*miserychick is actually happy

“These people are gonna wake up and they’re gonna call the cops”

In the midst of my sleep I woke up to someone yelling that outside my front window.  He repeated a couple times in the manner of a friend trying to get some stubbornly drunk friend home.  People yelling in their drunken stupor is no stranger to us, but this was extra loud and sounded very close.  Grumpy to be woken up, I said out loud in my half sleep state “hell yeah, I’m gonna the cops… I’ve got their number on speed dial.”  The night before I had to call and complain about an super loud party at 2:30 am, and they were playing music I hated.

We got up and came to the living room just as the noise went down.  Mark spotted a group of generic club kids on the street walking away.  Nothing was particularly out of place until Mark noticed that the front window was left opened and the mesh screen was cut off.  Then we looked around, something seemed missing, but since our place is always such a mess, it was hard to figure out.  The computers were there.  The phones, well, we sleep with them.  The camera… the camera wasn’t where it should have been… but maybe we had put it somewhere else?

Our door was unlocked.  Did we forget to lock the door before going to bed?  That doesn’t seem right.  I opened our apartment door and the front door of the building was wide opened.  Someone did come in through the window and left through the door.  I looked outside, the burglar had line up the trash bins to use as a climbing device, my poor bike that was parked out front (b/c there’s construction equipment in my back deck) was stomped, laying helplessly on the ground.  Only after we realized that it was actually a break-in did we check for our wallets.  Mine was there, but the thief took out the contents of it which included a five dollar bill and a five million dollar Zimbabwean bill and left it on the table, then he put the wallet back into my purse.  Cash was taken from Mark’s wallet.  $15.  Some U.S. dollars we left out on the bookshelves were gone.  He didn’t take any cards or ID.

I looked over at the mantel and there was an empty space.  Weird.  There shouldn’t be any empty spaces, but what was there before?  We both looked at it for a while, then Mark figured out that it was our bowl of pennies.

“Tokens!  He fucking took the tokens!”  There were five or six subway/streetcar tokens we just bought that were scattered on the tv stand along with some loose change.  All the tokens were gone.

So then we called the cops.  About 10 minutes later a very helpful and polite police offer came to take our statement.  We described the situation and what we thought happened.  He looked around “did you guys touch most of everything already?”  Yep.  Checking our bags and wallets and other stuff came by instinct and we touched pretty much everything, all the cops and investigation TV shows didn’t teach us much.  Before he left he told us that he’d order a forensic team to come by and dust for fingerprints on the window.

We never did see the burglar, and don’t know if he was wearing gloves, but the forensic cop is here now dusting for prints and taking photos for evidence.  In my fantasy, I wish I had woken up earlier and came out to catch the guy and save my beloved camera.  But he had a knife, so it’s probably better we didn’t.

Posted on Monday, 14 September 2009 at 9:22 UTC