I first met the man who was to help my in my endeavour when he was fourteen and I was twenty. It had been the day after the renovations on my new apartment had been finished. I had installed three locks on my door, all expensive with heavy tumblers, and only ever two were locked. My windows were double pained and permanently latched shut, my vents were grated and locked on both sides and I ensured that the space between my walls and the floor below me was shoved full of insulator. The original apartment was large, cheap and in the dodgiest part of town I could find. I was incredibly proud of my apartment, it had taken nearly all of my savings as a small time burglar but I finally had an appropriate safe house.
And so, as you can imagine, I was furious when I discovered that, through my high security, I had attracted my own burglar. Of course, at the time, I had little to offer him, I had spent it all on what had brought the burglar there in the first place, my locks.
Nick was the name he gave me when he was picking his way out of my home, and it was the name I called him by for the rest of the time I knew him as a burglar.
The only other person who lived on the floor was a round headed teacher named Paul whom I had only ever seen wearing Velcro shoes. Paul had not bothered to check what the yelling was about because he had been grading papers.
I had just returned from quite an eventful robbery involving chickens eating chicken, but I won't go into that. And my clothes were covered in feathers while in my pocket, although I didn't know it until it started to stink up my apartment, was a hunk of raw chicken. No money.
So, I'm sure you will excuse me for not being on my most alert as I opened my front door, because Nick didn't. It doesn't help any further that he still has the scar over his right eyebrow that, "ruins his perfect complexion"
At the time, I didn't care about his complexion, I just cared about the irony of the situation and the fact that I had never been burgled before. I had opened my door, accidentally slamming it into Nick's head and knocking him, and all his picks, onto my floor. He had kept silent while he recovered himself, while I started cursing and swinging my fists at the fourteen year old burglar. Which may be seen as child abuse, but Nicks still an asshole so it doesn't count. I was twenty, by the way, that's why it was child abuse if you didn't get that the first time.
And that's how Nick and I met. Our relationship was never one of peace as he quickly turned out to be as foul mouthed as I. But we got along by necessity. I had experience, dexterity and a female figure. While he had money, contacts and eyes so innocent that every time he turned them on someone I felt like throwing him off a roof. For a short time we worked together, getting in and out of houses either with stealth, clever lies or dramatic scenes to distract someone. More than once Nick had been arrested because something had gone wrong, but he always seemed to be able to work his way out of a bad situation. As he did on those occasions.
It was one of these moments that put him away for ten years, and put an end to our adventures. Nick had started the more prominent years of my career and for that I'll always be grateful, but after three years together, that arrest had been what I had needed to really become known. And when he got out, I was thirty and still working, he didn't contact me so I didn't look for him. It was simple and I never thought of him. Well, that's not true, I often thought of him when planning for a job and still do.
