The Haunted Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

part
of me feared the memory could be taken away from me at any minute.
Jewels returned and pushed me to the side so she could share the
seat with me. After a few seconds of boredom as I did my Hemingway
with the notebook, she moved the mouse. She knew my password so it
was easy for her to log in.
    The picture of the wall with the ghost image
was up on my desktop. I stared at it. I hadn't downloaded that yet
so why was it open on my desktop?
    "Hey…someone's moving your mouse and it's
not me."
    I watched for about a second before I
realized someone had remote access to my computer. Shit! Logically
I should pull the internet plug on the computer—but I also wanted
to see if I could catch this mother fucker. I grabbed my phone from
my back pocket as I watched the mouse try repeatedly to put the
image in the trash.
    That's when I saw six missed calls from
Pink, my Internet wunderkind. I hit the redial and pushed Julie out
of the way. "Pink—"
    "What the fuck is going on?" She was all of
eighteen and my niece, with a mouth as bad as my own. If my sister
ever heard her talk like that, I was the one who was gonna pay.
"Someone's in my system."
    "I'm looking at it right now. How is this
possible?"
    "I don't know. I've been monitoring them
since they broke in."
    "You know when they hacked it?"
    "Hell yeah—and if you'd
answer your phone, you'd know, too." She paused. "They're not
trying to actually access the important stuff— my stuff—but they are trying to trash
a folder you uploaded earlier today. What's TAH?"
    I froze, the phone to my ear. "What?"
    "It's in your picture folders, for your
company? It's says TAH and whoever this is has been trying to
delete it for the past half hour."
    "Oh that stands for The Alley Haunt . It's
where I took pictures today. I've uploaded to it but I haven't
downloaded. You've got it protected somehow?" I grabbed my mouse
and moved it. That action took the mouse out of the control of
whoever was remotely hacked in. I let it go and it started moving
again, trying to delete the photo.
    "Yeah. Once you upload to my server, it's
all password protected. Whoever got in used your password, but they
can't get access to anything. But damn if they're not trying."
    "Can you find out who it is?"
    "Already tried and still trying. They've
actually rerouted their connection off fifty spoofed IPs."
    She lost me somewhere in the middle, but
that was okay. I had no ego in this shit. "What do you want me to
do? They're actually accessing my desktop as we speak."
    "What are they doing?"
    "Trying to delete a file. The file's open
but I didn't open it. It's like…whoever it is opened it to check it
and is trying to get rid of it."
    "Shut your machine down and disconnect your
Wi-Fi router."
    "Won't that make it hard for you to track
them?"
    "Right now, I just want them out. And don't
worry—I plan on finding out who they are."
    I shut the machine off, unplugged it, then
reached up on the book shelf to the left of the desk and pulled the
Ethernet from the modem to the router. "Okay. It's all off."
    "Yeah, I bounced them. Looks like they
changed your password, too. I'm changing it back and adding a bit
more security. Give me about a half hour before you try logging in
again. I'll text you the info."
    We disconnected. Julie was looking at me.
"You okay?"
    "I just got hacked."
    "I saw that. Was that Pink on the
phone?"
    "Yeah…" I ran a hand through my hair. "They
were trying to get rid of the pictures I took earlier today."
    "Of what?"
    "This corner building—used
to be a bar called The Alley
Haunt ."
    "I remember that bar. Over in Buckhead. Or
sort of off-Buckhead. The way off-Broadway is…" She let the
metaphor die. "Why would anyone want to delete those pictures?"
    I sat back down in the chair as she sat on
the edge of the table. "I don't know. It's not any kind of special
place. I mean…it feels all wrong in places, especially upstairs.
But the bank just wanted pictures for a potential buyer. And not
just that