As usual we didn’t hear the doorbell, so we woke in the 1:00 AM dark to Muddy’s running growl and then the “Bang!” as he hit the front door at full speed. By the time I made it downstairs he'd stopped his usually ferocious growling and scratching at the door. Instead he barked tentatively from a few feet away, like a bully who’d surely beat you up if only his friends weren’t holding him back.
On the porch were two cops, one of whom asked if those were our cars in the drive. They explained that the front car's door was open when they arrived only a minute after the prowler call came in, and that they couldn’t see anything wrong with it. Then they asked “Did the other car have a stereo?”
The thief was also a smoker: one car reeked of cigarette smoke and he’d left a burning butt on the floor of the other. The thunderstorm that had been threatening for hours finally started as I stood on the porch answering the officers' questions for their complaint form. The younger cop suddenly said "Go ahead" into his shoulder-mike, and I heard the dispatcher say that someone at an address around the corner had just reported that someone matching the “white guy with a cast” description of the prowler had shoved something under their porch.
The doorbell rang again a few minutes after they'd left. As I opened the door I heard the bigger cop say "Ew, gross" while he searched through my wife's gym bag, rubber gloves white against his skin, his uniform shirt dark from the rain. In addition to wet workout clothes and the contents of her glove box, the bag held my car stereo and an extra-large "Texas" T-shirt that didn't belong to either of us.
When the doorbell rang the third time at 6 AM I did hear it. Muddy was his more typical “slavering beast from hell" trying to go through the front door, so it clearly wasn't the police returning. Instead it was a red-eyed, unshaven 20-something guy carrying what was obviously not his first beer of the morning, but rather the latest one of the night, or even of several nights. I did check to see that he didn't have a cast on.
I was feeling kindly towards this guy. I’ve redirected a few other early morning visitors to our next door neighbor over the past months, most of whom arrived shortly after bars close at 3:00 AM. 6:00 seemed almost civilized.
“Who you looking for?” I asked. “Maybe I can point you to the right house.”
He snottily gave a name similar to that of the next-door neighbor the other lost boys had been seeking, pulled a phone from his pocket and walked off with no acknowledgment or apology, like I was stupid for being in the wrong house.
We got up without a doorbell prompt at 8:30 to four police cruisers, a tow truck and a Parking Control car in front of our house. When I learned that a guest of the next door neighbor had been arrested for pushing the parking control officer as she ticketed his car, I hoped it was snotty boy even before I hoped it was the thief.
From a request for proposals posted March 9 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:
