Surprise!

Dead poeple can be unpredictable.

It sounds weird, I know.

By definition, dead people are the most predictable people on the planet.  They're done moving around, and they've got nothing to talk about.  They're not going to show up in church wearing a fantastically indecent mini-skirt and they sure as hell are no longer going to say anything shocking over Thanksgiving dinner.  They're never going to drunk-dial you at 3am on a Tuesday and they'll never appear at your work and ask to borrow money.  Perhaps that's why when dead people do something unexpected- they're so damn creepy. It's just not normal.  In the natural order of things, they should be done with surprises and ought to just lie there and decompose while the rest of us dish out all the appalling behavior and "in-poor-taste" remarks (which I specialize in.)

I'm a big fan of the new James Bond franchise.  Daniel Craig is the man.  Sure, his ears stick out, and he kind of has the face of those little plastic treasure-trolls that middle aged women like to put on their desks at the office.  These unforunate aesthetics aside, I still think that the new James Bond movies are baked slices of awesome, drizzled with sugary sweet awesome sauce.  Therefore, I am delighted to have the opportunity to quote  the movie "Casino Royale":

As said by the character, Mathis, after he successfully frames a bad guy for murder by stowing an otherwise inconvenient corpse in the trunk of the bad guy's car:

"Just because one is dead does not mean one cannot still be useful."

Well, I must tweak this quote to my own purposes and instead say:

"Just because one is dead does not mean one cannot still be dangerous."

Let me 'splain.

Dispatch told me I had a dead body in the woods, a report that initially filled me with dread.
A young, female, dead body in the woods just screams "homicide".  The scenarios one can imagine for how she ended up there are never... comforting.  However, THIS young female body had a relatively benign story.  A man had been walking his dog and found her laying in the weeds in a "nature preserve" area just beyond a big bank of apartments.

"I walk this way with my dog everyday," the bug-eyed, traumatized suburbanite had gasped as I spoke with him.  "She wasn't there yesterday..."

A brief investigation of the scene had revealed the nature of the whole event.  She had apparently walked out to that location, popped her head-phones on and swallowed 3 whole bottles of prescription medication, washing them down with the diet coke she had stowed in her back-pack which lay nearby.  The head-phones were still in place and one of the empty bottles was still sitting in her lap.  We dismissed the guy who found her to go home and pour himself a tall, stiff one, while the two cops and I processed the scene and the body.
I noticed, as I looked her over, that she wasn't actually holding her cell-phone/music player.  Her cell phone was in the pocket of her coat and she was clutching a mysterious, square, pink item in her hand.

"What is that, that... thing... in her hand?"  I asked the police officers.  They shrugged.

"Okay, lady..." I grunted to the corpse as I leaned over her an pulled her rigored fingers loose from the object,  "Hand it over..." (Yes, I talk to the dead... no, I don't think they answer me)

I pulled the object loose and held it up for inspection.  It was roughly the size and shape of an old 110 film camera.  The thing was bright pink, and tucked into a little pink leather case that was cut away to reveal a switch on the side of the box and a strap that was attached to a metal pin that plugged into one end.  I had a flash of recognition.

"Oh, my gosh!  I know what this is!" I announced proudly to the officers, whose disgusted expressions indicated that the two of them likely believed the object's pink color meant it was some kind of feminine hygiene product.  They weren't altogether wrong.

"This is a personal alarm!  My uncle gave me one of these a while back.  You pull this little pin on the end like a grenade and it makes some unGODly loud noise.  It's supposed to scare off attackers."

My uncle DID give me one of those little personal alarms once, but I never used it.  Quite frankly, our discovery surprised me in as much as I didn't think that anyone made those personal alarms anymore.  I was even more surprised to imagine anyone actually used them. In my opinion the effectiveness of such a device depended completely on the assumption that one would never be accosted by anything more threatening than a nervous cat.  I gave mine to my mom and took Hapkido classes instead.

The cops looked doubtful.

"I'm serious you guys... watch, I'll show you."  I grabbed the little strap attached to the pin and pulled.

Nothing happened.

"Huh... that's weird..." I mumbled as I turned the device over in my hands, plugging the pin back in.  I noted the switch on the side, along with a little raised button.  I flipped the switch and tried pulling the pin again.

Again... nothing happened.

"Man, what am I doing wrong here?"  I ran my fingers along the side and, feeling the little button on the side, I pushed....

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

The end of the device erupted into a shower of icy blue lightning as the tell-tale clapping-crack of a tazer shattered the serene peacefulness of the quiet, wooded scene around us. My hand had been covering the business end of the tazer, and through some stroke of luck, my palm had NOT actually been in contact with the prongs when the weapon went off.... all the same...

"HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT!" I shieked as leapt at least 2 feet in the air and flung the tazer down at the officers' feet.  The two of them scrambled back as though I had just launched an angry pit-viper their direction and their hands slapped to their hips where their side-arms were secured in holsters.

We all stood there is silence for a moment.  The ambient noise of the woods had come to an abrupt halt, and you could imagine the local fauna turning to one another in confusion and saying:  what the fuck was THAT?
The silence was broken by the two officers bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

"Oh my GOD, you should have SEEN the expression on your FACE" the younger officer howled at me as he slapped his thigh and rebuttoned the safety strap on his holster.

"Well," the older one chuckled, "THAT will get your attention."

"Okay, sure.. yeah, you guys think THAT'S funny..."  I said as I retrieved the little pink tazer and brandished it at the two of them, letting the lightning bark at them as I pressed the button.

"Watch it now. I've got one of those too..." The older officer warned me as he reached to his belt and pulled his giant, black, police-issue tazer gun.... the kind that fires pronged wires into your flesh and issues about 10,000 more volts that the little civilian model I was holding.

(Here, I feel I should note that, way back when, during my time on the ambulance, I had a cop once tell me that before an officer can carry a tazer- they have to actually BE tazed... The cop choked up and fell silent when I asked him to describe the experience.  He looked me dead in the eye and said he'd rather be shot than tazed.)

"Now, now... there's no need for THAT kind of talk..." the younger officer said to the older officer as he pulled his own tazer and levelled it at the older man's thigh.

"Man, that just would not look good, would it?"  The older officer said as he observed the Mexican tazer stand-off in which we now found ourselves.

"What?" I asked, observing that my girly little tazer looked a lot less threatening than the industrial strength monsters I was up against.

"That poor guy, walking his dog tomorrow morning- and finding the dead body still here, surrounded by two cops and one medical examiner, stuck full of prongs and tazed into unconsciousness."

At autopsy, we confirmed that the woman had died of the drug overdose and wasn't fending off an attacker with her tazer when she "passed on".  It seems kind of... counter-intuitive to me.  I mean, I understand not actually wanting to be attacked, but what's with the self-defensive grandstanding when you're already going to kill yourself?  What, exactly, are you afraid of?  A murderer?  But, then again, I suppose I can't begrudge her not wanting to die painfully... as she doubtlessly would have if a murderer had gotten to her before she could do the deed herself.  And who am I to say that her tactics weren't successful?  She sure scared the hell out of me.