Thief (3 page)

Still there wasn’t any choice, and they both knew it. Soon the police or the goons would arrive, neither being noted for their tolerance of thieves. He couldn’t be here, and he had to bring her with him. Without understanding why he knew absolutely he had to bring her with him.

Before he had a chance to even begin to panic however, the angel solved his nightmare herself. She ran to the passenger’s side of the Lotus, pushed the seat all the way back and dived face forwards on to it. Did she understand the danger they were in after all? Or was she just trying to help him out of a tight spot? He had no time to ask. Amazingly the angel somehow fitted into the tiny space. It was tight though. Even with the seat pushed all the way back like a cot her wings barely fit between the rear window and the front passenger’s foot well.

Mikel hurriedly gathered her wings into the door wells, carefully shut the door on them, hurdled the small car’s bonnet and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. Even for his more humanly proportioned, though admittedly over-large frame, the car was a squeeze. For an angel it was surely as close as she could come to a straight jacket. It should be a living nightmare for her. The loss of the freedom of the sky in exchange for the convenience of a tin can on wheels. It was just wrong.

But looking across at her he still saw that same expression in her eyes, complete trust. Without any good reason, she believed in him totally. She knew he wouldn’t let her down. He would get her out of this he promised the heavens above silently; he had to.

“We’ll be OK.” He said it as much for his own benefit as for hers. He was trying to bolster his own confidence, badly shaken by the terrible number of mistakes he had already made in a single evening, and that the fact that her appearance represented  both a bulls eye painted on his back, and a weight around his neck. The angel would stand out like a sore thumb, and be harder to bear than any dead albatross. Yet he could not fail her. In response she just smiled again, and he literally had to look away before he fell once more under her power. Even looking away, he could feel her smiling. Could that even be possible?

Mikel didn’t have time to think about the impossibility of it all, as he pushed his foot all the way to the floor, and the car took off like a rocket, which was of course why he’d always used the Lotus as his choice of getaway car. The relatively small turbo charged engine made it the equal of any other car in its class, while its light weight and massive tires gave it a tremendous edge in acceleration and handling.

He’d never needed the awesome abilities of the Lotus before, the benefit of good planning, based on a desire to live a long life. But he’d long ago made it a rule never to stint on safety. You only get one shot at life, and if the worst had come to the worst he didn’t want to be caught dead in a slow coffin, literally. This time however, his planning while good, had been more than a little upset by the angel’s arrival. He was at least twenty minutes behind schedule, and to cap it all, the angel had been seen, if only to shoot at. Mikel simply had to hope he didn’t need the car’s awesome performance.

Leaving the underground car park sedately; he had to calm his nerves and drive normally if he was to pass by unnoticed, he saw the first of the police arriving, and knew they saw him. But despite his terror they passed him by, the sight of an angel in his passenger seat apparently not enough to stop them in their duty. Of course they didn’t have time to stop him now, they were on their way to an emergency in the next building, moving so fast they surely hadn’t seen her. Why would they care about some rich yuppie in his sports car with a winged woman, when lives were on the line next door? But that wouldn’t stop some of the more alert of them taking down his license plate details for later. Which was all well and good as he reminded himself. The plates would lead the police to another local crime family, one of the triads, whose number plates he’d carefully forged. Should be a hot time in the old town when that came out.

Minutes later they were cruising sedately along the motorway out of town; after all he didn’t want a ticket, least of all with an angel in the car, and travelled towards the seaport and his waiting plane. The police band radio blared loudly in the tiny cabin, but he heard no reference to either the Lotus or the angel. They must truly have been oblivious this night, something for which he felt truly grateful. Normally they weren’t so unobservant. Which was why he’d planned on having plenty of time to make his getaway.

Twenty minutes into the drive, having listened to the scanner intently, he could finally accept that they were in the clear. A huge weight began lifting from his shoulders. For what seemed like the first time in many long hours, he relaxed his muscles and started breathing again. Finally things were back on track. Mikel activated the controls that would warm the plane’s engines, and radioed in his pre flight plans. No point in leaving these things for the last minute. Especially this day.

It was a long drive, though at least no longer a scary one, as the immediate danger had passed, and all other risks had hopefully been prepared for. If not he’d deal with the problems as they arose. As he always had. But as the danger passed, and the pleasure at the success of his latest mission came and then passed, his mind kept returning to the angel like a magnet. And no matter how many times he tried to concentrate on anything else, his thoughts always zeroed back on the woman, the angel beside him.

It was lust of course, simple lust. What drew him back, was the sight of her, now lying on her side squeezed into the seat beside him. Her wings enveloped her in the most luxurious feathery blanket imaginable. In the cramped cabin he couldn’t help but brush them every time he changed gear, the feathers so divinely soft and smooth he had to restrain himself from petting them like a bird’s. Then there were her clothes, layers upon layers of gossamer thin silk, almost transparent and showing off the sensual curves of her body to perfection. She was undeniably gorgeous, demure and innocent yet strong and sensual. In short she was a platinum blond bombshell, and then some. 

“I thought angels weren’t supposed to be sexy.” From where the words came he wasn’t sure, but he turned red even as he uttered them, and it was all he could do not to cross himself. He turned redder still when he felt her response, pleasure that he should think her so. It became difficult to drive about then and he forcefully had to exert some more self control or risk ending his career as the most successful thief the world had ever known in a routine highway accident.

