Orange Corvette

So, I was awakened this morning by a colleague telling me that the streets around Guadalupe Schools where I work were closed, because the police were trying to apprehend a guy who had killed a cop during a traffic stop in Millard County. He had escaped and made his way to the neighborhood near our school, where he has family.

This caused problems for the school, both major and minor, and many phone calls were exchanged. I ended up having to deal with some of it while I was getting my hair cut; when I left, the stylist said, "The news says his getaway car was an orange Corvette. He shouldn't be hard to find in that, huh?" I laughed and promised that if I saw the car, I would let her know.

So, I made it to school, sneaking past the roadblock by using an alley connecting a couple of parking lots. Sure enough: as I came into the building, there was the car, parked on the street at the north end of our playground. Naturally, I called my hairdresser and left her a message: "I'm looking at the orange Corvette right now."

For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, we fought to remain dignified professionals in the face of overwhelming curiosity. With each new development ("They're sending a robot over to the car!" "Why is that guy with the cell phone running away?" "I think the helicopter is landing.") we would stampede [trottrottrottrottrot] from one window to another. If the school had been a boat, we would have capsized it. At one point, I glanced toward my office window and saw a reporter hidden there, with a telephoto lens trained on the orange Corvette. He was oblivious to us, on the other side of the tinted window, but I could have opened it and handed him a sandwich. If I had wanted to. He had one.

At one point, my boss and a couple of other staff members and I went upstairs, thinking we could see more from the second floor. There is a fairly big window there, which faces out onto the playground and the Corvette. We could hear a couple of cops talking under the window, or maybe a cop talking on his radio. My boss cracked the window open, hoping to listen in. But the cop sneezed. "Bless you!" she said. Shit! We all slapped our hands over our mouths. Sure enough, footsteps under the window and a knock on the school door directly underneath us. Trottrottrot down the stairs to open the door. The police officer says, "We think you may have some schoolchildren near the upstairs window. We have snipers with high-powered rifles trained on this parking lot from every angle, so we need all the kids away from the windows." "Yes, sir, Officer, sir." "We'll take care of those kids right away." He seems to have forgotten that school had been cancelled. Or he was trying to be tactful.