Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash (17 page)

THIRTY-TWO

The Jackal made it through his line before I made it through mine, so after I paid for the pen with the miscellaneous bills I had in my pocket, I ran outside and spotted him putting his boxes in the back of a white van.

Now, I’ve been accused of having a “vivid imagination,” an “overly active imagination,” a “wild imagination,” and a “destructive imagination.”

These have come from principals, vice principals, and policemen.

Oh.

And my mother.

I’ve never mistaken any of these as compliments—probably because of the sneer or frown or eye roll that went with it. And I have to admit that it’s kinda true. My brain can get really spun up in thinking things are connected when it turns out they’re not.

So even though I’d convinced myself that this bald, one-eyed guy with the angel wing tattoo is the Jackal, as I’m watching him drive away, I’m thinking, What if he’s not? What if he’s just some old guy buying tape at the office supply store?

How will I ever know?

And then I start kicking myself. Why didn’t I have my camera with me? Why was it zipped inside a couch cushion? Why did I even
have
a camera if that’s where I was going to leave it? I could have taken a picture of the bald, one-eyed guy! I could have zoomed in and snapped his license plate! I could have had something to work with!

But I didn’t have the camera, so instead, I tossed down my skateboard and chased after the van.

Now, if he’d been going clear across town or out to the highway, there’s no way I could have tailed him. But with downtown traffic and him sticking to downtown streets, I managed to keep him in view.

It involved some illegal street crossings and grabbing my skateboard and
running
a couple of times, but I never lost sight of him.

And you know where he went?

Straight to the Senior Highrise.

Most of the people who live at the Highrise don’t drive. And most of the ones who do probably
shouldn’t.
But the point is, there’s no garage or any, you know, parking
structure
for the Highrise. There’s just a parking lot tucked around back and street parking.

The one-eyed bald guy pulled into a place on Main Street, took his boxes, and went in the front door.

I waited a few minutes, then jaywalked across Main and went straight for his license plate.

Trouble is, the license frame said
BUDGET RENT A CAR
.

I memorized the plate anyway, then went in the front door.

“Sammy-girl!” Mr. Garnucci bellowed from his desk.

“Hey, Mr. G.,” I said, hurrying up to him. I kept my voice real low as I asked, “You know that guy who just came in? The one with the boxes?”

“Sure do!” he shouted.

“Shhhh!” I looked around. “Don’t you think he’s kind of…you know…
scary
?”

“Jack?” he said, his eyebrows reaching for the sky. “Jack’s a great guy!” His eyebrows ease down as he leans back in his chair. “Ohhhh. It’s the eye. He can’t help that.” He shrugs. “But I can see how it might give a kid the creeps.”

“So he’s okay?” I ask, trying to fish out some more information.

“Sure he is.”

Now, since he’s not volunteering any details and I don’t want to seem like I’m actually
snooping,
I just say, “Okay, well, thanks. I feel better.”

“I keep a good eye out, don’t you worry.” He chuckles, “No pun intended.” Then he adds, “Your grandmother’s safe here.”

So I start for the door, saying, “Thanks, Mr. Garnucci.” But after a few steps, I backtrack and say, “I feel bad. I thought for sure he was, you know,
shady.
”

He laughs. “Trust me. Jack Allenson is a good man. A very good man.”

I nod and smile, but my body’s shivering with the heebie-jeebies.

Jack
Allenson
?

Jack-Al!

I left there wondering what Mr. Garnucci would say if I told him his “very good man” had been sneaking around the Highrise in disguises and breaking into fat ladies’ apartments.

When I was safely across the street again, I found a quiet place near the mall, parked myself on the ground, and finally ripped open the counterfeit pen package. Then I pulled out the twenty Grams had given me, uncapped the pen, and swiped.

I waited and waited for the swipe to turn dark, but nothing happened.

I swiped again.

And again.

On the back, on the front, everywhere.

All the swipes stayed yellow.

“Yes!” I whooped. “Yes, yes, yes!”

I jumped up, feeling like a million bucks. The money wasn’t fake—it was the real deal!

I toed my skateboard around, pushed off, and flew to Hudson’s house. “Sammy!” he said from the porch, where he was all by himself, reading the paper.

