I’m not altogether sure why I (as well as several friends of mine) were given Monday, July 5th as a holiday from work. My assumption is that due to Independence day falling on a Sunday, the injustice of not getting an extra day work-free was just too overwhelming for our over-worked employers, thus a three-day weekend was in order. Had the 4th fallen on a Tuesday, the same considerations would not have been made. At least I don’t remember that ever having been the case. At any rate, as a result I had all of yesterday to do with as I pleased.

Well, not necessarily as I pleased.

As most of my weekend had been spent with friends and just general running about I had failed to notice the disheveled state of my apartment. Having no such activities planned for Monday, and knowing I had to work on masks for the Steampunk Festival for the upcoming weekend, the idea of cloistering myself in my unkempt apartment for hours on end while sitting amidst the chaos was not ideal. So. Dishes, laundry, etc etc.

Then Doppler started barking incessantly at the window. What the hell. Investigate.

Ah.
Notice the complete look of not-terror on the cat’s face. This is because, as I observed over the next several hours, this feline was completely unfazed by the obnoxiously loud beast menacingly barking at it through the glass. Not just from my windows, but also from the windows next door, where a rather large Burnese Mountain dog resided.

Cat bounces back and forth among the ivy.
Boingy boingy boingy.

The dogs react predictably. “ARGHARGHARGHARRRRHHHH!!!!”

Cat pauses, sits. I swear to god it fucking smiled at them.

This proved exceedingly annoying when I was trying to do fine detail work on the aforementioned masks, and in a moment of highly focused silence Doppler launches into his full-blown canine tirade, I jump, the paintbrush shoots off, and triage is required.

I began to look for heavy objects around the apartment to hurl at the cat.

Thankfully I did have dinner plans that evening with a friend of mine so I was able to escape the randomly noisy seclusion for at least a few hours. Dressed, put shoes on, grabbed sunglasses, bid farewell to the dog, flipped off and yelled obscenities at the cat, and headed for the wine bar.

Lovely evening ensued with good wine, good food, good conversation. At the end of the evening, we headed towards my apartment. As we drove past my building, we noticed a Seattle PD cruiser in front and the main door propped wide open.

Terrific.

Parked the car, cautiously strolled up to my building where, oddly, there was no one to be found.

Then I happened to notice the droplets of blood on the tile in front of the door to my building.

Terrific.

Maintaining caution, trepidatiously approaching my unit (which is midway down the first floor), I slowly unlocked and opened the door, ensuring that Doppler was still alive and breathing. Check. Ok. My place seemed to be in order, at least. As Seattle’s finest was still on property, and nothing seemed amiss with my apartment, my guest bid farewell and I hurriedly locked the door behind him explaining to Doppler that his walk would have to wait until morning.

After some time had passed, I decided to check the hallway and see if the officer had returned to his vehicle. Indeed he had. And he had already left.

It was then I noticed some pieces of paper taped to the door. Despite my apprehension at leaving my apartment, my impulse control failed and I walked to the doors anyway. The small, robins-egg blue post-it caught my attention first:

“Do not touch door handle –

Blood!

I looked down at the door handle.

Terrific.

Then over at the yellow sheet of legal paper.

“Do not use door – handle has blood on it”.

Yeah, I got that.

Thus my mind began conjuring up all of the endless possible scenarios of what occurred in my building that evening (murder, assault, rape, robbery, slaughter with an axe…). I checked the Seattle PD blotter online but alas no information was provided for my location for that evening.

Sleep was difficult. When I finally did nod off, I was awoken at 2:00 am by Doppler vomiting all over the carpet.

Terrific.

This morning, I was able to reach an officer at one of the precincts and was given a brief rundown of the previous evening’s events.

“Robbery, 2nd floor, suspect cut open hands, fled scene bleeding (obviously). No arrests, still at large.”

Voulez-voulez-vous…

Terrific.