Sleeping with the Beast

“I haven’t heard much,” I said, which was a half-truth. “The war doesn’t look like it’s anywhere near done yet.”

She nodded, more to herself. “That’s not so bad.” Then she looked at me, head tilted. “Aren’t you getting sick of me yet?”

I frowned back at her, surprised. “Didn’t think you’d care.”

“I guess I’m curious. What do you do all day?”

“Not much,” I said. “I’m working on my novel. Me and Mona, we sit in her writing room and bat story ideas back and forth.”

She laughed and I smiled a little. I didn’t want to tell her that I spent most of the days bored, thinking about her, about how bad I wanted her.

“You’re some master thief, right? I bet you’re so sick of sitting around doing nothing.”

“I could always break into some houses if I get really tired of doing nothing.”

She gave me a panicked look. “You wouldn’t really—?”

I laughed, shaking my head. “Of course not. I’d need some time to case the place and get a feel for the lay of the land first.”

“That’s not saying you wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh, good point.” I grinned at her and tilted my head. “You want to hit a house with me? I bet we can find a good score.”

She frowned at me, then spoke very slowly. “If we did that, how would it go down?”

I grinned at her and draped an arm over her shoulders. She didn’t pull back, and I tugged her close against me as we made it into the downtown area.

“It’d be easy. First, we’d scope the neighborhood out, you know, watch the people, get a feel for how things go down. Then we’d find a target, maybe a house where everyone leaves during the day, or maybe a house where all the mail’s built up, multiple papers on the front driveway, that sort of shit.”

“Seems too simple.”

“Simple’s good.” I leaned my weight against her. “Then I’d pick a lock, probably the back door, or I’d get a window open. You’d be surprised how easy that is.”

“Really?” She chewed her lip. “So you could get in anywhere?”

I shrugged. “Not anywhere, but you know, most places.”

“And what would we do inside?” She had a strange excitement in her tone, and I looked down at her, curious, but kept going.

“We’d find something small but worthwhile. Watches, rings, jewelry, shit like that.”

“Why not like a TV?”

“Too big. You don’t want to leave a place with a goddamn TV under your arm. Some guys, they come with a van, and fill that up. But pawning a whole lot of stuff’s hard. You can get away with selling small items, sell them slow and over time, and usually it’s fine. But if you try to pawn a bunch of big electronics, you get a side-eye, and you don’t want that.”

“It’s scary how you have it down to a science.”

“Been my profession for years.”

“Why?”

I grunted and shook my head. “That’s an odd question to ask.”

“But it’s a good one. I mean, why steal from people, why not get a real job?”

I took a second to think about that. It was both an easy question and a hard one. I wasn’t proud of the answer, wasn’t proud of a lot of the shit that took me from back then to today, but I wasn’t ashamed of myself, either.

“You went to high school,” I said.

She nodded. “And college. I mean, it was a local state school, but still.”

“Right, well, I didn’t finish high school. I didn’t have what you’d call a loving, nuclear family.”

“What were you parents like?”

“Mom was a meth addict until she joined NA. Then she turned into an alcoholic.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, don’t be. My father died when I was young. I hear he got murdered in a drug deal, but I don’t know if that’s true. Story goes, he paid for drugs with fake bills, then the dealer ran him off the road while he was riding a motorcycle, and he died in the crash. Don’t know how true that is, but it’s what I was told, and it’s bad enough that it might be real.”

“That’s horrible. How old were you?”

“Eight when it happened.”

“And your mom told you that’s how he died?”

I smiled a little. “She loved it. She hated my old man and I couldn’t blame her.”

“So you got into crime because, what, you had a rough childhood? That’s kind of a cliché.”

“It’s a cliché for a reason. When you grew up in a neighborhood where there’s no money and no jobs and everyone around you is either selling drugs or taking drugs, and the only people with money are the people selling them, you tend to gravitate toward that profession. I didn’t get into the drug trade, and that was purely by accident.”

“Accident?”

“Met a guy that stole cars and found my true calling.”