“Hey!” I called, picking up my skateboard. “I heard Marissa’s visiting.”

He kicked his boots off the railing and said, “She’s playing catch with Michael in the backyard.”

That
stopped me in my tracks. “You’re kidding, right?”

He shook his head and hitched a thumb around back. “Take a peek. They’ve been at it quite a while.”

What I saw when I looked around the corner was roly-poly Mikey waddling after a softball, scooping it up, and hurling it to Marissa.

“See? You’ve got a good arm,” she called. “You just needed practice!”

My jaw dropped.

Marissa
complimenting
Mikey?

These were definitely strange new developments.

“Pssst,” Hudson said, motioning me over. “Let them play.”

So I tiptoed back and sat down in the chair next to him. “Did you have a talk with her or something?”

He folded up the paper and tossed it on the table between us. “She just showed up on her own. Said she’d had a bad dream about him drowning. I assured her there was nothing on the premises he could drown in, but she wanted to see him anyway.” He smiled at me. “You seem full of vim and vigor today.”

I laughed. “I ought to be. I slept ’til eleven.”

His bushy eyebrows reached for the sky. “Oh?”

So I told him all about the pool party and saving Heather’s life and being totally wiped out and all of that. And when I was done, he sort of grinned and shook his head.

“What?” I said, ’cause I could tell he was thinking
something.

“You know why Heather broke down and cried, don’t you?”

I just looked at him.

“She’s beholden to you.” He eyed me. “Forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“You saved her life! That’s no small thing. In some cultures, if someone saves your life, you become their servant for the rest of your life.” He smiled. “After all, you wouldn’t have a life without that person.”

I snorted. “Well, Heather’s not about to become my servant. I’m sure she’ll keep right on plotting ways to
kill
me instead.”

He wagged his head like, Nuh-uh-uh, you are so wrong. “She may
act
like she hates you for it, but there’s no denying what you’ve done. It’ll have a deep psychological effect on her.” He shrugged. “How that plays out will be interesting to see.”

As I rolled my eyes and told him, “Whatever,” that counterfeit pen sort of jabbed me. So I pulled it out of my back pocket and was about to shift it to a front pocket or something when Hudson zeroes in on it and says, “Is that a counterfeit-detecting pen?”

Now, there’s nothing unusual-looking about the pen. It does say
COUNTERFEIT DETECTOR
on it, but it’s not real obvious. It just looks like a random highlighter or marker, so Hudson spotting it for what it was surprised me.

But then I remembered that Hudson Graham has a kind of secretive past.

Not
bad
secretive.

I don’t think, anyway.

More CIA or FBI or, you know, Undercover Guy secretive. Like maybe he was a spy at one point. He never talks about it, but sometimes something happens that sort of gives away that he’s got secrets, and this was one of those sometimes.

“How’d you know that’s what this is?” I asked. Then, because
I
had secrets to cover up, I said, “I thought it was just a regular marker when I found it.”

He gave a little smile as he took the pen and turned it between his fingers. “It’s very plainly a counterfeit pen.”

I didn’t want to push it, so instead, I asked, “How’s it work?” as I pulled Grams’ twenty out of my pocket. “I marked this and it just stayed yellow. That’s ’cause it’s real money, right?”

He nodded.

“Why does counterfeit money turn brown?”

“There’s starch in standard paper, that’s why. It reacts with the iodine in the counterfeit pen’s ink and turns from yellow to brown.”

“So…real money doesn’t have
starch
in it?”

“Correct.”

I thought about this a minute, then asked, “Why don’t counterfeiters use paper without starch in it?”

“Some do.
If
they can get their hands on it without raising suspicion.”

I blinked at him.

I blinked at him some more.

Finally I choked out, “They do?”

“Sure.”

“So…one of these pens wouldn’t work on it?”

He shook his head. “But there are other ways of determining whether a bill is real or fake.”

“Like…?”

He took the twenty from me and rubbed it between his fingers. “Aside from the paper, which has a distinctive feel, there’s the security thread, the watermark—”

“Wait—what security thread? What watermark?”

