Bystander - Truth on the Sidelines - pg 34-51

February, 2033

Saif twisted his shoulder and immediately chastised himself for it as he stepped into the convenience store and looked around the scene.  Three customers and the clerk, nobody looked hurt, thankfully.  The floor and everything else was covered in water, many of the periodicals were ruined.

He glanced down at his feet and noticed the pair of casings and lumps of metal that forensics hadn't yet picked up.  Looking to the techs he saw one of them looking over a wallet that had been found just inside the door.  Further scanning showed no impacts for the bullets, save one hole in the ceiling, and, again, none of the customers were injured.

Two of the customers were an older couple, husband and wife probably.  The man was wearing a frustrated expression on his face, as if he wanted to be doing something more than sitting around.  The coat he was wearing marked him as a veteran from the invasion of Afghanistan back around '02, infantry.  

Hopefully he got a good look at the perp.

The man's wife looked a bit shocked still and was fanning herself despite what felt like winter's last chill breeze whipping gently through the store.  She was maybe ten years younger than her husband, or maybe she just aged better.  Her husband was very protectively hanging close to her.

The third customer was a twelve year old kid, a boy in a cap who was munching quietly on a candy bar.  He didn't appear related to anybody else in the shop, probably just stopped by for a snack when the whole thing went down.  He was staring around at all the police officers with wide eyes, and periodically his eyes would wander back down the shelves toward a corner of the store, but whatever he was looking at was obscured by the shelves at the moment.

The clerk was a college girl trying to act tough, but obviously very shaken by the events, she was chewing on a tobacco cigarette and focusing very hard on the lighter in her hand.  He didn't comment on the action, despite the normal illegality of smoking in doors.  Aside from that sign of tension, however, she was looking around as if all of this was a personal affront to her busy schedule.

Flipping up a notebook, he walked forward to talk to the clerk and caught sight of a pale reflection in the chrome of the moulding on the wall.  Looking across from the reflection, he found a fourth customer.  That must have been what the kid was looking at.  A girl, a woman?  Eighteen…thirty?  Her skin was too smooth to be older than that, though he was surprised to see the color of her silver hair.  He'd thought it was black from the reflection, but he supposed that must have been the shadows.

Her sweater and poodle-skirt combination made her look something like a ghost from the 1950s, well before his time.  Her hair was bound up in three locks, a teeny-bopper pony tail down to her mid back and two braided forelocks that looked like they belonged more on a renaissance actor than a teeny-bopper, but it was the only detail that broke the theme.  Then she turned around and blew a bubble of gum that popped in her face, simultaneously popping the bubble of ethereality that had hung about her.

Late teens, early twenties.  

Assaf made a note of her and turned back to the clerk to take her statement.

"Tell me what happened," he said simply.

"Duh," the clerk answered.  "Some drugged out thug robbed the place.  What do you think happened?"

"If you could be more specific," Assaf asked politely, not raising his voice to the sarcasm.  "It would be most helpful in catching the man or woman responsible for this robbery."

"If you guys were doing your jobs, this sort of stuff wouldn't happen in the first place," the clerk said, destroying the cigarette in the process.

"The punk just burst into here wearing some sort of purple face paint to keep his features covered," the older man said, Saif turned to look at him writing down the facts as they were spoken.  "He was brandishing his gun like some idiot from a movie."

"When did the sprinklers go off?" he asked, pointing up.

"That was when he was emptying the cash register," the wife said hesitantly.  "The coffee machine in the back started burning something and set them off.  Made his make up run all over."

"So you all got a good look at him then?" Detective Assaf asked, directing his look back toward the coffee machine, which was indeed a burned out husk next to the girl in the poodle skirt and sweater, a shattered coffee pot vaguely identifiable atop of its heat pad.

"Yes, I did," the husband agreed, "and I can recognize him if you need me to."

"Heh," the clerk said.  "They have to catch him first."

"He shot once into the ceiling," Saif noted pointing up.  "But I see four more casings, anybody want to tell me about that?"  He also only saw three more bullets, or at least mutilated fragments that looked like bullets.

The older man looked a little embarrassed at the question, and Saif decided the man must have done something to provoke the shots.  His wife looked to him and back to the detective uncertain of what to do.

"Oh, that old man there tried to grab the guy," the clerk said with a laugh, "got kicked off for it too.  The jerk fired a buncha times but missed every shot."

