Chapter I:

Catherine gets Finn to herself after apparently searching the ghettos of Brooklyn for him. While Finn is concerned with safely escaping a crime scene, he is more concerned with figuring Catherine out.

My fingers trembled against the arms of the chair I sat in. A coffee table situated between us kept us apart from each other. It was probably the sole reason why I did not vault forward and immediately strangle her. She knew my face and my identity, but how did she know the latter? When did my name hold any notoriety? Catherine had placed herself into an undoubtedly dangerous situation " being a young woman, alone, at the dead of night " to find me, and for what purpose? Was she some sort of investigator, an officer, even? Did they wisen up enough to disguise themselves, and as such a beautiful woman at that? To what extent was she willing to go, if not in positioning herself in one of the most dangerous ghettos of the borough, to locate me? I had not been thinking when I gave her my name, and was admittedly frenzied from what was a job gone wrong. Whether Catherine concluded my identity from the moment she had saw the blood trailing from my shoes or from when I had given her my name, I could not put my finger on it. It could never be the former, for I am a thief, not a murderer. I have never been one  for murder and have never even been suspected of committing one, even among “friends” in the criminal underworld; things, however, just did not work out as they always did this time around. I regretted it when these hands came to frisk the most precious and forbidden thing of all, the gift of life, from another. I still regret it now. It is no surprise to me that with my biggest mistake yet, all events afterward have not gone according to plan. After all, the repercussions I feared for have become very real " and of the worst of them, there was a face to my name. The look on Catherine’s face when she confirmed just who I was, it was marvelous in a way: an innocent, exhilarated grin, like a child spoiled on a Christmas morning. She looked far from terrified of me, which actually came to terrify myself. She had me right where she wanted me, and I knew she would pry…

“Oh… well I’m flattered.” I managed through a gulp. My eyes were constantly shifting between her own, a loudly ticking godfather clock, and the variety of furniture that gave life to the humble abode.

“Please, Finn, lighten up… I just want to talk.” Catherine insisted, and beckoned a hand for me to hand her back her cigarette. “And no, I’m not one of the feds.” Her mentioning this took an astronomical weight off my shoulders. I had not noticed it yet, but I was hovering from my seat, obviously more eager to leave than I had realized. I sunk, a bit more relaxed, into the cotton of the armchair.

“So what is it you want to talk about and why?” I asked Catherine. Her eyes widened with excitement, and she went on to make her point.

“Oh, I want to know everything there is to know about you, Finn: your name, your age, where you were born, where your parents are from… what got you into your profession… your first score.” Catherine’s excitement in her tone seemed to dwindle down into a more serious, inquisitive one when she made her last two mentions.

“Well aren’t you eager?” I asked. Almost immediately, she retorted with, “Fascinated, really.” I raised a brow, and pressed on.

“Alright… I still don’t exactly know why, but  you helped me out of a pickle. I owe you for at least that much.” I folded my hands together neatly in my lap, and sat up, resting one leg over the knee of the other. Admittedly, I was quite flattered. It was almost like an interview. “You know my name already. Finn Evans Crowley. I’m twenty-nine years young.” I contemplated going any further than that. After all, who exactly was Catherine? Instead, I thought I could twist the situation around and put the spotlight on her.

“I’m not feeling to answer unless you do the same for me.” I crossed my arms over my chest, and leaned back in my chair. “Well, shoot. And here you were saying you owed me…” Catherine pouted and leaned back in her own chair. “I’m risking more than my identity here, you know. What do you even need to know this all for?”

“Wellllllllll…” Catherine let her cigarette and its expired embers descend into a small ashcatcher at the tap of a finger. “I thought it’d be a good idea to get to know one of my greatest inspirations.” Indeed, she was flattering. Perhaps they were buzzwords, perhaps she was exaggerating, but she had gone indecent lengths to get me here. My time seemed to have the possibility of running short, so why not share my story with somebody?

“ Your ‘greatest inspiration’ though? You’ve got to have a seriously strange set of values to be inspired by a no-good like me.”

“A no-good? What makes you think that?”

“I steal stuff for a living.”

“You should be more proud of your profession, you know.”

“If you could even call it a profession, maybe.”

“I would kill to be in your shoes, you know!” I was surprised to hear her say this. Catherine was an interesting character. Surprisingly, despite inviting a known thief into her home, she was unmistakably social with me. I wondered just what she could mean by this; Is she interested in joining me on my one of my heists? Is that why she had come to find me? With the thought in mind, I also could understand that this woman was way in over her head. Catherine was delusional a way that was awful to think about. To proudly proclaim to a criminal that desired to be in his shoes. His bloodied shoes, at that. Surely, there were some of us that enjoyed what we did; to a degree, I enjoyed the cunning, the challenge, of thievery. Some of us, however, did not pick these professions because we thought, This is my dream career. I want to be a serial killer!, no; we were trapped here by our circumstances… we honestly do not know a life that is better.

“Tell you what, Cath. Can I call you Cath?”

“Call me what you like, Mister Finn.” She smiled cheek to cheek, tilting her head over slightly.

“If you can really get out of this mess not dead or in jail, you can have all the answers you want… I’ll even take you with me on a heist, but only after suspicions have dropped around me. Fair?”

“Fair… but one more condition.”

“And that would be?”

“Tell me just how you wound up in this mess, anyway.” Remembering it happened, being stained by it, gave me chills. Recent or a lifetime away, that was a story I could never forget.