»
Main Forums
»
Passions in Prose
»
An Evil Dwelled Upon
| Passions in Prose |
|
An Evil Dwelled Upon |
|
|
broker6 Member
since 1999-11-07
Posts 132Bellevue, NE, Sarpy |
An Evil Dwelled Upon by Richard J. Budig A streak of blood three inches wide and about two feet long arced down across the broken glass of the front door of my pawnshop where one, or perhaps more, intruders tried unsuccessfully to get out. Illuminated by the two officers’ flashlights, hair and shredded skin, peeled from heads and flailing arms, waved in the 2 a.m. summer breeze like strands from a broken spider web. As I stepped up to the door and inserted my key in the lock, I heard behind me the sounds of heavy handguns slipping from shiny black leather holsters. The metallic crackle of safeties snapping off joined with the audible portion of my alarm system, still squealing from the depths of the store. The juxtaposition of these sounds was like some kind of crazy jazz, the alarm calling out for help, while the rattle of guns promised instant death. After a quarter of a century in this business, and probably as many break-ins, I knew what came next. The moment the lock clicked open, I stepped back and the officers, guns pointing over the barrels of their flashlights, stepped through the door. Glass crunched beneath their feet. Their flashlights swept the darkness like lighthouse beams gone mad, bouncing off walls, the ceiling, TV screens, stereos, and the broken glass from the front door and from the smashed handgun display case. Suddenly, one of the officers dropped to a crouch, his weapon stabbing the darkness like a scorpion's tail, his light aimed at the ceiling. There, above him, was a hole in the ceiling with a rope dangling from it, obviously their point of entry. Both officers watched the hole intently for several moments. But nothing moved. Then, cautiously, they pushed on, working their way into the back of the store and the main light switch. As I had done many times in the past, I followed the officers at a discrete distance. When they cleared the wall with the light switch, I snapped on the lights and turned to look. There, before me, was a scene with which I have become familiar over the years. Shattered glass was everywhere -- literally. I knew that I would be finding glass in every corner of the store for the next several months, including the bathroom (I’ve always wondered how glass could get two rooms deep, around a corner, and into the john, but, somehow, it does). A couple of toppled TV's lay in the aisle. And, somewhat to my surprise, several handguns lay on the floor like the discarded toys of little boys who had tired of playing cowboys and Indians. The handgun display case was shattered and it was obvious that the guns on the floor were the ones that had been in the case. After all these years, it still mystifies me why these nitwits first break the display case and then try to retrieve the things in the case. After breaking the glass, whatever was inside -- guns, jewelry, small electronics -- lay beneath thousands of shards of razor sharp glass. In this break-in, it was obvious that the target had been handguns, so why were they scattered on the floor? My answer came from the trail of debris inside the store as well as the blood marking on the doors and walls. Near the front door, for example, it looked as though a wounded animal had been cornered and tried to claw his way out through the glass. I've owned and operated three pawnshops so far in my career as a pawnbroker, but this was the first one that had bars on the doors and windows. Several things became clear as I studied the scene. First -- and this is true 99.9% of the time -- thieves, gangsters, robbers, and wanna-be bad guys are NOT rocket scientists. They do really stupid things . . . like this . . . break into a place that they can’t break out of. It was clear, from the trail of wreckage before me, that these guys thought they had figured a way around the bars on the window, bars that kept them from getting in. They went up on the roof, chopped a hole in the ceiling and lowered themselves down with a rope. Of course, the moment they dropped in, the motion detector sensed their presence, and started sounding an ear piercing shriek, while simultaneously dialing the alarm company. It was probably somewhere around this point that they realized the bars on the doors and windows that had refused them entry in the first place, now held them prisoner. That’s where the hair, blood and skin came from on the front door. In their panic, they had used an old snow shovel to hammer a hole in the glass door between the bars, which were spaced eight or nine inches apart. There had to have been two or more of them in the store because someone had also climbed into a front display window and tried to break a second escape hole between the bars on the window, which were about four inches wide! Meanwhile, one or both of them raced off to the back room, nearly tearing one door off its hinges, to reach a locked, steel reinforced back exit door. It was locked and reinforced, but all they had to do to open it was lift a steel rod and push. As I studied all this, their panic became obvious. Strewn along their path were more of the blood-smeared handguns from the display case, the very treasure for which they had gone to the trouble of breaking in. On every door and doorknob, in the bottom of the display case, on the shards of glass on the floor, on the floor itself, on the brick they used to bang away at the front display window, and on the shovel used to break the glass in the front door, there was blood -- streaks of blood, spatters