Project Sweet Life (16 page)

“We need to do another stakeout,” Victor said. “But that means—what is it? Three days? Four? And we’ll need delivery uniforms. Something that makes it look like we fit in.”

“There’s no time!” I said. I reminded them about my mom’s back-to-school shopping trip the following morning.

“I still can’t believe she’s making
you
pay,” Curtis said. “That’s totally unfair!”

“The point is,” I said, “if I don’t have the money, my parents are going to know I don’t have a job. And then it’s only a matter of time before your dads find out too.”

“But even if we do implicate Eddy,” Victor said, “it’s not like we’ll get the reward money by tomorrow afternoon.”

I nodded. “I know. But it’s one thing to be caught in a lie when your lie turned out to be a total disaster. It’s another thing to be caught in a lie when the lie ended up catching a bank robber.”

We thought about that for second. Then Curtis turned and started up the front steps of Eddy’s apartment building.

“Wait!” Victor said. “Where are you going?”

“Inside Eddy’s apartment,” Curtis said. “There’s no time for a stakeout, so we need to do this now.”

So Curtis was being his usual, impulsive self. But it wasn’t just Curtis. I was edgy and irritable and impatient and totally ready for this endless summer to be over, not
to mention still terrified of my parents finding out the truth about Project Sweet Life. If we were going to catch a bank robber by tomorrow afternoon, Curtis was right: We needed to do this now.

“But what about Eddy?” Victor said. “He could be back any second.”

“He was in a big hurry,” Curtis said. “People in a big hurry are in a hurry to get
to
something. Something important. And important things take time. Besides, it’s Friday. I’m sure he’s gone for the evening.”

Curtis was obviously just making things up again. But I wanted to believe him this time, and I guess Victor did too, because neither of us called him on it.

We followed Curtis up the steps. The doors to the apartment building had been propped open with cinder blocks because of the heat. There was a row of dented metal mailboxes in the foyer just inside.

“Here’s an E. Drake,” I said, pointing to one of the mailboxes.

“There’s also an E. Lannister,” Victor said.

“The apartment numbers are listed on the boxes,” Curtis said. “So let’s check ’em both.”

We tried E. Drake’s apartment first, which was located on the third floor. The stairs of the building were marble, but deeply indented from a century of footsteps. The hallway carpets were frayed and faded. The whole building smelled of dust and cooking grease.

We stopped in front of E. Drake’s apartment. Curtis knocked on the door, and it rattled in its frame.

No one answered. We didn’t even hear any movement inside the apartment.

“No one’s home,” Curtis said. “This must be Eddy’s place.”

“How do we know?” I said. “Maybe E. Lannister isn’t home either.”

“Good point,” Curtis said. E. Lannister lived on the fifth floor, but we walked up and knocked on the door of that apartment too. A skinny woman in a red headband answered the door. She looked like she’d been cleaning house.

“Is Eddy here?” Curtis asked.

She stared at us blankly. “Uh, no,” she said. “I think you have the wrong apartment.”

After she closed the door, Curtis looked at Victor and me. “Well, that’s it then. Eddy’s last name is Drake, and that was his apartment.”

Which meant, of course, that now we had to go break into it!

We returned to the third floor. Curtis walked right up to the door of E. Drake’s apartment, facing it like a dance partner.

“Don’t tell me,” Victor said. “You know how to pick locks?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve read about it on the internet.”

As Curtis stared down the lock on that door, I looked down the hallway. Televisions murmured and electric fans sputtered behind the peeled paint of the other apartment doors. Were people spying on us through the peepholes? Standing there, I felt completely naked and exposed.

“Hurry,” I whispered to Curtis.

“Don’t whisper,” Curtis said.

Curtis picked the lock just like I knew he would. We quickly stepped into that empty apartment and slid the door closed behind us. We kept the lights off. It was
already dark outside, but there was just enough of a glow from the streetlights that we could make out the lumpy furniture and the mess.

