Like any person out there, I have regrets.

I regret not buying that $20 coat for my Ma for her birthday. I also regret swapping a friend's really nice rifle with mine.

But standing here in the middle of a robbery operation with bullets flying everywhere, I regret every choice that has led up to this current predicament.

Let me back up.

My name... is not important. I am twenty-two years old, five foot eleven, with dark skin and hair and a mouth that runs considerably faster than my brain. I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is a city that will either toughen you up or flatten you, and I was too stubborn to be flattened.

I used to be part of a small Family operating on the South Side of Philly. Nothing legendary. We weren't the kind of outfit making headlines or running half the city. We handled neighborhood business: collecting debts, protecting a few local rackets, moving small shipments, and making sure people remembered whose block they were standing on.

Most days were routine. Some days weren't. Disputes with rival crews had a way of escalating from heated words to shattered storefronts, busted knuckles, and everyone disappearing into the night before the sirens found their way over. We weren't kings. We were just another crew trying to hold onto a few streets in a city that was always looking for the next fight.

Now, I want to be very clear that what happened last month was not entirely my fault.

In my defense, I was trying to test my skills by beating up some bodyguard, and the man said bodyguard was protecting didn't take it well and challenge me to a duel. Suffice to say, I lost.

So I packed one brown suitcase, sent my mother a letter of apology I spent three hours writing and that she probably used as a coaster, and bought a one-way bus ticket to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fresh start. New city. New me.

 Las Vegas in the summer is aggressively, personally, almost insultingly hot. I stepped off the bus and the heat hit me like an open oven door and I stood on the sidewalk in my good traveling dress sweating through my good traveling dress while the city blazed around me.

It was also, undeniably, magnificent.

The signs. The lights even in the daytime. The long black cars. The women in their beautiful dresses moving through it all like they owned every inch of it.

I picked up my suitcase and told myself that I was going to be one of those women inside of a year.

This was optimistic.

The reality of Las Vegas for a girl with forty dollars, one suitcase and a mild criminal record was considerably less glamorous. I found a room above a laundromat on Fremont Street so small that I had to step outside to change my mind. The window looked directly into a brick wall. The radiator made a sound at three in the morning like someone was slowly murdering a trombone.

I found work as a waitress at a supper club called The Crimson Slipper. I carried a tray of drinks through clouds of smoke while men in expensive suits said things like smile sweetheart and left tips that were an insult to the concept of tipping.

Now I should mention that being a young woman carrying Alcohol through a Las Vegas supper club came with its own particular set of complications that I will not get into at length except to say that I had developed, by necessity, a very effective look that communicated try it and find out without requiring a single word. It saved considerable time.

But the city was new. And new was all I'd asked for.

I'd been in Las Vegas exactly forty-three days when everything went sideways.

It started as an ordinary Tuesday which, in my experience, is when everything always goes sideways. Nobody's life is ruined on a Saturday. Saturdays are too busy. Tuesdays just sit there quietly, looking innocent, waiting to destroy you.

I had the morning off and needed to deposit my wages before my landlord — a tiny suspicious man named Mr. Kowalski who had apparently decided I was personally responsible for every noise complaint in the building — came looking for rent money I did not entirely have.

I put on my blue dress, the one with the white collar that made me look like a respectable member of society, which is a thing I have never technically been, and walked four blocks to the First Continental Bank on Fifth Street.

The bank was busy for a Tuesday morning. A long line of people stretched back from the tellers and I joined the end of it, clutching my little envelope of wages and mentally calculating whether I had enough left over for a real meal or whether it was going to be crackers and butter again.

Crackers and butter, probably.

I was deeply absorbed in this depressing arithmetic when the doors behind me swung open and four men walked in.

Now I grew up in south Philly. I know what trouble looks like when it walks into a room. Trouble wears a nice suit. Trouble moves slow because it doesn't need to rush. Trouble has a particular way of scanning a space that is not looking around so much as taking inventory.

These four men were a whole lot of trouble.

There were four of them. I would come to know them as Ace, Knuckles, Baby Face and The Tall One, which was not technically a nickname but was the best I could do because the man was enormous and it was the first thing you noticed about him and frankly the second and third things too.

