I felt a sense of dread for the coming week, seeing clearly just how pissed my boss would be once she returned from her New York shopping spree. The shit was going to hit the fan and by the time she was done, absolutely no one would be walking away clean and smelling of anything but!
I was so tired from having suddenly been ripped out of my deep sleep by the phone call half an hour ago that I was even sure I was still dreaming after my eyes had opened. I could hear the rage already simmering from way across the Atlantic, her shrieking voice grating on my nerves while her shrivelled prune of a face chewed and wrinkled with anger.
The call had been from the security company making me privy to the fact that the sensors in our little Off License had been triggered, setting off the burglar alarm. The Police were to arrive half an hour after and I was to be there to open up the shop for them. Providing the front of the shop wasn't wide open already!
Fuck the bitch, I thought. I was back in the roughest part of town on a Saturday morning, at 04:35, assessing the damage while she was most probably spending the Christmas bonus she never gave us this year because she couldn't afford to. She'd only put my details down for "callout duty" and left me a note about it before she'd gone on her merry way.
At that moment she was probably piss-drunk and spending the money she wouldn't even have had to her name if it wasn't for the minimum wage staff that worked without a break through Christmas and over the New Year holiday period.
Let the bitch scream, no matter how the sound will strangle my nuts blue!
But oh, the sight as I turned up at the shop. The burglars had done an admirable job and had left a considerable amount of damage that would cost a lot to take care of.
They had broken into the flat above the shop, which wasn't being rented, and dug through the floors to drop in on us. Since it was the boss's idea to lock up the stockrooms, of which we had two separated from the rest of the shop by steel reinforced doors, they dug through the walls as well.
But that was after they'd disconnected and stolen away with every piece of the security camera system minus the actual cameras themselves. Only the basic alarm system remained and I'd managed to turn off the alarm first thing.
When I turned up at the shop, two Police Officers were waiting for me outside. Not looking too jolly but then again, they were good at hiding their amusement when need be.
One man and one woman, dressed in black and looking like a typical pair of Jehovo's; the woman, I recognised, was a regular face on the street and I'd flirted briefly once, wondering what kind of response I would get.
Well I hadn't got a baton up my arse and I hadn't got a phone number either but I did at least get an awkward smile out of her. The guy looked like a prick, like most male Police Officers in my vicinity turned out to be. Tall as horses, just as long in the face, shy around people and nervous around loud voices!
They were there of course to make sure the burglars had already left the shop before we'd arrived and when they left me standing outside for ten useless minutes, the alarm blaring away in the dark early morning, one of the neighbours had popped his head out of a window and started to throw verbal abuse at me.
Needless to say, I got bored quickly and followed the Police into the shop and that's when I saw the ceiling had caved in.
The officers were wondering why I sounded so cheerful rather than upset and I told them simply that it wasn't my shop and since the boss was such a tight fisted cow, who could go on holiday four times a year while everyone else struggled to keep their electricity flowing, I was now not feeling too bitter about being awake at such an antisocial hour when I could have been sleeping off the effects of seven ten hour days a week!
The guy was a prick after all and made it known when he told me I had a "strange attitude" towards my blessing of a job and the employer that gave me it in the first place. So I turned to him and said, 'you'd better go and check upstairs to see if none of them are hiding in the flat, don't you think?' while pointing up at the yawning hole in the ceiling.
I myself went ahead without them into the hallway at the back of the shop and had to call the security company to get them to reset the alarm. That's when I saw the computer had gone along with all the rest.
'Oh my God,' she said and startled I turned around to see the WPC standing right behind me, seeing what I had seen.
'Where's Private Pyle?' I asked and purposely meaning to be rude, but she just smirked and a blush put the colour in her cheeks as I stood there redundantly with the phone hanging on my shoulder, talking to big brother.
'He went around the side to search the flat,' she told me.
If I remembered her name right it was Sarah, but most of the time, the Police dressed up a lot so that you could never read their name tags, so I never knew her surname. It was pretty much tactical, I'm sure.
A local reveller talks trash to a Constable and the next minute he's being arrested, booked and fined by a Sergeant but if an officer got rough-handed with a member of the community, they couldn't be so easily identified if need be.
But then tactics were needed around here, so it's not like I completely discredited the Police for how they did things. Joy Riders and Drug Addicts had a presence in the local park here, gang violence happened every weekend, all weekend and shit needed shovelling.
Sarah was one of those rare Police Officers I had come to respect even if I hadn't the opportunity to appreciate her for her role within the community. Only because she allowed me to speak to her as a person and not an authority figure!
I had no respect for robots on power trips. How can a man protect what's his without human emotion or by distancing himself from what's more closely important to a man? Personally I liked to do things differently, or the old fashioned way, while she went by the rules but as much as she must have known I wasn't the most legitimate soul on God's grey Earth, I think she might have appreciated someone that wasn't intimidated by the uniform.
But having said that, there was nothing else but a feminine face -- although minus any hint of makeup -- and one fine peach of an arse to indicate just how feminine she was underneath all the day-glow gear and the funny WPC hat she wore.
As soon as we'd reset the alarm, I hung up the phone with a gruff sigh and set about doing absolutely nothing to do with the shop damage. What could I have done?
'Cup of tea?' I asked and she hesitantly declined. I just stood there tasting the awful early morning taste in my dry and sticky mouth without being able to think of anything else.
'So what will happen to the CCTV footage?' Sarah suddenly asked me. Of course, as I told her all the same, the footage before the computer was disconnected and stolen would be backed up online on the internet but as of this moment, we were now free to piss up the walls and drink all the whiskey. Nobody would ever know!
'So we should be able to catch a mug shot of them, hopefully,' she added but not so enthusiastically.
'Maybe if they turned on the lights to raid the shop and then turned them back off again before they left, but otherwise, I doubt it. It'll just go towards the insurance claim,' I explained and then got very bored of explaining things. 'So when everybody's getting drunk, stumbling home and in the throes of passion with each other, this is what you do on a post-Friday night?'
Sarah suddenly looked at me and grinned, closing her eyes and voicing a sigh of accepted defeat before laughing quietly and nodding her head.
'Unfortunately yes,' she answered, 'how about you?'
'Me too,' I said and emphasised with a nod. 'Gladly though I don't have to share it with your friend upstairs,' I added with a careful whisper. 'He doesn't look like he knows how to make Friday night/Saturday morning much fun!'
Sarah just nodded again and smirked as at that very moment, her partner bust through the front door, babbling into his radio about an escaping suspect. Her own radio blared out harshly at the same time with her partner's voice and still he remained unclear.
'Let's go!' he shouted and Sarah's face was a pure expression of confusion.
Anybody with a little sense might know that a poorly trained dog might, on occasion, respond to the order, 'let's go.' More so if you waved a piece of meat in front of him and then ran in the desired direction.
Sarah was not a dog. Sarah was clearly an intelligent human being that responded to Police procedure and needed a little bit more information than that.
'What are we doing?' she asked him.
I walked back out into the shop and saw that the male PC was flustered and out of breath already. Not only that but he looked like someone had really pissed him off.
It turned out that the burglars had run and hid back in the upstairs flat and had got the jump on him as he was searching the place. Not only that but days later I heard from one of the neighbours that they saw the Policeman running after two of them in circles around the front of the park. How we didn't hear this I have no idea.
