Nothing much ever happened in our town. That was the point of it. We handled noise complaints, the occasional drunk, lost dogs, domestic arguments that cooled off by the time we arrived. The kind of place where you learned every street by heart and every shift blurred into the next. Serious crime belonged to cities an hour away, not here.
Then the burglaries started. Not all at once. Not loudly. Just enough to feel wrong. One house, then another. A back window pried open. A garage door left ajar. A laptop gone, a wallet missing, a sense of violation that lingered longer than the damage itself. The calls came days apart at first, spaced just far enough that no one panicked.