Page 329 - NIXBOOK

Mid-1990’s: night patrol shift. I’m at the Sands Restaurant which had been converted from a drive-in a few decades earlier. I’m
sitting across from Brubaker, a crusty old patrol officer who regularly downed greasy burgers and piles of fries covered with
ketchup and way too much salt. Dessert was always a couple of cigarettes. About 2 years after Bru retired, he dropped dead one
day. My surprise level: pretty low, even though he was only in his mid-50’s.

Woman at the front counter of the PD wants to report a theft. Specifically, someone stole! all of her opiate pills! and she needs
to file a police report for theft because the pharmacist will not give her any more pills unless they were legit stolen from her. I
sigh. Because I know they weren’t stolen; she either ate them all herself, or she sold them on the black market and the pharmacist
is on to her now. I tell her I’ll only file a report if she makes her statement in writing, under penalty of perjury. So she brazenly
did! Her craving for the pills overcame her reluctance to lie to the police, and she actually wrote a BS story on the statement
form, and signed it, declaring it was all true. There was nothing for me to investigate, so my report was pretty short. Also no way
to prove or disprove her story, so she got a police case report number to give to the pharmacy to get more pills. Of course she
can only do that once with us; for her next fix she’s going to have to come up with something else that doesn’t involve the police.
Now how many time do you think I, personally, had to deal with people who wanted to claim their oxycontin pills had been
stolen? I’d say somewhere between 20 and 30. The first one or two I believed; after theat I knew they were all BS cases. Most of
the complainants I was able to successfully shoo away so they didn’t waste my time.

Me, in the senior citizen trailer park. An old lady is missing. Her adult daughter can’t find her. The old lady’s car is not in the
driveway, deepening the mystery. Her cell phone is left behind on the kitchen counter, so we can’t call her and ask where she
is. The most likely scenario is that she wandered off who knows where, because the dementia has started to kick in. Is she in a
coffee shop nearby? Or has she gone for a nature hike and gotten lost in the woods somewhere? Shit. I’m going to have to call a
sergeant, and search and rescue is going to have to get called out. This is going to become a Big Deal. But suddenly! Old lady
comes back home, dropped off by a friend, because they had gone to the casino to play bingo! Cancel everything, all is well now.
How many times in my career did I have situations like that? Almost a dozen GD times.