The Mystery Danger Serials: Dead Man Running

Dirty Money

"Holy smokes!" Jim said, "Would you look at that...

     Gives new meaning to saving something for a rainy day."

     The money continued to pour out of the bag. Fifty-dollar bills now littered the floor. Jim took out his knife. He cut a slit in a bag marked "manure". He plunged his hand inside the bag and pulled out a wad of green.

     "Andrew Jackson and his brothers..." he said, dropping the twenty-dollar bills to the ground. He cut the next bag of manure open. More twenties. The next bag was the same. Every bag of manure held hundreds of twenty-dollar bills.

     "If all those are Jacksons," I cut a second bag of compost. "and all of these are Grant..."More fifties spilled out. "Then the fertilizer should be either Hamilton or..." I stabbed a bag of fertilizer and watched as green paper feathered to the ground.

     Jim let out a low whistle. "Hello Mr. Franklin. So happy you could join us."

     We looked around the room. There must have been about forty to fifty bags of each. Math never was my strongest subject, but even I knew that there was more money in this room than in most banks in the city. 

     "Lincoln, there must be thousands here, maybe a millions."

     "I'd say it's closer to a hundred-million." 

     "A hundred-million dollars?" Jim's eyes were big again. He took his hat off and wiped his brow. "Lincoln, that's more money than a man sees in a life time! Just sitting here under the roses! Where did it all come from?" He sat down on a pile of manure bags. "I mean, this has to be bad news. This is too much for some small time crook. We have got to phone this in fast. "

     I shook my head.  Jim was right. This money belonged to somebody big. Maybe a group of somebodies. And whoever they were, they probably wouldn't be too happy to find us dumping it all over the basement floor. As soon as word got out about our charred florist, the owner of this dough would be coming to move it elsewhere. We had to get upstairs and call for back up.

     "Unless..." Jim paused. I could see the gears turning in his head. "Unless, nobody knows it's here."

     "Jim, how is someone going to forget where they placed a hundred-million dollars?"

     "Hear me out." He stood up and started to pace. "The Dynamite Gal offs the Suit. That night she took his guns and cash. But that cash was headed somewhere else. They were putting it on different trucks. Right?"

     "Right." I nodded.

     "The Suit came to town after we nabbed Anton Calvabri and all his goons. What if he took over what remained of Calvabri's operation, and gathered all the nest eggs those crooks had stashed. What if he started to collect all their crumbs, storing them in one place. How many did we arrest?" Jim was on to something.

     "Fifty-six."

     "Dixon would be fifty-seven. So, what if this is the nest where the Suit stored fifty-seven lowlifes' eggs?!" 

    "With the Suit gone, and everyone else locked up, Bud Thorn hides the nest. Until, Rose Jones discovers that the rainy day fund is here and comes to collect. That explains why she only hit the man, and not the building...

  She wants the cash!"