Just Watch Me Read online

  The room hadn’t been much before I got there. It was worse now. A lot worse. It looked like someplace where the worst frat on campus had competed with an indie band for craziest party. It was a close contest, and garbage won. It wasn’t my usual habitat. Mom made sure I grew up so that I am generally pretty neat. It just makes everything easier if you can find what you need. But when I’m working out a plan, I’m somebody else. I don’t even notice what’s around me.

  Which was a good thing: I had turned this room into a total dumpster fire. There were heaps of dirty dishes, old pizza boxes, cans and bottles and wrappers, all of it just flung wherever, into every inch of the room—except my desk and one other area. In a corner near the door was a clothes rack, the kind you might find backstage in a theater. Hanging from it were pieces of the people I’d become to check out the Eberhardt—a seersucker suit that was about eight sizes too big for me, a wrinkled mass of filthy rags with a bushy beard perched on the hanger, coveralls, and a few more ordinary articles of clothing. Beside the rack was a table holding more carefully arranged items: a pair of glasses with cranberry frames, a couple of wigs, and so on—all carefully preserved, just in case I needed them again before this job was over.

  But it was starting to look like this job was over before it started.

  “Shit,” I said one more time. And because I hate to repeat myself, I added, “Fuck a shit-piss.” I said it a little too loud, but the garbage soaked up the noise. And anyway, it didn’t help. My gray cells weren’t churning out anything. It just wasn’t happening, and it had to. It abso-fucking-lutely HAD to. To the very depth of my soul, if I have one—and I kind of doubt it?—I totally believe that no matter what the goal, there is always a way to achieve it. It’s not that I’m any kind of California brown-rice, new age optimist. I’ve had a hard life so far, often violent, starting in my childhood. The kinds of thing I’ve lived through would knock rosy optimism out of the Dalai Lama. So I’ve got no delusions, illusions, or confusions about what life really is. It’s a fucking mess, a flying shit storm with a sharp knife. Life mostly sucks, and then you die. But I also believe—no, I absolutely fucking know—that whatever rotten shit pit life dumps you into, there is always a way out. Always. That’s the only real piece of faith I’ve got: There Is Always a Way.

  But this? The Eberhardt Museum? If there was a way in, I hadn’t found it. Usually, that would be like using spurs on a thoroughbred. It would whip me up and make me think of something new, something no one could hope to anticipate. That’s what kept me going. That’s who I was: Riley Wolfe, the guy who never quit and always won. Riley Wolfe, who took every obstacle as a challenge to greatness. Riley Wolfe, the greatest thief who had ever lived. I always found a way—always—to get what I was after.

  Until now.

  I couldn’t grab it if I couldn’t get inside to where it was kept. And this time, there was no way in at all. Nothing.

  “Nothing yet,” I muttered. “There’s always a way . . . Has to be . . .” I tried like hell to believe it was there. And I would find it. I had to find it. What was at stake was more than the incredibly rich payday. This was who I am, goddamn it. If I couldn’t do this, I wouldn’t be me anymore. Because it was totally fucking impossible, and that meant I had to do it, whatever They might say.

  Who’s They? The ones who told me I couldn’t, whatever it was. They’ve been telling me that my whole life, since I was a kid. And as I got older and the things They said I couldn’t do got more complicated, I kept doing them. There was always some fat-ass, born-into-money jerkwad standing in my way and telling me to give up and crawl back to Loserville with the other poor boys. And it didn’t matter. I found a way. I did it. Always, ever since I was so young and stupid that I let their fat-faced sneers push me into all the dangerous, crazy bullshit stunts they said I couldn’t do. Always, since the very first time, I found a way and came back to wipe the stupid smirk off their fat faces.

  But this time . . . ?

