A Twenty-Dollar Bill Dropped Into the Dust Beside a Tennessee Highway

Every bill was a brand-new hundred, never traced through a bank network or a legal filing.

I counted twenty-five bills off the first bundle, the dry snap of the paper loud against the concrete walls.

Twenty-five hundred dollars in clean cash.

I squared the hundreds into neat stacks of ten and set them side by side on the workbench.

I picked up the next bundle and counted out another three thousand without taking my eyes off the count.

By the time the garage wall clock struck one, I had forty-one thousand dollars spread across the greasy wood.