Ticket

Jake walked from room to room, from the kitchen into the living room and then to the bedrooms, looking at drawers, cabinets, under sofas, behind televisions. He couldn’t find a single place to hide Grandma’s diamond ring. Where to put it? Oh, yes – in the empty socket box in the bathroom. The one that had a solid cover on it.

They’d never look there. Of course, Jake lived in Georgia, so “they” always meant a particularly pigmented class of people. Those kind of people. The kind of people everyone was taught to treat as inferior. The people the sick liberals from the Northeast and the West Coast always tried to force down Southerners throats. Jake rolled his eyes after hiding the ring. If the liberals had to live like he did, they’d change their merry tune.

Why, just the other day, he’d been talking to his neighbors. There’d been three burglaries in just the last couple of months. They’d gotten into one guy’s house and stolen a television. A computer and a microwave in the second. And a laptop in the third.

What did they think they were doing? Shouldn’t they be working, getting a job or something to earn their keep like everybody else, instead of mooching off solid, up-standing white people like Jake? And to make matters worse, it’d taken an outcry from the neighborhood to get the police to increase their drive-bys. But then again, most of the policemen were them. “Them,” of course.

Jake thought about all of this, getting ready for work one morning. He worried about his dog and the two cats. If someone burglarized the house, would they harm the animals? Or worse yet, would they leave the door open afterward? The animals would wander away and get lost. Idiots. They were always doing stupid things.

He drove out of his house and turned left at the corner onto the next street. A police car turned on its pig ears. Damn, Jake thought. He didn’t really stop at the sign.

And when the policeman got out, Jake knew he was screwed. It was one of them.