She read it. She read it again, slower, the way I had. When she got to the part about restitution, her eyebrows went up just slightly, and I decided I liked her.
"Ma'am," she said, "HOA disputes are a gray area for us. A lot of these covenants let the association come onto a lot to fix a violation, usually after notice. Whether this," she lifted the paper, "falls inside that is probably a lawyer question. But taking personal property out of a fenced backyard, and holding it for payment, that's a different animal. I'll take a report for criminal trespass and theft, and I'll attach the notice, and if you have any footage..."
"My neighbor does. Both his doorbell and his phone."
"Then I'd like a copy of that too." She took out a notepad. "What's your estimated value on the items?"
I'd done the math in my head already, standing in front of my inverters. "Mower, about forty-two hundred. Freezer, six hundred. Outdoor fridge, eleven hundred. Smoker, four hundred. Pressure washer, two-fifty. The cords, maybe a hundred." I paused. "And there's about ninety pounds of venison in the freezer. Or there was."
She wrote it down. She glanced at the notice again. Ferrell Property Compliance, LLC. "I know Rusty Ferrell," she said, a little grimly. "He does a lot of work for HOAs and apartment complexes. Evictions, junk removal, that kind of thing. He's not a bad guy. He's just a guy who does what the paperwork says." She tore off a card with a case number on it. "I'm going to go talk to him. And I'm going to go talk to Ms. Ashworth. You stay here, all right? Don't go over there."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good," she said, and then, almost against her will: "You really don't have a meter?"
"I really don't."
"Huh," she said. "I didn't know you could do that."
Ozzie had already sent his recordings to my phone by the time she left, with his grandson's help over the phone, and I sat on the patio in the dusk with Splice's head on my foot and watched them.
The doorbell camera's footage was wide and fish-eyed, but clear. At 10:04 Wednesday morning, a white box truck with FERRELL PROPERTY COMPLIANCE on the side pulled up at the curb, followed by a gray pickup. Four men in navy polo shirts got out. Then a golf cart rolled up behind them, and Glenda Ashworth climbed out of it in a white sun visor with a clipboard under her arm.