The Black Bag Job

Mickey Sullivan knew he was risking his fifth parking ticket this month by parking in front of a fire hydrant on 43rd Street, but he’d rationalized that he’d only be in the check cashing store for five minutes, tops. He ran back to his car like a rabbit chased by a pack of dogs, only to find a freshly minted parking ticket waving happily at him from underneath the passenger side windshield wiper.

But as he muttered angrily to himself under his breath, he saw something else that would cause him even more trouble than the ticket.

On the front passenger seat of his Taurus, between a dirty virus mask and the white paper straw wrapper from yesterday’s lunch, sat a black doctor’s bag.

Mickey’s curses froze in his mouth, and he wondered a few things simultaneously. For starters, How the hell did someone get into my car? He was sure he’d locked it, but then, Mickey was the sort-of forgetful type.

His next thought, Whose bag is that? was followed immediately by, Is it a bomb? Mickey peered in through the window. He could see that the bag, bright and shiny as if it had just been purchased, had been left partially open. Inside the narrow opening, he could glimpse what appeared to be tightly rolled cylinders of—

Cash! Lots of cash!

Mickey had seen enough gangster films to recognize what rolls of bills looked like. He instinctively looked up and down the busy New York street, trying to spot whether anyone was watching him or the car. But the pedestrians all appeared disinterested in him and the bag, while the cars all plowed slowly up and down the street, all of them just as oblivious to his predicament.

Without thinking, Mickey tried to open the passenger side door, but it was locked. Normally, he would have questioned the situation further, but not today. He hurried around to the driver’s side, eliciting a not-so-friendly blaring horn from a passing taxi who believed he and only he owned the road, and fished his keys out of his worn leather jacket. He fumbled a bit unlocking the door, then finally jumped inside.

His hands hovered over the bag, wanting to dive into the money and bask in his good fortune. He took one more cautious glance fore and aft, and finding nothing in the street or on the sidewalk to dissuade him, he slowly widened the opened bag.

It was packed almost to the top with rolled wads of cash, $20 bills from the looks of them. But there were two additional items, resting on top of the loot: a thin black notebook, also in shiny black leather, and an old fashioned ink pen, the kind with a screw-on cap. Mickey cautiously picked up the pen, handling it as if it too might explode, then placed it delicately on the seat beside the bag.

He lifted out the notebook, held it in his lap, carefully glanced around one more time to make sure he was still semi-alone, and opened it.

It was thin, somewhere less than fifty pages, but he found he was only able to open the notebook to the very first page, as if the others were glued shut. He tried to insert his thumbnail into the balance of the pages, but no dice. They were as tight as if they were concrete painted to look like pages. It didn’t matter: what was on that first page was enough to rattle his long-held belief in an Unseeing and Undoubtedly Uncaring God.

The page was entirely filled top to bottom by a forest of words, each neatly written in a deliberate yet precise cursive script, as if Conan Doyle himself had hand-penned the first draft of “The Red-Headed League.” As Mickey read the words, he became more and more intrigued.

“Mickey Tamarack Sullivan, of 238 Russel Road in the borough of Queens, greetings!

“My name is—well, you don’t need to know my name. Just think of me as your current benefactor. The important thing is, I know your name. That’s why you have this notebook, and that bag of cash. If you take the time to check, you’ll find there are twenty rolls in the bag, each made up of fifty twenty-dollar bills, for a total of $20,000. Go ahead and check. I’ll wait.”

The author was right: Mickey desperately wanted to check the bag’s contents further. He placed the notebook in his lap, and reached over to the black bag.

One, two, three… He dug through the rolls of currency, each tightly wrapped and bound with a wide purple rubber band, sliding them aside so he could get to the ones on the bottom. …Eighteen, nineteen, twenty! Yes, there were indeed twenty rolls, and as he carefully thumbed through a couple of them, each of them did appear to contain fifty twenty-dollar bills.

Wow! he thought. Maybe not robbing that little old lady last month earned me some karma!

Mickey made sure once again no one was watching him from outside the Taurus, and lifted the notebook. He picked up reading where he’d left off.

“Satisfied? Good. From this point on, you have two choices:

"The first choice is an easy one: keep the money. Do with it as you choose. Put it in the bank, spend it on better weed and more expensive hootch, go wild for a few weeks. Or deposit it into your bank, and bring your balance up to just under $19,600.

“Or you can opt for a difficult alternative. It’s not hard, really, more of a challenge. From this moment until midnight tomorrow night, you will be asked to spend that $20,000, every single bill, on strangers, people you’ve never met before. You won’t be able to keep any of it. If you keep even one penny of it, you will fail at this challenge, and you’ll never hear from me again.”

It continued, “Of course, there are a few rules to this challenge.”

