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I thought I needed to find something impossible. It was starting to look like I’d done it for real.
“Shit,” I said one more time. It still didn’t help. “There has to be a way. Goddamn it, there’s always a way.”
I glanced around the room without really seeing it. It was small and cramped, but it was all I needed right now. There was a bed, a dorm-sized refrigerator, a hot plate—and behind a tattered old shower curtain, there was a sink and a toilet. The room was in an old building south of Williamsburg, and it smelled like a public toilet. But what the hell, I’ve had worse. I can get used to anything, and nobody else was coming in here. I had paid a stupid amount of cash for three months’ rent and a guarantee that I’d be left alone, to “finish my novel.”
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.