"Does anybody know the girl in the back there?" Detective Assaf asked, pointing back there.

All three customers and the clerk looked back at the girl with a mixture of reactions, but it seemed evident that they hadn't really thought about her much.

"She was pushing her way to the front of the line when everything started to happen," the wife said in a displeased voice.  "Even knocked that little boy down behind the counters."

Saif looked to where she was pointing and noted that it was out of the line of fire from the thug at the door.

"So she was standing up here near the counter when everything happened?" Detective Assaf asked.  "She was the closest one to the gunman?"

"That's right," the veteran said.  "She's why I didn't get a good shot at the punk.  She got in my way I had to reach around her to get at him.  That's when the shots went off."

"Excuse me," the detective said, calling back to the techs.  "Can I see the wallet for a moment?"

One of the techs walked over with the requested item, opened but sealed in an evidence bag.  There was a driver's license inside showing the name and face of nobody that was inside the store at the moment.  Playing a hunch, Assaf showed it around to the four witnesses.

"Is this the guy?" he asked, curiously.

"That's him all right."

"He's the bad guy!"

"Yes…yes, I think that's the boy."

"Yeah, that's the asshole.  Guess you'll get him after all."

Nodding to himself, Saif returned the wallet back to the techs and stepped carefully over the shells and slugs to walk back to where the silver haired girl leaned against the wall in the poodle-skirt that hung down past her feet.  She'd parked herself right where the cold wind pooled together the most.

She had her arms crossed over her stomach, with one hand hidden under the other arm and her head mostly turned away, though not far enough that he couldn't see the faint bruise at the corner of her forehead, just edging out of the hairline.  She also had failed to hide a round hole in her shoulder just on the inside curve leading down toward one of her breasts.

"Can you say what you saw here?" he asked politely.

"You've already heard everything out of those other plebes," she said, shrugging unconcernedly.  "Je n'ai pas rien."

"Do you need a doctor," he asked conversationally.

"No," the girl said looking toward him firmly.  "Am I finished, can I go now?"

As she spoke a tinkling sound attracted his attention down to the ground as a mutilated glob of metal bounced lightly on the tile beneath the young woman.  Assaf rose his eyes to look at her again, questioningly.  In response, she blew another bubble and then chewed it back down.

"Peak," he said.

"That's right," she answered, chewing loudly.

"I've seen you around the Calm Night haven't I?" he asked, memory starting to pick up on half-seen images since moving to this city.

"Probably," she said.  "I'm there a lot."

"For someone who spends a lot of time around cops," he said.  "You're a bit reluctant to help out."

She hesitated a moment, looking away towards the glass and tapping her chin as if in thought.  Finally she turned back to speak to him.

"Don't need me," she said in error-strewn Arabic.  "Get everything over there."

"I'm third generation American," he told her in English.  "And my accent is the best part of my Arabic.  So let's not discuss this in mutually horrible grammar."

"I don't know anything," Lucretia said in a pouting voice like a frustrated little child.

Saif paused and tapped his pen on his notepad as he looked to where the coffee-pot had shorted and set off the sprinklers from smoking.  He thought about the wallet that was conveniently found by the door.  All of it was very convenient, but he didn't really have anything specifically to prove his suspicions.

"What's your name?" he asked, she glared at him and he shrugged, ignoring it.  "I can find it out at the station.  I'm sure someone knows you."

"Lucretia," she said.

"Lucretia what?" he asked.

"Just Lucretia," she repeated firmly.

****

Saif looked about as he entered through the doors of the Seattle Central Library.  Like
much of the rest of the city, it was a new building, less than twenty years of age.  It was constructed mostly of recovered bricks of the original central library.  There was a old-world European charm to the building that had been deliberately reconstructed in the plans, but it still was a modern building.

The brickwork facing and granite facades concealed metallic frameworks and supporting internal structures.  At the time it was built, it had used many of the most cutting edge designs for earthquake prone regions of the day.  Even now, it was considered one of the safest buildings in the city.  

At least in terms of dealing with the movement of the Earth.

The inside of the building was softened with the warm colors of stained wood panels.  Saif guessed that they were probably pine.  There had been a lot of damage to the pine forests in the same year that the old city was half-buried and the crews set to clear the debris had been quick to sell the salvageable trees for wood.

