By Hook or by Wolf

“They won’t look like this,” she comments, touching the frames again. “Maybe we can pick up some plastic gems and put them in. Then they’ll look the same.” She puts the picture back in my bag and we sing along to music for the rest of the drive to school. I park and walk her in to her class. I don’t stay and chat with her teacher the way I usually do. Instead, I dart back to the car, open my bag, and pull out the frames.

Sure enough, there’s a lovely sapphire carefully worked into the design of each frame.

Fuck.

I couldn’t have noticed it last night, of course, because each frame is covered in flowers. The art gallery was dark and in the dim lighting, I wasn’t able to see that in the center of a flower on each frame is a little sapphire.

So what I did wasn’t steal a picture out of spite and being an asshole.

What I did was steal something that’s probably a family treasure.

I did exactly what I didn’t want to do and something tells me that I need to make this right as quickly as possible. I’m not exactly looking forward to seeing Emily. Not really, but I also know that I don’t have a choice.

My motto, by hook or by crook, doesn’t really apply to robbing someone’s family heirlooms.

Damn.

I LEAVE THE SCHOOL and drive directly home. I get online and pull up Emily’s contact information. It’s a pseudonym, of course, or possibly her maiden name. Now that I know she’s part of the Claw family, I can search a little easier. I type in “Emily Claw” and find out whe

re she lives, where she works, and where I can find her today. To my dismay, it seems as though she’s actually kind of a big deal in the world of Starton.

It’s been awhile since I heard someone talk about the Wolf Bitch of Starton.

It’s a nasty, mean name that nobody deserves, least of all somebody as quiet as Emily Claw, or Emily Bright-Claw, as I’ve come to discover. Apparently, she met me under her maiden name, which is how she was able to produce so much paperwork showing that she was the true owner of the Gem of Malice.

It was all true.

She just hadn’t also told me that she’d been married to the person in charge of the art gallery or that they had kids together.

I have no idea what her final play was or why she hired me for something that she obviously already owned. Was she trying to see if I could break in? Was she trying to see if I could do it? I promised her I was a good thief. I wasn’t lying about that. I really am the best. There isn’t anything I can’t steal. There isn’t any place I can’t break into.

Why didn’t she just take my word for it?

With a sigh, I realize what I have to do. When we met before the gig, we met at a coffee shop. It was a small, quiet place that didn’t get a lot of foot traffic. It meant we wouldn’t be disturbed and it meant that nobody would recognize us.

Now I was going to have to march right into Claw Enterprises and hand over the stolen goods.

Why?

Because it was the right thing to do.

These were pictures of her sons and I took them. I’ve taken them. I’ve robbed the Claw family.

I feel like crap about it, too.

I also think that my research before the job must have been weirdly lazy. I researched Claw Enterprises, of course, but there’s no picture of the CEO anywhere online. Despite being well known in the art community, Emily Claw doesn’t spend a lot of time making public appearances. I can’t really blame myself for not knowing, but I at least should have run a background check on the buyer.

I guess I got too excited at the prospect of a fun gig.

Fuck.

I close my laptop, grab my stuff, and get back in the car. I have two missed calls from Emily from this morning. I definitely didn’t tell her I wasn’t going to deliver the gem. Instead, I just didn’t show up. It was kind of shady of me. I’ll be the first to admit that. Still, I was pretty pissed at having the wool pulled over my eyes.

Never again.

I always tell myself that the next gig is going to be the last one, but there’s always one more bad guy, one more old woman with a sob story, one more problem that needs to be fixed.

The reality is that I don’t always have to be the one who saves everything.