Fake Money, Blue Smoke

by Josh Haven

Genres: Mystery; Animal Cozy Mysteries; Hard-Boiled; Thrillers

Synopsis

In the first caper from a "promising new talent" (Publishers Weekly), a skilled counterfeiter hires a crew of career criminals to steal an artwork from a speeding train

When former platoon sergeant Matt Kubelsky is paroled from Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institute in upstate New York, he’s surprised to find his ex-girlfriend waiting for him out in the parking lot. An ex-girlfriend he’s spent years pining for after she dumped him and stopped answering his letters. An ex-girlfriend who wonders if her apparently criminally-hardened ex-boyfriend can help her out of some extra-legal difficulty of her own.

During the years Matt was in prison, Kelly Haggerty discovered she couldn’t earn a satisfactory living as an artist, so she turned her artistic talents to counterfeiting foreign currency—and ended up embroiled in an international money laundering intrigue. Now she hopes she can get herself out of trouble with a cleverly-plotted theft and one last enormous score. 

The missing ingredient is someone Kelly can trust to do the dirty work, recruiting career criminals who won’t flinch at the opportunity to make good money by whatever means necessary. And Matt is happy to oblige, as it seems like the perfect opportunity to settle the score with the men responsible for ruining his life and putting him away for a crime he didn’t commit. The heist—a horseback robbery of valuable artwork from a speeding Amtrak train—seems to be going perfectly, until one of the players starts to suspect he’s been paid in counterfeit bills…

Pulse-pounding suspense, wholly original action scenes, and enough double-crosses to leave readers reeling make this caper a must-read for fans of fast, adrenaline-fueled crime fiction. The first thriller from the author whose seafaring adventure novels are published as J.H. Gelernter, Fake Money, Blue Smoke announces an exciting new voice in the genre.

 

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Release date: December 6, 2022

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 281

Sample

1

Matt Kubelsky was surprised to receive a phone call from an ex-girlfriend offering to pick him up from prison. She called him a week before his release; he’d been in prison almost five years and they hadn’t talked in almost twenty.

“I saw your name in the newspaper,” she said. “I know your parents are dead and I didn’t know if anyone would be there to pick you up. I thought maybe I could offer you a couch to crash on for a while, if you needed it. And anyway, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

They’d broken up in spring 2002 because he’d cheated on her. He’d begged her to forgive him, said the other girl didn’t mean anything to him, which was true, and that it had only happened once, which wasn’t true. He said he was young and stupid, which was true. He was a high school senior in Decatur, Georgia, and she was a freshman at Georgia Tech. She was a transplant from New England and she’d wanted to spread her wings a little in college. She had regretted going for the first guy she met. And she hadn’t known he was still in high school when they’d started dating. They’d met at a college bar.

He was the one who cheated and he was the one who ended up with a broken heart. He’d dropped out of high school and joined the army. He’d spent fifteen years in in the army, been promoted all the way to platoon sergeant, and then was convicted of murdering an unarmed prisoner. He was sentenced to twenty-five years at Leavenworth. His lawyer had raised objections to the prosecution’s handling of evidence and requested a mistrial. The judge refused but reduced the sentence to eight years and granted a request for transfer to a medium-security civilian prison. In the end, Matt had been paroled after five years and two months at the Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution in upstate New York.

In Ray Brook’s parking lot, he spotted Kelly Haggerty through the glass of her windshield. She looked the same as she had in Georgia: light brown hair that was nearly blond, a pointed, somewhat large nose and high cheekbones, and a cigarette in her mouth.

Kelly saw Matt before he saw her; she’d watched as he waited for the chain-link gate behind him to close, the chain-link gate in front of him to open, and then continued to watch as he’d looked around the parking lot for her dark green Honda.

When he climbed into her car, she saw he had a swastika tattooed on his neck. That was new.

“Hi Kelly,” he said, and pushed a blue plastic duffel of personal items through the gap in the front seats. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“No problem. It’s good to see you.”

“Can I have one of those?” He pointed to the cigarette she was clutching in her teeth (flattening the filter).

“Yes,” she said. “In the cup holder.”

Matt pulled a pack of Camels out of one of the cup holders and a Bic lighter out of the other.

“Turkish Silver?”

“They’re ultra-lights,” said Kelly. “I’m trying to quit.”

“Why not smoke the electric ones,” he asked, lighting and inhaling.

“They’re bad for the environment,” said Kelly. Matt shrugged.

