Dangerous Times

A small area near my house was cordoned off with police tape by the time I got home, and I wondered what had gone down.

"Some guy got shot near our place early this evening," my brother told me.

I raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yeah. He was in a car. Some guys on a motorcycle rode up next to him after he had just come out of the bank. Shouted for his money, and then shot him."

"How did you find out?"

"Mom texted me. The guy was fifty years old or something. She thinks he died."

As it turned out, the victim was in critical condition at the nearest hospital. He had apparently withdrawn a significant amount of funds from the bank (somewhere in the area of six digits), which gave the assailants plenty of motive to chase him down. The robbers most likely held no remorse at all for the shooting -- the victim's family was in the same car as him, with his four-year-old granddaughter among them. At least, that's as far as I know right now.

One of the first things that I did when I went online was check the newspapers for more details. The victim's name sounded oddly familiar for some reason, so I ran a small background check using the local search engines. This, combined with my mother's powers of recall, gave rise to the notion that he was an old acquaintance of my late father. We had consulted him on a purchase of building material some twenty years ago.

It's funny, how some coincidences play out. But then, considering the circumstances, it doesn't really strike me as funny right now.

We live in interesting times. Sadly, there's a fine line between "interesting" and "dangerous" nowadays.