Up With The Coyotes – And Keeping The Barman Happy

Out dodging the coyotes who were in full voice last night, nudging things that may have stories buried under them and applying small doses of single malt to help get through the evening.

Night Time Is The Right Time for Mister Charles and ordinarily we’d agree, comfortable as we are in dark places where all the harsh edges have been softened and everything takes on a mysterious air.

We ventured sans Rolex into The Big City, because that’s where they store the single malt, and came away relatively unscathed though the pricing for neat scotch whiskey seems to have taken a dramatic turn upward. Pushing a goodly portion of our month’s salary across the plank to keep the barman happy we sallied forth, pausing to check the jacket pocket communicator for text and email messages from the readership – one of whom wondered if it was true another Nightwalker had arrived at a local hospital with an entry wound, at about the time another shooting was reported in Brentwood. The gunplay. Lots of gunplay lately.

Pulling over to dash off the usual flurry of enquiries we were head down and startled when someone called us by name, advancing to be recognized as one of a small squad of local “shooters” – (and, again, to us a “shooter” is a photographer, and not the other unfortunately accepted modern reference) we have come to know and respect. Trading shop talk and commiserating over the night’s developments we went our separate ways, lone wolves bound by a digital tether and reflecting, briefly, on how far our chosen professions have come.

Our communicator buzzed again, this time with yet another enquiry about an unfortunate instance that just happened to take place in front of Lafayette Elementary School recently, a traffic stop we covered by Flash Alert and which plunged the school into the first lockdown of the year as soon as officials saw police with guns outside their windows. In the end it was no harm, no foul as police wrangled a pair of suspected thieves without further incident and the kids tried to get back to their books but, yes, scary and especially so given all that has transpired lately.

Piling into the News Wagon we let the hood steer us for home and hearth, dialing up Smokehouse’s “Cadillac In The Swamp” to provide the musical background and realizing we’d made it to Thursday in a rocking new week, the ‘Yotes in full voice and either signaling approval or angst – who can really tell what’s on their minds?

We’re waiting to see how things finish up, past knowledge showing us that things tend to slow after eventful weeks. We’ll see, there are a lot of pots on the stove and many are still on the bubble.