Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound Annual 3, Page 6

  **********

  Dr. Tatum walked out of the office building and into the warm sunlight, and she clutched the assignment folder close to her chest. She had been demoted, but she had been allowed to keep a job with benefits. It was not ideal, but considering all of the adversity she had experienced over the last few months, it was not as bad an outcome as it could have been.

  She turned down the street and walked over to her car, and there was a white slip of paper stuffed under her windshield wiper. When she pulled it out, she found that it was a parking ticket.

  “How the hell?” she questioned herself and then looked up to see the expiration on the meter. She looked at her watch and realized that her time had run out just three minutes earlier. “That was fast for a parking cop,” she muttered to herself, and then she saw the black jeep creeping slowly down the street from car to car. The policeman held out a laser scanner at the license plate and then quickly pulled ahead to the front of the perpetrator’s car. Within seconds, a stick with pincers reached out of the window and placed another ticket on that windshield. “Sometimes I really hate advances in technology,” Dr. Tatum remarked as she stuffed the ticket into her purse and got into her car. She opened the assignment file again and read out the destination aloud.

  “Three Rivers, California. Hmm, sounds like a good place to go when things are so crummy here.”

  Chapter 2

  *

  Stunned