When it comes to homes, there are two kinds of mess: cluttered-messy and dirty-messy. An apartment can be cluttered and disorganized but not necessarily dirty.

Eddy’s apartment was both cluttered
and
dirty. Clothes had been strewn everywhere, and pizza boxes littered the floor. Loose white paper—bills and take-out menus—glowed in the dark. And unlike the woman on the fifth floor, Eddy hadn’t been doing any housecleaning lately: Rancid smells floated over from both the kitchen and bathroom areas, and the whole apartment smelled like cigarette smoke.

“Search,” Curtis said. “Look for anything that was stolen from Mrs. Shelby’s house.”

There wasn’t anything in the front room. But in the clutter atop the dresser in the bedroom, I saw a glint.

I stepped closer. It was a gold necklace.

A
woman’s
gold necklace. I remembered the jewelry I’d seen spilling from the box on Mrs. Shelby’s bureau.

“Bingo,” I said.

Victor stepped up beside me. He pointed to other
stuff on top of that dresser: a gold watch still in its case, diamond earrings, even a couple of figurines from
The Wizard of Oz
—all stuff we’d seen on Mrs. Shelby’s dining room table.

Curtis, Victor, and I looked at one another and smiled. First we’d found Eddy, and now we had some solid evidence that tied him to a crime. Could it be that our luck had finally changed?

But it was at that exact moment that we heard a key being slid into the lock in the front door. Eddy was back.

No
, I thought,
our luck hasn’t changed!
I also thought,
Why didn’t we think to have one of us standing as a lookout out on the stairs?

“The bathroom!” Curtis whispered.

We all ran for the bathroom. There was no point in hiding in the tub because the shower curtain was clear plastic—grimy, but clear. So we stood just inside the door with the light turned off. Now we just had to hope that the bathroom wasn’t the reason Eddy had come home.

We listened to Eddy—the jingling of his keys, his soft sigh, the shuffle of his feet.

We held our breath, desperate to hear where Eddy was going. The bathroom?

No. The bedroom.

This could work,
I thought. The bathroom was between the bedroom and the front door. If he stayed in that bedroom, we could make it to the door and out, maybe even without being heard.

We all instinctively seemed to know this. As soon as Eddy had entered the bedroom, we tiptoed out of the bathroom and turned toward the front door.

At that moment, Eddy stepped back out of the bedroom and faced us in the hallway.

“What the—?” he said, confusion in his eyes.

Wow,
I thought,
our luck
really
hasn’t changed!

Victor and I both froze as if in a spotlight. But Curtis was right there with a lie on the tip of his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Eddy. “Is this the wrong apartment? We’re looking for someone named Lannister.”

Eddy hesitated for a fraction of a second. It was a good lie, and Curtis had spoken it with his usual, practiced innocence. But Victor and I must have looked too frightened, our faces too flushed, and Eddy was no fool.

“How’d you get in here?” he said. “That door was locked. Wait, you were already in here when I got home, weren’t you? How’d you get in? What did you see? What
do you
want
?” For the record, there was no confusion in his eyes anymore. It was scary how quickly he was piecing things together. He was a thief and a slob, but not stupid.

“Nothing,” Curtis said, his voice catching at last. “I told you we were looking for Mrs. Lannister.”

“You’re lying,” Eddy said, but he wasn’t rude about it. “Let’s talk. I can make it worth your while.”

He took a step toward us so he was barely five feet away.

Victor and I froze again.

But Curtis said, “
Run!
”

We lunged toward the front door. Fortunately, Curtis brought up the rear, so when Eddy grabbed him from behind, he somehow managed to wiggle free just as I threw open the door.

We ran—through the doorway and down the dusty hallway, down the deeply grooved marble stairs and out into the street.

Eddy followed. But he was an old guy, and we were three fit fifteen-year-olds. Besides, what exactly could he do even if he did catch us?

Outside the apartment building, I glanced back. Eddy was barely ten feet behind us. On the plus side, we really were faster than he was; he seemed to be losing ground.