of blood, bits of hair and skin, and bloody fingerprints. Guns lay in the strangest places -- lodged between items on the shelves, and beneath display tables where they skittered after falling out of bleeding hands (It’s true . . . they forgot to bring a sack for their booty). Three guns lay in a heap by the back door beside scrape marks on he floor where panicked feet slid on the concrete floor trying to wrench open the door. I recovered nine of the 14 handguns that had been in the case that night. A year or so later, while doing some ceiling work near the area where they had broken in, we found three more handgun in the rafters where they had probably fallen as the intruders, by now in full panic, fled the way they had come . . . up a rope like monkeys, probably clambering over one another to get out. So, in the end, these guys netted two handguns in a criminal effort that could get them quite a long prison sentence. They broke local and federal laws for two old hand guns they could sell on the street for around $200 each. What was really funny was that very day, I had been collecting scrap gold to sell to a refinery. Pawnshops and jewelry stores do this all the time. We keep repair scrap and worn old jewelry that doesn't have a chance of being sold. When we get enough of it, we box it up and sell it for it's scrap value. That night, I had a box with approximately $8,000 worth of scrap gold sitting on a table not three feet from the smashed gun case. Had they taken this unassuming little box, they could have sold it's contents almost anywhere without fear of being discovered. Guns have serial numbers. Scrap gold doesn't. The police crime lab unit took samples of blood, and managed to pick up one perfect bloody finger print from the front door. But, as in all except one of my break-ins, nothing came of it. None of these guys had been arrested before, so their prints were not on file. Police suggested that they were probably all in their teens, youngsters just starting their criminal careers. Of course, in the minds of non-rocket scientist criminals, the first thing they need is a gun . . . something they feel is a perfect tool of intimidation, but sadly, one which usually earns them a charge of murder somewhere along the way. The one break-in where someone was apprehended occurred while I was out of town. My son, Greg, was running the store while I was gone. As usual, these things never happen at a decent, Christian hour. It's always somewhere between midnight and dawn, hours peopled by ghosties, ghouls, and non-rocket-scientists looking for something for nothing. As it happened, it was a false alarm that called my son out of his bed at one in the morning. It was the dead of winter, and snowing hard. It was lucky he had one of those old truck-like vehicle with knobbies from hell or he wouldn't have made the four mile drive to the store. Police were waiting when he got there. Following the drill, he opened the door and stepped back. Cautiously, they cleared the main floor. That particular pawnshop -- my first -- was in an old building that had a basement, a ground floor, a rear mezzanine, and a second floor. The second floor, which was closed off, opened into vacant rooms above three adjoining businesses. Clearing my store was always an ordeal. Police had to work their way through all the floors, including the basement, which, for some reason they usually left until last. On this blizzarding night, the police and Greg had gotten onto the first floor mezzanine and were about to ascend a small staircase to the second floor when they heard something. It was a tremendous racket, but it sounded faint, as though coming from a long way off. One of the police officers cocked his head and looked at Greg. "Sounds like it's coming from the basement," Greg said. The two officers decided that one of them would go out the front door and run around to the alley while Greg and the other officer would go to the basement via the inside stairs. The pincer movement worked. But it was unnecessary. While Greg and the two officers were inside checking out the false alarm, a half frozen hobo had made his way down the alley and found what he perceived to be a weak door. He was right. Several good kicks felled the door . . . knocked it right off it's hinges. As the police and my son arrived, the hobo was laying out his bedroll in the dusty basement. He had propped up the fallen door to keep out the blizzard. He was indignant at their arrival and his ensuing arrest. We repaired the old back door and then sealed the entrance to preclude another event of this kind from happening. We relaxed when the work was done. But as it turns out, the back of my store became the scene of yet another wanderer the following spring. I didn't know a thing about it until a police officer stopped in my store the next morning and told me what happened. He had been on regular patrol around midnight the night before when he cruised my alley. In the old days -- probably during the World War II era -- my building had two back doors. One was at ground level, which on that side of the building, was the basement. That's the door the hobo kicked off of its hinges. The other door was directly above it. To get to it, you had to go up a wooden staircase. But now, all these years later, the wooden stairs were gone. All that remained was the wooden landing about eight feet in the air which jutted out above the door below. It looked kind of like a little roof that protected the lower door. So, the cruiser is coming slowly down the alley . . . " . . . and I thought I saw something, so I slowed down," the officer