Different Circles

The gate swung open and Stivick stepped through, making the trip up to the house on foot. He weaved carefully between the little white egg-looking things the hippies had been launching and then climbed up the hill. It took him the better part of five minutes to make it to the front door. Jake and Laura both took the opportunity to lose their robes and throw on some sweat pants and shirts for the meeting. They still reeked of sex, particularly Jake’s face, which had spent a considerable amount of time between Laura’s legs earlier, but they figured Stivick would be unoffended.

“Come on in, Bob,” Jake told the sergeant when he opened the front door for him. Since the last visit Stivick had made to the house, he and Jake had graduated to first-name basis with each other.

“Thanks,” Stivick said, turning off his flashlight and then holstering it in a pocket on the left side of his uniform pants. He looked over at Laura, who was standing behind Jake, and gave her a smile. “Good to see you again, Laura. Sorry it has to be for something like this.”

“Good to see you too, Bob,” she told him. “Thanks for coming out so fast.”

“It’s what we do,” he said. His eyes then turned to Meghan, who was behind Laura, still wearing her long t-shirt sans bra. He looked her up and down appreciably, particularly her bare legs and her jiggling breasts.

“Oh, Bob, this is Meghan,” Jake introduced. “She’s our nanny.”

“Hello, Meghan,” Stivick said flirtatiously. “I’m Bob Stivick. I’m one of the night shift supervisors for the coastal district.”

“Nice to meet you,” Meghan said shyly.

Stivick reluctantly took his eyes off of her and turned back to Jake. “Did your little girl sleep through all the commotion?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?” Jake asked. “A freakin’ bomb wouldn’t wake Caydee up if she doesn’t want to wake up. Some of the best advice we were given was to not make any attempt to be quiet around her when she’s sleeping. It pays off.”

“Hmmm,” Stivick said thoughtfully. “My wife and I weren’t given that advice. Now we have a couple of pre-teens who wake up whenever a mouse farts.”

“That’s a bummer,” Jake said lightly. “But it is good to have some anecdotal evidence to support the hypothesis.”

“Uh ... right,” Stivick said slowly. “Anyway, we got Phil and Dana in custody, as I’m sure you saw on the camera. Not sure what we should charge them with though.”

“What are those things they were slingshotting all over the property?” Jake asked.

“Dirty diapers,” Stivick said.

Jake’s eyes widened. “Dirty diapers?”

The sergeant nodded. “Dirty disposable diapers, to be exact.”

“I see,” Jake said. “And why are these hippies using a slingshot to shoot dirty disposable diapers over our fence at three-thirty in the fucking morning? What did we ever do to them?”

“You use disposable diapers for your baby,” Stivick said simply. “Do you remember that interview you gave a few months back where the reporter asked you if you used cloth diapers to help protect the environment?”

“Yes,” Jake said. “And I said, ‘fuck the environment’. I was kind of joking about that. I honestly didn’t think that reporter would actually print that statement. And it was quite out of context.”

“Well, Phil and Dana took it very seriously when they read that,” Stivick said. “They decided to teach you and Laura a lesson.”

“By doing the very thing that they are protesting?” asked Laura incredulously. “They’re mad about disposable diapers messing up the environment so they litter our property with disposable diapers to show their anger? That makes no sense at all.”

Stivick shrugged. “These people are not rocket scientists,” he said. “In their minds, they were asking how you liked it. And they also were not planning on getting caught. They knew you had a camera and a motion detector on the gate, but they were quite surprised to find that you had them on the approach to the gate as well.”

“Where did they even get the diapers?” Jake asked. “They don’t have a baby, do they?”

“They got them from the dumpster behind the KinderCare in SLO,” Stivick said. “At least that’s what they told Cartwright and Brooke. They said it took them almost a month to gather that many. And I’m here to tell you, those things are rank. I almost puked when I looked in the bag.”

“Disgusting,” Laura said.

“That’s where I used to work,” Meghan added. “And come to think of it, I did see that van hanging around the area the last few weeks I was there.”

“You should smell the inside of that van,” Stivick said.

“No thank you,” Meghan said with a wince of disgust. “Cleaning a baby’s booty is one thing. Dealing with month old diapers is something else entirely.”

“You got that right, hon,” Stivick said. “In any case, this is far from a first offense for Phil and Dana. They’ve been arrested for egging SLO city hall, for breaking into the chicken farm outside of Paso Robles so they could free the chickens, and are routinely caught vandalizing the fence at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. They have a particular hatred for the nuclear plant.”