Project Sweet Life (17 page)

This was bad. With a source of light, Eddy was sure to see the hole in the ground. He was also likely to see
us
! We’d cornered ourselves in the cells. If we tried to go forward, Eddy would hear us for sure.

Slowly, Eddy inched closer. He must have heard that we’d stopped moving, that we were waiting for him, and while he may or may not have sensed the open pit, he had to know something was up.

A globe of flickering light entered the prison chamber. In the amber glow of the flame, Eddy’s face looked cadaverous—his eyes dark and hollowed, his skin haggard. But at least he hadn’t yet spotted the hole in the floor.

“Don’t shoot,” Curtis said suddenly. “We’re in here.”

Curtis!
I wanted to say.
What are you doing?!

Eddy’s face crumpled into a big smile. But to get a clear shot at us, he had to step forward into the middle of the room, right toward the pit.

Now I saw why Curtis had spoken. He assumed Eddy would see the pit with his light, so he’d drawn his attention toward us, up off the floor.

“We’ll talk,” Curtis said. “Just don’t shoot us.”

“Talk?” Eddy said, strolling calmly forward. “What’s to talk about?”

And that’s when he stepped right into the open pit.

The lighter snuffed out the second he began to fall. He screamed as he plummeted downward.

We heard him hit the floor with a painful thump. He groaned softly, so we knew he was still conscious.

“Let’s get out of here,” Curtis said.

Eddy fired his gun up at us, again and again. Unlike the flickering lighter, the orange flashes brightly illuminated the whole prison. But now because of the angle, he didn’t have a shot at us.

But in those flashes of gunfire, I saw something under our feet in that cell.

It was those pieces of crushed plaster of Paris and drops of paint we’d seen before, the ones we’d thought had something to do with the gamers from the Dungeon Door. Something about the mess nagged at me.

We didn’t want to give Eddy a chance to shoot out a brick over our heads, so we hurried away, leaving him in the sinkhole.

“We did it,” Victor said once we were safe. “We got him! Let’s go call the police. We’ll tell them everything.”

But something about that plaster of Paris and those little drops of paint still bugged me.

Then suddenly I had it. Could the answer to Project Sweet Life have been with us all along? It seemed too incredible to be true. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions again. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it
was
true. It was like the whole summer was coming into focus, almost like everything we’d done had been for a reason.

Curtis, Victor, and I climbed out of the China Tunnels. We called the police from a pay phone on the street near Old City Hall. I did the talking. I told them about Eddy—how he’d been involved in the Capitol American bank robberies, how he’d also broken into Mrs. Shelby’s house,
and how he was currently trapped in a sinkhole under the streets of downtown Tacoma. I was very specific about everything, including Eddy’s address and the fact that he currently had lots of stolen loot inside his apartment. But I didn’t give them our names.

Then I hung up the phone.

“What are you doing?” Curtis said. “You didn’t tell them about us. That we were the ones who caught him.”

“I know,” I said.

“But the reward!”

“We don’t
need
that reward,” I said. “We already have more money than we could possibly spend—more than enough for Project Sweet Life and then some.”

“Tell me more,” Curtis said.

I smiled. I would tell them everything. But not just yet.

First, we watched from near the Spanish Steps to make sure the police had believed me about a guy trapped in the tunnels under downtown Tacoma. A few minutes later, three cars arrived. The officers went right to where I had said the entrance to the tunnels would be. Would the police have enough evidence to get a warrant to search Eddy’s apartment in order to find the stolen loot? Maybe there had been some witnesses to Eddy chasing us down the streets of downtown Tacoma and shooting at us. At this point, that was now between Eddy and the police.

I turned toward our bikes, parked several blocks away. “Let’s go,” I said.

“We’re really leaving?” Curtis said. “We’re really not going to talk to the police?”

“We’re really not going to talk to the police,” I said calmly.

“But why?” Victor said.

“I can’t just tell you,” I said. “I have to show you. It’s the only way to prove I’m right.”

“You
better
be right,” Curtis said. “Because we’re giving up a hundred-thousand-dollar reward!”

That’s when I realized how cool the air was. At some point in the last few hours, the heat wave had broken.

“I’m right,” I said. “I’m absolutely positive.”

It was almost eleven before we made it back to Curtis’s. I’d called my parents from the road and asked if I could spend the night at the bomb shelter. They’d said yes, so we still had the whole night ahead of us.

“Okay, okay!” Curtis said once we were inside the seclusion of our hideout. “What’s this all about?”

“I know what happened to the Labash coins,” I said.

“We
all
know what happened to the Labash coins,”
Victor said. “They were hidden in the China Tunnels, but the owners of the Dungeon Door found them, framed them, and hung them on their basement wall.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know what those coins hanging on the wall were—props from
The Pirates of the Caribbean
movie maybe? But I know they weren’t the Labash coins. Because the Labash coins have been with us all along.”