“I live. I strive. I win.”

He spoke out loud the three short sentences of his personal mantra, ignoring her gaze, determined to regain control of his errant thoughts. Long ago he’d begun studying the martial arts, honing his mind and body to razor keenness. Developing his own mantra had been one of the most useful parts of all those long years. The mantra had once allowed him to walk for miles on a broken leg. He’d regularly used it to push his body and conscious beyond their normal endurance, and to allow his mind free reign over seemingly insoluble problems. Used properly it could help him achieve the seemingly impossible. But never once had he thought he’d need it to overcome simple lust.

Repeating the words over and over again, focusing on them, he quickly reasserted his control, and allowed his mind to start wandering free of his body’s desires. More accurately it allowed him to recognize them, and set them aside so he could concentrate on other matters, such as the other cars on the road.

Questions, too long unasked began to pepper him. Who was she? Why was she here? What did she want with him? And above all else why was she so powerfully attractive to him? Was it simple lust? – Or was it something more sinister? The word ‘trap’ started running through his thoughts, years of paranoia finally coming back to the fore.

Then there was the question of how she’d found him, and more importantly, why? Had it been by chance? Had she simply been out flying around up there when she’d seen his high wire act and flown in for a look? He didn’t think so. Somehow he was certain that she had known who and what he was long before she’d ever shown up. She’d sought him out deliberately, even picking out the most awkward moment to make herself known. Why? Because it told him she knew everything about him, his ever vigilant paranoia whispered. She was telling him he had no choice but to do as she wanted, - or face life behind bars. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but it made perfect sense. And there was no other explanation.

Eventually he pulled himself back together and then took the opportunity of the long drive to ask the angel some of the things he desperately needed to know. He should have guessed he would meet with only limited success. Her method of communication and his were so far apart, added to which he also had to concentrate on staying alive, that it was a wonder he picked up anything at all. And yet for all the lack of hard information he received from her he somehow felt she said more in her way than he did with his clumsy words.

By the end of that drive the only new concrete information he had was her name, Sherial, which sounded to his ears the way it seemed to sound in her thoughts, if that made any sense at all.

But Sherial he gathered was an angel’s name, along with Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, and an angel was what she clearly was. Free of his twisted emotions he could finally acknowledge that mind-boggling impossibility with impunity. This winged beauty beside him was an angel. There could be no argument.

Yet even the fact of what she was, didn’t bother him as much as what it implied. If she was an angel, it surely meant that God existed, and that against all the evidence, he sometimes acted in this pitiful world. Everything Mikel had believed for forty years just went out the window.

That in itself raised a zoo full of questions. Things like, If He was here, knew everything, could do anything, why did He allow so much evil to be done? Why did He let the poor and weak suffer while the strong and powerful took everything for themselves? Not very far behind his questions, was an anger that threatened to burst free, and he knew if it did, he’d never drag his thoughts free of their dark path. Mikel held it in with difficulty.

Besides, his paranoia was telling him there were more important things he needed to know, and soon. Was she here for herself? Did angels even do things just for themselves? Was she heralding something? Or as he expected, was she here specifically for him, and in which case what did an angel want with him? Why did she want a thief?

His mind was a tangle of confusion and unanswerable questions, which plagued him for the rest of that long drive to his waiting plane, and then throughout the even longer flight back to his island home.

Could she be here to save his soul? Redemption? It ran across his mind but didn’t really take hold. He simply couldn’t bring himself to believe it. For a start he wasn’t sure he needed redeeming.  Certainly he was surely both a sinner, and a thief, though at least not a murderer or worse. While perhaps not evil he also couldn’t exactly call himself pure. He lived apart from others enjoying the peace, but equally condemning the masses for the most part for their ways. He took what wasn’t his to take and yet he also gave nearly everything he stole to lessen the plight of those who suffered the most in this world, while at the same time bringing a form of justice to the wicked.

While he might not be a saint, neither was he totally evil. Surely those most in need of redemption from an angel would be far more evil than he. Many of his prey perhaps. Then again, why would anyone want to redeem them? Better surely to send them to hell and lock the door behind them. Those people were truly evil. They killed, cheated, stole, raped, and carried out every other obscene act possible simply for their own selfish purposes. To nearly all of them, there was nothing important outside of their own wants and needs. Once they might have been hungry or stupid youngsters. But they had grown up to become scum, pure and simple. He was not like them. He hated everything about them.

But the dark side of the coin was still dreadfully real. That he too, like those he stole from, was too far gone to be redeemed. He stole, lied and swindled. He hated those he stole from, and that hatred itself was a sin. So was pride and he was always a proud man. How bad did you have to be to go to hell? Perhaps angels carried the Lord’s punishment. He dreaded to think what that might be.

Then there was the more tantalizing possibility, his first thought, that she wanted to hire his services. She had as much as said so, even though she had said nothing. The angel had come to hire a thief. It made more sense and yet it also made none. Angels surely don’t steal.

Then there was Mikel himself. A sinner, perhaps beyond redemption, perhaps not. OK, so maybe even he didn’t know exactly what was his state of grace, but he knew he surely couldn’t be an angel’s first choice as an agent. Unless of course she wanted the most skilled thief in existence, which he was just about vain enough to believe he might be. Certainly no other contenders sprang to mind, but then if they did exist, he wouldn’t know of them as he reminded himself. Just as they wouldn’t know of him.