(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

I'll have to take a breather from these charity fics for a while - I've got to get stuck into my original novel, and a revised Who proposal to boot. But in the meantime, here's my second effort for my groovy brother Andrew:



Peri told us why she didn't like guns. It wasn't a political stance; she never thought much about that kind of thing. 'The Doctor and I got caught up in a bank robbery one day,' she said. 'And someone got shot. They died.'

'That's awful,' we said. 'But criminals with guns - that's not a reason law-abiding citizens shouldn't have them.'

'Maybe,' said Peri. 'But it's kind of more complicated than that.' Oho, we thought, hereby hangs a tale. 'You can rob a bank in a lot of different ways. I mean, you can go in the front door with a gun under your coat - at least you could, when this happened. This was in the mid-eighties some time.'

'Oh - was this when you were hanging around with Bob Salmon¹?'

It was a good guess. 'Bob had got work in electronic security.' Peri smiled, reminiscing. 'He boasted about plugging a hole in the new automatic teller machine system. If you pretended to be a technician, and interrupted someone just after they entered their password - told them the machine wasn't working - then they walked off with their card, but they were still actually logged in, and you could withdraw all the money you wanted from their account. It was a really simple scam, but it didn't stop until Bob worked it out. That was how he got his job.'

'Was it Bob who owned the gun?' we said, feeling pretty clever about working it out, not to mention determined to get back to the subject.

'Yeah,' said Peri. 'Bob had an RG Industries RG-14 .22 revolver.' She rattled off the name in one breath, as though she'd had to memorise it. For a court case? 'He had a licence and some training, and he kept it safely locked up. I don't want this to reflect badly on Bob. He's a good guy. One of the best.'

'We understand.'

'His dad was in the military. So guns just seemed ordinary to him.'

We nodded. We weren't so interested in the fate of Robert Salmon, white hat hacker; we wanted to hear about Peri, and especially the Doctor.

'Well, mostly, Bob sat in an office looking for bugs in the bank's computer software. When he found a way people could interfere with the computers to get money, he reprogrammed them.

'There was one glitch, happening at one branch of the bank, which he just couldn't explain. It wasn't somebody dialling up the bank's computer over the phone line. And he was sure it wasn't somebody inside the bank, one of the tellers or one of the computer operators - he checked everything. It took him months.

'Somehow, somebody was changing the bank's records, a little bit at a time. They were putting aside exactly eighty eight dollars and fourteen cents, every day - only it didn't happen every day. The account filled up in fits and starts - that's how the Doctor put it.

'After a couple of months Bob worked out that it was going into a hidden account, but he couldn't identify the owner - one day, when they had accumulated enough money, they'd just make a withdrawal, and he'd never know.'

We said, 'So he had to work out who it was before that happened.'

'That was the problem,' said Peri. 'The only way to catch whoever it was would be to catch them red-handed. Bob stayed at his computer nearly around the clock, checking every time an employee did absolutely anything, but he never saw one suspicious thing happen.'

'Is this where the Doctor comes into the story?' we said, getting impatient.

'Well, yes, it is,' she said, shifting uncomfortably. 'You know, the Doctor is really funny when it comes to guns. He's really anti-gun, you know. Bob tried to get the Doctor to take his gun. He got it out of the toolbox where he kept it locked up, and cleaned it and loaded it, and then tried to get the Doctor to take it along.'

'Take it along where?'

'To the filing room, in back of the bank. Every day, the computer operators made a backup of the tapes and sent them to a lockup in the basement.

'The Doctor and Bob worked it out between them. Someone was altering the backup tapes. Then, from time to time, they'd force the computer to shut down - it looked like a routine crash. When the operators loaded up the backups, that was when the secret account got its $88.14 per day.'

We said, 'That's very clever.'

'Bob wanted to erase the account and send out a memo to everyone in the company. That way whoever it was would be stopped, and warned off, and there wouldn't have to be a confrontation. It turned out that the thief had already worked out that Bob knew what was going on. Bob started getting death threats. Really nasty stuff turning up on his computer, and then stuffed into his mailbox. That's why he wanted the Doctor to take the gun when we went to catch the crook.'

'So the Doctor shot the thief!'

'No! No way. The Doctor is a crack shot, that's the weird thing, he just really hates guns. When Bob tried to make him carry the .22 he just made a joke about it.' She sighed. 'Bob should have been really confident with the pistol. He had the training and plenty of practice. But when it came to actually maybe killing somebody... he just kind of freaked out.'

'So that's what happened. Bob "freaked out" and shot the thief.'

'The thief had a weapon of his own - a shotgun. He got it in past security because he *was* security, the head of it, for the whole bank. He was waiting for us.'

'The thief shot Bob?'

'I took the gun along,' said Peri. 'I shot the thief.'

'*You* shot him?' We couldn't imagine it. 'You didn't mean to, though, right?'

'Actually I did. He was going to blast the Doctor with the shotgun. I hid Bob's pistol in my handbag, and when I saw that, I just pulled it out - it weighed a ton - and started firing at him. It slapped my hand around all over the place - my whole arm. I didn't know what I was doing, but it was kind of point blank.'

'We can't believe you actually shot someone dead!'

Peri shrugged awkwardly. 'Actually, I only shot him in the hip. He ran away - well, I guess he limped, really - and tried to drive off. He got dizzy from the blood loss and crashed his car into an oncoming semitrailer.'

We're still puzzled. 'You saved your friend's life,' we said. 'Of course you feel bad about contributing to that criminal's death, but you didn't even kill him. So why don't you like guns?'

'I guess... I guess because a doofus like me could get a gun that easily and actually shoot somebody.' She waved her hand around, indicating the world beyond the room, beyond the building. 'Think of all the other doofuses walking around out there.'


¹ Name changed.




... a little bit experimental, that one, not sure what I think about it. For now, one more to come, due Thursday. Oh, btw: one of these stories has a massive continuity error in it. Spot it, and I'll donate another $10 to Amnesty.

Comments

[shellshear.livejournal.com]

I like that one a lot! A deleted vignette from "Blue Box", a book which could easily support many more such short stories. I'd pay for another one, if/when you get back into it.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I thank you!