Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger

Author:Brent Hartinger [Hartinger, Brent]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

WEEK 6:

The Perfect Crime

The following Monday I was eating a late breakfast of leftover Cap’n Crunch pancakes when my mom asked when I was leaving for work.

“Uh, I have the day off,” I said. According to my “schedule,” I didn’t really have the day off. But I was getting tired of lying to my parents, and for some reason this lie-within-a-lie seemed somehow less serious.

As my mom was sorting through recipes, I noticed the front page of the newspaper. It had a big story: Local woman receives reward for capturing bank robbers.

Mildred Shelby, the article read, the 76-year-old woman who provided the information leading to the July 11th arrest of two robbers of the University Place branch of Capitol American Bank, received her just reward yesterday—a check for one hundred thousand dollars, given by the bank’s national headquarters, in accordance with a long-standing policy to thank those who thwart robberies.

It was the very end of July, almost three weeks after we’d solved the mystery of the bank robbers, and the lady who had taken the credit for it was finally getting her reward. There was even a photo of the old biddy smiling and accepting the check just outside the bank branch.

I brought the newspaper with me to the bomb shelter.

“She did it!” I said. “She finally got the reward money.”

We were back to having furniture—a couple of folding chairs lifted from Curtis’s garage and a lumpy, ratty couch that had been cast off by a house six blocks away and carried by us all the way to the bomb shelter just the day before.

“Who did it?” Victor said. “Who did what?”

I flung the newspaper at him. “Mrs. Shelby.”

Victor didn’t even glance at the newspaper. “Who’s that?” he said, sitting back against the couch. It squeaked like a dying pig.

“The woman who took credit for our solving the Capitol American bank robberies!” I said.

Curtis, on the other half of the couch, said, “Bank robberies? What bank robberies? I don’t know anything about any bank robberies.”

Even now, Curtis and Victor were still pretending the fiasco with the bank robbers had never happened.

“Look,” I said, “you can ignore this all you want. But the fact is, we solved that bank robbery. We’re the ones who put the pieces together, and we’re the ones who almost got ourselves killed! Mrs. Shelby just happened to overhear us talking. Sure, she called the police, but anyone could have done that. And the only reason she got the reward was because she lied and didn’t tell anyone what we did. That hundred-thousand-dollar reward is rightfully ours—and she’s living our sweet life with it!”

Neither Curtis nor Victor said anything. They just sat there on the couch staring stubbornly in opposite directions. Meanwhile, I stared stubbornly at them.

Finally, Victor said, “I feel something.”

Aha! I thought. I had finally lit a fire under Victor’s butt. Now maybe we’d do something about the fact that Mrs. Shelby had basically stolen our money.

Curtis looked over at Victor. “What do you feel?”

“I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.