little sketches of us…

Somehow I feel like I should blog the story for posterity, so here it goes:  We exchange babysitting with the neighbors but decide to stay home for date night. Cristian cooks me a fun steak dinner, and I sit at the bar on a kid’s chair on top of a bench just talking to him. It’s nice to have a de-stressed evening to ourselves. About 7:30, we walk two doors down to get the kids, visit for a few minutes, and are trying to decide when to go when Cristian says to Steve (the neighbor), “Why is there a truck in your back yard?” Steve looks out, sees the truck partially parked on the grass, and says, “There’s a guy in the back yard too.” I’m not so worried. We’re in suburbia; there are people wandering around all the time. Then Steve goes out, comes back in, and says the guy told him to get back in the house because “there are good guys all over out here.” What? I think Steve is a little excited over nothing. Then he says the guy is DEA. I have no idea what that means, so Steve and Tracy explain that it’s the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Ok, that’s weird. I tell Cristian we forgot to lock the door and maybe we should go back and do it. He heads out; I decide we should all head home, and I start shoe-ing and coating the kids.

Cristian is met at the door by two guys in black and one says, “Who are you?” Cristian says, “What do you mean? I live here.” “Really? Do you have I.D.?” He goes in to get it. The guys follow him, ask him for additional proofs of identity, and look in every room of the house while they’re there. On the way back out, they meet me coming with the kids and say, “You better go back to the neighbor’s. We’re going in this one!” Wow, ok. Now I’m a little concerned. We head back to Steve and Tracy’s, and they all take turns going outside to try to get the scoop while I nurse the baby. There are black SUVs lining both sides of the street in front of our house and down at the intersection as well. We see a few blue lights, but the whole deal is very silent.

The kids are upstairs playing, and Oliver later tells us that they’re watching a guy laying down in the middle of the road. He also tells us about lots of “elephant guys.” This is his visualization for cops with large guns raised, and we have many conversations in the next couple of days about cops, elephant arms, good guys, and bad guys.

Steve comes back in and tells us they’ve arrested someone from the house next door. Ok, it’s actually OUR house because it’s a duplex, and we share the inside wall and the attic. The cars clear a little, things seem to be settling, and we ask the DEA agent with the SUV in our driveway if it’s safe to go back in our house. He says yes but that he’ll be in the driveway until the warrant comes sometime around 1:00-3:00am. He’s from Detroit. He continues to camp out for the night, coming over a few times to ask us some questions. I tell him they should check the attic, and he says they already pulled two bags out from there.

About 1:00 am, we start hearing sounds of mass destruction, more like barrels rolling through the ceiling, furniture breaking, boots stomping and dogs barking. Luckily the kids sleep through it, but we don’t. It lasts for a few hours. I get worried about Emory, and she ends up sleeping with us for the rest of the night.

In the morning, there is absolutely no sign that anything happened. We decide maybe we should let the landlady know since she owns the whole house. The DEA has already contacted her, but she comes over later and tells us that there is a hole in every wall, that the guys had dis-mantled the fireplace and re-plastered it to hide things, and that the DEA found $2,000,000 in cash and the equivalent of 1.8 million in cocaine! WHAT?!?!

I think about how the one guy was actually pretty nice when we talked to him last summer, and we both say how quiet they were. There is one day of silence, Sunday.

Monday evening the local police come to search again: dogs, banging and stomping, making sure everything is out I guess. I ask a cop if I should move my baby since her room is on the inside wall. He says yes, and I try to get her to sleep in the pack-n-play in the laundry room. It doesn’t work because of the echo so I put her back in her room but take the picture off the wall. I find out later that they use an x-ray to check everything, and I hope that it’s safe or at least that they were done with her room when she came back.

We hear the story of how the DEA stopped a truck coming from California in Oklahoma with drugs, asked where it was going, and sat in on the exchange in Lexington. Then they followed the neighbors back to the house, arrested one of the guys from his car that he parked on the street, let the other pull into the garage, and broke in the front door to arrest him. He hears them, runs out through the garage, and there’s a foot pursuit in which he makes it almost to the shops on the corner before they arrest him. There is supposedly a third guy. We have only met two.

The landlady packs out stuff. We see painters, movers, random cars. She sends builders, loads up more stuff, puts up a rent sign. Two movers knock on the door asking for jumper cables since their moving truck died. Cristian is gone with ours in the trunk of the car, but I tell Steve to go over and check it out. He says they are moving out the fridge and took out all the cabinets. We hear people replacing the floor. There are painters and carpet cleaners. The rent sign goes down. I peek out the blinds and wonder about the new car in the driveway and the cabinets closing in the kitchen.