The Tall One walked to the center of the room, reached inside his jacket and the bank went very quiet very fast.

"Alright folks," he said, in the cheerful tone of a man announcing a church raffle. "This is a robbery. Now I know that sounds alarming but I promise it doesn't have to be a whole thing."

I stared at him.

He had the audacity to sound reasonable about it.

Ace and Knuckles moved behind the tellers. Baby Face — who was, I cannot stress this enough, enormous, the nickname being deeply ironic — began moving along the line of customers with a canvas bag and an apologetic expression, collecting wallets and jewelry with the energy of a man who genuinely wished everyone involved a pleasant rest of their day.

"Sorry ma'am," he said to the woman ahead of me, taking her pearl necklace. "Lovely choice by the way. Very classic."

She blinked at him.

"Thank you," she said, apparently by accident.

He moved to me next. I looked at him. He looked at me. Then he looked at my envelope of wages and his expression went, I am not making this up, genuinely apologetic.

"Sorry about this," he said, holding out the bag.

"Don't you dare," I said.

He blinked.

"That is my rent money," I said quietly and with great feeling. "If you take that I will be personally evicted by a man named Kowalski and I promise you neither of us wants that on our conscience."

Baby Face stared at me for a moment. Then he moved on without taking the envelope.

I don't know who was more surprised. Him or me.

I was just starting to think that this was all going to be over quickly and relatively painlessly and I could get back to my crackers and butter when the man two people ahead of me — big, red-faced, the kind of man who had definitely been told he had a strong handshake his entire life and had taken this as a personality — decided that he was going to be the hero.

He lunged at Baby Face.

Baby Face, who outweighed him by a conservative estimate of sixty pounds, looked genuinely surprised and a little hurt by this.

What followed was thirty seconds of absolute bedlam. A gun went off into the ceiling and plaster rained down on everyone like the building itself was expressing an opinion. People screamed and hit the floor. Baby Face and the hero went stumbling into a desk. The canvas bag went flying, arcing through the air in what I can only describe as slow motion, scattering wallets and jewelry and loose bills across the marble floor like the world's most stressful piñata.

The bag landed at my feet.

I looked at it.

I looked up.

The Tall One was already looking at me from across the room with an expression that was either a threat or a question and in that particular moment I could not tell you which.

Now here is the thing about growing up in south Philadelphia and working for a Family. You develop instincts. Fast, unreasonable, occasionally self-destructive instincts that bypass the rational part of your brain entirely and go straight to your hands.

My hands picked up the bag.

My brain, catching up approximately three seconds later, said: oh no.

I gathered the scattered contents back into the bag fast, the way you gather anything you've dropped in public — quickly and with the intense focus of someone pretending nothing happened. Stood up. Smoothed my dress. Held the bag out.

The Tall One stared at me.

I stared back.

Outside, a car horn sounded. One long, two short.

"That's our signal," Ace called from behind the tellers.

The Tall One kept looking at me for one more second. Then the corner of his mouth moved.

"You coming?" he said.

And here is the thing. Here is the absolute thing. I had a choice. A clear, obvious, sensible choice. I could put the bag down, sit on the floor and wait for the police like a normal law-abiding citizen. I could chalk this up to a strange Tuesday and go back to my crackers and butter.

Instead I said — and I want it on record that I blame south Philly entirely for this — "Well I'm certainly not staying here."

And I followed four armed robbers out the back door of the First Continental Bank on a Tuesday morning in my good blue dress with my little envelope of rent money still in my hand because Baby Face had a conscience apparently.

My mother, I thought distantly, was going to be so disappointed.

The getaway car was a black Cadillac, long and beautiful and idling in the alley like it had been parked there all its life. We piled in with the practiced efficiency of people who had rehearsed this, except for me, who climbed in last and sat in the backseat between Baby Face and the window wondering what exactly I thought I was doing.

Nobody spoke for a full minute.

The city moved past the windows. Knuckles — who had the hands of a man who had introduced his fists to many faces and bore absolutely no regrets about any of it — navigated the back streets with the calm of a Sunday drive.

Then Baby Face leaned over and whispered, "You did great back there."

"I picked up a bag," I said.

