Free Write Thursday

The detective saw his opportunity. He grabbed the waitresses arm and said “You’re coming with me”. For 10 years he had been tracking down the illusive group of credit card thieves. At first it started out with one person, Camille Scott,  reporting that her credit card had been stolen. It then escalated to ten, twenty, all the way up to thirty within the past year in the small town of Gatesville. Thirty out of the total 1,000 citizens had reported credit card theft. With no motivation, the police department was taking in complaints about the card theft. They were taking forever to process the complaints, and said there was nothing they could do about the thefts. Citizens were getting fed up, the problem was only getting worse. The people of Gatesville took the situation into their own hands, they hired a private investigator, Carl Jennings. He promised to be one of the best PI’s around and would figure out anything. The citizens explained their situation, “Seems like you’ve got a big problem” said Jennings. This was not taken well by the citizens, they wanted to know whether or not he would be able to find who was stealing all of the credit cards. The thief was stealing life savings of small town people. Jennings started with interviewing everyone about what they did the day when their credit card was stolen. He could find no common thread, except the majority of people ate at the Carlson’s Diner. He started his search there. Asking for all the records of credit card transactions, and interviewed everyone who worked for the diner. The pressure was on to find the thief, and quickly. After interviewing the waitresses, he felt that they were not telling him something. All of the servers had the same story, they were just here to make enough money to get out of this small town. He figured that they could not be making nearly enough of what they needed to move out of this town. Jennings decided to come back to the diner in disguise and see what he could find. He was only 23, so a distressed college student would probably appeal to the overworked servers, he figured. That Friday, he went to Carlson’s and ate at the diner. The waitress was asking lots of questions about if he was going to college, where he was working, if he needed money. As he was about to pay, she sat down at his booth and asked him if he would be interested in a business opportunity. Intrigued, he said yes. “We have a “card business” where we borrow people’s credit cards to better the environment, and ourselves” the waitress said. That’s when Jennings knew he had caught the credit card stealers.

Word Count: 461