The veteran detective turned to look at the checkout counter, seeing a tall, thin man with wispy white hair and a bitter glower to his expression.  He stood with a straight, proper posture as he worked with the computer in front of him, eyes scanning the old LCD monitor attached to the library computer.  In approaching, the name "Elders" became readily legible on the old man's name-plate, along with the title "Head Librarian."

This close, he also noted another piece of equipment connected to the computer.  He'd seen it before, in the homes and offices of the blind.  The device would translate any text under the mouse pointer over into Braille, making it somewhat easier to use the computer.

"Excuse me," Detective Assaf said, pulling out his badge.  "Do you have a moment to speak?"

The man looked up from his work and took in the badge for a moment before smiling in a manner that made Assaf moderately uncomfortable.

"How may I help you officer?" he asked.

"I need to speak to one of your employees about an incident some nights before," the detective said.

"Of course," the man noted.  "I believe you'll find her in the stacks in the history section."

"And she would be?" Assaf asked.

"Really, detective," the librarian noted.  "I only have one supervillain in my employ.  Has she done anything that I need to be aware of?"

The tone of voice conveyed in no uncertain terms just what the old man thought of that situation.  

"Not really," Saif noted, replacing his badge.  "I need to call her in for a statement and to arrange a testimony.  She was a witness to a crime."

"A witness," the man noted with a barely concealed sarcasm.  "I see.  Well, I've already told you where you'll find her, I'm sure she'll be very forthcoming with whatever she happened to see."

The man looked back toward his work after a curt bow to take the place of a dismissal.  Arching his eyebrows at the old man's behavior, Saif shook his head and started walking back into the stacks.  For a moment, the only sound was his muffled steps on the carpeted floor, but as he drew near the history books, a muffled conversation could be heard.

"Look, lady," a young voice said in a tone somewhat higher in volume than was usually acceptable in a library.  "This doesn't have anything to do with our project."
The response was a voice that was speaking quietly enough that he couldn't make everything out yet, but was clearly more than a little frustrated.  There was a brief pause as he first started focusing on the voice, clearly female, and then it started again, slowly becoming clearer as he got closer.

"…all tied up," was the explanation.  "Like a spider web.  You can't talk about the Invisi…the homeless situation today without talking about recent history."

There was a deep breath as Saif turned a corner to find the same silver-haired girl he was looking for.  Her dress was not of the same high quality or distinct flavor as the fifties inspired dress she'd been wearing before, work clothes obviously, but they were still very flattering and stylish.  She was currently facing away from him, talking to a trio of what he assumed were undergrads.

"When the psyc…leader of North Korea suddenly keeled over in 2011," Lucretia noted as she grabbed some books from the shelves and carted them over to the students she was helping.  "Some of his people started trying to figure out who was in charge.  It started to get violent and South Korea got nervous so they decided to settle things before someone found a nuke and pushed a button.  The US stayed out until some idiot North Korean bombed a base and then we were in it."

Her accent was thicker as she grew more irritated, and hard for Saif to pin down at first.  The girl's file said she spoke French and Japanese natively as well as English, so he suspected it was a mix of those two accents.

"What does that have to do wi…" the most annoyed of a small group of university students was saying.

"It sparked the first big wave of immigrants to the States, that's why," Lucretia said, thumping a particular book pointedly.  "And then came the Market Bombing in India, same year. So the Pakistan-India conflict started up within a week, which kept us in Afghanastan to help the UN funnel refugees out.  A lot of which ended up where?  The US.  Same time, Siberia started pushing for independence from Russia.  By next January, Korea had calmed down, but the whole Pakistan-India and Russia-Siberia things had spilled over into China.  Then in December came the bombs and…"

"Yeah, yeah," the doubter said.  "But a lot of those refugees went to Japan and other places…"

"…near the Pacific Coastlines.  Which brings us to 2018," Lucretia said.  "The Year of Wrath as some like to call it.  Starting with the blizzard in January that suddenly covered a quarter of Canada and then just…died."

The last was said slowly and with a degree of sobriety, or perhaps sadnesss, that surprised Assaf.  But the girl shook herself out of it quickly enough to continue her impromptu lecture.

