Between the Rivers

CHAPTER 10

  Entitled

  LYNCH was not a thief. He was entitled. Not to everything, he would be the first to admit, but certainly to anything. Any little thing that caught his eye, his fancy or his simple need to have.

  Ownership, he had heard tell, was dang near all there was to the law. The piddly sub-clauses not directly related to who-owned-what were no better than embarrassing shirttail cousins relegated to a wobbly throw-together trestle table at the edges of the legal family picnic. So long as Lynch held possession of whatever item was currently in dispute, the complainant could protest until they turned blue. All Lynch had to say was: prove it. For preference, though, he never allowed the situation to escalate to full-blown blueness, or even soft clematis-blue. The trick was to select the shiny-shiny he would grace with his ownership, and move it along before it, or its previous guardian, could suffer from acute separation anxiety.

  Lynch felt no guilt at this. Being entitled did not leave room for guilt. It did leave room to make himself at home in other people’s homes and to help himself to those small bits of frippery over which said people, sadly, could not maintain ownership.