Throwing The Book At 'Em

I was walking up to the library to return a couple of movies and pick out a couple more. What did I see except several police officers advancing on the building? I looked at my watch and swore. There were perhaps fifteen minutes left before the place was due to close, and all I could think of was that if the police were necessary, then something must be going on inside that was going to eat up a lot of that time and impede my efforts to transact my business.

As it turned out, the two patrol cars and four officers had little impact on things. I gather that whatever it was that brought them there, the person responsible was no longer present. I assumed that the staff would be rather agitated, as I have found to be the case in the past, but this time it was not so. It was just another day, all appearances to the contrary. There was a woman and what I will assume was her daughter ahead of me, and I don't know that they were convinced of that.

After talking with whoever it was had summoned them and chatting casually with a local vagrant, the officers headed out. This was just as I myself was heading out. Considering that they appeared when I did and left when I did, I might be inclined to get very paranoid and assume that they were in truth shadowing me and using as a flimsy excuse whatever the thing was that had happened earlier. It wasn't me of course, although it's nice to be wanted.

What was terribly funny was watching one of the cars driving off. The first had been parked on the curb, but the second had driven right up to the building. This library, incidentally, is in the park, so it was there on the grass. I assumed it would be driving away via the nearest road in front of the library, but watched in amusement as it slowly lumbered across the grass towards the intersecting road, which was a much longer haul and which seemed practically designed to inconvenience park-goers. Never assume someone knows what they are doing just because they do it with authority.