Remember my neighbors? Well, there have been some developments.

Andreas and I were woken up at 6am on Thursday by a police loudspeaker instructing someone (us, naked in bed?) to come out with their hands up. Being the rubbernecker I am, I tossed on a bathrobe and went to the living room to investigate.

There was an armored truck (the kind used to transport sacks of money to and from banks) in our neighbors’ front yard. There were several police cars parked on the street and two SWAT team members with matching shaved heads, goaties and rifles (brothers? lovers? both?) poking around the side of our neighbors’ house, shining flashlights into the backyard.

It was truly a WTF moment. The cops seemed relatively low-key (despite the rifles) and there were no perpetrators to be seen anywhere. No gun shots were fired. Where were the people in the vehicle who’d been told to come out with their arms up? There was nothing really to see, other than the excitement of a SWAT-style peace-keeper vehicle showing up a few minutes later. The police were mostly just standing around, so Andreas and I went back to bed to try to get some more sleep. By the time I left for work a couple hours later, everything was gone. The only sign of any weirdness was that our neighbor’s front window was broken out.

My theory was that of coincidence: someone had hijacked an armored vehicle, a chase had ensued, and since we’re on the edge of a weird 5-way intersection, the stolen vehicle had missed a turn and ended up in my neighbor’s front yard. I laughed to myself about how the drug dealing neighbors must have been shitting themselves, flushing their stash as the cops investigated the armored vehicle that had ended up on their front lawn.

But how to explain the broken window? I trawled the news for anything about “armored vehicle seattle” but never found anything.

Then the neighbors disappeared. Andreas and I got home Friday night to find their front door wide open, and a few lights on. The only car around was an old beater that had been parked for weeks (months?) at the curb in front of the house.

Strange.

Today I actually walked the 20 feet over to the house and peered in the still-wide open door. “Hello?” I said. No answer. The place was abandoned, no furniture, just some clothes strewn around the living room. After hemming and hawing for a bit (I don’t like talking to the authorities, even if I don’t have anything to hide), I decided to call the police. I mean, the place is obviously a rental, so even if nothing sketchy happened and the tenants just bailed, the owner should know, right? Someone should lock the door, right? The house should be checked for rotting corpses by someone other than me, right?

When I called the police, they said they’d first research what had happened a few days ago before starting a new investigation. When I’d mentioned the armored vehicle, the officer said “Oh, if SWAT showed up, then it was definitely an investigation.” But I hadn’t mentioned the SWAT brothers/lovers cops. How did he know SWAT had showed up? I realized I had been wrong: that wasn’t a hijacked security vehicle. That was an undercover SWAT vehicle. I think our neighbors just got massively busted.