Then I saw the gun in his hand.

“I’d call the police on my cell phone!” Victor said, even as we kept sprinting down the street. “Except—wait! I sold it eight weeks ago in our garage sale!”

“You are not seriously
still
going on about that!” Curtis said.

He can’t shoot us
, I thought.
It’s downtown. People would see. There’d be witnesses.

But the truth was, it was after eight now, and the streets were deserted. Downtown Tacoma had gentrified, but not yet to the point that it had any kind of nightlife. And when I looked behind us again, I saw that Eddy had somehow slipped a black ski mask on over his head.

Now he’s wearing a
mask? I thought.
Where had that come from?
Or was a mask just something that a thief always carried with him—like a pocketknife or breath mints for most people?

“I have a plan!” Curtis said suddenly, even as we all kept running.

Curtis had a plan! I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or even more terrified.

We kept running downhill and reached the Spanish Steps—those white stairs that led down into the Old City Hall District. That’s when I realized where Curtis was taking us.

“You are
not
seriously thinking of leading him down there!” I said.

“Why not?” Curtis said. “It’s perfect!”

Then the second part of Curtis’s plan occurred to me. And I immediately thought to myself,
What the heck, this just might work!

When we came to Fireman’s Park, I could still hear Eddy’s footsteps thundering behind us. I looked back and saw we’d gained about forty feet on him.

We found the clump of ground cover with the metal grate that led down to the China Tunnels. We threw the grate to one side, but as we crouched to crawl down the shaft, the footsteps behind us stopped.

I looked up. Eddy had stopped running and was aiming his gun right at us.

“Saint Asparagus!” Victor said. For once, his invented saint made no sense whatsoever. But under the circumstances, I couldn’t really blame him.

Eddy fired.

My eyes bulged as I stood there expecting to feel hot metal sizzling through my flesh. In the nearby greenbelt, I heard the panicked scatter of feral cats.

But I didn’t feel anything. The report of the gunshot echoed. Eddy had missed. When I looked at my friends, I saw them both scurrying for the rungs of the metal ladder that vanished in the darkness.

Eddy fired again, but this time I didn’t wait to see if I’d been hit. I scrambled after Curtis and Victor into the shadows of the China Tunnels.

Would Eddy follow us? Even before my feet touched the ground at the bottom of that ladder, I knew he would. Sure enough, the rungs of the ladder squeaked and wrenched above us.

That’s when I also realized the flaw in Curtis’s plan: If Curtis’s plan
didn’t
work, Eddy was free to kill us in complete privacy, and no one would ever know what had happened. What if he had a flashlight along with the gun
and ski mask in his pockets? We had no light whatsoever, which meant that Curtis’s plan would be over before it had even begun.

“This way!” Curtis said, heading off into the darkness, and I knew that he’d spoken as much for Eddy’s benefit as for Victor and me. The whole point was to get Eddy to follow us.

But it was dark, and the tunnels were anything but straight. What if Curtis couldn’t find what he was looking for? What if we ran right into a loose spike or nail, or hit our heads on a low-hanging beam?

We fumbled forward, feeling our way rather than seeing it. The scuffles and muttered curse words that echoed in back of us told me that Eddy was right behind.

“Stop!” Curtis whispered suddenly, blocking Victor and me with his outstretched arms. “We’re here.”

We had reached the abandoned subterranean prison under Old City Hall. But I knew it wasn’t the old cells that Curtis was planning on trapping Eddy in; it was that open sinkhole in the middle of the floor
outside
the cells. I could somehow
feel
the open pit right in front of us. That said, I hadn’t sensed it until just then, which meant we
had almost walked right into it.

Would Eddy sense it too?

Quietly, Curtis prodded us over toward the cells, where we could wait to see if our web was going to catch this fly.

But behind us in the hallway, I saw something I definitely didn’t want to see.

Light. Something was flickering in the near-total blackness.

Eddy had a lighter! How could we have forgotten that Eddy was a smoker?