Panic in Detroit ... I mean Newburyport

Tonight after the meeting I described in my last post, I was standing outside City Hall with Barry Connell, on the corner of Pleasant and Green St. (but on Green St.). It was around 9:40.

This car screeched around the corner of Water St. and Green (which of course is one way the other way), pulled over to the side of the road and stopped outside the NPD building, facing us.

Barry and I both looked.

It sat there for several seconds, then made a U-turn and went back out onto Water St. By then I had started walking towards the Green St. lot. I saw the same car pull into said lot. It parked right by my car.

I was was a little freaked out, so I tried to catch the attention of a police officer who was lurking behind an SUV parked Green St. But he was on his cell phone and scampered off when he saw me to lurk instead in the ground floor entrance to City Hall ... *ahem*

So I actually entered the police dept. to tell them of some potentially suspicious activity taking place across the street.

They mobilized into action ... no, they really did ... except that an officer in a cruiser told me that cars often turn the wrong way up Green St. and then I thought I saw the car on the road and the officer in the SUV followed where I told him that car went.

But I was wrong - the car was still parked in the Green St. lot. Neither officer had thought to actually go into the Green St. lot (probably because I said the car was driving along Water St.).

Two men were wandering around the lot and returned to the car just as I got to my car.

They followed me, you guys ... right up until I saw the police SUV pulling out of The Tannery, and I was gesturing wildly to the officer, but he didn't see me (must have missed the 'stolen' license plate on my car) ... then I pulled over and turned around, saw the cruiser coming out of the Waterfront Trust lot and tried to flag that down ... that officer also ignored me, although I was waving madly out my window this time.

Well, by then I thought perhaps I was overreacting, so I drove up Federal St. to High St. and went home that way.

I called the NPD after I got home, told the dispatcher what had happened, and gave them my contact info. Just in case the men were in fact up to no good and someone actually had apprehended them.

I don't know if it was the Michigan in me or the Boston in me that caused me to panic, but it just did not look right.