Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page A

want to delay the party. The flowers were just flowers, and if that cell phone call a day earlier had been anything at all, it had probably just been her ordering a cake.
    Boy, did I feel stupid.
    Victor and Curtis didn’t say anything, but I could tell they felt just as stupid. We had all jumped to conclusions.
    “Curtis,” I said. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t a bad idea. Honestly.” After a disappointment like that, there was no way I was going to dump on him.
    Even Victor wasn’t rubbing it in. “I bet those robberies really were an inside job,” he said.
    Curtis looked almost catatonic. “We should go,” hewhispered. “We’ve wasted enough time here already.”
    “Yeah,” I said. But then I stopped. “Wait. No.” I really had to pee. I’d been sitting at that table drinking ice water all day. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
    I made my way down the hallway toward the restrooms in the back of the coffee shop. Suddenly I overheard voices from the kitchen.
    “Well, they’re up to something ,” a guy said. “They’ve been sitting there all afternoon. Can’t you just tell them to leave?”
    “Sure, I could ,” said a woman—the waitress. “But it’s better if they go on their own. They’re just about to leave, I think.”
    “Relax, Jerome,” a third voice said. “They’re harmless. They’re—what? Fourteen years old?”
    Fifteen! I wanted to shout. Was this person blind ?
    I didn’t want the people in the kitchen to know I was eavesdropping, but on the other hand, I still had to pee. As I crept down the hallway toward the restrooms, I saw over a swinging door into the kitchen. The waitress was talking to two men, a younger, skinny cook dressed in food-spattered white and a burly older guy with a leather jacket and a shaved head. The two men had their backsto me, and the waitress was standing in profile. Behind them, back between a set of shelves and the stainless steel refrigerator, a pair of binoculars hung on the wall.
    “They’re probably harmless,” the waitress was saying. “But they are watching the bank.”
    “So?” said the guy with the shaved head, solid and unflinching. “So are we. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”
    “That’s the point , Eddy,” said the cook, as twitchy as the other guy was cool. “Do we really want anyone else knowing what a great place this is to watch the bank? What if someone puts two and two together?”
    It took me a second, but then I got it.
    These guys are the bank robbers!
    I immediately ducked back into the hallway, away from the swinging door.
    Curtis had been wrong when he’d thought the robberies were inside jobs; they didn’t involve anyone from inside the bank. But they did involve the people from the coffee shop just across the street!
    Talk about a robbery in plain sight! It was all so obvious. It also explained why it didn’t matter that so few people ate in the restaurant. It was a setup to spy on thebank. In fact, fewer customers were probably better for them. They probably used those binoculars to peer into the bank’s open vault.
    I have to tell Curtis and Victor what I know! I thought. But to tell the truth, I also still desperately had to pee. Do I have time to use the bathroom first? I wondered.
    No. This was too important to wait.
    But just as I turned and started back toward our table, the waitress stepped out of the hallway into the dining room.
    She looked over at me, then back at the hallway behind me and at the swinging door. I could see the wheels turning in her head. My only hope was to convince her that I’d been in the bathroom the whole time—that I hadn’t heard anything that she and her coconspirators had been saying. I knew I could do it; I just had to be completely cool, absolutely unruffled. She thought I was only fourteen, so I was sure she wouldn’t expect me to be able to lie convincingly.
    “I was in the bathroom!” I said to the waitress, almost a shout. “I’ve been back there the