Hoopty! My daughter had her 1983 Malibu stolen by thugs to be their hoopty. Pissed me off. I was able to use ATM access attempts (they got her ATM card and cell phone) and phone records to localize an area.
I rigged out like "Taxi Driver"....it was about year 2000. Strapped on a K-bar in a shoulder holster set up and a Sig .45 and staked out the hood. I actually saw the car my first night on stakeout, at a Mom and Pop 7-11. It had two 4x4 inch squares of black rust treatment where I was trying to stop some rust at the lower back windshield...they looked like two big black square eyes.
I saw those two black eyes as I drove past the store...the car was pulled up nose first. I wheeled into a carwash at 2AM and turned around to go get the car about 300 yards back. That's when I saw all the zombies watching from the shadows. I learned that hot summer night to look deeply into shadows...every shadow held a lurker. It was a real bad area and full of drug folks...summertime and they were roaming all over.
It was probably good the car was gone when I got back to the store. My plan was to block its escape with my car until the cops got there. I would have probably ended up in a fire-fight and badly outnumbered. A stupid situation but I was a pretty pissed off fellow at that point.
I went back to that neighborhood every night for about a week, cruised slowly through nearby neighborhoods, followed a few suspect cars. One night (late...it was usually at least 11pm or midnight before I hit the hood) I was slumped down in my Saturn watching traffic and two black women with about 5 little kids milling around them walked by the car. The grownups didn't notice me. One of the kids hollered, "mama, I just saw a white man in that car!" They spun around, saw me and all took off running.
I moved my stakeout location that night....I never saw the car again until about 1-2 months later. We got a call that it had been impounded. I went to the impound lot and got some flak from the lot owners about some official madness they wanted to subject me to before I could go see the car. I said, "forget it" and I left, found the car on their big lot and popped the trunk to look for the reason for all my drive and madness...my daughter's Outward Bound journal. She had it in the trunk, along with groceries, when the car was stolen.
Amazingly the journal was still there and OK...the groceries were there, too...awful. The inside of the car was stripped...the thugs used the inside trim to deck out another car. My biggest surprise was when I opened the hood to check the fluids before I tried to drive it out.
NO ENGINE!!! All I saw was ground...I couldn't have been more surprised if a tiger had exploded from the engine area. They took that 231(?) chevy engine for another car...bastards. All told it worked out good. I got my hunter/killer rigging fine tuned for proper movement and use and she got her journal. And I didn't have to go to jail for shooting a bunch of low life mofo's.
