I Caught me a cat, no a burglar acting like a cat. Well, sort of.
Let me recap.
A four-storey apartment building, nestled among a cluster of other similar-sized buildings just outside of the town centre. I'm on the third floor, in a 2 bedroom unit of about 800 square feet. Pretty nice, hardwood floors, good solid construction, the view is meh, I see other buildings; beyond them, the mountains and the sky. It works for me, or it had worked for me for the past six years.
I'm passing sixty. A widower, my late wife had been in a wheelchair for the last 15 years of her life, and I had become her full-time caregiver. We had a good life, I was doing a good job, from my home office, of Technical Support and training for a well-known technology company that sells lots of phones and computers, and stuff. It had allowed us to pay off our debts and by some good investment in the market, we were building up a decent nest egg to buy a rancher style house to move into.
Then she got sick. Within a few weeks, it was over, and she was gone from my life. For me, the last 25 years of happily wedded bliss, even with the accident that put her in the chair, all went to hell when I was left alone. Her kids, born from a former bad relationship, although they called me Dad -- they all had their own lives to live, and without her to anchor us together, drifted away.
I kept to my routines, and when it came time, and it did, about a year after she passed, I was eligible to retire. So, I took the offer, invested the payout, and signed up all the myriad of government forms to become one of the growing senior citizen class. I had nobody to celebrate it with, and once the job was done, and the team had come and taken the specialized gear away, my days became a lot emptier.
My brother, living in England, tried his best to help me -- he got me focused on programming and developing using the video game engine Unity, which I happened to also hold stock in, and I dove right into it. After all, what else did I have to do?
Voxels, Pixels, Vectors, C code ... it all was alien to me for the first couple of months as I tinkered with a development system that had been used to make all sorts of games from Pokemon Go to the silly Fall Guys party game for the consoles. I persisted, following tutorials on YouTube and slowly experimenting until I began to get a grasp on things. Then my development exploded and I learned how to make a level, how to animate a character, how to rig, how to walk, and then run that character, collisions, interaction, all the crap that goes into making a video game. Christ, I hardly even played the things, but now I was helping to create something that might just leave a legacy behind for others to enjoy.
Unlike my brother, I had no problem with Blank Page Syndrome. He could be bogged down for days or weeks, whereas I normally always had an idea or two cropping up. So we had no shortage of prototyping ideas coming forth, and we began to craft an RPG style game that we are still working on.
I work weird hours, as inspiration can strike at any time, and with nobody to take care of, except our cat which we named Kitten, a seven-year-old female tabby who never has grown up herself, I would wake at all hours, code or design, then go back to sleep to be up by 6.30 am to watch the market open. Monitor it for an hour, make my trades, then generally nap until noon, watch the market close, check my end of day tallies, cash out if I had a gain, then back to coding or design for another few hours. Evenings were spent watching TV, enjoying a very few of the current batch of crap being produced by what passes for Hollywood these days, but with the access to the on-demand and subscription services, thousands of hours of what is now vintage TV and movies were at my fingertips.
More than one evening was spent watching a movie from the 80's with a mug of Irish Coffee in my paw, sometimes falling asleep in my chair as there was really no reason to go to a lonely bed. This is how we met, me and the burglar, one night when I had fallen asleep in my chair.
Being on the third floor, and owning the apartment I lived in because after she passed, I didn't see the point to move so I bought out the lease and just stayed there as an owner in the building. I was not too concerned about security. The inner door was always locked, with the official deadbolt and two others I had installed. The door to my patio, that also had locks, but I hardly ever locked it ... third floor, remember? Cluster of other Apartment buildings ... there was no way anybody would not be seen climbing up the outside of a balcony or wall to the third floor, or so I thought.
I had always slept lightly, trained for years to awake if my wife needed something in the night so I would be awake and ready to help in any way necessary, so when the screen door began to slide open, even though it was a very slight sound, I was awake.
It was dark, as usual, the timer on my systems set to turn off if there was no activity from a remote after 30 minutes, and the fans made enough background noise to drown out the city sounds, but the gentle scrape of rollers on the metal guide was enough to alert me.
I am a cautious man, more so after she passed than before. Home defence became more prominent after some laws passed allowing for lethal force to protect a home in the event of a home invasion. I took the firearms courses, learned how to break down, load, and fire a handgun and bought myself a lethal Colt .45 which was kept in the left pocket of my recliner. In this case, though, my hand slipped into the right pocket, where I held a replica weapon.
By the time the shadowed figure was fully in the room, I waited, not moving as it quietly walked around, I guess casing the joint. Dressed all in black, so cliche I know, but what can you do? It, or she, was small, maybe 5 foot if even that, fairly slim build, and probably fairly young. Whatever that meant, to me, that meant anywhere from 40 or less.
She turned to look at me in the chair, I was not moving, so her gaze swept the room and landed on a china cabinet full of collectables, she had a penlight that she was using to look at them, so when her gaze was off me, and I knew I had a few seconds, my foot pushed the heavy glass door to the patio closed, and as it solidly closed, with a click as it's spring locks dropped into the channel top and bottom, I flicked on the lights and sat up, the gun in my right hand pointing at her middle.
"You know I am within my rights to shoot you." I stated.
"I'm ... sorry." She stammered. The voice sounded oddly familiar.
"Or, I should just call the police, might be easier than cleaning blood from my floor."
"Mr. Julien, please. I didn't take anything, I won't ever do this again, please. Don't shoot me, and don't call the police, please, sir." She said, dropping to her knees as she backed into the wall.
"Who are you, take off that stupid covering." I snapped.
Taking the hood off revealed the shoulder-length blond hair and face of one of the other residents of the building, a girl who lived on the first floor with her grandmother and her uncle. Bother her parents had been killed in a car accident, while the uncle had walked away. He had been raising her and milking the grandmother for cash for the past six years. Not that I really cared about the other goings-on in the building, but knowledge is power, and you never know when it might come in handy. The kids' name was Tenisha.
"I'm Tenisha, from down on-" She stammered
"I know where you're from." I interrupted grumpily. "What the hell type of game do you think you're playing here, girl? You could just as easily be bleeding to death right now?"
She didn't say anything, and I noticed her legs had begun to shake. I dropped the gun back into the pocket of my recliner.
"Oh hell, girl, I'm not going to shoot you. Take it easy."
I stayed in my chair as she visibly began to relax a bit. Hopefully, the shock of having a gun pointed at her might have broken this little burgling streak, but with the gun no longer visible, now the fear also began to subside, at least a little bit. After a few minutes of watching her breathe, she finally looked up at me.
