So many good choices, so little time. And none of them told me what I should do. So just when I could see Stone was getting impatient, I settled on the most devious thing I could do.
I told him the truth.
“Bullshit,” Stone said when I was done.
“God’s truth,” I said.
“You can’t steal a goddamn wall,” he pointed out. “Not from the goddamn Vatican.” He shook his head. “It can’t be done.”
“I know that.”
He blinked at me a few times. “What’re you gonna do?”
“Steal the goddamn wall,” I said. “From the goddamn Vatican.”
“How you gonna do that?” he demanded.
“Not a fucking clue,” I said. “But I’m gonna do it.”
“No way,” he said. “It can’t be done.”
I shrugged. “There’s always a way.”
“You think you can do it?”
I shrugged again. “I sort of have to.”
“And then, what? Deliver it? To Boniface’s island?”
“Yup.”
“Huh,” he said. He was quiet for a long time, not really looking at anything, just thinking about it. He finished his drink, poured another one, sipped that, just staring into space.
I finished my drink. Stone still didn’t say anything. Finally, he drained his glass and stared into it for a moment. Then he nodded. “Perfect,” he muttered. He put the glass down and looked at me and said the one thing in all the world I never expected to hear from him. “How can I help?”
I was pretty sure I’d heard him wrong. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I had too much of this good whisky. I thought you said, how can you help.”
He smiled, and it wasn’t a smile that would make anybody happy. “That’s just what I said,” he said.
“But that’s—you don’t want me to fail?”
“Nuh-uh,” he said. “I want you to succeed.”
I didn’t get it. I just shook my head and looked at Stone, and he just smiled and looked back. And then, just as I opened my mouth to ask him what the fuck he meant by that—
“Oh,” I said. Then the full weight of what he meant hit me. “No. Sorry, but no. No fucking way.”
Stone’s smile got bigger. “You got the reputation of a man who always finds a way,” he said. “When nobody else in the world would even think about trying something, good ole Riley Wolfe comes along and just does it.”
“I draw the line at suicide,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow, but the smile didn’t go away. “But you’re okay with killing a friend?” he asked. And the stupid over-obvious low-class son of a bitch actually turned his head and looked at the picture of Monique, just to make sure I’d get what he was talking about.
Yeah, I got it. Just like I got what he wanted me to do. He said he wanted me to succeed, and he did. He wanted me to steal a fresco from the Vatican and deliver it to Boniface. Because he figured that if I did, he could come along for the ride when I made the delivery. I mean, a wall takes up some space, which means a large boat, probably big enough that he could find room on board for himself and a few close friends—the kind of well-armed friends you’d want to invite to the party when you meant to kill Boniface and his little private army.
Really cool plan, right?
Except I saw a few problems with it. First, and the biggest problem, it had me in it, right in the middle, with a giant bull’s-eye on my back. If Stone tried and lost, Boniface would kill me. If Stone won, his best bet was to kill me anyway, to keep things tidy, quiet, and secure. And no matter who won, there was a really good chance that I would take a bullet from all the flying lead. Which is just as dead as if it was on purpose.