by Dan Taylor
He makes it a couple steps before Grace says, “Wait, Officer!”
He stops and comes back, resumes his position resting his elbows on the edge of the passenger-side window. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Forgive my husband. He’s just a little tired. Whatever it is you need from us to arrest this man, we’re willing to go through it tonight.”
He smiles. “I think that’s the right decision.” He pauses. “Now tell me, do you folks always go for a midnight drive with your luggage in your vehicle?”
16.
“What the hell does that have to do with that man in the back of your car having assaulted my husband?” Grace says.
“Ma’am, calm down and don’t curse.”
Grace is pissed, and she looks super sexy. But that’s not what I’m focusing on right now. That would be why this asshole is treating us like the suspects when we’re so clearly the victims. Grace says, “What curse word?”
“You used the H word.”
“The H word? Hell?”
“Yeah. Where I come from, that’s a curse word.”
When Grace gets super pissed, she becomes a less-than-stellar debater, which goes someway to explaining her response. “Well, where I come from, you invariably get served your salted caramel latte by a chick with tattoo sleeves and piercings in her face.”
“Ma’am, don’t get agitated.”
Grace takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for a second. I think it’s worked, her calming herself down, until she says, “I’m not agitated. I’m super f-ing pissed.”
“I don’t want to have to arrest you, too.”
Not wanting to spend the night in our motel room alone, I say, “Now let’s all calm down a little. Officer, I don’t want to speak for my wife, because, well, we’d know how that would go…” I pause, waiting for him to soften upon hearing my clichéd the-old-ball-and-chain joke I injected into the situation, but he just stares at me stoically. I continue, “I don’t want to speak for my wife, but I think she’s just a little confused about why you’re questioning us about what our intentions were when we got into our vehicle. As far as I can tell, whether we were checking out of the motel room—which we’d paid for in advance, by the way—is impertinent to the crime that was committed against us.” I turn to Grace. “Have I got that right, honey?”
“You have, honey. Impertinent,” she says, her arms crossed over her chest.
He looks at us both, taking his time over it, and then says, “So are you saying you were fleeing the motel room?”
I sigh. “That’s not the word I would have used, but yeah, we were checking out. The people in the neighboring room, as far we could tell, they’ve fallen to sleep with their TV way loud, like they wear hearing aids and just nodded off. We’re light sleepers, and yeah, we were going to leave the motel room, see if we could find another one.”
He thinks for a second. And then says, “Then why’d you folks tell me and him you were going for a midnight drive?”
“Tell you what, Officer, we’ll save you the paper work tonight and decide not to press charges. Have a nice evening, and I hope you don’t feel too bad when Murder McRaperson does this shit to someone else,” I say. “Honey, can you roll up the window?”
Grace goes to, but the officer says, “Now hold on a second. I want what you two want: that shit bag behind bars. But as I said, I’m just trying to clear up what happened before the incident so I can arrest him.”
“Then what my wife said happened, apart from we were checking out of the motel room, unofficially.”
“And you didn’t do anything to provoke him? Like, I don’t know, called him a jackass?”
“So that’s what this is about, your Mr. Roboto routine? The fact that I called that jackass a jackass?”
“So you admit it.”
Grace and I shake our heads simultaneously. And then I say, “I’ll write him and his mom a written apology, if you’d like.”
Playing along, Grace turns to me, and says, “My mom’s going to be so mad when she finds out I’ve been given detention.”
“And my dad’s gonna tan my hide.”
Our bit’s interrupted by the officer slamming his hand down onto the window edge.
Grace and I look at him, shocked.
He’s lost his shit, but then he takes a deep breath and bites his lip and simmers down. Then he says, “You two, stay here.”
He goes back to his car and gets in the driver’s seat.
It’s hard to tell, again because he has his lights shining right into our eyes, but it looks like he’s radioing it in.
He’s at least speaking into his radio.
I say, “What do you reckon? Should we just drive off?” And then I think twice. “Can we even do that without him chasing after us? I’m not too sure.”
“Do you think he knows we’re high?” Grace asks.
“I thought so, when he was smiling, but now I think he’s just straight out of the academy and doesn’t know how to set the right tone.”
“I don’t like this, Jake.”
“Relax, no one likes speaking to the law when they’re fucked up.”
“Not that. I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole thing.”
“When he comes back, he either arrests the guy, or we drive off. I promise.”
Grace squeezes my hand.
We sit in silence thirty seconds or so, and then the officer comes back.