Dammit! Mickey swore to himself. It figures.

The text continued, “What would be the point in rewarding you if this wasn’t a challenge? As the great Samuel Clemens once said, ‘Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.’”

Mickey looked up at the Taurus’ faded ceiling liner. Will this Sam dude be part of the challenge?

“You’ll find the rules are very precise, but also not too difficult to understand. Before we get into them, let me assure you that following through on this challenge will reward you far beyond this measly bag of $20s. I can’t, at this point, share exactly how well you’ll be rewarded, only to say that it is far beyond your wildest dreams.”

Mickey chuckled. I can dream some pretty big dreams, Mister Benefactor.

“If you’re still reading, I can assume you might be willing to undertake this challenge. Here are the rules:

“1) You cannot transfer any money electronically. Each payout must be made with these exact bills, and they must be made by you in person. No paying someone else to distribute the money for you.

“2) You cannot use the money to buy anything tangible for yourself. No buying works of art, fancy or not-so-fancy cars, clothes, etcetera. You can’t buy yourself even so much as a single Girl Scout Cookie.”

Mickey was already beginning to see just how much of a challenge this was going to be.

“3) This money must be used to help the poor, the needy, or some otherwise deserving person. No tips for the doorman, no throwing the money into a donation bottle. It must be put right into someone’s hand.

“4) You cannot spend more than $20 in any one location. No going to a food bank and handing out $100 to every person you see. This means, you’ll need to make at least one thousand donations.

“5) Keep in mind, you need to do this before midnight tomorrow night. Distributing $20,000 twenty dollars at a time, means you need to make fifty donations per hour over each of the next twenty hours or so.

“Let me remind you, Mister Sullivan, that should you choose this challenge and complete it successfully in the allotted time, you’ll be rewarded far more than you would be if you'd simply kept the $20,000 for yourself. The choice is entirely up to you.

“I wish you all the best. Make me proud!”

Mickey blinked again. That’s sure an odd way to end this—whatever this is.

He slid the keys into the ignition and clicked over to the Accessories. 4:49, the cracked dashboard clock read. He had less than twenty-eight hours to spend a thousand twenty dollar bills, and not more than one in each location.

Mickey hoisted one of the tight rolls and considered whether he should just say screw it and keep the twenty Gs for himself. But something in the very detailed instructions nagged at him. There’s a bigger pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow.

He sighed, then slid the rubber band off the roll. He stuffed a wad of the crisp bills into his pocket, closed the doctor’s bag, and crawled out of the Taurus, making sure he locked it after he exited.

He headed directly to the sidewalk, excitement welling in his throat, as he looked around for a likely target. Right off the bat, he spotted what looked like a homeless fellow ambling his way, unkept strands of long dark hair draped across the shoulders of a disheveled and stained grey-checked greatcoat.

“Hey, buddy!” Mickey called out. He held out a $20 and thrust it towards the man, who stopped short like he was being offered a dagger, sharp end first.

“No, no,” Mickey added, “I want to give this to you. You really look like you could use it.”

The homeless man peered at Mickey, then the bill, and slowly accepted it with his dirty fingers, partially covered in fingerless cloth gloves. “Hey, t’anks, buddy!” the fellow replied, in what seemed almost like a bad English accent.

Mickey smiled, basking in the glow of gratitude, an emotion he had rarely experienced.

Before Mickey could move on, the fellow added, “Hey, any chance I could get anudder? I gots a buddy down at the flophouse who could sure use a hot meal.”

“Sure thing!” Mickey quickly replied. Without thinking, he pulled another crisp $20 bill from his pocket and handed it to the fellow.

Across the street and four floors up, a man in a dark blue windbreaker watched the transaction through an expensive astronomer’s telescope. Still watching, he spoke into a mic clipped onto his lapel.

“Looks like Mister Sullivan has already failed your challenge, sir. Just as I warned you.”

But before the homeless man could pull his hand back, Mickey snapped to a realization. “Wait, nope, sorry, not that one.” He crammed the bill back in his pocket, and slid his hand into his jacket’s inner pocket, retrieving a straight $20 from an envelope of money he’d gotten at the check cashing store.

“Here,” he said to the homeless man. “Give your friend this one.”

The smile on the homeless man’s face grew wide and genuine. He nodded his head a few times as he accepted the bill, and said, “Bless you, son” with such emotional content that Mickey felt a wave of joy travel right up his body to the top of his head.

“You’re, uh… You’re welcome, old man!” Mickey clapped him on the shoulder and, smiling almost as wide as the homeless man, headed up the street, looking for his next recipient.

As the homeless man watched Mickey walk up the street with an honest bounce in his step, he touched an earbud in his right ear. “See, Jerold?” he said, in a much more refined voice than before. “I told you he’d make a real show of it!"