The Despite putting some 26 years into policing and receiving a medical retirement at age 48,

thanks to some wannabe gangster with an itchy trigger finger, I wasn't nearly ready to quit working.

The way I saw it, I was faced with two choices.

I could move out to the sticks and hope some small town sheriff's department has room for

a crazy old deputy with a limp or I could follow an ex-partner of mine into the wacky well-paying world of private investigation.

The idea of starting all over again in what is most definitely a young man's game was not appealing in the slightest.

I've worked my butt off to get to a level of relative autonomy and losing that would mean a big hit to both my ego

and my style of investigation.

Whereas on the other hand, going to work with my ex-partner would mean better pay and more professional freedom.

And when I thought of it like that, it didn't seem like I had much of a choice at all.

One of the first things I was told was not to expect the same level of

excitement or intensity as regular policing. I figured that went without saying

but when my first assignment involved getting to the bottom of some industrial

sabotage at an upstate retirement home, I joked about having made a terrible mistake.

I was fine with a change of pace and even referred to it as semi-retirement so I really was only being

sarcastic when I was told how boring PI work could be.

Besides putting me to work on a bunch of old timers, real old-timers, I mean,

was exactly the kind of assignment I've been hoping for.

Anyway, the job went a little something like this.

Over the last few months, a whole bunch of stuff had been either malfunctioning or going

missing at this one particular retirement home. Management claimed it was

industrial sabotage and that it ranged from petty annoyances to dangerous errors

...