“Nobody’s in here.”
“If nobody’s in here, then why are we whispering?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. A drawer slammed shut in the print shop, and the droning hum started again.
I stood up quietly, careful not to trip over any of the boxes or dollies as I crept to the swinging door I’d seen Jackson leave through. I peeked through the clear plastic window at the top. A massive printer was churning out brick-shaped stacks of paper in the corner. Someone hovered over the machine, scrutinizing one of the printed sheets under a handheld magnifying lens, the kind a jeweler might use to inspect a gemstone or fix a clasp.
The printer jammed with a horrible shriek. The man swore as he knelt to inspect it. I retreated from the door and tiptoed back to Vero.
“Someone’s in there. We need to get those boxes back under the shelf and get out of here,” I whispered.
“We can’t leave without the money! I’ll hold the door open with my butt. You carry the money to the car. If he tries to stop us, stab him in the nuts.”
“We can’t take all that cash, Vero!”
“But it’s mine!” she whispered.
“Which is why we have to leave it here! If we’re caught with it, it will make you look guiltier than you already do! We’re going to put the boxes back where we found them and—”
A door chimed. Vero and I froze, our ears tipped toward the front room. A male voice rang through the print shop. “Jackson, I’m back! Where the hell are you?”
“Down here, fixing the feeder on this fucking machine. What took you so long?”
“I had to try three different places to find beer at this hour. Better grab a slice. Pizza’s getting cold.” A can snapped open.
“Be there in a minute. I need to restart this print job or it’s going to take all night. I’ve still got one more batch to run.”
“Good. As soon as it’s done, I plan to crash.” This second man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t seem to place who it was.
The front door chimed once more. A third male voice called out, “Sorry I’m late. Some cop came by my condo, wanting to know if I had seen or heard from Theo. Someone from the bar must have called them. Don’t worry, I handled it.” Vero turned to me and mouthed,Ben?“I made up a story about him visiting some friends. Then I called the bar and told the manager the same thing. That should buy a couple more days. Problem solved,” he said. “How are they looking, Jacks?”
“See for yourself.”
Ben’s low whistle was almost reverent. “Holy shit, Jackson. These are good. Like, reallyreallygood. They could totally pass for the real thing.”
“I almost hate to hand them off. The whole idea was genius.”
“That’s why they pay Ben the big bucks,” the second man teased.
“Ishould have gone into business,” Jackson grumbled.
“Your art degree was good for something,” Ben reminded him. “These things are worth at least twenty times what it cost to print them.”
The second man laughed. “Only because that paper was a steal.”
I turned slowly toward the box we’d just opened. To the logo of the printer spitting out the dollar sign. My eyes climbed to theshelf above it, to the cases of toilet paper, hand soap, and photo-processing chemicals… and several bottles of bleach. My mind raced back to the night in Theo’s house. The laundry machines. The empty boxes. The ironing board and the wet dollar bills. The stacks of buckets and jugs of bleach.
Everything someone would need to wash money.
… That paper was a steal… These things are worth at least twenty times what it cost to print them.
“They’re counterfeit,” I whispered to Vero. My sister had once told me about a method of altering money involving bleach. She had regaled us with stories about it over dinner, after she started working cases in Organized Crime. Regular paper was difficult to pass off as real currency, so amateur counterfeiters often resorted to bleaching the ink from real dollar bills. They could be washed, dried, ironed, and reprinted to look like higher increments. It was a laborious process, but if it was done with a commercial-grade scanner and high-quality inks, one dollar could easily be made to look like a twenty, or even a hundred-dollar bill.
Making party flyers was only part of what Jackson and Bennett had been doing here.
“This might have been your sorority’s money once,” I told Vero, “but it’s not anymore.” And the bills in that box were worth a lot more prison time than the charges Vero was wanted for.
“Forget the money,” I said urgently. “We need to put it back where we found it and report everything we saw to the police.” I folded down the cardboard flaps and pushed the box toward the nearest shelf. The edge of the cardboard stuck on something, and the box refused to slide all the way under. “Help me with this,” I whispered, leaning a shoulder into it. Vero turned around and shoved with her backside, but between the two of us, we couldn’t get it to budge.