“Well, look,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve really analyzed a bill, but see this eagle here behind the Federal Reserve stamp? See this wavy
TWENTY USA
behind the Treasury Department seal? See how the art is made of incredibly fine lines? All these things are very hard to duplicate, but the security thread and the watermark are the real giveaways.” He held the twenty up to the sunlight. “See this?” he said, pointing out a faint, smudgy-looking vertical line that ran through the upper and lower number 20s on the left side of the bill. “That’s the security thread.”

“Is it a
thread
thread?” I asked, looking up through the bill.

“No, it’s the currency denomination printed in a line, but it’s called a thread.” He pointed to the right edge of the bill. “Here…can you see the watermark? It’s a smaller picture of the president, which you can only see when you hold it up to the light.”

“Yes!” I said, taking the bill away. “Wow! I had no idea.”

He stood up. “Let me get you a loupe. You’ll be able to see everything a lot more clearly.”

So he brought out a little pyramid magnifier, and when I held it up to the twenty, I could see all
sorts
of detail. And that security thread was just what he’d said—a repeating
USA TWENTY
in teeny-tiny characters.

“There’s one more thing,” he said, easing the bill out of my hands. “See this number twenty?” He was pointing to the one in the bottom right corner. “When you look at it straight on, it’s gold. When you look at it sideways, it’s…” He hesitated. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s because it’s the newest series? In the older issues, the gold twenty appears green when you view it from the side.” He slid his wallet out of a back pocket and removed a different twenty. “See this one?” he said, passing it over. “It’s an older issue—it changes color.”

I looked at his gold twenty face on and then from the side. It definitely turned from gold to green. “Wow, that’s cool,” I said, but my heart felt suddenly lumpy. Like the blood inside it was thick and having trouble pumping through.

“Here, this one does it, too,” he said, handing over another bill. “And this one.” He inspected my twenty again. “I wonder why this one doesn’t.”

“Can I keep all these?” I joked, taking my twenty back.

Just then Marissa and Mikey came around the corner. “Sammy?” Marissa asked.

I shoved Grams’ twenty and the counterfeit pen in my pocket and handed the other bills back to Hudson. “Hey!” I said. “I heard you were here, so I thought I’d swing by.”

“Cool!”

Hudson smiled at Mikey. “You ready for lunch, slugger?”

Mikey was red-faced and sweating, but he panted, “Do I get to light the grill?”

“Yes, m’man.” He turned to us. “Girls, do you want to stay for shish kebabs? Michael and I will cook for you.”

Marissa looked at me, so I shrugged like, Whatever you want, and to my surprise, she blurted, “That sounds
great.
”

So while we kept half an eye on the wonder that was Mikey
cooking,
Marissa talked and talked and talked about Danny and the pool party and all her long-range projections for everything that had happened. “Heather made such a fool of herself, don’t you think? First she nearly drowns, then she has a complete meltdown. Who wants to go out with that?”

But while she’s talking, what I’m really thinking about is how the gold twenty on Grams’ bill didn’t change colors.

Why
didn’t it?

One of the other bills Hudson had handed to me had been the new style, just like Grams’.

It changed colors.

Why didn’t mine?

And despite the fact that the bill had passed the watermark test and the security thread test, despite the fact that it felt like real money and passed the counterfeit pen test, the gold twenty staying gold bothered me.

Why would my bill be different from any other?

Plus, other things were creeping into my head, haunting me.

The bundles of cash I’d found had all been so
new.
So crisp and clean and…
perfect.
If the money was stolen, it would be, you know,
varied.
Some worn, some crisp, most in between. Right?

The amazing sketches that I’d found in Buck Ritter’s desk drawer at the Heavenly also spooked around in my brain. The ones of birds and faces, done in fine lines made out of dots.

Just like the art that’s on money.

And that dream I’d had about the money disintegrating haunted me. Maybe it hadn’t disintegrated into sand.

Maybe it had disintegrated into
dots.

Marissa’s words were a blur. And no matter how much I tried to focus on how the bill I’d shown Hudson had everything
right
about it except for one tiny detail, it was that one tiny detail that I couldn’t get out of my mind.