  I blew out a frustrated breath and closed my eyes. Nothing came to me. No wonderful, unexpected key that would unlock the doors of the Eberhardt. All I could see were lethal obstacles and unbreachable walls, and me on the outside again with no way in. And I hated that, being outside. It made my skin pucker, made me feel small and stupid and dirty, like I was trapped in a box with the walls closing in and the air hissing out so I had nothing to breathe, no way to move, nothing to do but curl up and wait for it to squeeze me out of life. Trapped inside the small and ragged kid I had been, surrounded by bigger, cleaner, better-dressed kids sneering and pushing me and telling me I wasn’t even shit to scrape off their shoes, and I would never be anything else but nothing.

  Go on, rag boy. Run away, back to your double-wide.

  That still ate at me like it had just happened. I put my head down. My stomach was feeling sour and had started to churn, because it looked like they were right and there was nothing I could do about it, like I was back at the beginning again. Just a kid without a clue . . .

  “It’s like this, son,” my father said. We were sitting in the grass of the front yard. A mild wind blew gently across us, cooling the sweat we’d worked up from playing catch. “People are sheep.”

  I looked at him. I mean, I kind of knew what he was saying, but . . . “Everybody, Dad?”

  He smiled. “Weeeeellll . . . there’s a few sheepdogs—just to keep the sheep in line, you know. But most people . . . Yeah. Just sheep.”

  “Are—are you a sheep, Dad?”

  My father turned and looked at me with a lazy smile. “No, son. I am definitely not a sheep.” He ruffled my hair. “I’m not a sheepdog, either.”

  I frowned, trying to make sense of it. “Why do people just, you know, stay sheep?”

  “It’s safe,” my father said. “It can be dangerous to leave the flock.” Dad looked off into the distance. “Very dangerous,” he said softly.

  “Are . . . Are you in, um . . . danger?” I asked.

  Still looking away, my father nodded. “Almost certainly,” he said.

  I felt a lump grow in my throat. The next day was my birthday—ten years old!—and I didn’t want anything dangerous to happen, not to Dad, not to me . . . not before the party. “Then why?” I asked. “Why do you have to, you know, be in danger?”

  Dad looked at me, very serious now. “It’s the price you pay, son. You want the truly good things, you have to put your neck on the chopping block now and then. But it’s a whole lot better than being a sheep.” Dad put a hand on my shoulder, squeezed. “You try not to be a sheep, too . . .”

  I didn’t really know what Dad meant—not then. But I said, “I’ll try” anyway. And then all of a sudden Dad was gone and he never said how not to be a sheep. Mom didn’t know, either, and things got bad. And before I knew what was happening, I was in the middle of a circle of boys and they were pushing me around and laughing at me, and I just had to let them because they were bigger and there was a lot of them and what could I really do? And they pushed harder and talked tougher and I got more and more scared and I started praying that somebody might come help me, but there was nobody who would, nobody who could, there was only me against them, all of them together and me all alone, the whole flock of them getting louder and—

  And then, just like that, I knew what Dad had meant.

  And I looked around at the circle of faces all scrunched into fake mean expressions—and all I saw was sheep.

  They weren’t really tough, dangerous guys. They were boys, scared boys, and they were pushing me around and jeering at me because they thought they could. Because there was a whole bunch of them and only one of me. Because, damn it, they were just sheep, and that’s what sheep did. They picked on the one they thought was weaker, different, until they felt better about being sheep.

  Right then and there, just like that, I knew I wasn’t one of them, would never be one of them, and I didn’t have to try any
more. And I didn’t want to try because I didn’t want to be one of them anymore.

  So I knocked away the hand on my chest. And I smiled. I could tell right away that worried them, scared them a little even—because that meant I was not a sheep.

  Right then and there, everything changed.

  Riley Wolfe was born.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it. But it’s gonna cost you.”

  The biggest, loudest, sheep-est one stepped closer. “You’ll DO it, rag boy? You’ll climb all the way into the old quarry?” He shoved—

  And this time, I shoved back. The big sheep stepped back, stunned. “I said I would, and I will. And I’ll bring back the taillight from the Studebaker at the bottom. For proof,” I said. I shoved the big one again. “But it. Will. COST you.”