said. "What I saw was this guy. Somehow, he got up there and was trying to get the door open. He was so intent he didn't see me until I stopped the cruiser and got out," the officer said. "When he saw me, he started pounding on the door and yelling something like, 'Hey, Bill . . . you awake . . . you in there?' like he was calling on a friend. "I asked him how he got up there, and he told me, 'The stairs.' He got real belligerent when I pointed out that there were no stairs and arrested him." One of my strangest break-ins was discovered by yet another false alarm. As usual, the phone rang about 2 a.m. I don't remember what the weather was like, but it usually happens in the middle of a blizzard, flood, thunder storm, or in the vicinity of a tornado, a nor'wester or a sou'easter. We let ourselves in and began the long, tense sweep of the building at gun point. And, as usual, we ended up in the basement. There was no one in the building, but when we got in the basement, we found a window that had been taken loose and propped back into place. Naturally, the police went stiff. They called for the canine unit. When the dog arrived, they began the job of clearing the basement. That old building had been divided up several times, and in the process, the basement had taken on the look of a catacomb. Little tunnels and runs and blind doors led more of the same in a basement that meandered beneath three street level businesses. You had to know your way around to complete the trip beneath them and end up where you started. The police were happy that I was there to show them the way. We didn't find anything human, but what we did find was disturbing. Someone had been letting themselves into the basement for quite some time. Empty food cans lay discarded on a basement foundation reinforcement wall. Several small fires had been started down there. The ceiling and overhead rafters were smoke-stained from the fires and a home made torch used to light the way from room to room. A wallet with an ID lay in the rubble. We never found the guy whose I. D. it was. He could have been our intruder, or it could have been stolen and left there by the intruder. Sometimes, break-ins are more smash-and-run in nature. One night, my alarm went off, and when I arrived, I discovered that someone had pitched a fire extinguisher through two large plate glass windows just to reach in and take two Big-8 sport wrist watches I had inadvertently left in the window. This "smash-in" occurred back in the days when my old friend, Murphy -- the guy who shot the legs off a savings and loan official during an armed robbery -- was still occasionally sleeping in his car outside my pawnshop. He lived in the little rooming house beside my pawnshop, but for some reason, he'd take a spell of sleeping in his car down on the street. There were three parking stalls in front of my pawnshop. Murphy worked in the kitchen of a local hotel until about midnight, and by that time, the parking stalls were usually open. If the weather was nice, Murphy would often bed down in his car. Murphy came in the next day complaining to me about the noise. "Why don't you put those things away at night, Dick? A man needs his sleep, you know," Murphy grumped. Now, 25 years later, I'm still getting broken into. It's not unusual for the repair and glass replacement bill to be at least $500. The sports wrist watch job that interrupted Murphy's sleep cost just over $700. The night some bird-brain drove a stolen car through two windows and my front door, the bill was just a few dollars under $2,500. Mark Twain is quoted as saying that when a man says it's the principle and not the money, it's the money. I agree. It gets downright expensive paying triple time to get a glazier to come out at 2 a.m. during a blizzard, flood or tornado. But after all these years and all these break-ins, I find myself dwelling on more than the money. In all, I've been self employed for something like 30 years as I write this. And in the final analysis -- the money notwithstanding -- the sense that lingers within me is a feeling of being violated, the feeling that some special and private place in my soul has been breached, that lurking strangers who have nothing better to do have entered my hopes and dream . . . and left them in shambles. Sometimes, I find myself looking very intently at new faces that enter my shop. I find myself wondering if this new face is the one I would see if I sat myself down in the dark of my shop and waited until the next intruder came along. I'd like to do that, but there is a part of me that won't allow it. If I sat here waiting in the dark, something tells me that my soul would take on the shade of the night, and that when the intruder came, I would do something darker than what he had in his heart. So I try not to think about because it seems to me that an evil dwelled upon begets a more powerful evil. 30-30 |
||
| © Copyright 1999 broker6 - All Rights Reserved | |||
|
Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187St. Paul, MN |
Wonderful piece here Richard, your tales are most excellent, it seems you've lived through quite a bit and gained a lot of wisdom as it can always be found in your pieces. Enjoyed.  In flames I shall not be consumed, but reborn. |
||
|
PhaerieChild Senior Member
since 1999-08-30
Posts 1787Aloha, Oregon |
I always find your stories to be well written and captivating. Every day I always look for a new one. Very good reading. Poetry~ Words falling on paper, painting a dream. Shawna R. Holder Boise, Idaho |
||
|
|
⇧ top of page ⇧ |
|
| All times are ET (US). All dates are in Year-Month-Day format. | ||
