“Whoa, wait, what the hell are you doing?” Alec held his hands up.

Erika held the gone steady. “I know Pascal is having me followed. You might as well admit it, he sent you, didn’t he?”

“Lady I don’t know who Pascal is or what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Of course, that’s what you’re saying now.”

“Erika. Listen. I don’t know who this person is you’re talking about, and if you want to put that gun down we can talk about it, but right now nothing good is going to happen if you keep pointing that at me.” He rose to his feet, hands still up. “This can’t be how all your first dates go.”

“No, you need to admit…”

Alec jumped at her. Grabbing her arm, he pinned it behind her. He disarmed her. Holding her close, he spoke against her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Alec said. “Believe it or not that’s not what I’m here for. This can be unpleasant, or we can talk about whatever is going on here.”

“Well if you’re just here to get laid, you might as well let go of me, that’s not happening either.”

“Are you going to attack me if I let go?” he asked. “I don’t really think you want a disturbance where police will have to show up at your door.”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to try it and see what happens.”

Alec backed away and let go of her. She turned to look at him. He emptied the bullets from her gun and then jammed the weapon into the back of his belt.

“You’re a beautiful woman,” he said. “It figures.”

“What?” she asked.

“It figures that you’re freaking crazy.”

“You’re not one of Pascal’s people?”

“No,” Alec said.

“No one sent you to find me tonight?”

“No.”

She cursed under her breath. She headed for the kitchen and he followed her, if for no other reason than to be sure she wasn’t going for a knife.

Alec stood at the center island, arms crossed and watched her reach into the refrigerator. She produced a bottle of vodka from the freezer.

“Are you going to explain why you just threatened to kill me?” Alec demanded. “And who this person is you’re raving on about?”

“Oh please,” Erika said through her teeth. “I don’t know who you are but you’re not just an accountant. You can handle yourself. My guess is you’re pretty used to having people try to kill you.”

“Is that a compliment?” he asked.

She reached into a cabinet for a pair of glasses. “Could be. Depends on which circles you’re running in.”

Alec laughed. There was a little of a hysterical edge to it. He wasn’t sure what this woman was going to try next but he was on guard. At the same time, he believed the worst part had passed.

“Must be something to do with my personality,” he told her. “Are you going to tell me what’s up?”

She pushed the bottle of Vodka towards him, but he didn’t touch it.

“Damn, I’m not trying to poison you now,” she said. Opening the bottle she took a gulp in front of him. After knocking it back she put the back of her hand up to her mouth.

“Well, we have a problem now. If you’re not really one of Pascal’s people, what do I do with you?”

“Hopefully not kill me and bury me in the desert,” he said. Taking the vodka, he ignored her glasses and drank straight from the bottle. “Who’s Pascal?”

“I don’t know that I can trust you.”

“You assaulted me with a gun,” Alec said. “And not only haven’t I called the police on you, I haven’t hurt you. I think that should be taken into account.”

“Why?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips.

“Apparently you’re not talking to anyone else,” Alec said. “Maybe I could at least listen.”

Something in her eyes shifted. He had reached her. It had to be a lonely life for her, being on the run and constantly paranoid.

“Talk to me,” Alec said. “I already gather you’ll kill me if I spill any of your secrets.”

“You’d take that risk?” she asked him. “For the possibility of getting some action? And you just called me crazy?”

“I did,” Alec said. “I never said I was really mentally stable either. I’m just curious now, and I’m not going to let you get rid of me without some kind of explanation. Or, I could make a complaint to the police. I don’t think you’re really looking for that kind of attention.”

“You’d do that? Really? Instead of just walking away?”

Alec leaned forward, stretching his eyes at her. “Indeed I would.”

She took another swig of vodka. “Alright. You’re going to need time then.”

* * *

They went back to the living room, and sat next to each other on the couch, passing the vodka back and forth. Alec was still aware of everything—the exits, the unloaded gun in his pocket, the possibility of her trying something again. But as the night drew on she was opening up to him more. There was no way he was leaving until she was through with her story.

“Pascal owns me,” Erika began quietly. She picked at her nails to avoid making eye contact.

“That’s illegal, you know,” he said.