Curtis’s eyes met mine. I think he thought I was joking or possibly crazy—that the pressure of Project Sweet Life and the threat of losing my two best friends had caused my mind to snap.

“I’m not crazy,” I said, “and I’ll prove it.”

I picked up our statue of Mr. Moneybags from the floor. I lifted it up as if to smash it against the ground.

“Dave?” Victor said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Yeah!” Curtis said. “That’s our mascot!”

“Trust me,” I said.

I hurled the statue to the concrete floor of the bomb shelter with all my might.

It hadn’t broken when it hit the Ferrari all those weeks ago, but I threw it hard, and this time it shattered—
though with a dull thud, not a sharp crash. I bent down and started rifling through the pieces.

The statue wasn’t ceramic. It was plaster of Paris painted with enamel. The remnants looked and smelled like crushed chalk. As I rooted through them, the pieces crumbled into white powder.

And almost right away, I found what I was looking for.

I held a gold coin in my hand.

I placed it on the floor and kept combing through the powder. I quickly found three more coins.

“What are…?” Curtis started to say.

“They’re the gold coins that Mr. Haft stole from Mr. Labash,” I said.

“Holy Perplexica,” Victor said, “patron saint of the totally confused!”

Meanwhile, Curtis’s eyes bugged. “But how did they get
inside
Mr. Moneybags?”

“They’ve been there all along. That’s where Mr. Haft hid them, not down in the China Tunnels where we thought.”

This was all coming too fast. Curtis and Victor didn’t
understand. “Wait,” Victor said. “Go back. Start at the beginning. Tell me how all this fits together.”

I took a breath. “Ron Haft stole the Labash coins from that downtown coin shop and used the China Tunnels to make his escape. But he didn’t hide the coins down there like I thought. Maybe he knew that other people were using the tunnels too, and he worried that they might find the coins. Or maybe he just didn’t want to let his precious coins out of his sight. He was worried he might be a suspect in the theft, so he needed a really good place to hide the coins, at least until everything blew over. He decided to hide them in plain sight—inside an object at his office that everyone there would have been familiar with.”

“Mr. Moneybags!” Victor said. “Mr. Haft had a sense of humor.”

“But how in the world did he get the money
inside
a statue?” Curtis said.

“He didn’t,” I said. “The first statue, the one that had been in his office, was made of porcelain. But he used the original to make a duplicate out of plaster of Paris.” I stepped on one of the pieces of the statue at my feet; it
crushed into powder under my heel. “Then after it dried, he painted the plaster with enamel paint to make it look like the original.”

“Down in the China Tunnels!” Victor said suddenly. “That’s where he did it. We saw the leftover plaster and the spattered paint.”

I nodded. “But once he had the new statue, he needed to get rid of the old one so it wouldn’t look suspicious.”

“We saw that too!” Curtis said. “In the water down by the ruins of the Chinese settlement.”

I nodded again. “He couldn’t just throw the original Mr. Moneybags away, because he knew the police might go through his garbage. So Mr. Haft took the original statue and carried it through the China Tunnels to that exit just above where Chinatown used to be. Then he walked down to the water near the site of that old settlement and tossed the statue into the bay, thinking that no one would ever find it. And no one ever
would
have found it, if it hadn’t been made of porcelain, which meant barnacles wouldn’t grow on it.”

“But what an amazing coincidence!” Curtis said. “We were trying to find the hidden Labash coins down in the China Tunnels, and we just happen to
own
the very thing
that they’re hidden inside?”

“It wasn’t a coincidence at all,” I said. “The only reason we started looking for the China Tunnels was because I read about them in
Trains and Totem Poles
, the book you bought at the same estate sale where you also bought that statue of Mr. Moneybags. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just
any
estate sale. It was the estate sale of Ron Haft. Curtis, don’t you remember how you overheard someone saying it was the estate of some local government bigwig? In other words, we learned about the China Tunnels from the same place Mr. Haft did. But it wasn’t until I saw the leftover plaster of Paris in that abandoned dungeon that I finally put all the pieces together.”

Curtis and Victor were speechless. Frankly, I’d surprised myself a little too. I’m not stupid, but I don’t consider myself brilliant either. I guess everyone gets lucky sometimes.

“Dave!” Curtis said. “That’s fantastic! I can’t believe you figured that all out!”

I shrugged matter-of-factly. “Piece-o-cake,” I said.

There were forty-two gold coins in all. But we didn’t want to get too excited until we were absolutely sure that
the coins were ours to keep. After all, Mr. Haft had stolen them from Mr. Labash. True, Mr. Labash had turned out to be pretty evil, murdering Mr. Haft and all. But what if he had a business partner, or some other relative? We didn’t want to do to them what Mrs. Shelby had done to us.

Still, I did take one of those forty-two coins. I figured I’d earned it. And the next day, when my mom took me back-to-school shopping at the mall, I encouraged her to stop at J.C. Penney first to try on some shoes for herself. As she did, I slipped over to the coin shop at the mall and asked what they’d give me for the coin.

