After months of sitting in the shop, waiting for the phone to ring, going out and knocking on doors (you should have seen the way people looked at him when he handed out his brochure, particularly at the ultra-conservative Christian churches), calling up his friends and family, running ads in the paper, and trying to learn search engine optimization, the Wizard was beginning to wonder how much work it was really going to take to spawn a market for his services. After all, would people ever really take him seriously enough to pay for magical assistance with ordinary problems? He needed a track record to point to, and the type of magic he practiced was nearly impossible to prove. Plus, his processes were sloppy and poorly documented.
But, the big day came, and he knew that he would get a call soon. The night before, the local police department had gotten into a high-speed chase all the way across town. The slimy little bugger had almost gotten away, by taking highly populated streets and speeding through red lights, nearly hitting crowds of people. The cruiser had to stop at red lights and take care not to hit people, so they'd lost ground. Soon, though, the old codger's luck ran out when he lost control of his car and careened into a parked moving van. They'd nearly escaped even that, were it not for the mistake of making a wrong turn into a dead end. They were corned, and the police were ready to snare them. But, when the driver got out of the car, he was quickly identified. It was none other than the President of the United States, George W. Bush. Since the President is immune to arrest, the officers on the scene had to let him go. Besides, they were just too dumbfounded to know what to do anyway. It wasn't your usual situation. But, by the time the night was out, they knew they'd been tricked, despite having checked him up and down, typing his blood, running his fingerprints, and double-checking to make sure he was the real McCoy. It turned out that the real President wasn't even in the country that night. How, then had this con artist pulled it off?
It got worse. The next day, a driver in a van cut off another driver. The second driver blew his horn and extended his middle finger, and things escalated from there. The first driver drew a gun and began firing at the car. The car sped away in an attempt to survive, and the van's driver shot out the car's back tire. Pulling over, the van driver shot the car's driver to death. That wasn't the bad part. The ugly part came later, during the investigation. The incident had been witnessed by at least 25 different people, as it was on a highway where traffic was congested, and people had slowed down to rubberneck. Every single witness gave a completely different account of the gunner's appearance, ranging from a tall, skinny Jamaican male, to a short, fat Chinese man, to a bare-chested, muscular Mexican, to an anorexic-looking albino woman, to a little boy with his hat on backwards. The descriptions were so consistently unlike each other that the police had no idea what had really happened. The descriptions of the van, the car, and the incident were equally unhelpful.
There was a knock at the Wizard's door, and his little bell jingled. A detective wanted to bring the wizard on board to help find this thief before he pulled off whatever he was trying to pull off. The man was already above the law, and that frightened the city. They knew that they had a magician on their hands, and they knew they weren't equipped to handle it. The wizard was hesitant. He hadn't gone into this to become a superhero, and he didn't feel he was quite ready for an arch-nemesis yet. But, the money looked good, and he figured he had to start somewhere.
He spotted a newspaper on the table and started looking through it. A good wizard always begins by looking for clues in the newspaper. He saw a classified ad for a 1995 Ford Taurus. Then, he saw an editorial about prayer in schools. He looked through the police reports, noting that a man named Christoper Trundle had been arrested for possession of crack cocaine. He wrote down the location of the car for sale and made preparations to head over there. Part of being a wizard was always playing the part of the decisive one. The detective was impressed with how quickly the wizard got on the scent.
In truth, he had no idea what he was going to do when he got to the car. He was just buying some time. It turned out to be all the time he needed.
