Free Plains Crazy by J.M. Hayes

Then, when it didn’t fit into the slot to the deposit box, leave it there so anyone who came along could swipe it? Judy didn’t get much time to puzzle over these questions. The lock on the front door to the bank clicked behind her.
    It was a glorious day outside, middle seventies, light breeze, popcorn clouds drifting across a sky almost as blue as Englishman’s eyes. Inside, it was cold and dry. They were running the air conditioning, filtering out all those spring scents, sanitizing it. Inside, she decided, it smelled like money.
    The teller took her time getting back to her window after unlocking the door. She was paying more attention to a piece of paper she was reading than to Judy.
    Judy knew the teller, though not well. The woman’s daughter had been a problem student and Judy had been forced to call the teller and her husband in on several occasions in search of help or clues. The clues were obvious. Denial appeared to have been a dominant gene in both parents.
    Judy couldn’t remember her name at the moment and it didn’t matter. The woman must have remembered her, though, and decided, in this minor role reversal in which she was in charge, to make Judy pay for those visits to the vice principal’s office. She forced Judy to stand and wait in front of her counter for a few extra moments as she reread that sheet of paper over and over again.
    â€œHere,” Judy finally said. When the woman looked up, Judy handed her the duct-taped envelope. If this was someone’s deposit, she needed to pass it along for proper handling. “Do you know what this is?”
    The woman’s eyes got big. Maybe some elderly farmer who had spent too many years inhaling insecticides and herbicides preferred to make his deposits this way. Silly, because the result looked like something illegal—a packet of drugs, or even a letter bomb. Only this was Buffalo Springs. There were plenty of screwballs here, but none of them screwy enough to stuff drugs or a bomb in the bank’s night deposit. She felt sure of that because Mad Dog was her brother-in-law. She didn’t have to look far for an example.
    â€œWhat do you want?” The teller wasn’t even pretending to be polite. Okay, Judy already had plenty of things to be testy about this morning. She was ready to give as good as she got.
    â€œMoney, of course.”
    â€œOf course,” the woman agreed. She opened her cash drawer and began pulling out a stack of bills.
    â€œI only want hundreds,” Judy told her. “Fifty of them.”
    â€œYes,” the woman said. She reached into another compartment and pulled out a stack of hundred dollar bills and handed it to Judy without counting them. “Here, take them and go.”
    Judy wasn’t sure there was $5000 there. She picked up the stack and began counting. There was more than $5000. She stopped when she got to fifty and pushed the rest back. “Mistake like that could ruin your day,” Judy told her. Rude was one thing, incompetent, something else. “Let me speak to the manager.”
    There was a little hall behind the tellers’ counter off which several offices opened.
    â€œYes, I’ll go get Mr. Brown for you,” the woman said, and practically ran into it.
    Judy waited. She had worked way too hard to put that money away. Then this rude bitch wasn’t even capable of counting it accurately. Come to think of it, she hadn’t asked Judy to sign a withdrawal slip or provided a receipt for the transaction. The woman disappeared through a door at the end of the hall and slammed it behind her.
    Judy was steaming by now. And the woman hadn’t taken the duct-taped envelope either. It was just sitting there, on the counter, along with a couple of stacks of bills. Judy didn’t want to cost the woman her job, but there was simply no excuse for behavior like this. She stood and drummed her fingers on the counter top and waited for Mr.