This was looking like the easiest job I ever had, which was strange for one that promised to be my most lucrative. This one could set me up for life, I knew. No more having to risk getting arrested, no more crawling into buildings at the dead of night trying to steal whatever I could find. I could start a new life, I could start to actually have a life.
It should have been difficult, but it was easy. Way too easy.
I pulled into the parking lot at four in the morning. I got out and stood at my car for a minute, trying to control my breath and mentally rehearse my plan. The sky brooded black and crickets chirped an evening song to each other. I wondered if any of them were wishing me luck.
I popped the lock of the bar door without compromising it, so when I was done I could just knock the bolt back into place and no one would be any the wiser. I opened the door and stepped inside. The bar it was pitch black, so I felt around for the light switch. The walls were sticky from what I presumed was beer but hoped wasn’t anything else. This far out in the country you wouldn’t believe the kinds of things that people got up to, and given that my job was to enter people’s houses and business without them knowing I had seen all kinds of things going on.
Bingo. I found the switch and the bar lot up.
Normally leaving the lights on was the last thing I'd do after teaming into the building, but this was a bar and anyone driving past would just assume that the bar staff were having a few private drinks after hours. It would look normal. And it was way easier to work with some light than having to crawl around in the dark. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten bruises for bumping into something while trying to navigate round a building I don’t know in pitch black.
The bar was your average country whiskey-dive; neon signs plastering the walls, a few tables and chairs scattered round on a random fashion that suggested whoever had done the decoration wasn’t a dedicated practitioner of Feng Shui. At the end of the room was the bar, a small space with a counter, a bunch of bar stools, a line of liquor bottles and a horizontal mirror. The mirror seemed strange to me. IT would reflect your face back at you while you sat at the bar nursing a drink, and I didn’t think many people would want to see that side of themselves.
Past the bar was a corridor that led to the gents and ladies toilets, and past that was another door. And that was where I needed to be.
I'd heard of the score three days earlier from a guy I knew who I sold a little weed to from time to time. Sometimes I let him smoke a bit in my flat after goods and money were exchanged, because it got a little lonely in my place. I didn't have any roommates, I don't have any family and it's hard to keep friends once they know what you do for a living. Add to that the fact I’ve never really played well with others and you’ve got the recipe for a pretty lonely existence.
"What are you up to this weekend?" I asked him. It was a small-talk kind of question, but we didn't really have much in common other than the fact we had nobody else to spend our time with. I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure if you were to ask me his name.
He took a breath on the joint and breathed out a silver plume of smoke.
"Me and a guy are hitting the Jackal bar."
He offered me the joint. I shook my head. I never smoked. I sometimes drank and one time in my teens I'd dropped a tab of acid, but drugs were not really my thing.
"Getting drunk then?" I said.
He laughed. "No, I mean we're hitting it. They got a safe with a few hundred thousand in it is what I heard."
Well now he certainly had my attention. My biggest score to do date was seven thousand five hundred that I’d taken from the back of a security van after coaxing out the driver with a flash of my tits and then
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