"Then came the worst year of recorded earthquakes anybody's seen," Lucretia said, with the air of someone half quoting some other source.  "Tokyo, Los Angeles, what was left of Beijing, all over Europe.  All over the world, volcanoes and earthquakes.  The best places to go to avoid it all were places with lots of stable land.  What wasn't radioactive in China and the subcontinent was war torn, Russia closed its borders.  Africa was just as war torn as it's been since the Pharoahs fell apart.  And a bad series of storms in the South Pacific made getting to Australia suicidal.  So guess where everybody turned up."

"And where is this army of refugees?" a student asked.  "The way you tell it we should be drowning in foreigners here."

"Excuse me, you live in Seattle," Lucretia said.  "Modern day Casablanca, businesses and diplomats from all over the place, plus Mexican soldiers at the NAMA bases, less than half the people here are American citizens."

"So according to you," the student said.  "The people forced out of the workforce has nothing to do with the fact the government started making super-soldier projects and 'genetic oddities' public knowledge in 2023.  None of those ex-waiters displaced by a licensed empath or construction workers turned away because they couldn't lift a ton."
Lucretia glowered and shook her head as she stepped back and carefully set another bunch of books on the table in front of the kids.

"If you want a research aide," she said.  "Listen to the research aide.  If you don't want an aide, don't ask for one."

"All you're supposed to do is get the books we ask for," one of the students protested.  "Not have you shove your stupid theories down our throats.  Where'd you get those ideas?  Some sort of anti-immigrant newsletter?  Kind of hypocritical isn't it China-girl?"

"I got these theories," Lucretia said tightly.  "From my…I guess you could call them neighbors.  I happened to be homeless most of my childhood.  And don't talk to me about peaks stealing jobs because we were in the buried city with all the other Invisible before you people ever knew we existed."

The student that had been complaining stared at her a bit chagrinned as she finished.

"And I'm Japanese," she snapped.  "Now, someone else wants to talk to me, so you're on your own for now."

She looked up and turned back to face Saif as she finished.

"I didn't want to interrupt, Miss Lucretia" the detective said before gesturing off to the side.

Crossing her arms and shaking her head, the girl floated on past the cop to head for one of the more secluded seating areas.  Behind her, she heard one of the students talking in a low undertone that the peak probably wasn't meant to hear.

"Wait, Lucretia?" the student asked.  "Silver hair, didn't she try to rob a bank a few years ago?"

Lucretia was muttering in French under her breath as they walked through the stacks.  Her expression changed to a patiently amused one as a pair of children ran over and started speaking quickly in something Asian.  

The silver-haired woman quickly quieted them down as she slipped a hand in one of her pockets to take out a notepad and pencil.  She wrote down some book numbers on the paper and handed it to them with a smile and a few instructions of her own.

The children bowed to her and started to leave.

"Wait," she said, stopping them.  "What do you say?  Practice?  English?"

The children paused, thought for a moment and then nodded.

"Thank you, Lucretia," they said before leaving.

"Vietnamese?" Saif asked.

"Thai," Lucretia corrected.

"How many languages do you speak?" he asked.

Lucretia shrugged.

"I just sort of pick them up," she explained.  "What do you want to talk to me about?"

"Testifying," the detective said.

"Testifying to what?" Lucretia asked.  "What did I see that everybody else didn't?  All I do is turn it into a circus."

"The defense attorney knows you were there," Saif warned her.  "He's going to be claiming you were masterminding the whole thing and asking why we aren't investigating you."

Lucretia rolled her eyes and looked up toward the ceiling.  She opened her mouth and started to swear until her eyes landed on another group of children further down the stacks, and then she merely mouthed the curse words.

"Yeah, that was pretty much our reaction," the detective noted.  "But we have to establish that you were just a bystander."

"Yeah," Lucretia said dryly.  "That's me."

****

"We have him IDed," a woman's voice came through a receiver as a quiet man watched the detective walk to the car through the scope of an old-school sniper rifle.  "He's the detective on that robbery case she got involved in.  Perfectly legitimate.  Though he probably should have spoken to the old man first."

"Understood, sergeant," the man said craning the rifle up the steps to see a silver-haired young woman watching the detective walk off with a trace of annoyance on her face.

"How's the bystander?" the sergeant continued.

As the question was asked, Lucretia, standing almost a mile away from the man's spot, looked up toward him, winking with a smirk before crossing her arms and turning to go back into the library.

"The usual," he said in a long-suffering sigh.