“Smart ass,” she said. “Not exactly like that. I owe him.”

“What for?”

“Okay, so to explain this I have to go back a bit. My mother and I lived from place to place when I was growing up. I don’t know what she was running for, but I have an idea,” she said. “But I’m not going to tell you about her because if I do it sounds like I’m blaming her for something and I’m not. When I was a teenager, I ran with a crowd of kids who used to cheat tourists. We were living in Prague. A group of us would scan the crowds and pickpocket people around all the tourist traps: in the town square, around the monuments, taking pictures inside museums. There were days when you would only get a few dollars’ worth of money, and others when you would hit a well-heeled mark and pull a few hundred. The police in the city always warn tourists but they don’t really do much about the problem; that is unless you just get picked up and they want to make an example of you.

“That money was what I was pretty much my entire income, that and the sporadic wires of money I would get from my mom. But she was always moving, and I couldn’t depend upon it all the time. So I learned pretty quickly to supplement my income with other means,” Erika continued. “I lived in a flat with five other kids. All of us were working the streets in one way or another. I had enough to pay my small portion of the rent, keep myself fed, and buy the occasional treat now and again. I would go out for dinner at one of the local clubs after a long day, have hot coffee and goulash with bread. Simple things kept me happy.”

“How old were you when you started living on your own?”

“Sixteen. Don’t look at me, there’s plenty kids on the streets far younger than that.”

“I guess I was just wondering why you would be on your own at that age.”

Erika shook her head. “My Mom had her own stuff she was dealing with. She trusted that I could take care of myself.

She paused and took another drink. Alec could tell she was somewhere between buzzed and actually a little drunk. It made him wonder again how long this story had been secret. He knew it couldn’t have a good ending to it.

“I got caught one day. They picked me up and they brought me to jail. My mother wasn’t in town. I didn’t call my friends because I knew none of them would get me out. It was a house rule. It was better to spend a few days in jail than having the police come sniffing around our flat or decide to start asking questions. Anyway,” she tossed her hair over her shoulder. “I was ready to sit my few days out. But someone bailed me out.”

“Pascal?” Alec asked.

“No. It was a man named Emery. He’s one of Pascal’s henchmen. He was waiting for me there at the station. Once I got outside, he put a gun to my back and told me that he had a proposal I needed to hear.

He took me to a diner and bought me dinner. He told me that his employer had presented my bail money and that there was some work he wanted done. He was gathering a group of people who wanted to take their careers as thieves to the next level.”

“What did that mean?” Alec asked.

“I asked the same question,” Erika replied with a shrug. “Emery gave me a sales pitch. He said, ‘how would you like to make five times what it’s taking you to make over a whole year in one night? And you’d only have to work once a month.”

“I told him that I was happy with my life as it was and that it sounded dangerous. His reaction to that was I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t want to cooperate, he would see to it that I landed in jail again, but this time for a serious offense which I would not get out of.”

“What did they make you do?”

Erika stared at him for a time. He could tell she was weighing whether or not she should really tell him the truth. Just when he thought she had decided not to say anything further, she spoke up.

“Pascal was putting together a team of people who could be trained to be thieves for him. He had us start out as burglars, and then we worked our way up from smash and grabs to more serious thefts; rich people’s homes and after that, museums. We had mentors and worked in teams. Mine was Emory. He taught me how to deactivate security systems, crack safes, all of the different skills which go into a heist. Now, you want to hear the rest? Because it doesn’t get any better here on out.”

“Might as well. He turned you into a real, seasoned criminal.”

“You could say that. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. He was forcing me in, and once I was in, he made it clear that there’s not really a lot of ways for me to get out. I concentrated on doing what I had to do to keep me out of trouble.”

Hard work taking advantage of other people, Alec thought. “Continue.”

“I didn’t start to really think about getting out until this last year,” Erika said. “I wanted to have a life on my terms. I gave Pascal and his people a lot of years of my life. And yes, I’ve made plenty money doing it in the meantime. Enough where I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life if I didn’t want to. And I started thinking more frequently about the kind of time I might be facing if I ever got caught. One of my friends was working a heist that went awry, and he ended up getting sentenced to twenty years in jail. That really made the risk more real to me. When I was younger, maybe I didn’t think about the future as much. But at some point, you have to wake up and realizing you only get one chance. A small misstep is the difference between freedom and spending the rest of your life locked up. I’ve been lucky for a long time now. A long run of good fortune can only take you so far.

