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I said.
    ‘Empty,’ said Marielle Vetters. ‘There were no bodies, nothing. I think that helped. It made it easier for them to keep the money.’

5
    T he money was in a big leather holdall behind what Harlan figured was the pilot’s seat. In every film he’d ever watched the pilot sat on the left, and the copilot sat on the right, and he had no reason to believe that this plane would be any different.
    Harlan and Paul stared at the money for a long time.
    Beside the holdall was a canvas satchel containing a sheaf of papers sealed in a plastic wallet for further protection. It was a list of names, typewritten for the most part, although some had been added by hand. Here and there sums of money had been included, some small, some very large. Also, again sometimes typewritten and sometimes handwritten, notes had been added to some of the entries, mostly words like ‘accepted’ and ‘declined’, but occasionally just a single letter ‘T’.
    Harlan couldn’t make much sense of it so he turned his attention back to the money. It was mainly in fifties, used and nonconsecutive, with some twenties thrown in for variety. Some of the wads were held together with paper wraps, others with elastic bands. Paul picked up one of the bundles of fifties and did a quick count.
    ‘That’s five thousand dollars, I reckon,’ he said. The flashlight picked out the rest of the money. There were probably forty similar bundles of cash in there, not counting the twenties. ‘Two hundred thousand, give or take,’ he concluded. ‘Jesus, I never seen so much money.’
    Neither of them had. The most cash Harlan had ever held in his hand was $3,300, which he’d got from selling a truck years before to Perry Reed up at Perry’s Used Autos. Perry had screwed him over on that truck, but then nobody ever went to Perry the Pervert for a fair deal: they went to him because they were desperate and needed money fast. Having that much cash was the closest Harlan had ever come to feeling rich. He hadn’t felt wealthy for long, though, because the money had gone straight to servicing his debts. Now Harlan knew that both he and Paul were thinking the same thing:
    Who would know?
    Neither would have considered himself a thief. Oh, they’d shaved a few dollars here and there from the IRS, but that was your duty as a taxpayer and an American. Someone had once told Harlan that the IRS factored cheating into their calculations, so they kind of expected you to do it, and by not holding out on them you messed up their system. You caused more trouble by not cheating on your taxes than you did by smudging your return, the fella said, and if you looked too square then the IRS would start thinking that maybe you were hiding something, and next thing you knew they had their claws in you and you were scouring the attic for receipts for ninety-nine cents just to stay out of jail.
    But now they weren’t talking about a hundred dollars here and there kept back from Uncle Sam’s purse; this was potentially a serious criminal enterprise, which raised the second question:
    Where had it come from?
    ‘You think it’s drug money?’ asked Paul. He watched a lot of TV cop shows, and immediately associated any cash sum too large to be kept in a wallet with drug dealing. It wasn’t like drugs weren’t a thing here, either: they flowed across the border like driven snow, but they mainly came in by truck and car and boat, not by plane.
    ‘It’s possible,’ said Harlan. ‘I don’t see no drugs, though.’
    ‘Could be they sold them already, and these are the proceeds,’ said Paul. He flipped through the bills with his index finger, and seemed to like the sound they made a lot.
    A larger object in the cash bag caught Harlan’s eye, and he pulled it out. It was a copy of the
Gazette
out of Montreal, dated July 14, 2001, just over one year earlier.
    ‘Take a look at that,’ he told Harlan.
    ‘It’s not possible,’ said Harlan. ‘This plane has been here longer