Two Hubcaps
Say you're lookin' for some new hubcaps for your car. Maybe yours are ugly or cracked or you don't even have any. You could go to your local Les Schwab and buy a set for pretty cheap, but you have a better idea: you're gonna steal some.
So you drive around town, cruisin' in your crappy car with its ugly hubcaps, looking for some 'caps that'll fit your wheels and make you look good. Those chrome babies on the F250 parked on the street? Nah. The swank 'caps on the neighbor's Hummer? No way. You spot a 2001 Subaru parked innocently in the driveway of a big house. It has a phenomenal set of cheapass grey plastic Wal-Mart 'caps - one of them is even cracked! HOT DAMN, you think. IT'S MY LUCKY DAY.
You come back by night to do the deed, since the car is parked near several other cars and lots of people live in the apartments in the big house. There are also several driveway spotlights. No matter - you set to work. You get two of the hubcaps off the car.
In the silence of a small-town Friday night, you drop one. SHIT. A light comes on at a neighboring house, and a sleepy middle-aged man pokes his head out to survey the scene. Maybe you ran away, maybe you hid, maybe you were long gone down the highway before he stumbles outside. But he doesn't see anything, so he goes back to bed.
The car's owner, the kind of brokeass twentysomething who would have cheapass Wal-Mart 'caps, looks out of her kitchen window the next morning. She blinks and looks again. Are her hubcaps missing?! She hustles downstairs and looks again.
Two are gone.
Two are still there.
What the hell?
Her landlady and husband live next door, so she asks them if they've heard anything. She gets the story of the noise in the middle of the night, the checking to see if anyone was there. But that's it - nobody saw anything. She herself slept through the entire debacle. They didn't take her bicycle parts or snowshoes or bike rack or winter hiking boots, all of which were in the car. There was no stereo to steal, just the factory tape deck, thank the Lord, since that got ganked a few years ago and she is too broke and cheap to buy a new one.
The landlady suggests that she go to the auto salvage yard and see if they might have some hubcaps to match the two that are still hanging on. She wonders if she could get some sweet funky 'caps for cheap.
She wonders if they'll come back tonight for the other two. If so, they're in for a little surprise - she'll be out of town. HA! Of course, there's always Sunday night. And Monday night, and every other night. Dammit.
Also, did you know that if you Google "two hubcaps stolen" you will come up with a lot of police reports of people having had two hubcaps stolen?
