“Listen Rob, is Rob okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

“Good. You see Rob it’s like this, I know you really care about my daughter but you just don’t know some things about her. She’s not exactly the kind of woman a young man like yourself needs to get wrapped up with.”

“Everybody has a few dark secrets in their closet, hell I’ve even got a few of my own. But sometimes you can’t judge a person about their past, or their actions in the past, you have to look around all that. It’s what they are like now, the decisions they make now, those are important.”

That’s now what I’m saying at all. Her past being what it may be it’s the way she really is and always will be that I’m talking about.”

“I haven’t noticed anything wrong with the way she is.”

“Yeah, well, that was when you had a business deal with her. She’s very professional when it comes to business and getting things done you see. She does what she has to do to get the ends that she wants.”

“Well our business deal reached its end, I mean, hell here you are talking to me, and that’s been a few weeks ago. Now she hasn’t shown me anything in that time to make me think any different of her.”

“That would be called putting up a front. It’s what you do after a deal for a little while just to make sure there aren’t any strings attached that can be pulled.”

“Look I appreciate the father to the wanna be daughters boyfriend talk here. It’s nice that you aren’t holding a shotgun while we are talking about this also. But the dynamic of the entire situation that we have gone through is not exactly one that most folks write off as a business decision. Look at it from a few steps into reality, I just raised you back from the dead, your daughter, full well knowing what you had done to meet your end wanted you back so I did it. I damn near did for free, only charged what I needed to pay for the needed components and manual labor.”

“In the circles we ran in this is not exactly something of a reality shift Rob.”

“Well I figured she had some connections to the a few other dabblers. After all she had to know somebody to find me.”

“Actually we’ve had your name down for quite some time. A contingency plan in case one of us died.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No I am not. Plus she is not the kind of person to get attached to others or be all emotional about anything.”

“So you’re saying that this was all part of a back up plan in case one of you died?”

“Exactly Rob. She is also not one to leave many loose ends either. If she thinks you are to attached to her then she may decide that you are a liability to us. Now if you are cut and dry and act like this is all over she may leave you alone.”

“Okay so why are you telling me this.”

“I’m alive and breathing right now because of you so I figure I owe you one. Plus I’m alive and breathing and that means you know what you are doing. It’s nice to know somebody that does things right, they can be of future use.”

“So if she thinks I’m a liability what is she going to do?”

“She will kill you Rob.”

“Kill me? Are you serious?”

“Well it takes a cold hearted bastard to kill people the way I did for the reason I did. Actually instead of ‘I’ the correct word would be ‘we’, you see I didn’t work alone.”

“…”

“Did I tell you she always wanted to be an actress? Evidently she should get an Emmy for the act she pulled off on you.”