When I found the money, I didn't do anything.
Not right away.
I couldn't.
Literally.
You ever been pulled over by the police when you're doing some shit you ain't supposed to be doing? You got weed in the car or an open container or you got an outstanding warrant or it isn't your car...
Your heart constricts. Your throat tightens. Your mind races. All you can think is, "Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckingfuck!"
That is how I felt ten seconds after I found the money.
But, MAN, those first nine seconds were great.
Then, I'm just sitting there looking at the money. More money than I had ever seen in my life. And I had seen a lot of money before. But this.... This wasn't a lot of money. This is what me and my friends call, "Fuck you!" money.
I know I gotta do something fast. The longer I sit there, looking at the money, the better the chances of someone seeing me looking at the money. Hit pause on the tsunami of crazy, scary, violent, paranoid (not necessarily untrue) thoughts, put the shit in the trunk, drive the fuck to someplace safe and then hit the play button and come up with a plan.
So I put the duffel bag in the trunk, I look around. No one there, so far as I can tell. I get in the car, put that shit on cruise control and drive.
OK, smart guy. What the fuck does, "Safe place" mean? A hotel? Where you gotta show ID? You gonna pay with a credit card since you only have eighteen bucks in your wallet or you gonna peel a hundred off the stack of...what? Counterfeit? Ransom? Marked bills from some fucking sting operation? ...You gonna drive home? Bring this potential nightmare to your parents house? What if there's a GPS tracking device in there, genius? You saw "No Country For Old Men" (actually, that flick wasn't gonna come out for a while, yet, but still...)
I go with the hotel. GPS or no, the chances of my name being anywhere near this shit is pretty slim. I'll find out what's what with that soon enough. So I hit the Airport Hilton. One forty-nine, plus tax. I check in for the whole weekend.
I play poker. I'm not great, but I win more than I lose. I've cashed in a dozen tournaments and took second place once at Hawaiian Gardens on a Friday night. I cleared thirty-five hundred. That's the most I ever made playing hold-em. Point being, I know how to act like I don't have the nuts when I do have the nuts. I wasn't sweating like the guy in "Midnight Express". I was cool. On the outside. I get to the room. It's nice. A mini-suite with a great view of the city. I close the blinds and I empty the contents of the duffel bag onto the bed.
I wrote a screenplay once. It got optioned, but never got bought (yet). It was about a family that robbed banks. One of them had gotten killed in a botched job and they needed to recruit a new guy, or at least that's what the new guy thought. In reality, they were using him as a patsy - a diversion to keep the cops occupied while the rest of the crew did the real heist. Anyway, at one point, I had to figure out how much space a couple of million dollars in hundred dollar bills takes up - 2.5 million, to be precise. After my research, I estimated that you could fit 2.5 million dollars in hundred-dollar bills into one of those cases that commercial airline pilots carry.
My point being, before I found the money, I already new what a couple of million dollars looked like and this was more.
A king-sized bed covered with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. I took a real deep breath. Counting was not priority right now. I figured I should quickly flip through each stack and address some of my most immediate concerns. I stop.
I have to go to fucking CVS and get some latex gloves and a counterfeit-detecting pen and a blacklight, if they have it.
Fuck. What if there is a GPS thingy in one of those stacks? I come back from CVS just in time to get my head blown off or some shit. I think for a moment. I got it.
It took me awhile to find a housekeeping cart, but I find one on the sixth floor. I grab two pairs of gloves and am back to my room without anyone noticing me. I'll flip through all the stacks real quick and if there's no tracking device, then I'll go to CVS for the other shit.
Each stack was banded - ten grand. No GPS or other electronic device. That's good.
Bills were newish, but circulated and non-sequential. Also good.
I put it all under the bedspread and go to CVS. I buy a counterfeit detection pen, a blacklight on a keychain, a Red Bull and a pint of Haagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond...(to be continued)
