I Don't do B and E's - Chasing down a Midnight Burglar

     I once made a man cry. He was a big tough guy, a punk, and he was on a crime spree. At first glance, he was not the sort you could picture breaking down and blubbering like a baby.
     I was in my thirties at the time, living in the city, and I spotted this man out my window at about 2:00 in the morning. He was moving like a pale ghost in the shadows between the buildings. Burglaries were common around where we lived, and in fact, our own house had been burglarized only the week before. Fortunately, one of our housemates had been returning home late at night, and he had surprised and frightened off the intruder in the very act. We had found most of my tools from my basement shop, piled in boxes by the back door, ready to go.
     It was a strangely eerie feeling, seeing that: "Sure, help yourself!" I had thought. "Take whatever you want; it's all free!" I was working as a cabinetmaker at the time, and these tools were literally my livelihood. Plus, I had been collecting tools since I was a boy, and this was a very personal violation to me.
     So, it's not hard to imagine what I felt when I saw a suspicious character sneaking between the houses across the street at two in the morning. I was furious, and my heart instantly began pounding with adrenaline. I was clad only in shorts, a T-shirt and slippers, but I had no time to even grab a jacket. I slipped silently out the front door into the cold darkness, in pursuit of the pale figure which had slipped out of sight around the corner.
    I followed him down the block, keeping within the shadows myself, as I watched him darting into alleys and inspecting locked windows. I had no thought other than to keep him in sight, and maybe to dash back to my house to call the cops, if I saw him enter a building.  
     This was the situation as we reached the end of the street, and he crossed the brightly lit but deserted intersection. I saw him crouch down and examine the lock of a bicycle which was chained to a lamppost. I had no way to remain in concealment at this point if I still wanted to follow him, and now I had all the proof I needed that he was up to no good.  So without really thinking about what I was doing, I strode across the brightly lit street right towards him and said, "Nice bike."
     As I approached him he snapped upright, and fixed me with an intense and venomous look of hatred. He seemed suddenly to tower over me, his eyes an ugly red and his body tense with menace. His first words to me were, "If you called the cops on me, I'm going to beat the **** out of you while they watch."
     I started talking fast. I told him to calm down; I didn't call the cops; I just didn't like seeing what I saw him doing. He kept calling me "you little toad"  and telling me how stupid I was and how little I understood my danger. I told him, stop calling me "little toad"; I'm not ignorant; I'm only trying to be a good citizen; this is my neighborhood. Why do you act like I'M the bad one?
    We went back and forth in this way for a while, both still quite heated, but without the dangerous intensity of the initial encounter. (The truth is, being a very fast runner, I never felt particularly vulnerable in the first place. I just stayed wary.) I wanted to get through to him somehow, and I began to spin a little yarn. I didn't want him to know where I lived, so I didn't tell him that we had been broken into just last week. He might have been the very one that did it. So I made up a story, telling him I was an auto mechanic. I told him my shop had been broken into, and that ten thousand dollars worth of tools and equipment had been stolen. I said I had no way of replacing the equipment and was now completely busted; ruined. I was a hard working man, I said, and now I can't even pay my rent. It was the best story I could come up with on the spur of the moment.
    "How do you feel about that?" I asked the man.
    "I don't give a **** about that", was the man's response. " It was your fault for leaving the door unlocked."
     "I didn't leave the door unlocked,"  I said. "The guy broke the lock."
     "I don't do B and E's" the man told me.  I told him it doesn't matter if you do breaking and entering, you're still a thief and you're hurting innocent people. Doesn't that matter at all to you?
     It didn't matter to him. Nothing seemed to matter to him. We had been talking a long while, and I was running out of things to say, when the man suddenly got quite emotional and blurted out, "I don't care about anyone but myself. Myself, and my mother."
     So I got an idea, and I told him, "Well, picture this. You come home someday and you find that your mother has been hurt. Some punk has knocked her down, cut her purse and run away with it. That was all the money she had, and she got hurt when she fell down. How would you feel about this?"
     "I would kill the **** who did it.  I would kill him."  he told me passionately, the red light burning in his eyes again.
     "No you wouldn't,"  I told him. "The thing is, you never find the guy who did this. By the time you find your mother hurt, it's already three hours since she was attacked, and you never find the guy who did it. He's gotten clean away. Now, how do you feel?  How do you feel, knowing that there are people out there that you can't stop, who don't care about you or anything, as long as they get what they want?"
     It was at this point that the man started crying. He just literally broke down in great heaving sobs, telling me he would be good some day, he was just too angry, he was so sorry, but he would be good some day.
     All of a sudden, reaction set in with me as well. I started shivering. I looked up and realized it was getting light out. The man was sobbing and calling out after me, but there was nothing more I could do. I was freezing there in my shorts in the cold light of dawn, and I ran home.