On the Run

“Your first mistake was stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from me. Your second mistake was thinking you could get away with it.” As I stood trembling before his desk, Mr. Atwater regarded me as if I were a bug on the windshield of his Lexus. “Do you have anything to say for yourself before I call the police?”

Without thinking, I turned and bolted out of his office, past rows of startled secretaries and accountants, straight down the hall and through the door to the fire stairs. I took them three at a time, forty-two stories in all, and when I emerged through an emergency exit into the narrow alley behind our building, I was heaving with exertion. I forced myself to walk at a normal pace as I melted into the crowd of pedestrians on LaSalle Street, and I was able to flag down a cab as the sirens of approaching police cars pierced the autumn air.

Returning to my apartment was out of the question. “Midway Airport,” I told the driver, not really knowing where I intended to go. Just far away, fast. Thank God I’d stashed the embezzled money in a bank account opened the week before with an assumed name and phony identification. As a woman, of all things.

It was just dumb luck that my girlfriend had persuaded me to dress up in her clothes for Halloween. She really got into it, and by the time she dragged me to a party thrown by some of her friends, I was actually passable. I kept her clothes until the next day, and that morning, I opened a bank account with a bogus Arizona driver’s license that I scored over the Internet. As Victoria Ross, I worth over half a million dollars, if I could stay ahead of the law long enough to get my hands on it.

Arizona…why not? I could start a new life there, far away from the Chicago winter. All I had to do was present myself at a local bank, transfer the loot, and keep a low profile. As my cab pulled up to the curb at Midway, I checked my wallet to make sure Victoria Ross’s Arizona license and ATM card were safely tucked in an inside pocket. I paid the cabby and sprinted to the Southwest Airlines ticket counter.