Page 113 - NIXBOOK

Some kind of boyfriend/girlfriend dispute at the Jack in the Box parking lot leads to a police call and response. I get there,
mediate the dispute and restore calm. The young lady involved, as it turns out, was living out of her car. Which was parked in
the parking lot. Because she was an employee at the Jack in the Box. Living in her car. That was, not coincidentally, the last time
I ever ate at the Jack in the Box. Because how clean can a food handler be, really, living out of a car?

A retired cop from California was talking to me outside the city hall one day. He mentioned he had been in a confrontation of
sorts with one of our local homeless dudes down at the public waterfront restroom; the homeless guy, for no good reason,
threatened to pull out a knife on the retired cop. The retired cop was outside the restroom door at that point and told the dude
to come on out and bring his knife to a gun fight, because the cop had a gun. (or at least that’s what he said..) The homeless
dude very wisely chose to not come out. The retired cop and I were laughing a bit at that; the cop had kept calling the homeless
dude’s bluff and was taunting him to come out and face him; but dude was having none of it. Maybe that will teach him to not
talk shit about pulling knives out on people.

A woman came to the police department because some truck had scraped her car badly while she had been parked in a grocery
store parking lot. I checked out the damage and it was pretty severe; it looked like a delivery truck’s rear lift gate had gouged
her car’s side; several feet long. It was a head scratcher, because she had not seen it happen. Her husband then showed up and
while we were staring at the damage she blurted out a story: “You know what else weird happened to me today? I was driving
along and some guy came running up to me and said that I had hit his mailboxes! But I didn’t! And he said he had my side miror
that broke off! But that’s crazy!” The husband and I stopped and stared at her. Then we looked at where her side mirror should
be, but it was broken off. Missing. Gone. Then we got very close and studied the damage on her car. Hmm…yep the scrapes and
gouges were at mailbox height. And there were some wood fibers imbedded into some of the scrapes, like they had come from
a mailbox post…The husband’s eyes got very big. Then the woman laughed and said “I didn’t run into any mailboxes! If I did, I
certainly would know it!!” and then she threw in another laugh. I didn’t say anything; I was just staring, watching her denial set
itself more firmly into her psyche. The husband, feeling and looking considerably awkward, put his arm around his wife and
said “Uh..honey, let’s leave the nice police officer alone and go figure this out..” which was fine with me, since the mailboxes
that got broken had not been reported to me, so it was either not in my jurisdiction or the owner had not cared enough to call
the police. As soon as I assured the husband they could leave if they wanted, he got her out of there pretty quickly. Like I said,
that one was a head scratcher.