I may have mentioned this before, but I’m a dispatcher at the local sheriff’s office, which means I’m in charge of fielding 911 calls and making sure ambulances and firetrucks get to the right places at the right times. Except in our tiny, picturesque town (it’s more of a village, really) the need for emergency services is pretty erratic. So ninety percent of the time, I’m a well-paid secretary.

But Wednesday, in the early hours of the morning, I earned my paycheck. In fact, I don’t think hazard pay is entirely out of the question. I was at the desk in front of the window, reading a hokey romance novel, when I heard a popping noise, and then felt something sail by my throat.

So I immediately looked in the direction of the window, and saw: a BULLET hole. A round, very distinct bullet hole with cracks webbing out around it. And while I was throwing myself onto the filthy, bug-infested office floor like it was my dearest lover, more shots were exploding and more glass was flying.

I stayed on the floor, cowering like a little girl and struggling not to pee all over myself in fright, until everything got quiet, and by quiet I mean deathly silent. It was like a tomb in the office. After that, I started using common sense, and crab-walked around the desk to lock the front door, then hustled to the back room (where there are no street-facing windows) to use the phone to call the deputy (who had gone home not EIGHT minutes earlier) and tell him to get his ass BACK to the office, ASAP. Okay, so truthfully, I’ve no idea what actually came out of my mouth. For all I know, it could’ve been a terrified squeak. But it was enough to start a full-scale investigation.

And, in starting the investigation, we realized that almost every business on the main highway had been hit, too. Someone went on a shooting spree, and I was the only idiot unlucky enough to be up at 3:00 A.M., sitting in front of a window, making myself a brightly lit target. Hence the name ‘bullseye butler’, which a deputy thought would be a smart-ass joke, because my surname used to be ‘Butler’ before I was adopted.

Anyway, I could have been hit, or even killed. So I’ve spent the last two days counting my blessings, and marveling at the oddity of someone losing their mind and treating my hometown like a shooting gallery. Of course, the bigger news networks in the area caught wind of the story and insisted that we would ‘never’ find the culprit, but I am happy (and proud) to say that our deputies did a bang-up job, and less than forty-eight hours later they arrested the guilty party. And on a personal level, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.