The Prisoner of Snowflake Falls Read Online Free Page B

someone else to find, and I could always use the pick if I forgot my key. “Listen carefully to my instructions,” he said, “and you will never have to stand in the rain again.”
    At first, I felt quite guilty about learning how to pick a lock. But Wally said it was just like learning survival skills in Cub Scouts. “You know how they teach you to rub a couple of sticks together and make a fire because somebody forgot to bring matches?” he asked. “Well, this is practically the same thing. Only usually much less hazardous than playing with fire in the woods.”
    Wally would never admit it, but I think he was proud to be teaching me what he knew about locks. “When it comes to challenging a young person’s coordination and mental agility, your computer games and your Rubik’s Cubes are child’s play when compared to picking a sturdy lock,” he said.
    It wasn’t long before Wally began to brag to the others about my lock-picking abilities. “This kid has the touch,” he would say. “He is going to become a big-time surgeon, if the concert violin doesn’t get to him first.”
    Of course, some of Uncle Andy’s associates doubted my talent. That’s how I started participating in a series of friendly wagers. For example, when I was ten, they asked me to try and open a locked door without using the key. Instead of a key, I was given a lock pick. My uncle and his friends placed their bets and put a pile of cash on the table. I was told that if I could pick the lock in under three minutes, all the money on the table would be mine. I opened the door in under two minutes.
    After that, a number of Uncle Andy’s friends began to take a personal interest in my development. Before long, I learned the fundamentals of how to forge an ID , hot-wire a car and pick somebody’s pocket on a crowded bus.
    None of my uncle’s colleagues ever encouraged me to use such skills for financial gain. They were just showing off to me a little. In the words of Mr. Cookie Collito, who can hot-wire anything on wheels faster than it takes to butter a piece of toast, “If we were farmers, we would teach you how to grow corn. But we are not farmers.”
    Almost all of our boarders in the rented house were men around my Uncle Andy’s age. The one exception was Madam Zora, who made her living as a professional fortuneteller in a downtown tearoom. She would forecast people’s futures by looking at the lines on their palms or turning over special cards with drawings of things like skeletons and devils on them.
    When she wasn’t working, Madam Zora let me call her Cindy, which was her real name. She said that people would never believe somebody called Madam Cindy could accurately predict the future. Cindy always seemed to have time to help me with my arithmetic or bake brownies for the class party on Valentine’s Day.
    You may think that it’s impossible to predict the future. But Cindy said that her real job was making her patrons feel good about themselves. She’d always make sure that a customer’s future looked very bright, telling them they were going to come into some unexpected inheritance or find their one and only true love. Then she would tell this long, sad story about how her little brother was trapped in a child-labor gym-shoe factory in outer Bulgaria and how she was trying to save up enough money to send him a plane ticket to Vancouver.
    At least seventy percent of the time, her customers felt so optimistic about their new and improved future that they’d insist on giving her some extra money for the plane ticket. There was no actual little brother in outer Bulgaria. There was just Cindy herself, who was putting aside a little nest egg so that she could live her lifelong dream of getting a fresh start in Las Vegas.
    Personally, I think Cindy was kind of sweet on my Uncle Andy, who I noticed always got the biggest piece of