  The big kid looked uncertain. “You can’t climb into the old quarry,” he said. “All the kids who tried it died.”

  And that was true, or at least it was the local legend. The old quarry was the place that every parent warned their kids to stay away from. It was a death trap—a hundred feet straight down, the walls made of soft and crumbly stone. And at the bottom, nothing but a pool of fouled water. Somebody had pushed a car into it years ago, a 1958 Studebaker Lark. The tail end of the car stuck up tantalizingly, a target for the best rock throwers.

  “Nobody can climb down there. It’s too dangerous,” one of the other sheep said. The others nodded.

  “Then you can’t lose your money, can you? So let’s see it.”

  “There’s no way,” they said.

  “There’s always a way,” I said for the first time. And as I said it, I realized that it was true; it HAD to be true. It was the whole explanation for how not to be a sheep. Sure, it could be dangerous. Dad had said so, and he was right. Climbing into the quarry was going to be risky as hell. But it could be done. There Was a Way. Always. It was a basic law of life for anybody who could grab it and believe it. And I did, and it filled me up with its truth, lifted me far above the bleating sheep and the crappy double-wide and all the hungry dreams I’d been squashing because there was no way they could ever happen. But now I knew better. There was a way. There had to be. “There is always a way,” I said again.

  And there was. There was a way down into that old death trap of a quarry, and I found it. And the sheep paid. Almost a hundred dollars altogether, a huge amount of money back then. I still remembered the look on Mom’s face when I gave it to her, the slow smile spreading over her face as she counted it out. “Oh, my,” she’d said. “We’re going to be living the life of Riley.”

  She liked to tease about that. “Living the life of Riley.” I didn’t know what that meant then, but I liked the name. And I kept it.

  And I kept that flash of insight, that there’s always a way. All these years in between that first time I put my life on the line and now. And all to get a stupid fucking taillight from a 1958 Studebaker Lark. It felt great taking the money from them, better than just having money, because they were fat, stupid sheep who had things I didn’t, and it almost felt like I was doing a good deed to take stuff away from people like that. But as nice as it was to get the money, I think I liked just doing it even more. Just to see the look on their face when I showed them that yeah, I fucking well could.

  That feeling stayed with me. It even grew. It always felt better to take it away from the rich sheep. They always thought they deserved to have what everybody else couldn’t because they had money. So that turned into what I wanted most—not just the stuff; the stuff taken from the rich sheep. And no matter how well they protected it, I always found it, and I took what I was after.

  But this time . . . Where was the way? What was left to try? What was I missing? What was the one thing nobody would ever even think about—nobody but Riley Wolfe?

  Go ahead, rag boy. Run away—

  Back to the double-wide . . .

  I still heard those voices in my head, getting bigger and louder, sneering, daring me, telling me I would fail—and I knew I would, because I wasn’t shit, I was just rag boy, trailer trash, and I always would be . . .

  I picked up the brochure from the museum and scanned it again: “. . . founded in 1889 . . . unique example of Stanford White’s influence . . . still owned and managed by Eberhardt’s descendants, who take an active role . . . recognized worldwide as one of the finest . . .”

  “Shit,” I said one last time. I’d read the thing a hundred times. The words hadn’t changed, and they still didn’t tell me anything I wanted to know. I crumpled the brochure in disgust. The fucking Eberhardts and their fucking family museum. “Rich fucking assholes.” Exactly the sort of privileged shitbag, scumbag sheep I hated the most. Not merely rich, they were rich from inheriting money—they’d done nothing at all to deserve it. I could just about feel their smug superiority from here. Their kind were my favorite target, and that made this deadlock even more frustrating. A perfect target, a legendary score—and I couldn’t get to the starting line.

