There was a thick darkness about, just a day after a new moon, only 1.7 % illuminated. At about 16th and Linden, I heard what sounded like 20 or so muffled, rapid handgun shots coming from up Linden. I wasn't sure, so I went to the middle of the street, which was illuminated there by a streetlight, and stared down for a few seconds. It was dark. There were no lights from where the shots came, no noise. Then I heard 15 more rapid shots, no noise, no lights, no cars. Then a bullet whizzed by over my head within about five feet and I jumped behind the building on the corner. It felt like the bullet appeared out of the black; staring down, it was a black hole, quiet.
I continued walking down Linden's sidewalk, keeping out of the street, to the park at 14th and turned around. On the way back from the park, before 16th, three dudes smoking in the dark of their front yard halfway-called out to me as I walked down the middle of the street. "Did you hear the gunshots?" I usually ignore people talking to me in my neighborhood because, as this story attests, it's shady. Prostitutes, crack fiends and dealers roam around. He had to say it three times, softly, as if giving me the opportunity to willfully ignore three shadowed figures in front of the house that has the most shady action in the neighborhood, occupied cars always parked in the street in front, people milling around, kids, women, dudes.
I said, excited, because it felt like a close call. "Yeah, did you hear that bullet come by? Somebody was going for it down there." He said, "Yeah, I was wondering where it came from." I told him it was from down Linden, and one of the other two said, "Yeah, it was West Grand, then." We kept talking for a few more seconds and then I left, saying to he and the other two, "Well, I'm going into the belly."
I kept looking and listening for the cops, but never heard any. About 15 minutes after the shots a cop car casually rolled up at 16th St. and turned down Linden toward the shots. I strolled down. One guy, about 30, in basketball shorts, house slippers and a white t-shirt stood in the intersection of 21st and Linden. His girlfriend?, a bigger black girl strolled up, and we all started talking, and then started toward the action, a block away. The girl was saying, "I was just frying some chicken ..."
Twenty minutes after the shots, the cops were just starting, quietly, mindlessly, it seemed, to flashlight the dark area on Linden St. just north of West Grand Ave. Four or five cops milled around the scene, their flashlights, sweeping the area with sharp, cool, blue-white crisp beams. Back and forth, back and forth. Gave the impression of ants swarming a fresh kill. I crossed the street to get a closer look, but as the police presence grew, and I knew I'd have to talk, I backed off, not wanting involvement.
The action centered around a bullet-riddled off-white Cadillac that barely was made out in the haze of a weak streetlight, a block-jump north. A cop finally, casually, started stringing up the yellow Crime Scene tape across Linden at West Grand. Not one siren had sounded to this point, and none would. Must have been premeditated murder: the second-darkest night of the mooncycle. Another day in West Oakland.
This morning, it occurred to me that that bullet that whizzed by from the black hole darkness of West Grand and Linden was likely aimed at me as I stared down from the well-lit intersection at Linden and 16th. I was in the middle of the street and staring down. But I was, according to Google Maps, a third of a mile away - a long way for a handgun bullet to travel. I think. Went to the scene this morning. It looked a long way to 16th, which re-confirmed my suspicion that that straightline bullet was purposely shot downstreet from 0.3 miles away, and not a stray from the car-bombardment. Who knows? Next time, I'm ducking no matter how silent, quiet, dark. After seeing the scene again, it is definitely too far to be aiming at someone. It was a stray.
This morning the street's open, as if nothing happened.
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