"You want me to get the glass guy out here today? Rush order?"
"Yeah. Get me the invoice as soon as possible. And Tony, everything. Itemize every single thing. The emergency board-up, the rush fee on the glass, the labor, the rug cleaning, everything."
The bill came to $3,450.12.
I'm a reasonable man. I decided to give her one chance to do the right thing before I unleashed the legal hounds. I typed up a polite, formal letter. It stated the facts: she broke the window, here is the video evidence, here is the police report number, here is the invoice for repairs, please remit payment within ten days to avoid further legal action.
I put it in a nice manila envelope and walked it over to her mailbox. Her car was in the driveway. She was home. I went back to my house and watched the camera feed.
About ten minutes later, Brenda emerged. She opened the mailbox, pulled out the envelope, and recognized my return address. She didn't even open it. She ripped the envelope in half, then into quarters, then into confetti.
She threw the pieces onto the ground and stomped on them. Then, in a move of breathtaking pettiness, she walked around to her backyard. She reappeared a moment later with a small garden shovel. On the shovel was a fresh pile of dog feces, courtesy of her yappy little terrier.
She walked to the property line and flung the mess onto my driveway, right on top of the torn-up invoice. Then she looked directly at my camera, gave it the middle finger, and went inside. I saved that video, too.
"Okay, Brenda," I said to the screen. "No more Mr. Nice Guy."
I didn't want a regular lawyer. I didn't want the guy who did my closing, a nice man in a tweed jacket who specialized in wills and estates. I needed a weapon. I needed a legal mercenary.
I found him online. His name was Saul Goodman. No, seriously, that was his name, and he leaned into it hard. His billboard on the highway said "Better Call Saul" in a font that barely avoided copyright infringement. His website featured a GIF of him high-fiving a pile of money.
His office was in a strip mall next to a vape shop and a sketchy massage parlor. It smelled of cheap cologne and aggressive ambition. Saul himself was a short man in a suit that was too shiny, wearing a pinky ring that looked heavy enough to break glass. He listened to my story, his eyes glittering like a shark that had just smelled chum in the water.
When I played him the brick video, he actually cackled. When I played him the video of Brenda throwing dog waste after rejecting the invoice, he slammed his hand on the desk.
"Gold. This is absolute gold. Jack, my boy," Saul beamed. "We got her dead to rights on the property damage.
That's easy. But we don't want easy. We want painful."
"I want her to pay for the window," I said.
"Pish-posh. The window is peanuts. We sue for the window. Then we sue for emotional distress, the trauma.
You can't sleep in your own home. You live in fear of flying masonry. We sue for loss of use of the living room. We sue for the cost of the upgraded security system you had to install because of her previous harassment. We can tie that in. And, of course, legal fees."
He started scribbling figures on a yellow pad. The numbers were getting very large, very fast.
"We're going to bury this Karen under a mountain of paperwork so high she'll need oxygen to climb out," Saul declared.
The first step was serving her the lawsuit papers. Saul explained that people like Brenda evade process servers like it's an Olympic sport. If they can't hand you the papers, the lawsuit can't start.
"Leave it to me," Saul said with a wink.
Two nights later, a pizza delivery car pulled up to Brenda's house. A young guy got out carrying a large pepperoni pizza box. He rang the bell. Brenda answered the door. We watched on my security camera.
"I didn't order a pizza," she snapped.
"Uh, is this 4002 Elmwood? Order for Brenda, paid for by a secret admirer?" The kid improvised beautifully.
Brenda paused. Vanity warred with suspicion. Vanity won. She opened the door wider to take the pizza.
As soon as her hands touched the box, the kid flipped open the lid. Inside wasn't a pepperoni pizza. It was a thick stack of legal documents secured to the cardboard.
"Brenda Johnson, you are served!" the kid yelled, snapping a photo of her holding the box with his phone, then sprinting back to his car like he'd just pulled a heist.
Brenda stood there holding a cardboard box full of lawsuits, her mouth agape. Then she let out a screech that probably frightened bats three towns over and threw the box onto her own lawn. Too late. The game was afoot.
Brenda, in her infinite wisdom, decided not to hire a lawyer. She posted a long, rambling manifesto on the neighborhood Facebook group about how lawyers were parasites of the deep state and how she would represent herself because "truth is my shield."
Saul read the post and almost wept with joy. "A pro se litigant who thinks she's smarter than the system. Jack, Christmas came early."
The court ordered mediation first. This is where you sit in a room with a neutral third party and try to hammer out a deal before a judge gets involved. It's supposed to be civilized.
We met in a sterile conference room at the courthouse. I was there with Saul, who was wearing his most intimidating pinstripe suit. Brenda was there alone, armed with three oversized binders filled with what looked like internet printouts. The mediator was a soft-spoken elderly man named Mr. Henderson, who looked like he just wanted everyone to get along.
He started by asking Brenda for her side of the story. Brenda stood up. She didn't speak. She performed.
"Mr. Henderson, what you have here is a classic case of entrapment and psychological warfare waged by this man," she said, pointing at me, "against a defenseless woman."
She opened a binder. It was full of blurry photos of my house during construction.