“Damn,” was all Jackie could say every time she thought about it. How could he just up and quit like that? Quit on her?

Jackie wasn’t selfish. She understood that he had just gotten shot. “If the situation were different,” she said out loud as she drove. “I’d probably be talkin’ that same shit myself. But damn.”

Jackie had allowed herself to believe that once Travis started feeling better he would change his mind, or at the very least, agree to do one last big job. At least that way she would have a stake to go forward with. But that wasn’t the case. Travis was already up and around and had shown no signs of backing down.

At this point, Jackie knew that she was on her own and would have to come up with a plan if she was going to survive. She had briefly given some thought to trying to get a job as a chemist. After all, she had graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in chemistry and had worked for a few years at Frontier Pharmaceuticals before she was fired for insubordination after refusing to work on a project for Jake Rollins, her former boss on her own time. But that was years ago, before she became part robber, part gambler.

“Maybe I’ll put together my own robbin’ crew?”

That was definitely a possibility, but she didn’t have the planning skills that Travis had. She considered bringing somebody in to plan the job, but quickly abandoned that idea for one simple reason. “If they planned the job, what would they need me for?”

No, she would have to plan and control the job to run her own crew.

“If then else, Jackie. It’s just the logical progression of events,” Travis told her once when she asked how he came up with his plans. “If condition is true, the statements following are then executed. If condition is false, each else-if, if there are any, is evaluated in turn. When a true condition is found, the statements following the associated are then are executed. If none of the else-if statements are true, or there are no else-if clauses, the statements following else are executed. Put simply, if this happens, then do this, if that ain’t workin’, what else can you do?”