The quieter the better, most think, but I like a noisy house. You can hear where everyone is and they won’t hear you. Just stay aware of the ebb and flow. It’s rarely noisy for more than an hour and you rarely get inside before it starts. Give yourself twenty to thirty minutes and you’ll be fine, generally.
Little kids are the wild cards. Often they’re left out of the noisy fun. Often they creep around, too. How you react to them if they don’t immediately start screaming is important. Behave right and you might not even see a problem. Many will even help you find things. Kids usually know at least where, if not exactly what, the secrets are. Or the goodies.
If they help, reward them. Make them complicit. And feed them a cover story. Kids are born conspirators.
Of course, crime never pays. You have to take it.
#
More of what I’ve learned after thirty-five years of breaking and entering? First of all, there need be very little breaking if you’re alert to easy entering. People leave windows, doors, and garages open all the time. They forget to turn on security setups. They have big, friendly dogs socialized to meeting new people. A visitor to a dog can show up at all hours, they still love it.
People practically invite you in. They’re inattentive, too. I’ve walked around in houses with people in them going about their business, oblivious to a shadow crossing a doorway or even a guy standing motionless in a dark corner.
Sometimes it creeps me out. I begin wondering if I’m a ghost or something. I’m tempted to touch them or say hello, just to see if I’m really there.
Many times people look right at you, in the eye even, and just don’t register. It’s downright eerie and never fails to give me goose bumps.
And old people can be even worse. Sometimes they’ll chat to you as you work. Or they’ll hand you things as if they aren’t aware what their hands are doing. Maybe they aren’t.
The opposite of me being a ghost has occurred to me, too, especially with some of the old folks. Like maybe they aren’t really there and I’m being given a privilege, let in on a cosmic joke. Psst: We just keep going.
Conservation of energy, I guess. It would make sense. In a cruel way.
People say they want to avoid hell, or suffering, and go to heaven, or enjoyment. Well, duh. Trouble is, they never like change.
If I take their stuff, it upsets them, even though all I’ve really done is move things around and give them a chance to change out their stuff for new stuff. Everyone wins. But they never see it that way. No, they whine, moan, and call the police to raise a ruckus. They talk of feeling violated, as if I raped them. They withdraw into paranoia and hateful mistrust.
How would they act if, upon death, their whole world was swapped for another. Their state of being? Talk about change. I’m betting they’ll hate it. They won’t be able to tell heaven from hell from just different.
Such life-and-death philosophy is not usually part of my job. Tonight, though, I have surprised myself.
When you started screaming I had been inside for only a few moments. Usually a scream is my cue to vanish. I’m good at it. I know my exits and escape routes and I’m trained in evasion.
This time, though, as I say, I surprised myself and, well, pounced. To stifle the damned scream was all I wanted and the pillow I used turns out to be one of those buckwheat hull jobs. Very dense.
You stopped screaming, all right. Hard to scream when you’ve stopped breathing. Damn you.
Nothing personal, but I hate you now. You’ve brought me to a change, and I just explained how we hate change.
That I have not already left is different in itself. Standing over you stricken, unmoving, talking under my breath to you all this time — seems like hours — shows me no escape routes, no way out in any sense.
Weirdly, a part of me wants to lay beside you and wait for dawn. What good that would do I don’t know. Maybe we’d wake up a couple, my entire life new. I would be a square breadwinner and you would be my house mate, my homemaker.
Makes me smile. Managed to choke down the hysterical laugh, though. That time.
Fuck. What should I do?
Yeah, I know. Put down this trendy buckwheat hull pillow and leave. Hope I’ve left no trace or at least nothing definitive.
Locard’s exchange thwarted, I could go back to comfortable invisibility. Do my job by my old rules. Scream = run. Simple.
Or I could over react, as so many of the burglarized do, and change everything. Find a new way to make a living. Become a new and different man not spotlighted by a ridiculous impulsive stifled-scream surprise murder.
Murder, damn it. Damn you. Talk about the over reactions of the burglarized, you take the cake. The whole bakery.
I guess I’ll leave and law low for a few months and hope for the best. Maybe move. A new city, new prospects.
Don’t think I’m sorry. Far too American for that emotional crap. Besides, it was your fault. Why’d you have to scream? Why rely on me vanishing? Not all of us do, you know.
You know now.
Sure hope this doesn’t happen again. Gotta go now. You can keep all your stuff. I don’t want anything linking us.
Nothing personal.
‘Bye.
/// /// ///
