We live in a quiet old neighborhood near a haunted gulch, a few blocks from a small hospital. The streets empty as soon as it gets dark, and the only sounds are the occasional distant ambulance siren, the muffled rattle and boom of artillery and machine guns at the base during training weeks, and Mr. and Mrs. Down the Street screaming at each other about text messages and relationship problems every few weeks.
So I was drawing on the couch late in the evening, listening to a netflix show on my phone, when somebody screamed like they were being murdered. I turned off the show and sat up to listen, and there was another scream - gutteral, unearthly, terrified, whole-body screaming. I jumped up, there was a third scream, and then a gunshot. Silence. I ran outside. The street was dark, nobody else had come to their doors, and I didn't know what the fuck had just happened. Had Mr. and Mrs. Down the Street finally murdered each other? There hadn't been any arguing. Nobody was sobbing or staggering out of their garage with a bloody rolled-up rug with feet sticking out of the bottom. But it had definitely been a gun shot, and the last time we heard a blast in the night it had turned out to be a drive-by shooting one street over. That street is not filled with nice old Japanese grandparents with fat little Shih Tzus. It is filled with cock-fighters and youths with shitty sub-woofers in their Hondas.
I was standing there trying to decide if I would want someone to call the police if I had just been murdered in my home (and I would, but maybe I could have yelled, "I'm being murdered!" to clear it up for the neighbors?), when a man started rage-screaming one street over, and cars began speeding away along the side roads. They could have been horrified witnesses to a hit! A clue! I called the police, because I am not running into a cock fight/murder scene in my reindeer pajamas. After explaining really badly what I was freaked out about, I asked them if they could please send someone to drive around and just see if anyone had, like, really obviously been murdered, thanks.
Nobody had, evidently. So what the hell had I been hearing? I went to work the next morning, mentally devising a plan to order luminol and then casually black-light scan the driveways for body-carried-to-the-truck-in-a-rolled-up-rug trails of blood while pretending to be on an evening jog. Maybe running through the neighborhood with a spray bottle and a black light bar would not be very stealthy, but they'd have to catch me to stop me, and while I am not in good enough shape to outrun even the fattest of Shih Tzus, I could definitely hit an old person with a light bulb when they caught me by the back of my sweatpants.
I explained all this to my boss, and he said, "Don't you live by the Botanical Gardens?"
"Yeah."
"... They hire people to kill the wild pigs in the gulch so they don't gore any visitors."
Oh.
Ohhhhhh.
So that's one murder mystery solved. Not by me, though. I was the one who called the police for a pig.
My skill set needs improvement, I have solved zero mysteries so far, unless you count the Mystery of the Severed Heads in the Library Dumpster, and even then it was my co-worker who found out who was ditching the bodies. I should take an online course or something.
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