DOUBLE MINT by Gretchen Archer Read Free Book Online Page A

was dead,
     and it’s not like I could kill him again. “Just tell me, Fantasy.”
    “You’ve got to see this for yourself.”
    The bathroom vanity was covered in stacks of cold hard cash. And hot off the press
     cash too. It was new car smell but better, because this was new money.
    “How much, do you think?”
    “I don’t know.” I ran a finger down a five-inch stack of one-hundred dollar bills.
     “Several hundred thousand, at least.”
    “Good Lord, Davis, look. There’s money in the bathtub.”
    We stood over the bathtub in admiration. “There’s a million dollars here,” I said.
    “Why would someone walk off and leave this money?”
    “They wouldn’t.”
    “Look at this.” She fanned out a stack. “It’s uncirculated.”
    Where did this money come from?
    We threw the deadbolt on the guest room door and got to work. It was just us; neither
     Bradley nor Baylor answered their phones, so they were still in the vault. I snooped
     in the man’s wallet while Fantasy rolled his suitcase into the bathroom to pack. The
     wallet was a brown leather trifold. In it, a neat stack of hundreds so freshly printed
     I didn’t even try to peel them apart, but having worked around money for as long as
     I have, I eyeballed it at two thousand dollars. And nothing else. No driver’s license,
     no ID, no picture of the wife, no Capital One card. I dusted and got partial prints
     from the wallet, the dinner knife, and the room keycard, and a set of perfect prints
     from the wine glass.
    “Hey, Davis.” Fantasy stood in the bathroom doorway. She used the back of one gloved
     hand to push her hair from her face and in the other gloved hand, she held thirty
     thousand or so dollars.
    “Yeah?”
    “This might be funny money.”
    Casino Employee Lesson Number One: Counterfeit Money.
    Fantasy and I probably know more about fake currency than the five hundred bankers
     here for the conference put together. You could wake either of us from a dead sleep,
     pass us phonies, we’d identify them by touch, sight, or print quality, then go right
     back to sleep. Technological advances have made counterfeiting so easy, and casinos
     are such an easy target for counterfeiters that, at this point, we’re experts. We
     could leave here and get jobs at the Treasury in a snap. We’re that good.
    Fantasy passed me a banded stack of hundreds. I peeled off my gloves and fingered
     through the money. It felt right, weight and mass. It looked right, embedded red and
     blue fibers, embossed images. The printing was excellent with clear and unbroken borders,
     the saw-tooth points on the Federal Reserve and Treasury Seals distinct and sharp,
     and the portrait was lifelike, standing out from the background. The problem was in
     the serial numbers. Specifically the stars. Every bill in the stack was a star bill.
    “What about the rest?” I asked.
    “The whole tub.”
    Every note in circulation has a unique serial number. It consists of three letters
     and eight digits. The first and last letters denote the series, and can be any letter
     but O or Z. O too closely resembles the number zero and Z is reserved for test runs.
     The second letter identifies the Federal Reserve Bank issuing the bill, and it’s always
     A through L. The numbers run the range between 00000001 and 99999999, and every thousand
     dollars or so, you run across currency with a star.
    If a defective note, damaged or misprinted, is found after the serial numbers have
     been applied, it has to be replaced so the final count will be accurate. It’s replaced
     from a stash of bills printed before the production run in which the last letter of
     the serial number is a star, and the rest of the serial numbers don’t trace back to
     anything or anyone. Star bills’ serial numbers are completely random. There’s no way
     to track a star bill back to production, and therefore, when trying to identify counterfeit
     currency by serial number, star bills get a pass. The bills