Thief by Greg Curtis Page B

How could anyone be so mean?
     
    Her house he quickly found out, she didn’t own, - at roughly the same time he was thrown out into the cold streets, which was the day before her funeral. By the time they’d buried her in a pauper’s grave he’d become a street kid. Because he wasn’t her child the social support agencies never identified him as an orphan, and he had to survive on charity and soup kitchens. Social welfare in those days was far from the support net it was supposed to have become, and life was hard, something he learned early.
     
    Life thereafter became a battle ground for him. Tossed like a pretzel between church, foster homes and the few homes for wayward boys he’d learned about the mean side of the streets, and the precious few good people that shone brightly among the trash. Most of those families that had taken him in had simply wanted a free labourer, someone to do the chores, and generally stay out of the way. Some were just cold, and some were straight out sadistic, while a few had even more vile intentions for a small child. Beatings, starvation, running away and trying to find some protection from the cold became the norm for him. And always, like his dearly departed Aunt, his would be foster parents spouted the verses of the bible at him, as they beat his skin from his bones.
     
    Impossible as it might be to accept for the good fathers of the church, the streets were actually safer for him than their parishioners’ homes.
     
    Crime soon became a way of life for him. Morality wasn’t an issue for a street kid. People with full stomachs and warm feet have morals, street urchins don’t. Crime brought him food, clothes and books to read, and gave him something to live for, an interest and a challenge. It paid his few school fees, and he’d always liked school. What’s more, he found he was good at it. And he liked being good at something. He might be smaller and weaker than others, but as a thief he could get some respect.
     
    Cat burglary quickly became his forte. His small build and wiry muscles letting him get in to places nobody else could, while his quick wits got him out again. In five years on those mean streets he was never once caught in the act, though several times his so-called friends had dobbed him in. Trust was also not part of his life on the streets, a lesson he had eventually learned.
     
    By the time he’d graduated from high school, he was also an accomplished criminal with a record long enough to stop him ever getting a job. Crime he found, was a vicious circle. The only way he could support himself was to steal, and the theft kept getting him back on the wrong side of the law, even when they couldn’t prove anything, which was the norm.
     
    Eventually he’d decided, the only way he was ever going to have a chance at a life was to leave. Not just the city, the country. He had to go somewhere were nobody knew him. A fresh start. That had been the motive for his first bank job.
     
    He’d cased it for weeks, timing everything down to the last second. It had been ridiculously easy. The two guards always walked in to the bank together while a third stood by the van doors guarding the bags they removed. He’d left a small device in the bank’s rubbish bins that day, and a simple push of the remote control had set it off. The sounds of gunfire and smoke had quickly caused complete confusion while the third guard had run for the van’s front cab and tried to radio in for help. He never even noticed that the van’s back door had shut but not latched properly. A tiny amount of gum had ensured that. And while he was at the front radioing in, Michael had helped himself to two bags at the rear of the van and walked away with them under his coat.
     
    Twenty thousand dollars that heist had netted him according to the radio, although when he counted it, it seemed somehow much closer to seven. Life, he had discovered, was full of crooks. It was just that some of them were