Read Online Giving Up by Mike Steeves - Free Book Online

considered them to be antiquated, obsolete, and so I certainly wasn’t in a position to judge whether the form he held out in front of me was standard or not. ‘That’s my friend,’ he said, and pointed to a line near the top of the form where in faint blue ink someone had written the name ‘Gary Trites.’ If he was trying to con me out of four hundred dollars then he was taking a big risk by letting me inspect the money order form. For all he knew, I might be the sort of person that regularly deals with money orders, and so knows what a legitimate form would look like. ‘There’s no way he’d try to pass a bogus form off on someone like me,’ I thought, and when I thought ‘someone like me’ what I meant was a relatively well-dressed, normal-looking, intelligent-seeming man – my intelligence, I believed, would have been evident to the stranger within seconds of our encounter – but I might as well have thought ‘someone like him,’ since I considered him to be well-dressed, good-looking, and obviously intelligent (or intelligent-seeming, at least) even though the desperate and wild eyes that were fixed on me throughout his whole story made me think of the senile patients at a nursing home. He had a nice voice and spoke clearly in full sentences and without the usual pauses, repetitions, and abrupt transitions and loopy syntax that characterize what passes for speech these days. He didn’t saturate his story with obscenities or any of the other commonplace verbal tics. And if it weren’t for his crazed and hollow stare I wouldn’t have doubted that I was speaking with someone in possession of a keen intellect. But the way that he was looking at me as he kept pointing at the name on the form and repeating the blank assertion ‘That’s my friend’, suggested that he wasn’t ‘all there’, or that he was a bit ‘off.’ ‘Either way,’ I thought, ‘he’d have to be pretty stupid to think that someone like me wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a phony money order and a real one. Why would he risk showing me the money order unless it was the real thing?’ I scanned the rest of the form and even though I had never seen one before I decided right away that it was legit. The FedEx logo was featured on the top left and the rest was divided into the boxed grid you would expect from the sort of form designed to record and transfer a sum of money. In addition to this, the form was a colour-coded sequence of three sheets with two carbon inserts, and it seemed altogether unlikely that this guy would have been able to forge this style of document, since the materials aren’t available to general consumers and would’ve had to have been ordered from some sort of specialized merchant who dealt in carbon triplicate forms and that sort of thing. I focussed on the text and was immediately struck by the words ‘Money Order’ on the top of the form. I was so intent on determining the authenticity of the form that it didn’t occur to me that he could have stolen it, or that they might be freely available to anyone coming in off the street. ‘See,’ he said, following my gaze and indicating a line just below the title where $500 had been scrawled in pale blue ink. ‘It’s like a cheque.’ Now that I was convinced that it was legitimate, I began to pay closer attention to what was written in the little boxes, but aside from ‘Gary Trites’ and ‘$500’ the form was blank except for another name – ‘Luke MacDonald’ – and an illegible signature at the bottom. ‘Is that you?’ I asked, pointing at the signature. ‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling the form away and putting out his hand for me to shake it. ‘Sorry, didn’t I give you my name?’ It’s Luke.’ I shook his hand as impersonally as I could manage.