Cinderella Sims by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, hard-boiled
ISBN: 9781453208625
Google: vR2LttRvBugC
Amazon: B00B1MSHA6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

7

There was a ten, a five and two singles in my wallet along with the nest of phony twenties. It was a good thing—otherwise I would have gone thirsty. Until then I’d been passing the stuff all over town like a drunken sailor, but now that I knew what it was it wasn’t the same at all. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, all right, but it was different. Now I just wanted to be rid of it.

I found a back booth in a dark bar on a side street and settled myself down to a double bourbon with water on the side. I swallowed the bourbon and looked at the water. It looked back at me.

Things were moving too fast, much too fast. I looked for the little lever in my head that would let me turn my mind back and start over.

I found it.

A girl whose name was undoubtedly neither Lucille Kraft nor Cinderella Sims had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit twenties that didn’t belong to her. The people who had originally owned them were chasing her. And she was running, but where?

The thing to do, I told myself, was to examine the situation through Cindy’s mind. This was easier said than done. I just couldn’t manage to think the way she probably thought. For a while I sat around feeling sorry over this little incapacity of mine. Then I felt glad about it. My projection may have been limited, but perhaps it was better to be able to think rationally than to be able to think like Cindy Sims.

So I did something else. I tried putting myself in her place. What would I have done?

Putting myself in her place wasn’t that easy itself. I just didn’t know too much about her, didn’t know who she was or what she had done. Most of what I did know was negative information—she hadn’t worked with a con mob, hadn’t held a cashier’s job at a club in Tahoe, didn’t have fifty grand all of a sudden, and, of course, did not make it a practice to tell the truth come hell or high water.

The positive information told me that she had stolen a pile from a gang of counterfeiters. But what in hell she was trying to do with it was, for the moment, beyond me.

Why steal it in the first place?

Well, it had to be worth something. If not, counterfeiters wouldn’t take the trouble to print it up. I tried to remember what we’d run into in Louisville that might fit into things; I couldn’t come up with too much, but I got a few little glimmers.

A counterfeiting ring, as well as I remembered, was a model for an extremely loose organization that worked with extreme efficiency. At the very top there was a small group of men who were the financial kingpins. Either they included an engraver and printer in their number or they managed to contract for the production through their own private sources.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.