She took a deep breath before continuing.

“You’re telling me you’re an international jewel thief?”

“Art thief,” she corrected and reached for the bottle, which was getting dangerously low.

“Why should I believe you?” Alec asked. “Maybe this is just your version of a tall tale. Something to shut me up.”

“You can believe that if you want to,” Erika replied. “Might be more convenient for me if you did think I was lying. But you asked for a story, so you got it. Long as you don’t go telling people about it. Though I’ve given you nothing specific enough to prove anyway. And people are more likely to think it was an overactive imagination and too much alcohol involved than to believe you.”

“I guess,” I said. “I’m sure people have said worse things about me.”

Erika continued. “I was doing a job for them in London about eight months ago. It was nerve wracking; an art heist at a very high-security gallery. There were about five of us running point, and I was tasked to get an original Mallet. It’s priceless, a lesser known piece which wasn’t even discovered until the estate sale of an elderly widow who lived in the British countryside back in the 1970’s,” she said, her eyes alight. Just talking about it, she seemed to be transported back to that place of time. He could see she loved the adrenaline. He was familiar with the feeling.

“Anyway, the more people you have involved in an operation like that, the more chances there are for things to go sideways,” she said. “There were a couple of close calls. If I were a cat I’d have lost three lives on that job. But in the end, we pulled it off. I brought Pascal’s men the painting, got my money, and promptly left London. No one thought anything of it at the time because we were always encouraged to leave the city right after a job. But Pascal always kept some form of contact with us; usually in the form of cell phones and email addresses. I tossed my cell phone, deactivated my email account, and left Europe for South America. I couldn’t be sure if he had private investigators on me or not, or worse, some of the thugs he used to take care of people who were a problem to him. I kept moving. I was on the run for about seven months before Emery found me in Canada. I remember how he smiled when he told me that I had managed to evade him longer than anyone else who had run from our boss. He let me know in no uncertain terms that any further attempts to leave would be severely punished.”

“Have you ever met Pascal?” Alec asked.

“No one meets with him, except his very oldest cronies, which would include Emory and a handful of other men under his employ. They talk about him like he’s this legend,” Erika said bitterly. “If you want to know what I think, he’s just a bully who uses other people to get his work done because he won’t risk his own flesh in anything that could get him hurt. He’s the same as any white-collar criminal, who takes from others but manages not to get dirt on himself.”

Unable to help himself, Alec blurted. “You have an interesting code of ethics.”

“It serves me,” Erika said. The bottle was empty. She got up, either to throw it away or get another bottle. She swayed on her feet, catching the arm of the chair for balance.

“Ah, don’t do that, leave it there,” Alec took the bottle from her hands and placed it on the coffee table. She sat down and he brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

She sat back down.

“You look kind of green,” Alec told her.

“I made a deal,” she said. “One last job. A big one. And Pascale agreed he’d let me go.”

With that, she launched off the couch and ran to the bathroom.

From the sounds he heard, she must have made it to just in time. He could hear her being sick. Feeling guilty, he sat for a while and waited. There was a lot of running water. She emerged a few minutes later, hair pulled back into a ponytail, her face blushed.

“You’re still here?” she asked.

“Wanted to make sure you were alright,” he said, getting to his feet. “So, should I call you?”

“What?”

“Should I call you?”

“You want to?” she asked. She frowned. There was a genuine look of confusion on her face that in other circumstances he’d have found humorous.

He smiled. “We’ll do a better job of things next time.”

“I don’t usually… I can hold my liquor most times.”

Alec stepped forward and planted a kiss on her cheek. Her skin was soft, cool, and smooth to the touch. “Water and aspirin,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

“I hope you’re not going to drive home,” she said as he headed for the door.

“No,” Alec said. “I’ll get a ride,” he said. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Have a good night.” He pulled her gun out of his belt and handed it back to her. It was still unloaded; he’d left the bullets on her table.