When it ended, I discovered an exploded beer can on my trunk, which was decidedly abnormal.
I noticed only because as I was getting in to the car to drive away, I happaned to glance up and saw that the door to my gas tank was hanging open. I walked back to close it, but stopped to check inside the little door, just to make sure the gas cap was on. It wasn't.
Oh, man, I thought. Somebody's been siphoning my gas. Weak. I hoped I had enough to make it to the station for a fill-up. I looked 'round for the cap. Thankfully, I found it on the ground a little ways away, put it back on, and discovered that the door had been severely bent upon trying to close it. I started to bend it back a bit.
It was very dark, and if I hadn't tried to unbend my violated gas door I might not have immideatly noticed the beer can still sitting there. It was covered with soot, and upon closer inspection with someone's pen light, so was a good portion of my trunk.
We (Me, my buddies, the Seattle Police and Fire Martials) figured some neighborhood kids got an empty can, filled it with gas from my tank, placed it neatly on my trunk (very close to the now open fume-emitting gas tank!) and lit it off. Judging by the way the can had quite literally blown it's OPEN top cleanly off, and NO evidence of any kind of time-delay apparatus(for instance: A Fuse), it's quite likely that one of the kids is currrently walking around with no eyebrows. While this thought doesn't exactly make me happy, There is a certain amount of satisfaction in thinking that maybe they got the living _____ scared out of 'em. Learning... is a good thing.
I did not, in fact, find any fingers. Rest assured I'd have kept 'em. You know, just in case the owner had come looking for it or something. I won't tell you that I wasn't vaguely disappointed....
Had I found a finger, or similar misplaced appendage, I would have called the police immideatly. As it was, I felt the urgency of the situation had quite literally cooled, and figured the Seattle PD probably had better things to do at 10:30 on a Tuesday than to come have a look at scorch marks in the dark and tell me that a fire had, in fact, been ignited on my car. I decided I'd call the next day.
So, I sat there for a minute and tried to recall all the jerkey things you can do to somebody's car, and checked for them. Among other things, I checked the exterior of my gas tank for evidence of sugar or other particulates, had a look to make sure nobody had rudely stuffed a bananna in my tail pipe to add insult to the whole situation (I ain' gonna _fall_ for no _bananna_ in my tailpipe!), mildly suggested that everybody stand back (which went over like a ton of bricks, as I had intended, ha!), and started the car.
It ran fine. Not even an extraneous twitch.
I think the real wonder here was that nothing really got damaged. As it was, the only effects of a small crude gasoline bomb erupting on my trunk were scorch marks, boiled paint liquifying and forming intriguing parastaltic lava-like flows which nearly got far enough to run down the side of my car (and formed a ring where the can sat during the mini-inferno), which alternatly caused a not-small section where the paint had been neatly removed down below the primer to bare metal, and a rather nasty burnt metal sort of smell I get subjected to whenever I open the trunk.
The next day, I discovered that the paint on the inside of the trunk had turned skillfully-cooked-marshmallw-brown at ground zero. Evidently, that sucker got really hot.
I would have expected the back window to shatter from the concussion. In my experience, sudden application of intense heat to one corner of a piece of glass sould have been devistating as well. I would have expected damage to ANYTHING in my trunk, and at the very least, the gasket which keept the water out. It's even possible that if the molten paint (which was interesting and totally unexpected) had run down any further toward my open gas tank, which I later discovered had nice little gasoline trails leading to it...
I was parked _very_ close to the wooden side of the church, and several other cars, as well. That could have gotten nasty.
But, no. None of those things happaned. All the damage was cosmetic, and they chose to do it to the one car in probably a fair whack of land whose owner is constantly doing things like, oh, sanding and repainting. I'm glad they chose to do it to my car, as opposed to anyone else's in the vicinity, for exactly those reasons. Someone else would have had to spend probably thousands of dollars to get it fixed. Me, I've already got everything I need to make it seamless. I might have to buy some heavier-grit sandpaper, and I seriously doubt it will run me as much as $5.
I am vaguely disappointed I didn't get to see it actually on fire, though. Judging from the aftermath, it was probably pretty impressive...
