The Sign

“PLANT SOME EVIDENCE”

by OPOVV, ©2014

(Apr. 4, 2014) — [NOTE: the following conversation is entirely fiction, but with the climate of police officers murdering civilians these days, it’s not as unbelievable as it may have been in the past.]

“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. This here meeting is called to order.”

“What do you mean by this ‘here’ meeting? Where else is it going to be, and even if it was somewhere else, that ‘somewhere else’ would still be a ‘here’, right?”

“It’s a matter of speech, you idiot. I’m just trying to put some class into this here meeting.”

“There you go again. Okay, have it your way.”

“Thank you. Okay, now, what we’re here for is to decide what we’re going to do, thanks to some clerical error.”

“It wasn’t some ‘clerical error’. It was a deliberate attempt to demean the police force.”

“We don’t know that.”

“The point is that we’re stuck with it, and now we’ve got to figure out a way to save face.”

“‘Save face’? What are we, Japanese?”

“I mean, we’ve got to find a solution to the problem. Let’s go over it again: the new police auxiliary station needed a sign and some wise guy ordered a “HERE BE DONUTS” sign, a custom sign that we can’t return. It’s paid for, and there’s not enough money in the budget to order another unless any of you want to pay for it. We’re talking in the neighborhood of $12,000.”

“How did it happen? I mean, the sign company didn’t get an order to make a big donut sign for us.”

“Yes, it did. The order went out on the internet and some computer hacker changed it, so the sign company built and delivered what was on the order. Probably done by one of our computer whiz kids in town, probably goes to the high school.”

“Let’s catch him and make him pay for it.”

“Can’t do that. First, it may not be a ‘him,’ and it may be more than one.”

“You mean we’re being attacked?”

“I didn’t say that. All I’m saying is that we don’t know. So, what are we going to do? We got a perfectly good sign that’s paid for.”

“Put it on Craigslist and sell it.”

“A valid idea, but there are problems with that. So far, this fiasco has been contained to the people in this room. If we go public, we may find ourselves out of our jobs.”

“I got an idea. Okay, so far we have a building on the edge of town. And we have a donut sign. Why not make it a donut factory, and the employees would be our prisoners. We get free labor, a paid-for building, a use for the sign, and all the donuts we can eat.”

“And maybe a drive-up window where civilians can buy donuts. Nobody would ever have to go inside.”

“But we’d need someone to be in charge. We need someone who actually knows how to be a baker and make donuts.”

“Easy. We just bring up some made-up charges on a baker. Arrest him for murder, plant some evidence, hold him for a couple of years while we ‘gather evidence’, and withhold bail because he’s a ‘flight risk’.”

“Yeah, that’ll work. So, let’s put the word out that we need an experienced baker, a ‘donut specialist’, that we can lay a murder charge on. Let’s make it ‘Murder One: premeditated, a master criminal, been at it for years.”

“And we can have it that he got rid of his victims in pies, cakes, and donuts.”

“Yea, that’ll work. Well, good job. We just saved the taxpayers of our community $12,000. Feel proud. Good job. Meeting adjourned.”

OPOVV