The Case of the Stolen Truck, Part I

It was a typical sunny weekday morning, approximately a week before Christmas.

My sister Kay was frantically running around, getting ready to leave for her job at the bank. She usually leaves the house around a quarter after eight.

I was laying in bed, brooding because I had to get my ass up and get ready for work. The sound of the triple chime sounding when the front door opened was usually my signal to get up and get ready.

I heard the triple beeps when the door opened. Then I heard it close.

Next thing I know, Kay appears in the doorway of my bedroom.

“Lee, where’s the truck?”

I looked at her like she was crazy.

“Lee, I parked the truck on the street last night. It’s not there now.”

Now, it didn’t cross our minds that the truck had been stolen. So I got up, slipped my feet in my sneakers, and walked outside still clad in my pajamas. I have a pretty long driveway, so we both walked out on the front porch and looked back towards the garage.

No truck.

We looked at each other.

“Somebody stole it, Kay.”

Of course, Kay doesn’t ever know what to do in any dramatic situation. She just stood there and looked at me.

“Call Ma. I’m sure the insurance is in her name, and..”

(No need to explain all that… You know how the bootleg go. We needed my mother to come over so that she could call the police and make the police report.)

On her way over to my house, Ma’s van broke down somewhere. Kay used my car to go get her. Ma came over, and they waited for the police. We made small talk, but she hung out with Kay. I was more concerned with avoiding some weird argument with her, in my house where I pay mortgage. Let’s just get this police report done without any sh** going down…

But all went well. I took my sister and mother to get a rental car. Then I drove down to Cabbagetown and hung out with Carter-Anne, one of the Original Oldgirls, for a half and hour, before dragging myself to work.

My biggest concern about that stolen truck?

It was my brother DaKari’s truck, his pride and joy : a big candy apple red 1992 Chevrolet Silverado.


Ma had bought that truck for one of her idiot boyfriends, and when that relationship went sour, she’d promised DaKari that it would be his once he got his license.

DaKari had been driving it since he was 16. Kay went and snatched it when DaKari went into the military. It was kind of like that scene from coming to America, you know, when them African boys (played by Eddie and Arsenio) went to Queens, New York to find a queen, and they left their luggage outside.

You remember how the neighborhood folks snatched up that luggage when they left it out on the curb.

Well, that’s what Kay did with that truck. She snatched it with the quickness!

The problem becomes, what do you tell the boy about his truck? I mean, what do you tell a boy who’s truck has been stolen? What do you tell the boy who use to sleep with his car keys so that our mother’s alcoholic dope fiend husband wouldn’t take it? Just what do you say?

I didn’t know, and I was very concerned about that…

But there were a couple of things about that truck that were jacked up:

First of all, for the past couple of years, the latch on the back sliding glass window of the truck was broken, making it quite easy for anyone to just slide that glass door open and get on in there and take his truck. I’d been on his rusty tail to go ahead and get that window fixed. His reply was always the same.

“Don’t worry about it, Shawty. I’m gonna get that back window replaced with a full solid window.”

Did he do that? No!

Second, I hated that truck. It had well over 200,000 thousand miles on it. And it drove and sounded like the funky car in that old cartoon Hong Kong Phooey. It was an automatic, but it felt like you were driving a stick, and it felt like you forgot to let the parking brake up or something. It was quite unnerving. Kay was always giving me advice on how to drive it.

“Lee, you got to push that gas pedal just right.”

You’ve got be kidding me.

Anyway, the boy called from Army Basic training. I think he noticed that I was quiet while he yacked nonstop to me on the phone. Finally he said “Lee, I already know about the truck, so no need to be so quiet and try to keep it from me.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

He said he was okay with it. He was going to get another car anyway when he finished up his reserves training.

So that was cool.

Meanwhile, I talked to my neighbor, the Infamous Hen-Dog about the stolen truck. We both realized that the Mayor of my ‘hood, Snake, was locked up. This usually meant that we have to watch our possessions a bit more carefully, since he’s not around to do any special investigations or snitch on perpetrators.

But Hen-Dog is friendly with other neighborhood crackheads, and one in particular, an older abuser Mr. Thomas, saw some odd people on our street that evening…

He said those strange folks were from a place in our hood know as “The Bottoms”, an extremely seedy part of the neighborhood that gentrification and revitalization would NEVER, EVER find.

Now, I don’t venture out too much around my hood. I take the occasional short-cut through some backstreets just in case there is a game down at the stadium. I ain’t like the white people that have moved to the hood, out speed walking and jogging, and all that craziness, just throwing caution completely to the wind. I tend to stay on my street, so if some mess jump off, I can break out and make a mad dash for my own house.

But Hen-Dog explained to me where “The Bottoms” were located. Turns out it was no more than a half mile down the cross street from my house.

“Just roll down there, LadyLee. Mr. Thomas said that them boys are probably so stupid, they might be still trying to remove the engine and the transmission from that truck.”

Yeah, they had to be stupid. They stole a truck that was pretty much on it’s last leg. How stupid could you get!

That didn’t seem like a bad plan. I mean it wasn’t like I was walking down to “The Bottoms”… I was driving. And if I had to run a fool over in the Mazda, then so be it.

So my plan was simple: I was going to make a trip down to “The Bottoms” to see if I could spot my brother’s truck anywhere.

Looking back on this notion?

This was quite stupid.

To be continued...