shots fired

Sunday night at 2AM (i.e., Monday morning) I awoke to (but was not awoken by) the report of gunshots in the street below. At first it sounded like dynamite at a construction site. There’s an unfortunate ditch a few blocks away that’s been the site of construction for the past ten years, with so little to show for it that it may sooner naturally transform into a kind of Grand Canyon-esque formation than ever see a building erected in it; but 2AM seemed to me an odd time to be disturbing the peace by blowing up rock—especially in a place where there was hardly any rock left to blow up after a decade of making sure they had the biggest, most perfect ditch dug for a building that would never be built. Shortly after the odd explosions, what sounded like a series of strikes with a jackhammer against my building’s skeleton reverberated through the concrete. I still don’t know what that was. I didn’t mistake it for an earthquake, but it was around then that I decided that the first sounds must have been gunfire. I went over to my window and looked out, just in time to see a suspicious figure in a black hoodie booking it down the street behind my building. This wasn’t some casual runner taking the air while the city slept—this guy was full-on sprinting. Not a minute later, several police cars came flying down the main road with sirens and searchlights ablaze, tore down the street behind my building, and turned into an alley. I don’t know what happened after that. The police seemed to arrive suspiciously quickly after the initial gunfire, which, given the SPD’s attitude toward crime in general, I found somewhat reassuring. I did wonder how they possibly planned to find him at the speed at which they were driving, searchlights strobing like disco lights, unless they’d contrived to put an AirTag on the guy. A report on the Citizen app confirmed that what I heard were indeed gunshots from some kind of fight that had broken out, and a corroborating account from a fellow night watcher, who possibly lives in the same building as me, confirmed that the guy booking it down the street had ditched a car by the park and was almost certainly the perp. No news on whether he’s been caught. This afternoon, when I walked to work, I also didn’t find any bullets or other traces of the previous night’s excitement to keep as a souvenir. (I kid, I kid.) I think this was the first time I heard gunfire in real life, and hopefully also the last.