“Before we talk about whatever you want to talk about,” he said, “I need you to drive me into town.” He was watching the security booth at the entrance to the parking lot and tapping his fingers nervously. The guard waved them past, no problem. Matt seemed to relax a little after that.

“Where in town?” Kelly pulled up at the stop sign at the end of Ray Brook’s leafy access road. It was early autumn.

Matt pulled a slip of paper out of his breast pocket. His shirt was plaid flannel. She wondered where he’d gotten it, coming straight to prison from the army. Maybe he’d had it with him in Iraq.

“Here,” he said, holding the paper so she could read the address.

“I don’t know where that is,” she said. “I can put it into my phone.”

“I think it’s in a shopping plaza just after where 73 and 9 meet. Do you know where that is?”

“I guess,” said Kelly. They were already on 73, she was pretty sure, and heading south toward Route 9 and I-87.

“Thanks,” he said, and opened the window. “It should be close.” He exhaled a small cloud of smoke and watched it get sucked out of the car. “So what’s up? What did you want to see me for?”

“I, uh, well I mean I wanted to see how you were doing. They talked about you on the news the other night, how you were getting out of prison and how a lot of people said you were innocent and that you might have been pardoned if you hadn’t been paroled.”

“Yeah, I heard that too,” said Matt. “There it is. Pull over here.”

Kelly pulled the car into a small plaza and into an empty spot.

“I’ll probably be like twenty, thirty minutes.”

Matt climbed out and Kelly watched him walk into a tattoo parlor. She finished her cigarette, then walked across the street to a fast food place and bought a cup of coffee and two burgers. She put the foil-wrapped burgers on the hood of the car, in the sun, where they’d stay warm, then got back into the driver’s seat, drank her coffee, and waited.

After a little more than an hour, Matt came out of the tattoo parlor and walked back to the car. The swastika on his neck was covered by white gauze and masking tape. From a distance, it looked like a giant blister.

When he was in earshot, she put down her window and pointed to the burgers. “I got those for you.” He picked them up and climbed into the car.

“Thanks.”

“I got you two,” she said, “ ’cause they were out of fries.”

“Out of fries?” He shook his head. “That’s fucking bizarre.” He took a bite of one of them. “That’s really good. That’s delicious.”

Kelly wondered if she should ask about Matt’s neck. For a few seconds she watched him eat, then decided it wasn’t the right time, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled back onto Route 9, heading south.

“It’s about four hours to my place in Queens.” She looked over at him. He yawned. “You could nap if you want.”

“I appreciate you letting me crash there,” said Matt. “You don’t want to talk?” He was starting on the second burger.

“It can wait. And anyway, I want to show you something at the same time.”

Matt shrugged again. “Sounds good,” he said, reclining the seat. “Lap of luxury here.”

“You want to listen to some music?” Kelly put up the windows and pulled onto the highway.

“Yes,” said Matt. “Weezer.”

“I don’t have any Weezer,” said Kelly.

Matt said, “Put on whatever you want, then,” and fell asleep.

2

“So,” said Kelly. “I have a business proposition for you.”

Kelly had pulled off the highway at a Best Buy near Albany and bought Matt two CDs Weezer had released while he was in prison. She would have played them, but Matt didn’t wake up till they were in Queens. In fact, she’d been a little insulted by that. He doesn’t see her for twenty years, spends five years in an all-male prison, and five minutes after their reunion he falls asleep? To be fair to him, though, she figured he probably hadn’t felt safe anywhere in at least five years. Maybe longer. Maybe since before he’d joined the army. Anyway, he’d thanked her for the CDs and slipped them into his duffel, saying he’d come back down to her car later to listen to them. The CD player he’d had with him in prison had died during the Obama administration. She said he could listen to them on her laptop and led him up to her apartment—a loft—with his duffel and her pack of cigarettes.

“Mind if I smoke up here?” he asked her, waiting in the doorway as she felt for her light switch. It was nighttime and the only light was coming from a traffic signal outside. The whole place was slightly red, then slightly green, and then Kelly flicked the ceiling lamps on.

“Only on the fire escape, please,” she said. “This stuff is a little sensitive.”

To Matt, Kelly’s setup wasn’t especially impressive. There were three plastic dinner tables arranged in a U, with a half dozen boxy, black plastic machines on them, and some arts and crafts–looking stuff mixed in. There was a desk in the U’s middle, with a two-monitor computer surrounded by stacks of files. The bed and kitchen, and a couch and a door to the bathroom, were at the far end of the room, which was about ten yards long and five wide. There was a little art on the walls, museum posters, that kind of thing. Wooden floor, white walls, wooden slat ceiling.

