"There's a man at the door."

I was in the laundry room, turning dirty clothes into clean ones, when my daughter hollered to me that there was a man at the door.

I've actually been having some issues with a local who has lost his grasp on reality, and who believes that I'm the cause of his problems, so I made decent speed to the door. Not running, not amped, but ready. To my irritation, the door was standing ajar. I opened it, and found one of our newest officers at my department on the porch. I'm afraid that he may have misread my irritation with my daughter's accurate-yet-incomplete report as irritation at seeing him. He stepped back, and noted my hand in my pocket.

"Damn, Matt, you were about to put a cap in my ass!" He laughed.

I protested that I was happy to see him, and that no such thing was on my mind.

"Bull. You've got your hand on a gun, right now!"

I had actually been re-seating my little J-frame back into my leather pocket holster. I shrugged and pulled the whole rig out to seat it better, and re-pocketed it.

I closed the door and stepped outside, expecting there to be a potentially sensitive issue. There wasn't one. We chatted. Seems that a month or two back, I had done the recently-late officer from another agency a favor, when he had asked me over chat on our MDT to check on the registered address of a reported hit-and-run vehicle. I had found the suspect vehicle in its driveway, and documented the damage to it thoroughly photographically. I then had put all the picturess on a DVD,. and mailed it to him (my email couldn't handle it, and I was too lazy to set up a DropBox account.). Well, with his sudden passing, the case was languishing. I said that I would find the pictures and re-mail them to his P.D.

Strange the things that pop up.

Now I need to have a chat with the family about my expectations on answering the door and giving a more complete report than just "a man at the door."