The rain in Brooklyn doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker.

Jack Moreau stood under the awning of a bodega on Fulton Street, a thick manila envelope clutched to his chest like a prayer book. The rain came down in sheets, silver needles stitching the sky to the street. He checked his watch: 11:47 PM. Three minutes to the meeting.

He had made three thousand bills tonight. Two thousand, actually. Each one a five-dollar bill, crisp and new, bearing the ghost of Lincoln's face. But the Lincoln on these bills was a lie. The paper was wrong, he knew that. The ink was wrong. But they looked perfect. He had checked them himself, under the workbench lamp, three times.

His left hand trembled slightly—Korean War tremor, they called it. The doctors gave it a name. Jack gave it a reason: he had spent three years printing codebooks for the Pentagon, and now he was printing counterfeit dollars for a man named Silk Delaney. Progress.

He opened the bodega door. The bell above it jingled, bright and cheerful, the way church bells were bright and cheerful. The place was empty except for old Mr. Park behind the counter, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee from a chipped mug.

Jack approached the counter and placed a five-dollar bill on the glass. "For the soda," he said. His voice was flat, the way it had gotten after the war. Not dead. Just filed away.

Mr. Park looked at the bill. He picked it up. He held it to the fluorescent light. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the watermarks. He looked at Jack.

The silence stretched. Jack's heart did the thing it did sometimes—a quick, frantic beat against his ribs, like a bird trying to escape.

Then Mr. Park nodded. He opened the register. He counted out two dollars and forty cents in change. He handed it to Jack. His hands were steady.

Jack took the coins. He took his soda. He walked back out into the rain.

He didn't look back. He didn't have to. The look on Mr. Park's face told him everything: the bill had passed.

Jack stood under the awning and cracked open the soda. It went flat quickly in the rain. He drank it anyway.

His apartment was above a laundromat on St. James Place. The stairs groaned. The fluorescent light in the hallway flickered like a dying thing. Tommy Russo was waiting for him on the third-floor landing, smoking a cigarette and watching a puddle of water creep under the door.

"Did it work?" Tommy asked. He was a big guy, broad-shouldered and soft-faced, the kind of man who talked before he thought and thought too late.

Jack didn't answer immediately. He counted the change in his palm: two quarters, two dimes, four pennies. Then he nodded once.

Tommy exhaled a plume of smoke. "Holy shit. That's it, man. We're in."

Jack walked past him to his apartment. He locked the door. He put the envelope under his workbench. He turned on the lamp.

Under the lamp, he took one bill out of the envelope and held it up. Five dollars. George Washington's ghost, or Abraham Lincoln's ghost—he couldn't tell anymore. The paper was off-white, slightly textured. The ink had the right shade of green. The watermark bled through like a scar.

He had designed this himself. Every line, every curve. His artistic training had come in handy—the years spent copying magazine covers and advertising layouts in a print shop in Bushwick. He knew how paper felt. He knew how ink dried. He knew how the human eye was tricked.

The war had taught him something else: how to make things under pressure. How to work in a damp bunker at two in the morning, printing codes that would be read by men who were alive or dead by sunrise. The codes had to be perfect. A wrong letter meant a dead man.

Five-dollar bills were less urgent. But the principle was the same.

He put the bill back in the envelope. He turned off the lamp. He sat in the dark and listened to the washing machines below, churning clothes that would never be clean.

The phone rang.

He stared at it. It rang again.

He picked it up. "Yeah."

"Jack." The voice on the other end was smooth, cultured, the kind of voice that belonged to a man who owned things. "It's Silk."

"Mr. Delaney."

"Good news. The bills passed. Your man Park didn't even blink."

Jack felt something in his chest loosen, just a fraction. "Good."

"I've got more for you. Bigger denomination. Two-penny-fifty. You can do it, Jack. I know you can."

"I'll need better paper. The current stock isn't right."

"I'll get it. Don't worry about a thing." The pause that followed was the kind that had weight. "Oh, and Jack? I want you to meet someone tomorrow. A woman from the feds. She's investigating the counterfeiting ring. I want you to meet her. Get to know her. See what she knows."

Jack's stomach tightened. "You want me to spy on an FBI agent?"

"I want you to flirt with her. There's a difference."

The line went dead.

Jack hung up the phone. He walked to the window. Outside, Brooklyn sprawled beneath a ceiling of rain and neon. Somewhere out there, a woman was looking for him. And tomorrow, he was supposed to meet her.

He went to bed. He didn't sleep.

---

The woman's name was Nora Vance. She met him at a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue, which was either a terrible idea or a very good one, depending on who you asked. Jack figured he was the kind of man who asked the wrong questions and got the right answers anyway.

She was sitting by the window, reading a book. Not a thriller. Not a mystery. Something academic. She had dark hair cut short, a sharp face, and hands that looked like they could do two things: write reports or hold a gun. Maybe both.

Jack sat across from her without being asked. "You're the feds," he said.

She didn't look up from her book. "You're Silk's printer."

"Jack."

"Nora."

He waited for her to continue, but she just turned a page. So he said, "You're young for the feds."

"Twenty-eight," she said. "And you're old for a counterfeit printer."

"Forty-one," he said. "Which is old when you're a counterfeiter, but prime when you're a veteran."

She finally looked at him. Her eyes were grey, the color of the Brooklyn sky in winter. Not cold. Not warm. Just grey. "Why do you do it, Jack?"

He thought about this for a moment. He could have said: for the money. For Silk. For the challenge. None of those were lies, but none of them were the whole truth either.

"Because I'm good at it," he said. "That's all."

She held his gaze for a beat too long. Then she reached across the table and took his hand. Her skin was cold.

"I don't believe you," she said quietly.

Outside, the rain continued.

Author Note & Copyright: