Prologue
Margo continued wantonly displaying her charms while she drove Steve Conway to the nearest motel. He'd left the prison gates behind him, and her shameless exhibition charged his mind with lust. But he could afford to be patient. He had Margo, the use of her posh apartment, and the hidden $40,000. But it wasn't so easy to adjust to life on the outside. The old gang had broken up, he was thought of as a has-been in his old slum neighborhood, and the insurance company was bringing pressure to bear for the return of the loot. He had ten days to cough up the hot cash, or it was back to the slam. And then he saw Teddy ... aid knew he had to claim her ... and his criminal mind began functioning again. In his Crime in a Changing Society, Howard Jones writes: "Most psychologists who study crime nowadays look for its causes in mental factors which lie outside the individual's control. ... Everything we do ... has a discoverable cause in the shape of a personal conflict or anxiety." Perhaps Steve's conflicts were too many to escape the slum syndrome....