If it’s not apparent by now, Task Force Officer
Longhead and I know each other personally and have a bit of history. I should probably elucidate but I won’t because I can’t grasp where to begin and the ending, to me, is at best a confusing mess and at worst is… something that’s not fit to print. But to give an inkling of how we’ve essentially always interacted with each other, you know those
fighting fish?
All right, Longhead and I get along like them: fine on the shelf in our individual cups, just don’t dump us together in the same glass.
That being stated, I was perpetually bewared Longhead would spy me before I’d accomplished what I wanted to with JADE -- thus spoiling my project -- and I went through a lot of trouble to avoid crossing paths with him. Nevertheless, we had several unbelievably near misses. I’d walk across a road and he’d drive transversely over the very spot seconds later. I’d coincidentally pull out in front of him at the Charlottesville Police Department as he was coming and I was going, then it’d be the reverse on another day. I’d be taking the stairs down, he’d be riding the elevator up. Those sorts of things. But it wasn’t until a couple of really,
really, close calls that it fully sunk in I had no need to fret. The guy is about as observant as an eggplant.
I’d parked down at the Drug Enforcement office, under the inference Longhead had clocked out for the day, and was about to hop out of my auto -- one he was familiar with -- when I spotted his Taurus coming in the lot. Like an explosion, it hit me that there was no place near the doors for him to put his car and that I was in the row that’d be his first choice if there was no place near the doors for him to put his car. Yes, indeed, he was headed straight for me. Closer, closer, closer, he advanced. I became the spitting image of an ice sculpture. Transfixed, I watched him pull in. All that lay betwixt us was a 9 x 18 foot empty space.
He got out, reached for miscellaneous articles, went around to the other side, tossed something in, then shut the door and clomped away. Despite facing my direction a multitude of times -- including when he looked back as he armed his alarm -- he was oblivious to my presence. I didn’t know what to make of it. Could it be all that worry all that inconvenience all that time, all unnecessary?! Hilarious. Yet pathetic.
Alas! It was too great a temptation, I couldn’t help myself: rather than rushing out of there as soon as the coast was clear, I stayed, right smack where I was, to find out if the same thing would happen when he came back. I even readied a camera and rolled down the window. Before Longhead returned, a car slightly larger than my own parked in the open spot. I don’t believe it made any difference, aside from its appearance in a few of the photographs I took.
At any rate, I don’t recollect if the above was the deciding incident or if it was another similar one but somewhere along the line I stopped bending over backwards trying to forefend possible run-ins with Longhead and started treating him like any other JADEr -- which is what I should’ve been doing all along.
