Team Small Dog attends their first bike-by shooting.

We waited until dusk to walk down to the beach, too darn hot out. We're having a heat wave. Burning up.

So we're walking down my street, I'm armed with the dogs and a poop bag, wearing a skort and only enough other items for basic coverage, because, hello, 100 degrees, and we hear 5 shots, right in a row. What apparently EVERYBODY knows is an automatic weapon. I just know that Ruby and Gustavo hate gun shots, and they stop, and I stop, then I have to think a minute. When you hear the gun shots, right there in front of you, you're supposed to run the other way, right?

Um. I'm pretty sure exactly where they came from, and no car came whizzing by me, and all I hear is nothing. So much nothing that I think, what if everybody's dead? And no one's going to help them, the poor bleeding gang kids, all those pops.

So instead of running the other way, I just keep going by the house. Because now I'm Florence Nightengale, dragging around 3 small dogs, 2 of who have clearly had enough of the gunshots. No one's around, the house is dark. Later their neighbor tells me the kid was on a bike, and when he fired at the open front door, at the mom who lives there, he ditched the bike and took off by the church. Not towards me. I didn't see him. I just hid behind some bushes, to see if the cops were coming. I figure it best to not go up to the door to see if they need help, but I wasn't really sure. Miss Manners doesn't tell us what to do in a case like this.

It seemed like it sure took a while for the cops to show up. I guess if they're not conveniently located 3 houses down, where I was, it takes a while to get across the neighborhood. The cops run by me, I'm standing in a yucca plant with all of my dogs. The lady whose front yard I was in comes out, she said that was ok if I wanted to stay in her bushes. Her husband went out to talk to the cops. Otterpop tried to yell at the cops. This is a bad habit. It's happened before.

No ambulances showed up, just all the squad cars. They asked if I saw anything, I just said no. Really I didn't, even though I was almost out front. I wasn't sure what else to do, so I stayed in the bushes for a while. The lady said that was ok, I could stay there as long as I wanted. She had no hair, and when she came out the second time, she covered up her shiny head in a turban. She was nice. I guess I'd let someone hide in my bushes too, if it seemed like what they wanted to do.

I figured we might as well head down to the beach. By then it was dark. The bushes were prickly and it didn't seem like a useful place to be anymore. The dogs needed to chase sticks into the water. That was the plan all along. They did for a while, then Gustavo jumped off the cliff down to the sea cave to freak out at a dead seal. I guess that's better than rolling in it. Ruby jumped down too and couldn't climb herself back up, so I went down and climbed her back up. We were all pretty jittery. We ran home as fast as I could in slipon Vans with no socks, but the cop wouldn't let us on our street. So we just walked the long way back home.