Road To Portland: Part 26: A Good Throw

Across the street from Janice’s second floor apartment, two men in a sedan were observing.

“Did you see the phone?”

“I know. Who has a landline?”

“Who throws one through the window?”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“Good distance though. Dude could switch from fighting to the shot put.”

The men were part of the new tri-county, anti-drug, community interdiction, special programs, environmental task force team, pilot project… a name that represented the interests of the eleven grant proposals that combined to fund them. They were originally hired by the Parks and Recreation department to clean outhouses on a seasonal basis. Unemployment every winter sucked so the two men teamed up to become an engine of grant writing productivity. This is how they’d wound up full time solders in the war on drugs. They loved their nifty new police cruiser. (Unmarked of course!)

Unfortunately, in this sleepy town, the task force team (meaning the two guys in the sedan) hadn’t quite thrived as hoped. Crime just wasn’t happening properly.

The biggest problem was that college kids stuck mostly to pot. The pussies in the state legislature weren’t anxious to cram some limp psychology student into a jail cell with hardened criminals. It just didn’t sit well with them. This was in opposition to the task force team who were willing to pluck the current generational equivalent of Shaggy and Scooby from their dorm room and drop them in a cell with father rapers from the Group W bench. Why not? If it paid their salary they’d do it. Have you ever cleaned an outhouse in August?

Alas, university kids, even when you could complete the arrest before the local cops screwed everything up, were impossible to convict. They tended to have rich parents who’d smoked pot when they were young and stupid. Thus, the kid’s parents (now old and stupid) knew how the game was played. One weepy call to mommy and helicopter parents would swoop in and lawyer up their particular student/snowflake. It was maddening.

Meanwhile, the profs and shockingly large portion of the nearby suburbanites chowed down on everything from Viagra to sixteen varieties of “Mother’s little helper” but did so discretely. They were off limits too. Nobody gets a promotion for busting the parents from the Brady Bunch.

The alternative, busting thugs from the other side of the tracks was unthinkable. A guy could get himself shot!

In the end, all their hopes rested on Janice. Everyone and their dog knew the guy (or gal) was supplying local bodybuilding meatheads with enough crap to become a Russian Olympic team. Nobody gets upset if you bust a gym full of weightlifters. Unfortunately, the meatheads knew every loophole. They dissolved countless powders and elixirs in their Gatorade so successfully that even they didn’t know what was in it. Most of it was legal and a lot of what wasn’t strictly legal was a grey area. Most of it was weird but innocuous sounding stuff. The public likes short words like “heroin” and not a paragraph about tea made out of toad gonads or moss from a Tibetan mystic’s ass.

It was a conundrum. You couldn’t bust the bodybuilders without a team of chemists. The chemist would need a team of lawyers to interpret what was legal. The lawyers would bill an exorbitant amount and plea bargain anything vague until the results sounded like an outbreak of littering.

No, the only way they were going to serve and protect the undeserving slobs of this shithole little town was if they got the kingpin… which happened to be a terrifyingly good fighter. Which brought them back to their biggest problem. How do two normal human beings arrest and subdue a dress wearing maniac who was increasingly unhinged.

There was a crash. A brand-new blender, filled with something blue, flew through the already broken bay window.

Upstairs Janice wrote in her journal:

09:15 Buy another blender.

If you want to help fund the new tri-county, anti-drug, community interdiction, special programs, environmental task force team, just click below.