Thanks for asking, let me explain how I got myself in this ridiculous situation.
As much as I’m loath to admit it, and never will if pressed on it, my father, who’s convinced this is a job only fit for washed up old men who can no longer hack it on a “real force” not “strapping young thirty-year-old’s with their whole careers ahead of them”, was right about this job. Not a ton happens in our sleepy little corner of the woods. I may make it sound like a little one stoplight type of town, but that’s just because I grew up in D.C., everything is little compared to there. This town is decent sized with enough going on to keep me busy, but within, oh, about five days of moving here I was already bored. I know, not a great way to start off a new life and job in a new town, but seriously, I didn’t get a single call in those five days. So, never one to just sit around and wait for shit to happen, I started looking through old case files and seeing what kinds of things people around here get up to.
Kaden, none of this explains why you are in a one-man high-speed chase.
Hold your horses, I’m getting there.
In the course of my digging into the old files, I noticed something strange. Every town, every county, every precinct in every city in the world, they all have unsolved cases, and they have more of them than they’d ever want to admit. Nothing strange there, unless you look at the amount of unsolved cases this little town has racked up, all only in the last few years. Missing persons never found, thefts never recovered, drug cases left to dry on the line, and even a murder or two left cold. Something didn’t feel right, and that uneasy feeling only got worse the more I dug up. In the last five years there have been over 25 different cases either closed and left unsolved, or straight up abandoned and all but swept under the rug. It’s like someone was hoping people would forget they ever happened and move on with their lives without getting answers, and this sleepy little town did exactly that.
One string of cases in particular grabbed my attention. A string of robberies that have never been resolved and had none of the property recovered. They all have a similar MO but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what gets stolen. The thief is in and out like a ghost, never showing up on surveillance, never tripping a single alarm, and they have bypassed every single safe or security measure in record time. There are never fingerprints or shoe prints, no signs of a getaway vehicle; nothing. The only thing found at a few of the scenes has been a few pieces of white cat hair, but nothing that has ever led anywhere.
Don’t let shows like C.S.I or anything like that fool you. That level of tech either straight up doesn’t exist, or it absolutely does not function in the manner or speed they depict in the show. Yeah, we found a cat hair but “the lab” has no idea what type of cat or where it's from and if you use half a brain cell you can understand why.
So. That brings us to tonight, and why I’m driving like a bat outta hell, refreshing the app on my phone every few seconds to make sure I don’t lose the little blinking dot I’m following. There have been three recent thefts in as many months, and all targeting the asshole of a Mayor of our little town. Mayor Burns has had one of his precious classic cars stolen, a painting from his office disappear, and a security deposit box broken into. Strange, right? Well, even more strange is the fact that he has not filed a report for a single one of them.
Kaden, get to the point.
Okay, okay.
Mayor Burns bought himself a brand-new corvette last week, to replace the equally ostentatious car he lost three months ago. I was convinced something so new and shiny would be catnip for my little cat burglar and installed a LoJack device in the tire well one day when he drove it to city hall to show it off. Now that brings us to tonight. After several days of watching the damn app on my phone I had convinced myself that maybe I was wrong and the car wasn’t a big enough draw for the thief, but then, just after midnight tonight, I got a ping.
So here I am, flying down the highway trying to catch up to the damn blinking dot on my phone, attempting to catch the fucker I’ve been obsessing over for the last year. He’s my white whale, just call me fuckin Captain Ahab. I refuse to lose him this time, after months of following his trail I’m way too close.
I follow the little dot north for a little over an hour before it makes a turn off the main highway and onto an unmarked dirt road that disappears into the woods. When I reach where the car turned off, the dot is about a mile ahead of me and I turn down the dirt road and follow with my lights off, not wanting the fucker to know I’m on this trail. After almost two miles the little dot on my phone stops moving.
Parking about a half mile down the road from where the tracker shows the car stopped, I leave my patrol car blocking off the small one lane road cutting off what I hope is the only exit to whatever sort of property I’m about to walk into. I was already off shift for the night so I’m in plain clothes, but something tells me rolling up in full browns wouldn’t have done me any favors tonight. The jeans,