  I wadded up the brochure and flung it away. It fell on an impressively big stack of other crumpled papers. I’d tried everything I could think of, every possible angle, and I had nothing but a heap of crumpled paper and a headache. I told myself I was very damn good at what I did, absolutely the best, and if I couldn’t see a way in—well, maybe there just wasn’t one this time. It didn’t make me feel any better. It just made it hurt in a way that went much deeper than the disappointment of missing a great score.

  I blew out a long, frustrated breath and leaned back in my chair, running a hand through the bristle of dark blond hair on top of my head, cut short so the wigs would fit. So far they had, and the disguises had been near perfect, and they hadn’t gotten me anywhere. The Eberhardts were just too good, too thorough. I had never before seen anything like this. They’d sealed up that museum so tight that the only possible way to get in was to buy a ticket.

  I took another deep breath and tried to focus. The frustration wasn’t helping. It was taking over my brain. I needed to push away all the bullshit, uncoil the knots building up inside. Relax and get to a creative place. So I reached for the Bose headphones around my neck. I slipped them up onto my ears and picked up my mp3 player. It was stupid expensive, definitely not just an iPod. It had on it all the hundreds of hours of music I needed, music from all time and all the world. I don’t give a shit about genres in music. Since I learned the music I liked mostly by myself, I never learned to care if it was rap, rock, or even bebop. I just care if it’s good. There was a mood or a moment for just about anything, even Balinese monkey chant. So my player was pricey, but it was the best, and that was what mattered. Money was for spending, and I never gave it a second thought. Besides, I’d made plenty, and getting more was easy. I thumbed up the volume and hit PLAY.

  At once, the music flooded into me—Miles Davis, In a Silent Way. Perfect soundtrack for letting your mind float away from problems and off to a peaceful place where the solution to the Eberhardt Museum would finally happen. I just needed to relax, let it come to me. I closed my eyes and let my mind glide. Forget the museum, forget the guards, let it all go and just drift . . .

  The gentle breeze blew, and Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Try not to be a sheep, son.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, even though I didn’t know what that meant. And then Mom was calling from the porch of the big Victorian house and we were walking across the wide lawn together and going in for supper, going in to that big wonderful old house, MY house—except that when I got there, Dad was gone and the house had turned into a battered old double-wide trailer and Mom was crying and there was nothing in the fridge so there was no supper after all and no money and Mom was crying, so I knew I had to do something and I did it but I didn’t mean to and then he was falling, falling, spinning and endlessly falling away, and I could only stand there and watch him falling, spinning and falling, and now it’s me falling, turning
slowly and falling, and I can’t—

  I woke up with a jerk. I tried to shake off the fumes of that black-cloud feeling, but it was no good. The asshole Eberhardts and their inherited billions and electronic systems had me beat. And as for a human door in, forget it. You didn’t bribe or blackmail Black Hat or Tiburon or, God help us, the Revolutionary Guard. And even the museum senior staff was mostly the fat-ass Eberhardt family anyway. A whole fucking family of entitled asshole sheep who did nothing except sit on their fat pimply butts and count their inherited money and keep out anybody who wasn’t one of them, so getting past them was just as impossible, unless—

  It hit me like something heavy falling on my head—but it felt good. Really, truly, amazingly fucking GREAT!

  “There’s a way,” I said out loud. “Goddamn it, there IS A WAY!”

  I jumped out of my chair and kicked through the heap of crumpled papers until I found the brochure from the museum. I threw it on the desk and smoothed it out, and this time I read through it slowly and carefully.

  When I was done, I just sat there and smirked for a minute. It was there. It was really and truly right fucking there. And it was so obvious—and at the same time so totally un-fucking-thinkable!—that only Riley fucking Wolfe would ever see it, let alone try it.

  It was there. I had my way.

  I switched the music over to something with a feeling of celebrating—David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust. And as the opening guitar chords crashed into my headphones, I leaned back and closed my eyes again—but this time, I was working. And as I began parsing the details, I was still smiling. “There is always a way,” I told the rich-bitch asshole fucking Eberhardts. “Always.” And I pushed away the last of the black cloud and its double-wide memories and began to plan.