Pickpocketing event

I want a pickpocketing event where the player can steal something, when he presses the action button or just a random button when he faces the same direction as the NPC. I know you can do that with the conditional branch: "player is facing down/ or up...". But that won't work if the NPC has random movement. I tried the event in the picture as well, with and without direction fix, but that didn't work either. Any suggestions on a solution? 

Here's an idea.

Set an infinitely running parallel process event page that causes the NPC in question to not move when the player is one block's space away, using a move route that is literally just a wait command.

How can you determine the player is one tile away?

Through the "Player Touch" trigger, I believe. Though, it really depends on what is meant with "one tile". 

The player touch command doesn't work because the npc automatically looks towards you hence the "You can steal" command never gets displayed. i tried direction fix, and it works, but than the npc is just walking around weird looking in the same direction the whole time.