“The story you’re about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

“I carry the tools. I have the knowledge, I follow the leads.” And sooner or later, everything is fixed.”

It was a cold morning in the city… the kind where trouble rolls in all quiet, like fog creeping in under an old flickering streetlamp.

I was just minding my business; working… a humble plumber trying to keep things dry in a world full of leaks, when the phone rang.

Dispatch had a tremble in her voice. That’s never good.

“Chad… we’ve got a situation. An older lady. Lives alone. Says there’s water rushing somewhere in her house. Real bad. No evidence of flooding, no wet floors or walls; no basement or crawlspace, just slab on grade.”

Rushing water… That’s the kind of phrase that makes a plumber’s spine tighten like a rusty old pipe wrench.

And a house on a cement slab? That’s a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

I grabbed my tools. My jacket. My sense of anxiety and dread and I headed out into the early morning dawn and into the unknown.

She answered the door like a woman caught between hope and disaster. Sweet as apple pie… and just as anxious as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

She led me inside, her voice shaking like an old neon sign. “It’s… gushing. I can hear it. But I can’t see where it is.”

The living room was quiet; except for it. A steady roar. A low hiss. A sound that whispered one thing to an old salty dog like me… pipe trouble.

I shut off the TV. No dice.

The sound stayed; undeterred by my investigation. Like a ghost haunting the ceilings and walls.

I checked the usual suspects around the house. Walls. Floors. Toilets. Hose bibs. Lines outside. But the clues just didn’t line up, none of the plumbing was givin’ up their secrets.

There was the noise and lots of it; but no culprit.

It was the kind of mystery that’d make any plumber detective squint through the cigarette smoke (if he smoked, but he doesn’t) and mutter something dramatic about fate. (and you know as well as I do that I’m all about the drama)

I paced the room lost in my head, tryin’ hard to piece together the clues I had. I Listened. Closed my eyes. The sound wasn’t coming from the walls. It wasn’t coming from the floor. It wasn’t coming from anywhere it should be comin’ from.

That’s when I saw it. The chair. She was rocking slowly, nervous-like, and next to her was a little wicker knitting basket, innocent as a choirboy on Sunday. But something about that basket… something about it felt wrong.

I bent down. Put my ear near it. The sound of rushing water grew louder. Like the basket itself had a secret. I lifted it and the sound rose with it. That’s when the music in my head swelled all dramatic like, the camera, if there was one, would zoom in, and the person narrating my life, or at least the voices in my head, would whisper: “You’re close… oh, so close.”

I dug into that basket like a detective going through the villain’s desk drawer, tryin’ to find the big reveal. Yarn. Needles. Projects half-finished, half-forgotten. But deeper in the shadows… a little hunk of trouble. A transistor radio. Crackling. Hissing. Pouring out static like a busted dam of noise.

It sounded just like rushing water. I held it up.

She gasped, blushing like a teenager caught sneaking in past curfew. Guilty… “Why, SIR, are you in my knitting bag?”

I clicked the radio off. Silence fell across the room like the final curtain on a Broadway tragedy. The sound of rushing water fading away like the static on the radio…

I gave her a grin; the kind a detective gives when the mystery’s wrapped up all nice and tidy. “Ma’am,” I said, “You called an emergency, but this one’s on me. This story alone was worth the trip.”

She exhaled all the worry she’d been carrying. Her shoulders softened. The color returned to her face.

I walked out into the black-and-white daylight, another mystery solved, another day in the life of a plumber-detective keeping the city dry… one knitting bag at a time.

The moral of the story is this: One dame’s emergency is another man’s story. Sometimes static does sound like rushing water, and I watch way too many old detective movies.