Christine is carrying $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills, five of them in the bill compartment of her wallet. The cab driver who drove her to the Hertz place accepted one of those bills with a pained expression not half an hour ago, when he nonetheless made change for her. For his trouble, she gave him a big tip and a leg show as she got out of the taxi. She now removes three more of those bills from the wallet, slides them onto the marble counter, and says, “May I have these in tens and twenties, please.”
Henrietta smiles, and picks up one of the bills.
She notices at once that this is not one of the new hundreds with the oversized picture of Benjamin Franklin on it. There are still many of these old hundreds in circulation; it will in fact take years before they’re all replaced by the Federal Reserve. Henrietta checks these older bills more carefully than she does the Big Bens because she knows there are a lot of fakes out there. The American hundred-dollar bill is the most widely used piece of currency in the world, and hence the most counterfeited.
She holds it to the light to check the security strip along its edge, sees the repeated USA100USA100USA100USA100, picks up the second bill to perform the same check and then something catches her eye in the sequence of serial numbers, and she frowns slightly — which Christine catches even though it lasts for less than maybe five seconds.
“Excuse me one minute, miss, okay?” Henrietta says, and leaves the teller’s window, and goes to where a bald-headed white man wearing a blue seersucker suit is sitting behind a desk near the vault. Christine sees her handing one of the bills across the desk to him. She wonders if she should run. The white man looks over to where she’s standing. Henrietta is handing him the second bill now. Let’s get out of here, Christine thinks. Just walk slowly to the door, smile at the uniformed guard there, go out to where she’s parked the red Taurus, and split, sister!
The bald-headed manager, or whatever he is, gets up from his desk, smiles at Christine where she is still standing at the teller’s window, and goes to a paneled walnut door. He disappears from sight behind it. Henrietta walks back to the teller’s cage.
“Sorry, miss,” she says, “but Mr. Parkins has to run those bills through the machine.”
“What machine?” Christine asks.
“To verify them.”
“Oh dear,” Christine says. “Did someone pass me some fake money?”
“It happens,” Henrietta says, and smiles. “These supers are hard to recognize with the naked eye. But the machine will tell us.”
“Supers?”
“Super-bills. They’re made in Iran on intaglio presses the U.S. sold to the old shah. They print the bills on German stock. They’re really very good.”
“I see,” Christine says.
Her eyes are on that closed walnut door.
“But the Fed installed these machines in all our branches. Just like the ones they’ve got in D.C. I guess after 9/11, they’re more worried about people using fake money to do mischief.”
“I’ll bet,” Christine says.
“Did you read about all those bank accounts the terrorists had? Right here in Florida! Opened them with fake social security cards, can you imagine? You can buy all sorts of fake ID nowadays, no wonder there’s so much trouble in the world. Ah, here he comes now.”
Run, Christine thinks.
But something keeps her rooted to the spot.
The bald-headed man is smiling behind the bars of the teller’s cage.
“Miss,” he says, “I’m sorry, but these bills are counterfeit. We’ll have to confiscate them.”
“What does that mean?” Christine asks.
“By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, but what do you mean, confiscate? Will I be out three hundred dollars?”
“I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.”
“I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine,” Christine says, and pulls a face.
“I’m sorry, miss.”
“I just don’t see why I have to suffer for somebody else passing phony bills.”
“I’m sorry, that’s the law. We can’t allow counterfeit currency to stay in circulation. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s fair,” Christine says.
Her heart is pounding in her chest.
She turns away from the teller’s cage, walks past the guard at the front door and the sign asking patrons to please not wear hats, kerchiefs, or sunglasses, puts on her sunglasses, and walks out to where she parked the Taurus.
What Henrietta and Mr. Parkins neglected to do this morning was check the Cape October police list of marked bills that was circulated to every bank and merchant in the state of Florida.
On that list were the hundred-dollar bills Christine just now tried to cash.
Luke Farraday is beginning to wonder why so many people are so suddenly interested in who picked up the Glendenning kids on Wednesday afternoon. The one here now is from the Cape October paper, on Luke’s day off, no less, and he’s given Luke some cock-and-bull story about one of the kids, he doesn’t know which one, having a party, he doesn’t know what kind of party, and wanting to put an announcement about it in the social calendar, but he needs to have a cute little story to go with it. He thinks the story about them getting picked up after school and their mother thinking they missed the bus might be just the sort of human interest thing that would tickle his paper’s readers. Then again, Garcia looks like a Cuban to Luke, and maybe Cubans have different senses of humor than Americans have.
“What kind of car was it, would you remember?” Garcia asks.
It suddenly occurs to Luke that maybe there’s a bit of change to be made here.
The job he holds at Pratt Elementary is what the Cape October Department of Education officially calls a School Loading Area Director, a Level-4 position that pays $8.50 an hour, not a hell of a lot more than he could earn at the local Mickey D’s, if they were hiring anything but teenyboppers these days. Way Luke looks at it, the entire state of Florida is run by teenagers, if not the entire United States of America. So if there’s a few extra bucks to be picked up here for providing information to a journalist, well, why not take advantage of the situation? There were women who’d been raped by Martians who sold their stories to the tabloids for thousands of dollars.
“Why’s this of such importance to you?” he asks, and Garcia immediately recognizes that he’s about to be hit up.
“Give the story some interest,” he says.
“Get your facts right, you mean.”
“Kind of car, all that.”
“How much would your newspaper pay,” Luke asks straight out, “to give the story some interest? Get the facts right?”
“Let’s say that depends on the facts.”
“How much do you usually pay for facts of this sort?”
“Twenty bucks? Thirty?”
“How about fifty?” Luke says.
“Fifty’s cool.”
“The kids were picked up by a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman,” Luke says. “Avis sticker on the right rear bumper.”
“Thanks,” Garcia says.
In Cape October, because the police force is so small, the Radio Motor Patrol officers ride one to a car. The single officer in the car usually hangs his hat on the back rest of the passenger seat, so that it looks as if there are two cops patrolling instead of just one. Everybody in town knows there’s just that one cop in the car, however, so the effect is somewhat diminished.