Thieving Weasels - Billy Taylor Page 0,19

remember. I’m strictly backup on this. I’ll drive, do recon, make phone calls. I’ll do whatever it takes as long as no one outside the family knows I’m involved.”

Uncle Wonderful nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“So what’s my cut?”

“Your cut? Your cut is I don’t break your arms for stealing Grandpa Patsy’s money.”

“Grandpa Patsy’s money?” I replied with an innocence I’d been rehearsing for the last four years. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Save it. We opened Grandpa Patsy’s storage locker after the funeral, and it was empty. You were the only one besides me and your mother who knew where it was.”

I looked him in the eye. “Did you ask her if she stole it?”

“Of course I did.”

“And?”

“She said she didn’t.”

“And you believed her?” I said with a laugh. “Why?”

“Because you took off.”

“I took off because I didn’t want to be a thief for the rest of my life. Think about it. Where did the money for Mom’s new house come from? And that Mustang out there didn’t just buy itself.”

A look of confusion crossed his face, and I thought I had him until he gritted his dentures and said, “Listen up, you little snot. You say one more bad thing about your mother and, job or no job, I’ll break your arms.”

I held up my hands and said, “Sorry, but I still need to be compensated for the money I would have made working in the cafeteria back at school.”

“How much are we talking about here?”

“Let’s see, twenty hours a week for two weeks, plus double time on Christmas. With tax and tip that’s . . .” I pretended to run the numbers in my head. “Three-hundred-and-fifty dollars.”

Uncle Wonderful burst out laughing. “Three-hundred-and-fifty bucks for two weeks’ work? You’re getting taken.”

“It’s honest money.”

“If you say so. I just never realized honesty came at such a steep discount.” He pulled out his wallet and said, “I’ll tell you what. Just to show you what a nice guy I am, I’ll throw in an extra fifty bucks and make it an even four hundred.”

Uncle Wonderful counted out four hundred dollars and handed it to me. I felt a little guilty lying to him—the school cafeteria was closed for the holidays, and I wouldn’t have made a dime during the break—but I needed the money to visit Claire. Better still, the cash said Uncle Wonderful believed—at least a tiny bit—that my mother had robbed Grandpa Patsy’s storage locker. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he must have thought that all along.

Otherwise, he would have already broken my arms.

11

THE AMOUNT OF MONEY IN GRANDPA PATSY’S STORAGE locker was always this big family mystery, and estimates ranged everywhere from five hundred thousand dollars all the way up to five million. Imagine my surprise when I broke into it, and there was only a hundred thousand dollars inside. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Growing up, I’d watched Grandpa Patsy throw away hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars each week betting on football and basketball games. Those kinds of losses add up, and I knew of at least two bookies who had sent their grandkids to Catholic school on Grandpa Patsy’s nickel. This last fact weighed heavily on my grandfather and was why, when I showed him a brochure for Wheaton Academy, he offered to pay my way. After a lifetime of betting on losers, he said with a tear in his eye, he wanted to go out backing a winner.

The only problem was Grandpa Patsy died without telling anyone about his promise to me. This was probably a good thing, considering my mother or Uncle Wonderful would have talked him out of it, but it put me in the tricky situation of having to steal money that was rightfully mine. Wheaton cost thirty thousand dollars a year, and my intention was to take only what I needed for four years of school. This plan went up in flames the moment I saw how much money was really inside that locker. My family had been drooling over Grandpa Patsy’s fortune for years, and there was no way they’d believe there was only a hundred grand left, and it all belonged to me.

One of Grandpa Patsy’s favorite sayings was that money separates friends, and big money separates families. I’m not saying a hundred thousand dollars is small money, but it sure ain’t five million bucks, and I knew that no matter what I did,