two fell swoops

Last Sunday Andrea and I pulled an all-nighter in order to finish some very time-sensitive house renovations.  At about 4 a.m. we had lights on all over the place as Andrea nailed in shoe molding and I painted window trim. We had the radio blaring so we could hear it throughout the house. (Our neighbors on both sides are businesses, so nobody sleeps there at night.)

At one point, I noticed through the window I was painting a bright light shining in our backyard.  It seemed a little brighter than what might usually come from a car turning onto our street at night, but I dismissed it as someone driving with their brights on or just my having rarely looked out of that particular window at that time of night.

Suddenly I was jolted from my trim painting by a figure on the other side of the glass knocking and shining a flashlight. Yep, the police. A woman knocking, and a man looming behind in the shadows. I give the woman a quick “one second” gesture as I put down my brush and hurry to the side door.

“The music’s too loud, isn’t it?” I asked. The officer said no and asked if I or someone else was trying to break into the house. I replied that no, we’re just having a late work night. She said that someone out walking in the neighborhood had reported what appeared to be a break-in. Earlier we had been carrying furniture between the house and our storage shed and using multiple points of entry to avoid freshly stained floors, so it made sense.  Since it was pretty obvious that I was telling the truth - they must have had a few minutes to watch us through the windows before knocking - the woman officer started to back away.  But before she could turn around completely, the other officer stepped out from the shadows and asked “Is someone in there using a nail gun?”

That’s when it dawned on me that those lights I’d seen in the backyard some twenty minutes earlier were police search lights.  The first officer to arrive must have heard what sounded like gunfire and waited for backup to begin a careful descent on our home.  When I confirmed that yes, we were using a nail gun, he seemed a little disappointed.

Sure enough, when we looked out the front window  after they left, there were several cars out on the street, ready for action.

ADDENDUM: Later that morning, the police got some action on another trip to our neighborhood to fish a dead body out of the Huron River.  The detail of that story that everyone seems to concentrate on is that the woman who found the body apparently waded into the water to “hold onto the body” and prevent it from going over the dam until police arrived.  Which raises a few questions: how far into the water did this woman have to wade to get to the body, exactly what kind of contact did her “holding” entail, and what extent of contact and wading distance would you go through to do the same thing she did?