Crime Reports
Those of you who think the Wild Wild West is gone from the gentrified South End, I’ll tell you a story. I got a call this morning at an uncivilized hour, something that the mizzus really hates, especially when it’s a threatening phone call, another victim of Skeeter’s satire taking serious umbrage. The Barefoot Bandit’s demented mom called one time while I was on a field trip and she didn’t sleep until I got home to take care of my mess, figuring, probably for good cause, someone might want to knock the door down to discuss matters. This call, however, was from a neighbor pissed off I had called him out in the widely circulated Crab Cracker for poaching crab. “You must have a guilty conscience,” I laughed in the pre-dawn hours.
Bingo. Sometimes Skeeter’s right on target. Rare, but it happens. My pal had been poaching crab, the police had been summoned and …. well, no point repeating the tale. I said I had someone else in mind, happened to use your given name, purely coincidental. He was unconvinced until I mentioned I’d written the story six months before his transgression.
“Well, okay,” Poacher Paul sez, still not totally sure I wasn’t conning a con. “But I got a better story for ya….” This, dear reader, is how reporters work. We develop contacts, undisclosed sources, ‘anonymous’ insiders. And then we wait for them to call us, why go hoofing around the nettlebottoms looking for leads? They’re dying to tell their story.
So maybe you remember the heroin addict up the road stealing from my neighbors I wrote about this past month? Or maybe you don’t. We got this yahoo addict living in the ‘hood, sheltered by a buddy’s neighbor. My buddy was robbed three times. He goes to see the neighbor and the neighbor won’t even talk to him. He sees the pilfering addict and the addict runs into the woods when he’s approached. It doesn’t take Perry Mason to figure who’s guilty here. But the cops can’t do anything but take reports and hope for a break in the case.
Down on the South End, we don’t like to wait for the break in the case. We like to be a tad more hands-on. So my neighbor and Poacher Paul and an ex-cop they bring along, go to visit our thief, ‘alleged’ not really applicable at this point. Did I mention it was 3 in the morning? And they brought a shotgun, a semi-automatic assault rifle and — my favorite part! — a video camera to record the whole thing. They commence to banging on the doors and bedroom windows, yelling to come out with hands up, guns drawn … and hear screaming that ‘they’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill us!’ If you’ve lived here as long as me and Dave, the guy now sheltering Needleboy, you would know the sheriffs shot a man to pieces wanted on warrants same time of night a house or two away back in the ‘80’s. Threw in a stun grenade, then shot him up like Bonnie and Clyde. He’d been seen firing his assault rifle on Bernie Road, a peaceful little cut-off to pretty much nowhere back then. We don’t cotton to that down here, I don’t care how much we seem to like firearms and the NRA.
Dave probably figured sleepily what his options were here and came out on his porch in his BVD’s blasting away with a sawed off shotgun. Events involving weapons have a way of getting out of hand…. By now my neighbor is in Dave’s house with his shotgun, waving it around like a can of aerosol air freshener. He wants his stuff back and he wants it right %$!!?**#@ NOW!
Course you know and I know that stuff is long gone, sold for peanuts and used to buy a few more fixes. I’m assuming our vigilantes knew that too, they simply wanted to put an exclamation on their point. Which was …? Well, hard, really, to say. I’m just a reporter, not a psychologist. But I’m guessing they wanted him to move up the line, maybe the North End. If you’re from up there, you might want to think twice before taking in boarders.
Hits: 171
Do I hear banjos?
Cause you would need a banjo orchestra to accompany this crew around the backwoods and tidewater, while they poach and rob their way through the neighborhood on an otherwise beautiful starry night. Three AM? Ladies and gentleman, time to unload your shotguns and syringes into the land of dreams, or nightmares.
You cannot have enough banjos.
Paddle faster!
Jeezus! Makes a person glad they live in a peaceful urban environment.
Hopefully our population will increase greatly commensurate with the crime and we’ll be an urban environment soon will all its inherent peaciness. Peaciness, yes, it’s a word, as in, world peaciness.