The beeping on the MDT (Mobile Digital Terminal in a police car) snapped me out of my daydream about retiring from the Los Angeles Police Dept.  The first radio call of the day in Los Angeles was typical in my opinion yet atypical to the rest of the world.

A lady from Nashville called her elderly father in Los Angeles and he didn’t answer. She called “Daddy Jim Bob” every morning and he always answered. She contacted LAPD to request a “welfare check”. I got the call, drove to his house located in a nice suburb in LA and immediately noticed newspapers stacked in front of his door. I rang the doorbell, I knocked, no answer. I went next door and asked the neighbors if they had seen him recently and they said no. I requested a backup unit to assist me. I discovered a side kitchen window open. Fortunately being female I was able to crawl through the window. As my feet hit the kitchen floor I smelled the odor of something burning. I didn’t see smoke. How odd, I thought. The backup unit arrived and I made my way to the front door to let them in. We cleared the rooms in the front of the house, no James Robert. There was one bedroom just beyond the kitchen to check. The closer I walked toward the bedroom the stronger the burning odor got. I also heard a grinding sound I couldn’t identify. As I entered the doorway with my Smith & Wesson leading the way, I saw an older White man obviously dead laying bed. A hose ran from under the sheets to a vacuum cleaner. I pulled the sheet back and discovered Daddy Jim Bob came and went! Jim Bob was masturbating with a vacuum cleaner hose and apparently had a heart attack. My cynical and nasty male counterparts want to know the model of the vacuum. They could care less about Daddy Jim Bob. At that moment my thoughts were, “who is going to call his daughter?”