The Mrs. Can Drive!

The Mrs. picked me up on her way home today. We took our usual route...most of the way. When traffic got a little backed up, the Mrs. took a favorite short cut down T Street, right near North Capitol.

Now I like T Street. I was at the northwest corner of T and North Capitol for church most Sunday nights for a couple of years. And Mr. D and Termite used to live right there, so I 'd get there during the week pretty often too. I was nearly arrested there for suspicion of drug purchasing and possession one time (turns out possession of a Veggie Tales video tape with intent to distribute isn't a crime so I was let go), but otherwise, that block has good memories for me.

But this afternoon it wasn't a good place to be. When we had driven about 3/4 of the way down the street (to a spot right across from the boys' old house), we heard "crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack." Time kind of stopped then. How long ago was Fourth of July? Who's around? Where's the noise coming from?

The Mrs. noticed more than I did. I saw a guy on the northwest corner of T and North Capitol. I somehow figured he was the shooter. She saw him too...and noticed a car ahead of us and another guy in red walking toward the guy on the corner. I didn't actually see the gun...the Mrs. saw a long rifle with a black strap hanging down.

Then time started again and we were barreling down the alley between T and Seaton. I've driven down that alley before, and I always go pretty slow since it is so narrow. The Mrs. took it at about 30 miles an hour!...and still managed not to run down a group of kids running at about 25 miles an hour in the same direction. It felt like a cop show or something...but Cagney's got nothing on the Mrs.!

Somewhere between T and Seaton I reached the nice folks at 911 and yelled "shots fired!" After describing what we saw, we took a slightly longer route home. We stopped at one point to talk through the window with a policeman in a car...he mentioned he'd heard something happened. But there were no sirens...not then or five minutes later or ten minutes later. We saw an ambulance go by later, but it didn't stop and appeared to be on the way to somewhere else. We're guessing nobody was injured.

The curious (and stupid) part of me wanted to go look for shell casings and find out what kind of gun it was. The guy was probably long gone, right? The Mrs., in addition to being a great driver, has more common sense than I do...we went home.


(Please note, the Mrs. used my account for the previous post...honest!)