DOUBLE MINT by Gretchen Archer Read Free Book Online Page B

would have to have other
     tells, and these didn’t. It was a genius method of counterfeiting, one I’d never heard
     of. We had a bathtub full of perfect money, every bit of it with green hollow stars.
    It was funny money. Very good funny money, the best I’d ever seen. At the same time
     it was useless unless spent one bill at a time. You could never deposit this money
     in a financial institution, take it to a currency trader, or even buy in for $500
     at a blackjack table and not wind up in prison. Whoever passed this money off would
     never be caught. Whoever tried to spend it would be. And fast.
    “Fantasy, this is a trap.”
    “What?”
    “It’s a setup.” I shook a few thousand dollars. “The man who left this money here
     either fell into a trap or he was setting one.”
    She rocked back on her heels. “You’re right. This money is a one-way ticket to federal
     prison.”
    Weird.
      
    * * *
      
    The fake money wouldn’t fit in the missing man’s suitcase. We arranged it several
     ways.
    “He got it in here,” Fantasy said. “Surely, we can get it out.”
    “I’ll sit on the suitcase, you zip.”
    Ten minutes later, me falling off the suitcase twice, I stuffed eighty thousand or
     so in my bra. Fantasy, after winning the fight with the suitcase, rocked back on her
     heels. “What’s going on? Missing people? Fake platinum? Fake cash?”
    “Those are questions for Magnolia.”
    Fantasy shook her head. “You’re giving that woman way more credit than she deserves.
     She can’t put a sandwich together, much less a con. In a million years Magnolia Thibodeaux
     couldn’t fill a bathtub with counterfeit money, rob a vault, and pull off a double
     kidnapping.”

Five

      
    When Bradley and I had been married for forty-eight hours and the smoke cleared enough
     for us to look around and see exactly where we were, I flew into a panic.
    “We have to go home, Bradley. This whole New Orleans thing is freaking me out.”
    “We have to take it a day at a time, Davis.” He stared at an elaborate oil painting
     above the bed of an expressionless alligator with huge marble eyes. Beside the alligator
     were the words Peace, Love, and Gumbo. “It is a little,” he blinked, “much.”
    He took off for his new job downstairs and I took off for the Bayou Bureau of Printing
     and Engraving down the hall.
    Wrapped in a blanket, armed with a cup of black coffee (my half and half had curdled
     in the big red refrigerator overnight), I set out to explore the casino manager’s
     residence, huge place, way more than we needed or wanted, to make my peace with it.
     We might be here a few weeks.
    My tour started at the front door with the ridiculous magnolia tree in the cast iron
     tub. The wide green leaves reached all the way to the copper dome ceiling. I was on
     my way to the next room, the circular tearoom decorated like a King Cake, when I spotted
     a door to the right of the magnolia tree in the foyer. A hidden door. It was seamlessly
     wallpapered against the rest of the foyer, totally inconspicuous in the background
     of the busy black and gold fleur-de-lis wall. A door I hadn’t noticed, having been
     in and out of the residence a dozen times already, a door that led to a place I wish
     I’d never gone, a door that once opened couldn’t be closed.
    Feeling along the seams, I nudged and it protested. It was a swinging door, no knob,
     hidden hinges, much wider than a regular door and at least ten feet tall. I used my
     hip to knock it in and when I did, the noise it made was nothing short of a train
     crash, bouncing off the foyer walls and copper ceiling, scaring me to death. I sloshed
     scorching hot coffee all over my hand. While I was dancing away the sting, the door
     swung back and hit me in the head, and there went the rest of my coffee, burning down
     the front of my bathrobe. (Looking back, I think it was a telekinetic message: Do
     not enter.) The only thing I’d managed to see was a