“Five hundred dollars,” the guy said quickly, trying hard not to appear too eager.

I’d looked up the coin’s real value online that morning, and this was way under. I also got the feeling that he wasn’t supposed to be dealing with anyone under eighteen. But with my mom waiting for me nine stores away, I was in no position to bargain. So I took the cash, which was more than enough to pay for my back-to-school shopping.

Only one more lie, I told myself. But it was funny, because the closer we came to the end of summer, each
new lie was becoming more difficult to tell.

“Ready?” my mom said when I found her in J.C. Penney.

“Ready,” I said. And I
was
ready, not just for shopping, but for this whole summer of lies to finally be over.

But there were still a few more lies to be told. We couldn’t let our parents know about the Labash coins, or they’d learn about Project Sweet Life too. That said, we did need an adult to find out if we owned the coins fair and square and, if so, to sell them for us. So on Sunday we made another visit to Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny.

We sat in the front room of their house and explained everything.

“Oh, come on,” Uncle Brad said when I was finished. “Are you sure you didn’t let your imaginations get away from you?”

So we showed them
Trains and Totem Poles
, and the coins, and the online printouts of what we’d learned they were worth.

A smile tugged at the corner of Uncle Danny’s mouth. “I think they really did it,” he said to Uncle Brad, who had also begun to smirk.

They started laughing.

“You did it!” Uncle Brad said. “You really did it!”

They’d laughed at us once before, when we’d first told them about Project Sweet Life. But this was a different kind of laughter. This time they weren’t laughing
at
us, but
with
us.

It was funny how up until then I hadn’t let myself get excited. I guess it was the fact that we’d gotten ahead of ourselves so many times over the course of the summer, and it had always led to some big disappointment. Plus, there was the whole lying-to-my-parents thing, which I still felt bad about.

But for the first time since the summer began, we’d actually gotten something right. That was finally sinking in.

Before I knew it, we were all slapping each other on the backs and laughing so hard that our sides ached.

By Wednesday of that last week in August, Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny had talked to a lawyer about claims of ownership on the Labash coins.

“Calvin Labash had no living relatives and no will,” Uncle Brad explained. “By being convicted of homicide
and then killing himself, his estate lost any claim to the coins. Meanwhile, Ron Haft died deeply in debt. This explains why it took them so long to hold his estate sale—it’s been held in escrow all this time while his creditors battled it out. But a court finally ruled that all his possessions be sold as is.”

“What does that mean for the coins?” I said. “Are they really ours?”

Uncle Brad nodded. “Legally, you bought them fair and square when you bought Mr. Moneybags at the estate sale for two dollars.”

The next day, Uncle Brad sold the first of the coins to a shop in Seattle.

For eleven thousand dollars.

It was more than enough to prove to our fathers that we’d had summer jobs. We could also pay back the money we owed to Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny for repairing the neighbor’s Ferrari.

The estimated value of all the coins together was 1.6 million dollars.

“Holy Saint Powerball!” Victor said when we found out the total. “We’re
rich
!”

School would start on Tuesday of the following
week. That meant we had four whole days of complete freedom to do whatever we wanted before the end of summer.

But the lying still wasn’t over. After all, Fircrest Pool stayed open through Labor Day, so I had to continue going to “work.” I decided to take Labor Day off—one fewer day of lies—so Sunday was my last official day as a fake lifeguard.

That Monday, the last day of summer vacation, my dad told me over dinner that he’d stopped by my workplace earlier that day.

I almost choked on my chicken-nugget salad.

“What?” I said.

“Oh, I know you said that your manager didn’t want family members bothering you at work,” he said. “But this was different. I didn’t want to talk to you; I wanted to talk to
him
. So I walked right in and said, ‘I’m Dave’s dad, and I want to know exactly how he did working for you this summer.’”

“Dad, I can explain!” I said.

“You can?”

“Yes!” But could I? I could explain about the stolen
Labash coins. But could I explain about lying to my parents? Was there anything I could say that would make
that
make sense?

The only thing I could do was try.

I told my parents the whole story of the summer from start to finish. I even told them about the coins and their being worth 1.6 million dollars.

Two minutes into the story, my mom dropped her fork onto her plate with a clunk.

Three minutes in, my dad’s face started to get very red.

But I kept talking, and they listened to it all. In a way, it was a relief to finally have it all out in the open. No more lies.

When I was done, no one said anything.

“Don’t just sit there,” I said. “Say something.”

My dad’s face was so red now that, for a second, I worried he was choking.

But then he sighed, deeper than I’d ever heard him sigh. “Dave, Dave, Dave,” he said at last.

“Well,” my mom said sadly, “this explains why you never complained about your job and never left wet towels on the bathroom floor.”

In other words
, I thought,
I’m a complete disappointment to you both
. Didn’t the fact that my friends and I had made 1.6 million dollars mean
anything
? It was like they’d completely missed that part.

“For the record,” my dad said, “would you like to know what the manager at the Fircrest Pool said to me?”