TBT Trick or Treat click here for the excerpt from Mugshots.

TRICK OR TREAT


"Can you describe them to me, ma'am?" It was the one night of the year when you could be guaranteed getting a good description out of an eye-witness. 

"Well, one of them had a hatchet and blood coming out of the bandages wrapped around his head, and another was Little Red Riding Hood. There were a Nurse and Dracula too." She continued.  "Yeah and there was the cowboy, a baseball player, and the kid with an oversized coat buttoned up to look like he had no head. I don't know them from the neighborhood. I only turned my back for a second, and they took it all. I don't have anything left for the other kids."

These marauding candy stealers arrived on foot, roving gang of ne'er do wells.

 I had to chuckle at the call on this warm Halloween night and my good fortune, as I cruised around the upscale Blue Bell, PA  neighborhood. For this, the Bi-Centennial year, my Chief had convinced the town fathers that tourists from all over the world would swarm Philadelphia and its suburbs like locusts.  
My hiring was the answer to the road-clogging hordes that never materialized. I was a twenty-one-year-old rookie working in my hometown on the 3-11 shift.

It wasn't long before I spotted them. In my deepest Marlboro man voice, I said, "Hold it right there mi amigos." I wasn't letting seven years of Spanish in   high school, and college go to waste.

 I got out of the Black and White and adjusted my Second Chance vest. I made a show of placing my nightstick in its ring on my Sam Browne belt. Loved making that move, just like on Police Story or Adam-12.

"I can throw you all in the back of my squad car and haul you to the Police    Station and make your parents pick you up, or you can march back to that nice
 lady's house and give her back her candy."  I could out-stare any bunch of 
 ten-year-old kids from the 'burbs, Philly may have been a different matter.

I drove back to her driveway as the band of now not-so-merry men made their way back it into her house. 

I was about to make them give her all of their candy until she said, "They did the same thing to my neighbor across the street. She came over and told me."

"Okay you guys, we're going there to give back the rest of the candy."

I led the rag-tag bunch of petty thieves across the lawns. The full moon's 
light bounced off the brim of my hat and their plastic masks. We made our way 
up her steps, rang the bell and waited. I thought about the cooling dew on my 
polished black shoes and remembered how it soaked my sneakers when I went door to door trick or treating. My best memories were on mischief night though, 
always the night before Halloween. My parents, in their wisdom, turned a deft 
ear to my plaintive cries and didn't dare let me go outside, knowing the kind 
of mayhem I would have created. Instead, I sat in the attic over our doorway 
entrance, a sentinel keeping a keen eye for the dastardly door-bell ringers and wily window soapers. Of course, I had the big pot of cold water ready to dump on the unsuspecting trespassers. Only had to use it once, nine years earlier, 
when I was in seventh grade. Word got out fast to leave the Hoda hacienda on 
Daws Road alone.  

My reverie was interrupted when the other victim opened the front door with a 
whoosh. She looked through the screen door first at me, then at the kids in 
their get-ups and bags of loot, then back at me. She shouted over her shoulder to her hubby in the downstairs den. He had the TV turned up too high. "Harry, 
HARRY!, You have to come here to look at this." She was staring right at me 
with a big grin. "This is the best costume ever!"