Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

“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.

The RMP officer patrolling Charlie Sector of the Pecan Street Division hung his hat beside him when he started his tour of duty at 7:45 A.M. this morning, and it is still there at 9:15. Like Tom Hanks talking to the volleyball in Cast Away, Officer Searles has begun talking to his own hat of late, a good argument perhaps for putting a second officer in the cars. Searles considers this good police work, however. Talking things out loud, so to speak, checking out the scene with someone else, even if the someone else is only your own hat.

“Narrow it down to blue cars,” he tells his hat. “No sense checking the tag on a red car, for example.”

He is slowly cruising the parking lot of the Pecan Street Mall. The mall opened at nine, and there are already plenty of parked cars in the lot.

“Weekend shoppers,” he tells his hat.

He is coming around the northern end of the long mall building, making a turn past the new Barnes & Noble that just came in last week, when he spots a pale blue four-door sedan parked some four ranks back from the front doors of the store.

“Hey!” he tells his hat. “A blue one! But is it a Chevy?”

The car is a Chevy.

It is, in fact, a four-door full-size sedan that Searles identifies at once as an Impala. On the right rear bumper there is a sticker that reads WE TRY HARDER. Searles takes out his pad, studies the notes he took this morning at roll call.

“We may have just won the lottery,” he tells his hat.

He pulls up alongside the blue Impala, engages the parking brake of his own vehicle, leaves the engine idling, and gets out of the car. He bends over, takes a look through the left rear window of the Impala. Empty. He drapes a handkerchief over his right hand, tries the back door. Locked. He tries the front door on the driver’s side. It opens to his touch. He leans into the car.

There is a red baseball cap on the backseat.

Christine is afraid to go tell him what happened.

Phony bills! Super-bills! What the hell is this, some kind of science fiction? Bills printed in Iran? He’ll never believe her. He’ll think she’s trying to pull a fast one, he can be so damn suspicious sometimes.

She has stopped for breakfast in a diner on U.S. 41, not far from the bank where she tried to cash the counterfeit bills. Can you imagine them just taking the money from her like that?

We’ll have to confiscate them.

What does that mean?

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.

She guesses she should’ve.

Fuckin thieves.

Worse than a stickup in a dark alley.

But what was she going to tell him?

Never mind being out three hundred dollars. If the bills are phony — well, they have to be phony, the bank has a damn machine! So, yes, let’s say the bills are very definitely phony. Which means they are out not three hundred dollars but two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which further means the whole damn scheme has gone up the chimney. Unless he can come up with another idea, he’s never been short of ideas, it was his idea to do this thing in the first place.