Clairvoyant

No, please. Don’t try to help me out. I’ve done this for years, and my skills require concentration.

I see a man. He’s around 25 or 35. He’s tallish. His hair is brown. On his left wrist is a watch—this is important—it’s a digital watch, not analog. Make sure you write that down.

There’s a magazine. It’s on a chair—no, a bench. It’s a bench seat…on a bus. The magazine is on a bus seat. Someone left it there. Someone who was riding the bus that morning. They may have been riding the bus to work, or to the drugstore.

The man with the brown hair picks up the magazine. Let’s pause here. Do you see that what this means is that the brown-haired man was on the bus? You do? Okay. Just checking. We need to be on the same page here.

The floor of the bus is dirty, but not dirtier than bus floors normally are. Could you note that? That they're not unusually dirty? Thanks. The bus seats are vinyl, with vinyl piping. Some of them have gum under them. Don’t ask me which ones. There is a lot of gum, and I will get squeamish and lose my concentration if you ask me to pinpoint which seats have the most gum stuck to them.

Is it really that important? Okay, well, the ones just before and just after the side door, the fourth one back on the right, the last 3 on the right before the back bench, and the last 2 on the left before the back bench.

You know, I don’t really understand how this is important to your investigation, but let me think...

Well, mostly Bubblicious Gonzo Grape, and Dentyne Ice.

Wait! I think you may have something there after all. There is gum stuck between two pages of the magazine. And it’s not a magazine. It’s a Little Nickel flyer. The gum is stuck between an ad for self-cleaning gutters and an estate sale annoucement. The estate sale lists furniture, sporting equipment, and a waterbed. There are baby items, a burl coffee table, and a non-operating hot tub, which you have to haul away yourself.

The brown-haired man walks to the back of the bus with the flyer. He is despondent. He must miss his son’s birthday the coming weekend, for reasons I can’t see. His son is 7, and has a disease. Or a limp. Or he limps because of a disease. The man peruses the flyer. He’d really like to send his son a nice, used football for his birthday.

But this is terrible! He misses the estate sale ad with the sporting equipment listing because it’s stuck to the ad for self-cleaning gutters. How will he find a used football now? Who will help him gain his crippled son’s love?

You people really have to get to work and track this guy down, or there’s going to be a very disappointed little boy out there.