"Under pressure," he said seriously. "That counts."

"You also didn't take my rent money," I said.

He shrugged one enormous shoulder. "Seemed rude."

I genuinely did not know what to do with that so I filed it away and said nothing.

The Tall One turned around from the front seat. In the daylight, without a gun in his hand, he looked slightly less like impending doom and slightly more like a man who took himself very seriously, which in my experience is its own category of dangerous. He had dark eyes that moved over things the way a card player's eyes move — cataloguing, calculating, giving nothing back.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Where'd you learn to move like that?" he said. "Fast hands. No panic. You've done this before."

"Not exactly this," I said carefully.

"But something like it."

"I'm from Philadelphia," I said, as though that explained everything.

It apparently did because he nodded slowly like that was sufficient biography.

"What are you doing in Las Vegas?" he said.

"Fresh start," I said.

"From what?"

"A disagreement," I said. "About marksmanship."

Knuckles glanced in the rearview mirror. Baby Face turned to look at me with new interest. Ace, who had been silent and watchful and was apparently constitutionally opposed to unnecessary words, shifted slightly in his seat which I was beginning to understand was his version of a strong reaction.

The Tall One studied me with those card-player eyes.

"You shoot?" he said.

"I win," I said.

A silence settled over the car. A different kind than before. More thoughtful.

"We're a family," the Tall One said finally. Not explaining exactly. More like presenting information and watching to see what I did with it. "We operate out of this city. We have rules, we have loyalty and we take care of our own." He paused. "We could use someone with fast hands and no panic."

"And good marksmanship," Baby Face added helpfully.

"I haven't agreed to anything," I said.

"No," the Tall One said. "But you're in the car."

He had a point. I was undeniably in the car.

"There's someone I'd like you to meet," he continued. "Before you decide anything. The man who runs this family." He said it the way people say things that are important without wanting to appear too interested in whether you find them important. "He'll want to meet you. After what you did back there."

"You want to introduce me to your boss," I said flatly. "Today. The same day I accidentally committed bank robbery."

"You weren't accidentally in that car," Ace said. It was the first thing he'd said since the bank and everyone in the vehicle including me went slightly quiet in acknowledgment of it.

He wasn't wrong.

"What's he like?" I said. "Your Family Head."

The four of them exchanged a look that communicated something I didn't have the vocabulary for yet.

"He's —" Baby Face started.

"You'll see," the Tall One said.

Which was not remotely reassuring.

I looked out the window at Las Vegas passing by in the afternoon sun — the hotels, the casinos, the signs promising fortunes and spectacles and all manner of things that sounded too good to be true and probably were.

I thought about Mr. Kowalski and the trombone radiator and three weeks of serving drinks and men who called me sweetheart and meant it as a ceiling.

I thought about crackers and butter.

I looked down at the little envelope of wages still in my hand — my rent money, intact, because an enormous man named Baby Face who robbed banks for a living had decided that taking it would be impolite.

Las Vegas, I was beginning to understand, was a considerably stranger city than the magazine had suggested.

"Fine," I said. "I'll meet him."

Baby Face smiled like I'd said something wonderful. Knuckles said nothing. Ace looked out the window. The Tall One turned back to face the road with the smallest nod, like a decision had been made and filed away and that was that.

"Buy you dinner first," he said. "And we'll talk about the rules."

"I want a real meal," I said immediately. "Not crackers."

Baby Face laughed so suddenly and so loudly that Knuckles swerved a full foot to the left.

"I like her," Baby Face announced to the car in general.

"Nobody asked you," the Tall One said.

But he was almost smiling again. And it turned out that changed his whole face considerably.

I settled back in the seat of a getaway Cadillac somewhere in the middle of a Las Vegas Tuesday and considered my situation.

I had committed bank robbery. I was about to have dinner with four men whose last names I did not know. And then I was apparently going to be introduced to the head of a Las Vegas crime family, who I had been given precisely no information about except that the four men who worked for him had reacted to his mention the way people react to the mention of weather they are not sure about.

This was not the fresh start I had planned.

It was, however, considerably more interesting than crackers and butter.

And I had, against all reasonable odds, kept my rent money.

My mother, I decided, did not need to know about any of this.