en locked in here?” I asked him.
“Since midafternoon. ’Tis getting tiresome.” He looked over at the vault door, which was slightly ajar. “Am I to stay?” Hatchet asked.
“Your choice,” Diesel said.
Hatchet jumped off the chair and rushed to the door. For a moment I was afraid he would lock us inside, but he scurried away.
“Sometimes he really creeps me out,” Diesel said. “He’s like a big, pudgy rodent.”
“This stone search is dragging,” I said. “I vote we let Rutherford and Ammon have it. Not to mention, we don’t even get to keep it. You gave it away to Wulf. So let him get the stupid stone from Rutherford and Ammon if he wants it so bad.”
“I like your thinking, and I’d like nothing better than to get zapped off to an island and a palm tree.”
“But?”
“But it’s not gonna happen. The stone is dangerous in the wrong hands. And it’s my job to put it out of circulation.”
“Are you telling me you have a work ethic?”
“No. I’m telling you my boss is almost as crazy as Rutherford, and I wouldn’t want to piss him off.”
“What would happen?”
“I’d have to fly commercial, for starters.”
“Gee, that’s awful.”
“You want to try it with a monkey?” Diesel was back on his heels, staring at the treasure bins. “We should take this.”
“The treasure?”
“Yeah. All twenty-five million of it.”
“That would be stealing,” I said.
“This stuff has been stolen so many times over the centuries I don’t think it matters anymore.”
“What would we do with it?”
“I guess we could eventually donate it to a museum, but in the short term it might turn out to be useful. We might be able to bargain with it. Or maybe we just use it to make the bad guys mad. Throw them off their game while we search for the stone.”
I didn’t want to steal the treasure. I wanted to get out of the vault. I wanted to go home or back to the bakery. I wanted to be someplace that felt safe and happy.
“Just thinking about stealing the treasure makes me nauseous,” I said.
“You’re probably just hungry. I’ll buy you an ice cream cone when we’re done.”
I glanced at my watch. If we were going to do this we needed to get it done quickly.
“The bins look heavy,” I said. “How are we going to get them out of here?”
“The same way they got them in here. Hand truck. There’s one in the corner. It’s still got three bins stacked up on it.”
“Then what? We can’t truck them all the way to the Wessel House.”
“Call Clara and tell her to bring the van.”
Twenty minutes later we had all the bins, plus the hand truck, loaded into the van. Diesel locked the vault and the back door to the bank, and we took off.