She tightened her grip.
“This junk is tanking our property values,” she snapped, voice echoing off garages and stucco walls. Her perfume hit me even from several feet away—cloying, sweet, too strong, like a warning.
“That’s not my truck!” I shouted back, pointing at the shattered windshield. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t care whose trash it is.”
And then she swung again.
The crowbar smashed into the side mirror, snapping it off with a crack that made me flinch. The mirror dangled by wires like a broken limb. Glass tinkled onto the driveway.
Neighborhood doors began to open. I saw faces framed in doorways. Phones lifted, screens glowing. The kind of people who never said a word when Victoria fined you for the angle of your garbage can suddenly found their voices—silent, digital, recording.
Eight years of Victoria’s petty rules. Her fines. Her towing tantrums. Her “aesthetic guideline” sermons delivered like scripture.
And now this.
A felony.
