Scary

Nothing like getting woken up in the middle of the night from a deep sleep by rapid gunfire coming from someplace very close to your house (next door, the alley, who knows).  Of course, gunfire in my neighborhood is fairly common (unfortunately), but it's usually from a couple blocks over, not RIGHT NEXT DOOR! 

The wife and I sit straight up in the bed and she asks, "what was that?"  "Gunfire", I reply.  "From where," she queries.  "Next door," I respond.  So I run over to the window and look out, only to see . . . . nothing; nothing at all.  I grab my cell phone and call 911 and report the incident stating that there's gunfire coming from next door and yes, I want to be contacted by the officer when he responds.  I look at the clock and it's just after 1am.  Guess what response I get from the local police department.  Go ahead, guess.  Guess how long it took for them to respond, and what time it was I heard back from them.  Any guess would be good because I got nothing.  Not a word.  And I know they didn't stop by and look around either, because the dogs would have barked at them had they gotten out of their car.  I love our local civil servants.

After looking out windows on all sides of the house, both upstairs and down, I decide to go back to bed.  Of course, I can't go back to sleep until my heart stops pounding, but I at least make efforts in that direction.  And that's when the dogs start barking.  Not the barking I hear when they're after the mice that are eating their dog food, but the barking I hear when there's someone out there who shouldn't be there.  Unfortunately, it was just a couple of barks and they were running from fence to fence like they couldn't figure out where what they were barking at was hiding.  Of course, I got up and looked around again (but I resisted the urge to go outside since confronting people with guns in one's bathrobe doesn't seem healthy).  Still, nothing.  The dogs barked a couple more times, but I never saw any evidence of anything.

In retrospect, I suspect that whatever was going on was happening in the alley.  There could even be a body lying there right now, or at least some very big blood spots, but no one would know that, because the police never responded.  Oh well.  I did finally manage to get back to sleep and the rest of the night was uneventful, but oh, what a night.