THE HEIST part 1

The dogs start going nuts at around 9:45 p.m. Thinking she must be home, I follow the larger of the two to the front picture window and gaze out into the whiteness in time to notice someone in a black coat walking toward the house next door as a van drives past him…or does it drop him off? If so, the driver is a bit of a prick The weather is terrible out there.

Thinking nothing else of it, I walk back into my family room and resume my viewing of Star Trek VI. A few minutes later, the dogs again start barking like crazed jackals and this time she is home. I let Gizmo outside since he is doing a bizarre tap-dance on the hardwood floor. As I open the door, I hear my cell phone ringtone going off from 2 rooms away. Since I’m already in the doorway, I lean out and ask her what she wants.

That’s when the white pickup truck with the plow lands in our ditch next to the mailboxes. I am wearing slippers and a T-shirt because I was cleaning and am unable to run outside. She starts gesturing toward the truck, eyes wide. From the doorway I can only see the truck and not its occupant.

Suddenly the sound of yelling comes from the street as the van I’d seen earlier drives toward the scene of the accident. She yells, “What are you doing!?”

I yell, “What the hell’s going on?”

Suddenly she starts yelling at me to call 911 and yelling for the dog to get out of the car. She wastes only another second on the former as she comes running into the house. The truck starts moving in the ditch. The 911 operator comes on as it breaks free of the snow and rams the plow directly into our mailboxes. I describe what’s happening to the operator and she interrupts to inform me that it is a stolen vehicle and there are officers in the area.

She runs back outside as I start looking for boots and my winter coat. I lean out the side door again to make sure the crazy m_r is really gone and hear her saying, “Are you guys OK?”

Suddenly, she yells, “WHAT!? Scribe, that was Daryl’s truck! Somebody just stole it!”

I throw on my coat and boots and run out into a frozen wasteland with no socks on & nothing over my T-shirt. As I make it to the end of my driveway, I see four people instead of the two I was expecting to see.

The two occupants of the large bluish-green van I saw earlier stand next to their vehicle that somehow wound up in the ditch across the street. I look past her to my neighbor Daryl who is brandishing an aluminum baseball bat. The sound of police sirens can be heard coming from all directions at once.

Daryl looks like a person coming down form an adrenaline rush, his nostrils widened, eyes bulging from their sockets and breaths coming in short, raspy exhalations. At the time I thought this was because he’d decided to chase the thief, but there was more to the story.

Apparently the thief panicked because Daryl did the “Walking Tall” routine on his arse. While the thief was hotwiring the truck, Daryl grabbed his bat and ran out the back door and around the vehicle, at which point he bashed in the driver’s side window and tried to do the same to the piece of shit stealing his property. This caused the thief to panic and veer away from the bat-wielding super-hero, taking out their light post with the plow on his way out of the driveway. Flash-forward a few seconds and the dumb-fuck has lost control and wound up in the next-door neighbor’s ditch, which is connected to mine.

The two guys in the van just happened to be heading down the street at that exact moment. Still panicking like the lil’ bitch ass scumbag he was, the thief jumped out of the truck and tried to jack them! Unsure of what he might be carrying, they got out of their vehicle and ran to the front of it. There was some yelling and obligatory profanity, then the thief ran back to the plow and threw it in reverse. By this time the two guys were back in their van. When the thief backed up to get out of the ditch, he forced them off the road and into the ditch across the street, front end first. At least, that’s what they told us.

More to the story...

TE BE CONTINUED~