When I was growing up, we had a Bearcat scanner/AM radio in the kitchen, right between the sink and the refrigerator. Every morning, the first person who got up (usually at about 5am) would turn it on, and it would stay on all day long until the last person went to bed. So all day, every day I heard adult-contemporary lite rock interrupted now and then with the cryptic chatter of police-band radio. One minute, I was grooving along to Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecelia," and the next I was listening to the cops rattle off numbers to each other. Next to the radio was a yellowed list of police codes that somebody had typed out on my sister's electric typewriter. "Hey! That's not far away!" someone in my family would shout. Then someone else would look at the list of numbers. "Domestic disturbance." My mom had all the codes memorized. She was good with numbers.

I used to sit at the kitchen table and just watch the scanner when I was bored. There were two red blinking lights that would alternately turn on and off when it was "scanning." I would stare at those lights, waiting for the police call. You never knew what it would be or where it could happen. Most of the time it was useless blabber, but now and then it was something good.

One day, the scanner announced that there was trouble on our very block, right across the street where this girl my age lived. My brother and I rushed to the front room, where we kneeled on the couch and looked out the window at all the squads right outside. When the cops drew their guns and went in the front door, my brother turned his hat backwards. I'll always remember that. The scene ended anticlimactically, with the girl's dad being walked out of the house in handcuffs. The girl moved away not too long after that -- something involving a divorce and a broken home.

Eventually, after about 30 years of service, the scanner crapped out. The radio still worked, but the police calls, which were far more important to everyone in the family than the England Dan & John Ford Coley tunes, stopped coming through. That year for Christmas, my siblings bought a new scanner for my parents. I wasn't impressed. In fact by this time in my life (my know-it-all teens) I was kind of irritated. Why do people have scanners? The whole thing seemed paranoid to me.

So last night at about 1:35am when Christa and I were sitting on my couch doing what we do best, which is yammering back and forth in a long series of one-liners, singing Lionel Richie's "Hello" and changing the lyrics to describe the video with the blind girl, and pausing now and then to watch more Veronica Mars. With all of this happening, the sound of the gunshot outside barely didn't immediately register. It took about two beats for me to say, "What the hell was that?" The answer was pretty obvious.

"Should we do something?" I asked, peering out the deck door.

Christa shrugged. "If the cops got another shots-fired report from my phone number, they'd probably laugh." Christa, I should explain, lives in the heart of the Hillside. I didn't see anything suspicious, like a dead body or a guy running down the street carrying a canvas bag with a dollar sign on it. It seemed that a call to the cops would result in a hassle that would end nowhere. We took note of the time in case there was an investigation, and went back to our cheesy existence.

But dammit, part of me wanted to reach over and turn up the knob on that scanner. To watch the red lights blink and then stop. To have the Lionel Richie interrupted by a cacophany of numbers, codes that could be looked up on a yellowed sheet of paper and translated into an answer.

I never got an answer.

Maybe I should ask my parents.