“What are those? Printers?” He looked past the black plastic machines, looking for the window that led to the fire escape.

“Yes,” said Kelly. “Really, really good ones.” She saw him playing, unconsciously, with the pack of Camels in his right hand. “Let me turn on a fan and you can smoke if you stand by the window. Just try to breath toward Brooklyn, okay?”

“Which way’s Brooklyn?”

“Out the window,” she said, bringing over a fan and a chair to stand it on. Matt sat down on the windowsill and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply, leaned back, and scratched the underside of his chin. He exhaled out the window and asked Kelly what the business proposition was. She was kneeling down in front of her desk and unlocking one of the drawers. She pulled out a paper box, the sort of box you get donuts in, and walked it over to him.

“Can you keep a secret?” asked Kelly.

“Yes,” said Matt.

“Sorry, did that sound insulting?”

Matt shook his head.

She handed him the box. “Open that. Don’t let the fan blow anything away.”

He held the cigarette with his lips and pulled up the cardboard lid. Inside were rubber-banded bundles of money. Multicolored. Not dollars, not euros.

“Is that Gandhi?” he said, sticking a finger among the bundles, counting how many were in the box.

“Yeah,” said Kelly. “They’re rupees. That’s ten thousand dollars American, in Indian rupees.”

“How much is that in rupees?”

“About seven hundred fifty thousand.” The bundles were different denominations: purple 100-rupee notes, orange 200s, dollar-bill-colored 500s, purple 2,000s. They were all slightly different sizes.

“Why five hundred and two thousand but no one thousand?”

“They don’t make one thousands anymore. They got canceled as legal tender. Too much counterfeiting.”

Matt closed the box again, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. It burned his fingers and he threw it out the window.

“So what’s the secret?” He handed the box back to Kelly.

“I’m a counterfeiter.”

Matt lit another cigarette and didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.

“I was studying computer science at Georgia Tech, remember? But by my junior year I couldn’t cut it anymore and I didn’t like it anymore. I ended up majoring in fine arts.”

She waited for Matt to make a joke about getting a fine arts degree from a top-notch tech school but he didn’t say anything so she went on.

“Anyway, I wanted to be a museum curator but I couldn’t find work. It’s a tough field to break into.”

“Yeah, I bet,” said Matt, knocking some ash into the fan’s current, watching it float away toward Brooklyn.

“So anyway, I bounced around for a while, took some office work, taught art and science at a parochial school in Crown Heights. Tried to get back into computer science, get back up to speed on coding and all that. And then I had this idea . . .”

“Why rupees?” said Matt. “Could I have some water or something?”

“Sure,” said Kelly, walking toward her kitchen nook. “I’ve got some local beer, too, if you’d like, and Diet Coke.”

“Have you got milk?”

“Yeah,” said Kelly, getting a glass from a cabinet.

“I’d like some milk.”

“I chose rupees,” she said, pulling a half-gallon carton out of her fridge, “for four reasons. First, because dollars are out—too many people in New York check for fakes. Second, rupees have weak security features, it’s a third-world currency. Third, it’s the most popular third-world currency, except Mexican pesos, and no one uses pesos in New York.”

“Mexico isn’t a third-world country, is it?”

“Whatever,” said Kelly. “That’s not the point.”

“Is India?”

“India is the third-world country. I mean, it invented the phrase to describe itself, meaning it was part of the third world, outside the worlds of Soviet and Western influence. During the cold war.”

“I thought it meant poor,” said Matt, knocking some more ash out the window.

“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s how I was using it. Relatively speaking. The fourth reason is that there’s a lot of Indian tourism to New York, so currency changers are used to it. But also they’re not as used to it as euros, pounds, yen, or renminbi.”

“What’re renminbi?”

“China’s currency.”

“I thought they used yuan.”

“They’re called yuan, too, but that’s the official name. Renminbi. Means ‘the people’s currency.’ ”

“I guess a lot changed while I was in prison.”

Kelly felt awkward. She tried to hide it by reaching into Matt’s breast pocket and pulling a cigarette out of her pack.

