected to an unsecured computer network via wireless router, with hundreds of customer records, including the credit card information of several nuns, potentially at risk.

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

Crime du Jour #16: Identity Theft

THE CLOISONNÉ HEART

The question of who my mother was only arose after her death. I had put some of her ashes inside a jewel-like, enameled cloisonné heart specially made to hold them. On the back of the heart was a threaded screw—a big plug, really. You put the ashes in, then screwed the plug shut. There was no way to unscrew the plug, no screwdriver slot or edges to grip on, once you had tightened it. Once it was in, it wasn’t coming out. The heart came with a little stand, so you could display it.

The rest of her ashes I scattered around the farm, trespassing because the property had long since been sold.

Our family’s savings and property were stolen by a con man in the late 1980s, when I was in ninth grade. At first no one could believe it. We limped along, trying to pay bills, until finally the bank lay down the law. Then we moved to Cheyenne, where my father got a job with a government bureau helping other farmers navigate their own bankruptcies.

I’ve looked over the paperwork. The con was a fairly common investment scam that involved going in on shares on guaranteed high-yield property around the East Teapot Dome Oil Field.

It was a deal too good to be true.

Mom worked tirelessly to hold the family together, working two jobs and cooking a dozen meals at a time to put in the freezer, for nights when she wouldn’t be home until late. She volunteered at our new church, not because she had the time, but because she felt obliged to repay the community for helping us out when we moved.

As the sale of the farm went through and the debts were paid off and the police had tracked down the man who had fooled Dad so badly, although we were given to understand that we’d never get the money back—that is, as things started to look up—Mom seemed to shrink in upon herself. She lost her temper over the smallest issues. She quit volunteering for the church. She put on weight. More than once, she wasn’t where she said she was. None of us had cell phones back then. She would blame me for the times when no one could find her: she had told me what my curfew was, and I was lying about her behavior in order to shift the blame.

I convinced myself that she was right, and that I should be ashamed of myself.

Then we were hit by identity thieves.

This was the early 1990s by then. A dozen credit cards were opened in my name, in Mom’s name, in Dad’s name. The savings that I had worked summers and after school to pay for college disappeared. All our savings did. Every vehicle we owned had liens taken out against them. A second mortgage had been dumped on the house. The thief had done everything they could to clean us out.

Once again, Mom held us together. Whatever had been wrong with her reversed itself. Her color came back, she lost weight, she took on a second job, and she started volunteering again.

Despite not having a lot of savings—I had switched banks once I turned eighteen—I started college at the University of Wyoming.

I had scholarships that covered most of what I needed, and a loan from my English teacher that covered the rest. I didn’t tell my mother that I was going. I don’t know why. I think I just assumed that she knew, given the mail that came from the college. I had Dad sign anything that needed to be signed. Nobody talked about it. Mom never said, “I know that money is tight, but…” I turned in my two-week notice at the hotel I worked at, washed my laundry, packed clothes and a few other things, and—went.

When I got there, I didn’t know my own phone number at my dorm room yet.

The first night I was at college, I went out to a freshman orientation thing that my roommate, Graciela, had opted to skip. The phone rang off the hook, at least two dozen prank calls of someone “screaming incoherently.” Graciela eventually left the phone off the hook.

By the time I went home for the first time, in October, Mom claimed that she had known all along that I was going to college. She even told everyone that she had saved up “pin money” to give me the last of what I needed that first semester.

I didn’t think, or talk, about it.

I slowly scraped my way out of my identity-theft issues. I fought with credit reporting agencies and wrote letters and studied accounting. The guy who had ripped Dad off initially had gone to prison, with the police telling us that “someday” we might receive pennies on the dollar, based on the guy’s prison-labor wages, at something like a dollar an hour.

Then Mom got sick with liver cancer and Dad got hit by the identity thieves again.

It wiped my parents out. They were lucky they had health insurance.

I had locked everything down, so the thief wasn’t able to get much from me—and I was quickly able to get the charges reversed. But the teacher who had loaned me the money I needed for my first semester got hit, too, at the same time. She lost her house.

Mom died.

It wasn’t until this year that it all started coming out. Dad found some bills stuffed between the drywall and the foundation, after he had had to make some repairs due to water damage last spring. Bills for credit cards taken out under my English teacher’s name.

I tracked down five hundred thousand dollars that Mom stole from us. But never what she did with it.

Afterward, that heart full of ashes, which I kept, seemed mawkishly appropriate.

THE END

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.