The wheels were turning…
I left her house. A patrol car was parked down the street. Was it Richards? I suspected so. What was that guy up to and why was he watching me? It isn’t like I had the potential of being anything like a dangerous criminal. Perhaps it wasn’t me he was watching… it could be Adriane. Whoever it was it didn’t seem to me to be official police business. Something stank of this whole thing and I had no idea how I was going to deal with it.Homer greeted me on the driveway of my place. He led me to the porch, looking back to make sure I was following after I dismounted from the bike. What I saw when I entered was not a pretty sight. The door was ajar and inside was… well… everything was on the floor…. The Remington… and the monitor screen as well as all my papers. I approached the desk to see that the side of the case to the computer was open and the hard-drive was missing. Damn, who? What? Why?
My neighbor, Jack, came down from his apartment upstairs and stood at the door, “Some guys were here… what the hell, I didn’t now they were doing this?”
“What did they look like?”
“I never seen them before… one was tall… a big guy.”
“Did they walk up or did they come in a car?”
“I didn’t see a car; they could have been parked around the side. I didn’t really look… I didn’t know they’d done…” his tone was a little too apologetic. I knew Jack would have stayed low and wouldn’t have done anything to stop it.
“How many were there?”
“Three… I think that I saw one before… like that inspector that was here before.”
That was better. He is at least giving up some useful information. Jack went back up to his apartment. I picked up the phone off the floor and set it on the desk. Shall I call the police and report it? Sure, why not? There were some obvious prints on the door. At least they can dust the place for prints. If it was Ryan, I’m wondering, why would he leave prints? Was he sending me a message? The place was trashed… that got my attention. So, what was I doing that would deserve this much attention and what is on my hard drive that he would want? At that time everything I wrote was downloaded to ‘A’ discs. Where are they? Good… I found them untouched where I kept them in my desk drawer. All the other drawers were pulled out and dumped… What the f…?
There was a knock at my screen door on the porch. My god, I thought, have they come back? I looked out to see two Hispanic young men in suits with brief-cases. It was not the right time for this shit! I’m not sure what I expected of them but I opened the door.
“Hello,” the older of the two greeted me, “We would like to share some information from the Bible...”
“... Oh no, thank you very much but I’m good with it.” I cut him off trying not to be rude I shut the door.
Other times I would have invited them in and offered them some tea. It is always good to be polite when someone has a Bible and the burden of hauling a vision of the dead prophet around. I admire them because they don’t even know me and they are trying to save my soul. I wish them well but I have business to attend... clean up this mess and think. Maybe I should wait ‘til the cops get here.
The police arrived a mere minute or two after I called… like they had to be waiting around the corner: or was I getting paranoid? They did the usual report. I had a few things damaged and nothing but the hard drive was missing… TV, VCR, tapes, discs… all went untouched. It was just a matter of the place being trashed. The uniformed cops took down the information and the value of the ruined computer and started to leave.
“Wait a minute,” I demanded, “Aren’t you going to dust for prints or anything?”
“So,” the #1 cop smirked, “you want us to get the print kit out for this?”
“Sure I do… I want to prosecute the fuckers that did this.” Frustrated I pointed to the prints that were so obvious on the window of the front door. “There’s some right in front of you.”
“Okay, okay… we’ll dust ‘em.” He humored me.
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