"Understood," was the response, accompanied by an echo of a sigh.

****

Assaf stepped down from the stand and started to walk out of the courtroom even as he heard the call for Lucretia to come up to the stand.  

The courtroom doors opened, giving him a quick view of the silver-haired peak talking with a Hispanic woman in her thirties.  Neither woman looked to be in a particularly good mood, and Lucretia herself looked more than a little petulant as the conversation ended and she glided through the path between the seats.  

The petulant air faded away as she gave Detective Assaf a slight smirk and impish wave as she passed him.

The peak's hair, except for the ever-present braids, was up in a tight bun.  Her dress was somewhere vaguely between fifties America and Victorian England, something like a stereotypical librarian.  There were no half-moon pair of spectacles on a thin chain to complete the look, but the overall theme was fairly apparent.

The old detective's eyes weren't the only ones to watch Lucretia as she gracefully moved down the aisles, feet hidden under her long skirt.  She was rather liberally broadcasting an air of confidence and sexuality with each movement.  She even seemed to carry her own breeze with her as what had to be the courtroom's fans kicking on swirled the air about her.  The dress ruffled artfully about her lazily, almost as if waving a half-mocking invitation for someone to approach her and try their luck.

It was certainly one way to make an entrance.

Given the frustrated look on the Hispanic woman's face as she sat down in the crowd, Assaf assumed it was hardly a unique way for the young woman to introduce herself.
Eventually she made her way to the stand and swirled about with coquettishly innocent expression to face the woman holding the Bible and preparing to swear Lucretia in.  She took in the Bible momentarily and her expression hardened briefly before it returned, somewhat less playful.

"Place your hand on the Bible, please," the woman said.

In a manner both casual and cautious at once, Lucretia lifted her hand and held it over the Bible.

"Do you solemnly swear to state the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

"Why should he start now?" Lucretia asked in a directly cheerful tone.

"I'm sorry?" the clerk said, looking around in confusion.

"Yes," Lucretia said impatiently with a roll of her eyes.  "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Though I'm going to ignore the mention of imaginary friends, got it?"

The clerk looked up toward the judge a bit confused.

"That's fine," the judge said, trying to stay patient.  "Just take the stand."

In response to that Lucretia bent back, bringing her legs up so that they remained hidden by her skirt, but were quite clearly crossed as the semi-constant breeze about the silver-haired peak pushed the fabric to occasionally present an accurate mold of what was covered underneath.  

Curiously, the girl seemed to remain the same height as she sat down.  Assaf hadn't thought that the chair in the stand was that much above the step in front of it.

The defense attorney stepped forward, straightening his tie as he approached the stand, watching Lucretia's hands clasp over one raised knee while she blinked at him in clear expectation.

The attorney was clearly uncertain of how to precede.  Apparently, he hadn't expected that entrance anymore than the rest of the people in the court had.  Most likely, he'd expected her to come in dressed and acting in a way to present herself as just anybody else.  He'd expected her to hide, and now that she wasn't, he was cautious and on guard.

"Would you state your name for the record?" the attorney asked.

"Lucretia," she said sweetly.

"And occupation?" he asked stolidly, things were coming back to where he felt himself in control.

"Which one?" she asked.

"Pardon?" the attorney asked, expectations once again shattering in the way his attention washed over Lucretia.

"I've had a couple of occupations," she said with just a trace of an accent, though Saif couldn't particularly identify whether it was more Japanese or French.  "Which did you wish to ask about?"

"Your current occupation," the attorney said with a dry and humorless expression.  "If you could?  Or do you have more than one of those as well?"

"I'm a librarian," she said simply, rolling her eyes and turning aside from looking at the man, instead taking in the gallery behind him.

The detective's immediate thought was that she was hiding something, and he shifted forward in his seat, eyes narrowing.  The defense lawyer also caught the shift and moved to his next question quickly while she was still apparently on the defensive.

"And what was your previous occupation?" he asked sharply.

"Public record," she answered with a shrug without watching him.  "I was a thief."

"And you were on the scene when my client allegedly tried to rob the convenience store in question?" the attorney asked.

"I gave my report," she said, turning to look at him.  "Because of him, I had to wait for two hours before I could go home.  And I did not even get my cream soda."

