Page 226 - NIXBOOK

Crazy women is in our police department lobby. I go talk to her. Among her chief complaints: one of her neighbors has been
sneaking over to her house in the middle of the night and putting house jacks under her house to raise the whole thing up.
Which is a pretty neat trick considering she has a basement with a solid concrete floor. Also he was shining big huge outdoor
stadium lights on poles toward her property at night. Sometimes people are shit house rat crazy, and sometimes they are batshit
crazy. She was batshit cray cray.

Old guy died in his living room, surrounded by his cartons of cigarettes. He was a retired engineer from Boeing. Had an
impressive workshop with metal working machines; drills and lathes and saws, but no creations of his were on display, sadly.
When he died, he fell forward off his couch and knocked over his portable heat dish heater unit, which when knocked over went
into safety mode and turned off the heat. But it also turned on the warning buzzer. That old guy died with that heater sideways
about a foot from his head, blaring its buzzer right into his ear. A neighbor found him a day later. I called for the coroner, who
showed up and we spent a while digging through the old guys’ papers to find some next-of-kin contact information. Before we
found that, I came across a bank statement showing the guy had about a quarter million dollars in his checking account. Which
was odd, since he was living in a very run down cabin that had some pretty major holes in the walls. The coroner was not fazed
at all; he’s seen a lot of dead folks with money saved away. He told me about one recent case where he had advised the next of
kin to look through everything carefully before getting rid of it. He got a call back from the adult son who reported “I am so glad
you told me to look! My old man had twenty and hundred dollar bills stashed in almost all of his books all throughout his house!”

This one happened in the old police department building; the one that had been an old doctor’s office before we moved in. One
of the exam rooms had been fortified into a holding cell for temporary prisoner custody, with 1” plywood sheets nailed onto the
walls in a solid layer, and the door was replaced with a solid wood door that had a small square in the middle with steel bars.
One day I had a teenager in there for something criminal, I can’t remember what. I was across the hall typing my report. “Hey
Officer Hoke!” the kid yells through the window. “What would you say if I told you that I could escape from here in less than 30
seconds?!?” I turned around in my chair and looked at him. “Well I’d say that I’d catch you and throw you back in there.” I could
see the kid grinning through the steel bars. “Okay, check this out,” and he then produced through the steel bars one of the door’s
brass hinge pins. I stare in disbelief and then tell him he’d better put that back. I then go into the holding cell to examine the
hinge pins and sonofabitch, the two hinges for the door are ON THE INSIDE of the holding cell. Where the kid was easily able
to pull out one of the hinge pins. With both out, it would have been a very simple matter to pop the door hinges apart and take
the door completely off. Fortunately it was a kid who figured that out and not the crazed murderer (with blood still on his
clothes) we put in there a few years later. Needless to say, we had those door hinge pins welded onto the hinges the next day.