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and partly because forty-eight hours is the maximum time frame that law enforcement has to reasonably catch the criminals and recover the money using the GPS.
    I swallowed. “What the hell was Fed money doing at a casino?” I said.
    “Going into circulation,” Marcus said. “The average casino moves more cash in a week than half a dozen banks. Hardly anybody brings cash anymore. Customers buy chips with plastic and expect to cash out winnings in bills. All of the bank vaults in Atlantic City combined couldn’t cover a hotel casino like the Regency on a busy weekend like this, so the casino got itself classified as a bank. It can draw down directly from the Federal Reserve, because none of the private banks can come close to filling their cash needs. There are a hundred ATMs and thirty gold-rated teller windows in the Regency. That’s like ten banks. It’s been like that for two years.”
    “How were you going to deal with the tracking device? GPS jammer?”
    “Lead-lined bag. Easiest trick in the book.”
    “How the hell were you planning on getting around the payload?”
    “That isn’t your concern.”
    “Like hell it isn’t.”
    “The money was for a drug deal,” Marcus said.
    “That doesn’t explain anything.”
    “The money is on a forty-eight-hour clock that started at six Eastern. I was supposed to get rid of it before six Eastern on Monday. It’salmost ten in the morning there now. That means I’ve got less than forty-four hours left to deal with this thing, or else I’m a dead man.”
    “How were you going to do it?”
    Marcus stared at me like I was the slow guy at the table.
    People like him do deals every day. Nothing goes wrong. Of course Marcus was going to do deals with his cut. It isn’t just good money, it’s smart. It’s the fastest, easiest, most profitable way of passing off stolen goods. Of course Marcus was going to do it.
    I said, “Answer my question.”
    “You’re not understanding me, Jack.” Marcus’s words came slowly.
    “We were going to use the cash for a drug deal .”
    Silence.
    My hands slid off the table.
    “It was never your intention to disarm the money. You were going to pawn it off on some poor bastard who didn’t know what he was getting,” I said.
    A drug buy is exactly as simple as it sounds. One person brings the drugs. The other brings the cash. They trade. It’s rarely more complicated than that. I did my first drug deal when I was fourteen. I put a nickel on the park bench, my dealer put a nickel sack in my lap and walked away. If I could do it then, anyone could do it now. Child’s play.
    Marcus’s buy was no different. It was just bigger. With a million in cash, Marcus and his two jokers could buy a whole car full of product at cartel prices. A million in pure acid could fit in a small water bottle. A million in heroin would fill the trunk of a sedan. Coke would take the backseat too. Pot would need a truck. The seller wouldn’t even question the shrink-wrapped money. He’d take it and go.
    Boom.
    Thirty hours later, there’d be one less drug dealer in town. Once the casino blew the cash, Marcus’s supplier would find himself with ten thousand or more useless hundred-dollar bills and a direct homing beacon to the federal government. Dealers on Marcus’s level can handle losinga million or more if things go south, but very few dealers can survive a swarm of Secret Service agents coming in for the kill by helicopter. Marcus didn’t rob a casino because he wanted the money. He robbed it because he wanted a weapon. Marcus wasn’t stealing from a casino. No.
    He was stealing from a cartel.
    I said, “You’re kidding me.”
    Marcus moved forward an inch. “For you it’s just a cleanup job. It doesn’t matter what trouble I’m in. I’m not paying you for the heist. I’m not paying you to tangle with the casinos. I want to pay you to make sure, make damn sure, that Ribbons calls in, doesn’t get caught and delivers the money where it