Mr. Smith says some very unkind and explicit things, then leaves.
It’s my turn to approach the counter. I do so with haste, spilling out all the events of the afternoon as fast as I can.
“A man broke into your house, and your ex-boyfriend is beating him with a baseball bat?” The officer repeats what I am saying in a bored tone.
“Yes. Exactly. It’s happening right now. They could be killing each other!”
The cop taps on his computer, and murmurs into the unit on his shoulder. Something comes back in a crackle of static.
“We don’t have any units for a fight right now, but they’ve been alerted.”
“A masked man is in my house and my ex and him are going to kill each other.”
“Sounds like a home invasion and/or domestic dispute,” he says. “We can fill out a report now, and…”
“It’s a murder about to happen. I’m not doing paperwork!”
“You’re going to need to file a report, ma’am. Now. What was your name?”
“Laura Brown.”
He starts writing my name down. “Is that Laura with a u, or an o…”
I barely restrain the urge to scream.
All in all, it’s almost a full hour before any kind of police presence arrives at my apartment. The cops give me a ride back, which is nice on some level. It means they’re not putting me right back in harm’s way.
“Stay down here, ma’am,” a young woman says. She seems nice, and is taking this seriously. Her partner is older, male, and stoic. The two of them go up while I wait in the downstairs lobby, wondering if I am going to have to identify Dave’s body. He came in like a fucking wrecking ball.
They come back down less than two minutes later, frowns on their faces directed at me.
“There’s no sign of anything being amiss,” the female officer says.
“There’s not? They smashed my kitchen up,” I frown. “They were fighting.”
The officers look at one another. “Ma’am, the apartment looks clean.”
“Did you go into the right apartment? The intruder picked up a chair and smashed it into the wall…”
They shake their heads. “No drywall damage, ma’am. Come up and let’s make sure we’re in the right place.”
There’s something in that tone I do not like. I’m about three sentences away from a trip to a place with grippy socks and padded walls, I can feel it. If anything, they’re more concerned than they were before, but about me.
We get all the way back up to the apartment. They must have gone into the wrong one. I know damn well the place is a mess.
But it’s not.
The kitchen counter is sparkling clean. There’s no sign of a broken coffeemaker. In fact my coffeemaker looks untouched. The hair on the back of my neck rises slowly as I try to understand what has happened. If anything, it looks better than it did when I left.
“Wow,” I say. “I guess I must have overestimated how bad the fight was. It seemed crazy at the time.”
If I tell them anything else, it’s going to seem like I’m crazy. This way it just seems like I am a bit dramatic.
“You said there was an intruder?”
“Yes. He had a mask on,” I say.
“We should dust for prints,” the female officer says. “There’s a chance the suspect will match someone on file.”