“Anyway, I actually started with dollars. I had them perfect, actually. I was printing twenties on bleached singles so they felt right, but only a couple weeks in a guy at a bodega ran one of the bills under a UV light to check the security strip, but singles don’t have security strips. I saw him figure it out, though he didn’t say anything, so I ran. Rode the subway all over the city to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I was kind of paranoid. Anyway, it took forever to change fake dollars for real money. That was when I had the rupee idea. I can change a hundred thousand fake rupees for fourteen hundred real dollars at JFK and no one bats an eye. Then I drive over to LaGuardia and do the same thing. Or I drive into Times Square or Newark. There are like fifty currency-changing spots I’ve got mapped out around the city and New Jersey. I wear hats and sunglasses and I change my hair color every now and then and change outfit styles, just in case they get me on camera, but I haven’t had any problems yet, touch wood. I just make sure I don’t go to the same place too often.”

“That’s your natural hair color, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t done it in a while. Now I’m working on something bigger. That’s what I wanted to ask for your help with.”

Matt threw another butt out the window. “Okay,” he said. “Ask.”

“Do you wanna have sex first? I figure you haven’t, in a while.”

Matt wiped away a milk mustache. “Yeah,” he said. “If you’re offering.”

“You didn’t catch anything in prison, did you?”

Matt shook his head.

“Anyway,” said Kelly, “I have condoms.”

3

Afterward, Matt rolled off Kelly and began to feel around on the floor.

“What are you looking for?”

“My shirt,” he said, pulling it out from under the bed.

“You don’t have to get dressed,” said Kelly.

“I’m not,” said Matt. “I want a cigarette.”

“Hold on, let me bring the fan over.” She climbed over Matt and he opened the window next to her bed.

“So what’s the favor?” he asked, as the little gray plastic fan started to spin.

“Did you know that all fans in South Korea have shut-off timers on them?” Kelly sat back down on the bed, by Matt’s feet, with her legs folded under her. “Apparently, basically all Koreans believe a fan fanning air over you all night can kill you. It’s called ‘fan death.’ There are government health warnings and everything. Some Koreans won’t even use the AC in their cars.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” He lit his Camel ultra-light. “You want one?”

“Yeah,” she said. He handed her the one he’d just lit and lit another. She took a long drag on it, and he watched her slide closer to the window to blow the blue smoke out of her apartment. She looked good, very much the way he remembered her, even though she was exactly twice as old as she was when he’d last seen her naked. Her breasts drooped a little more, maybe, and maybe there was just a hint of loose skin between her shoulders and elbows, but that was it. She was fit, the way she’d been in college. He’d always thought she looked like the lead in a girls’ soccer movie. He wondered how much longer she had to spend at the gym these days to maintain that. Or maybe all it took was the walking between currency kiosks.

“What’s the favor?”

“Well, it’s two favors, actually. A big one and a bigger one.”

“Okay,” he said. He waited for her to go on. “You want me to guess what they are?”

“No,” she said, and smiled, a little nervously. “Do you speak Arabic? It said on the news you were social with the locals. In Iraq.”

“Yes,” said Matt. “I speak Arabic.”

“I need to go to Qatar,” said Kelly. “And I’d like you to go with me.”

“Why?”

“I’m doing important business there and I don’t speak the language. Plus I think it’s hard for a woman by herself there, and I was kind of hoping that you could sort of be my bodyguard. The business isn’t strictly legal, or with very nice people. I don’t want to end up like Liam Neeson’s daughter, you know?”

Matt’s face was blank. Maybe he didn’t know.

“There was this movie, maybe it came out while you were in prison? Some guy kidnaps Liam Neeson’s daughter and tries to sell her as a sex slave, to some sheikh or something.”

“It came out while I was in Iraq.”

Kelly nodded. “Right, yeah. I didn’t remember the year.”

Matt scratched his throat, and then his neck, around the gauze that was taped over the swastika. Kelly was surprised it hadn’t come off while they’d been banging around. She’d actually forgotten about it completely. What was under there now? She hoped prison hadn’t fucked him up. Or war, or PTSD, or anything. He’d always been kind of reckless and contrary. She didn’t remember him being solemn, all quiet, the way he was now.

“Is that the big favor or the bigger favor?” He noticed her staring at his neck. She looked up, saw that he saw, and blushed.

“Um, that’s the big favor. The bigger favor is—and I’m assuming you made some contacts in Ray Brook, and I apologize totally if I’m being a shithead asking you—I wondered if you could hire some armed robbers for me. ...