My old buddy chapter 3

Who really threw the stone?

Both Tom and Henry hung their heads when they heard this.

Just then, the phone rang. The policeman answered it. After listening for a few seconds, he kept saying “Yes.” After hanging up, he quickly dialed the police chief’s number and said urgently, “Chief, this is Officer Johnson. Please come right away. Mayor Smith is coming… Yes, yes, I’ll inform the deputy chief too!”

Soon, there was the sound of a car horn. A luxury car drove into the police station yard. Mayor Smith and his secretary arrived. On the way, the mayor told his secretary to notify the main leaders of the district government, the police department, the urban management department, and the business administration department to come here immediately. No one dared to disobey his order.

Mayor Smith entered the building. He didn’t go anywhere else but asked where the old men were. When he entered the room, he warmly shook hands with the two old men and invited them to the conference room, asking them to sit on either side of him.

In less than fifteen minutes, all the relevant leaders had arrived. The police station yard was filled with cars. It was obvious that they had come in a hurry. Some of them hadn’t even washed their faces. They wiped their faces with the wet towels handed by the police officers and rushed into the conference room.

When everyone was present, Mayor Smith asked Henry, “Sir, did you file a complaint about Jack setting up the grilled lamb skewer stand under your building?”

Henry got angry and said, “Of course I did! I went to the business administration, the urban management, the police station, the district government, but they all passed the buck. No one cared!”

Mayor Smith scanned the room and his tone became stern. “This is outrageous! You can’t even solve such a small problem, forcing the old man to take matters into his own hands and throw a stone! Couldn’t you have handled this through normal channels? Do you have to wait until someone gets killed to take action? I also heard that after the incident, the two old men were competing to be the ‘murderer’. Whether their actions are right or not, their spirit of taking responsibility should make us, who have been ‘inactive’, feel ashamed, don’t you think?”

After this scolding, everyone in the room didn’t dare to make a sound.

After the meeting, Mayor Smith told the others to leave first, saying that he wanted to talk to the two old men. So the leaders who attended the meeting wisely left in their cars. Only then did Mayor Smith start to scold Tom. “Dad, I got a call from Mom last night and learned that you were here to see Uncle Henry. Dad, I have to say, you’re getting more and more reckless. You know I’m the mayor here. Why didn’t you just call me if there was a problem? Instead, you wanted to throw a stone at someone!”

Hearing this, Henry realized that Mayor Smith was actually Tom’s son!

In fact, the matter was not that simple. Later, the stone that hit Jack was identified by the observatory. It was a meteorite that had fallen from the sky. It was God who hit Jack! Astronomers said that the probability of a meteorite hitting a person was as low as winning the lottery jackpot. Jack, that unlucky guy, really got hit! Well, maybe he was so bad that even God couldn’t stand it!

It’s true that Jack was hit by a meteorite, but it didn’t fall from the sky. It was thrown from upstairs. There was a man on the fifth floor of Henry’s unit. His daughter was going to take the middle – school entrance exam. Since Jack set up his stand, his daughter couldn’t study. So his wife took their daughter back to her parents’ place. The man himself worked in shifts. Due to lack of sleep, he almost had several accidents at work. Last night, he just couldn’t bear it anymore. He picked up a stone he had found by the river when he went back to his hometown. The stone looked quite strange. He opened the dark kitchen window and threw the stone at Jack downstairs. To his surprise, he hit him. After that, he quietly undressed and went to bed, thinking, “Finally, I can have a good sleep tonight!”