And now it looked like she was trying to distract attention from the fact that she was hiding something.  The detective started to worry that, even if there was nothing to the attorney's claims that Lucretia was going to make it look like there was with her testimony.

"Yes," the attorney said with a beaming smile.  "I can see how that would be annoying.  Now, do you recognize my client here?"

Lucretia turned to look at the man, who glared at her from a behind a fading grin.

"He was in some pictures the police showed me," Lucretia noted.

"So you claim you hadn't seen him before that?" the attorney asked for clarification.

"I couldn't have given you a description you'd recognize," the librarian said with no hint of a lie.

"Though she didn't quite answer the question," the detective noted to himself.

"That's not what I asked," the attorney said.  "I asked if you'd seen him."

"Well, I'd have to have seen him when he was firing the bullets all around me," the silver-haired peak noted, shaking her head.  "But all I saw was a bunch of arms in my face."

"But you just said you couldn't give a description of him," the attorney noted.  "So how could you possibly identify him as the man that shot at you?"

"The police arrested him?" she returned with an unsaid "duh".

"And how can you possibly know that the police arrested the right man?" she was asked.  "You already said you couldn't recognize him to describe him.  When did you see my client before that you'd recognize him now."

As the lawyer continued, his client's expression looked more and more self-assured, even cocky.  He tried to keep it under wraps, but the attempt was just as obvious as his failure.  It was probably the only benefit so far to this testimony, that the jury was seeing that man's gloating expression.

Lucretia leaned back a bit uncomfortably, looking around.

"I didn't see him before that night," Lucretia protested.

"Then how…"

"I don't have to give any answer if it'll fuck me over," Lucretia protested.

Saif ducked his head in defeat as Lucretia inexpertly invoked the Fifth Amendment.  Doing that was always a sure way to make the jury think that something fishy was going on.  He saw the victorious grin on the defense attorney's face as the man turned toward the jury.

"Then you're invoking the Fifth Amendment?" he asked.

"Like I'm going to outright say I picked his pocket here," Lucretia said with a huff before her eyes widened.  

Silence rang over the courtroom as the lawyer's expression crashed into a shocked look and he turned slowly to face his witness.

"I mean…he was trying to kill m…people, and that old guy behind me…" she took on a rather nervous appearance.  "What else could I do, I mean at least then someone would know who shot me up."

"Did you jus…"

There was a loud crash as the man's client leaped up from the desk and charged for the stand.  

"You bitch!  That's why they found my wallet!" the thug shouted.  "I'm going to kill you, you little thief!"

Among others, Saif stood up and moved forward to get in the way of the man as he charged at Lucretia.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Hispanic woman Lucretia had come in with rising out of her seat and moving forward as well.

The peak herself, watched the action with a surprised but unconcerned look.  She was yawning when the bailiffs and cops wrestled the accused to the ground no farther than half-way to her.

"Take him out of here!" the judge shouted angrily.  "Court is in recess!  Everybody get out!"

As the bailiffs and others cleared the room, Saif watched as Lucretia stood up and casually left the room past all the chaos, apparently trying to catch all the eyes again despite the fact that most people were more concerned with the chaos that was going on.

Saif followed discreetly, noting that the woman who'd Lucretia been arguing with was bogged down by the excited crowd as it tried to leave itself.  He was out of the courtroom in time to see the silver-haired woman take quick turn around a corner and moved quickly and quietly to take the same turn.

What he found was a dead end with a pair of water fountains and the feeling of a quiet breeze passing overhead.

"Lucretia!" a voice snapped behind him.

He turned to look back and saw the bodyguard, the Hispanic woman, approaching his witness in exasperation.  

Very briefly, his eyes met the silver-haired girl's and he met her eyes and saw the same shallow look there that she had possessed through much of the period in the courtroom.  This time, however, there was a glint of something that made him think that those shallows weren't anything more than a thin layer of ice lying just below the surface and concealing something much more complex and dangerous.

Nothing in what the peak had done was an accident.  From her entrance to her exit, she'd calculated each step to produce the desired result.  She'd given the impression that she was flighty and incautious.  The lawyer was supposed to know she was hiding something, but then she started acting in a manner disproportionate to the magnitude of what she was hiding.  She'd let him dig her into a corner and gave her big reveal, which provoked the thug into action with the suddenness of her proclamation.

All while making her look like an air-headed ex-con with a selfish streak.