He must be done talking to Grace, because he comes to my side of the vehicle.
He stoops down so that his head is level with mine, props himself up on the window edge, and removes his shades for the first time. “You folks look tired.”
“We are, officer. We’d just like this thing to be wrapped up so we can go back to bed,” I say.
“I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.”
“Look, if we have to come down to the station, dot the Is and cross the Ts, hell, even if we have to file the damn report ourselves, we’d like that man arrested.”
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the vehicle.”
“For what?”
“We can discuss that when you’ve gotten out of the vehicle.”
“Then I decline to discuss it.”
“You decline?”
I grab hold of the steering wheel, gripping it tight, as a way of responding. I also look straight ahead, ignoring him.
I hear what sounds like a button being undone, and then Grace screams. Right in my ear.
I turn my head to see what made her scream, but it’s stopped by my cheek pressing into cold, hard metal.
“I take it from my wife’s screaming that that isn’t your baton you’re pressing into my face.”
“Sir, step out of the vehicle, and slowly. And you, ma’am, put your hands on the dashboard.”
“Is this necessary, Officer?”
He doesn’t respond, so I say, “Okay, this is your party. I’m getting out.”
Getting out of Winnie Pooh, with its rusted door hinges, is usually done in a slow manner, but I do it extra-slowly, with him pressing the gun into my cheek the whole time, only taking it off so I can close the door.
When out of the vehicle, he pulls me to my left with his free hand and slams me up against Winnie.
My face smushed, I say, “Now’s probably a good time to tell me what this is all about.”
“Have you been the driver of this vehicle all day, sir?”
“You can drop the sir, if you’d like. It doesn’t seem appropriate with your pistol pressed into the back of my ear.”
“Have you?”
“More or less.”
There’s a flash of white-hot pain in the back of my head, and I lose consciousness for a millisecond. As blood trickles down the back of my neck, Grace is going apeshit, hollering and cursing and telling the officer he’ll never get away with it.
Trying to calm her down, I say, “Don’t worry, honey. It only feels like a flesh wound. And as for your question, Officer, Grac
e did a little driving this morning before I took over. What’s this about?”
“This vehicle was reported as being involved in a hit-and-run accident earlier in the day.”
17.
“That’s bullshit! That guy climbed onto the top of our vehicle, and we didn’t know he was there. Let him go, you asshole.”
That was Grace, by the way. Never have I thought it was a good idea to tell the person who’s pressing a gun into my head that what they said is bullshit.
“Honey, I think you should calm down. And maybe drop the asshole thing. Maybe switch it for gentleman. Like this, ‘Let him go, you gentleman.’ That didn’t quite work, but you get the picture—”
“Shut up.”
“It’s true, Officer. That guy, he climbed onto our roof when our vehicle was stationary, and we drove off, started driving, I mean, before we stopped, with him up there. What I meant to say is—”
The officer starts reading me my Miranda rights, but he gets them all mixed up, says that I have the right to remain in a court of law, and that anything I say can and will be used against me in silence, and that I have the right to afford an attorney.
I’d laugh, if I didn’t just realize something.
He cuffs me, trips me up so that I land face first on the asphalt, and then says, “Ma’am, I’m coming around there to arrest you too. Keep your hands on the dashboard. When I get there, if your hands aren’t on the dashboard, I’m going to shoot you. Is that understood?”
Between sobs, Grace says, “It’s understood, you jerk.”
Thirty seconds later Grace and I are getting escorted to his squad car, both of us in handcuffs. He tells us to wait where we are, and that he’ll shoot us if we run, before he goes over to the rear passenger door.
He opens it, says, “Sir, you’re free to go.”
Marlboro Man gets out, and the officer removes his handcuffs. He thanks the officer for his mercy, before he tips his hat to us and apologizes for the misunderstanding.
Grace whispers, “Jake, what the hell’s going on here?”
The officer’s busy telling Marlboro Man to keep out of trouble, like he’s a teenager who got caught egging his math teacher’s car, so I take the opportunity to respond to Grace. I whisper, “Honey, I don’t think Officer Numb Nuts is a police officer. He isn’t a police officer, at all.”
Grace sighs. “I kinda thought that myself.”
“Whatever happens, I love you, Grace.”
“I love you too, Silly Dummy.”
18.
It’s a good question, Grace’s. What the hell is going on here? As I said to Grace, in a less humorous fashion than I will now, the officer who has ‘arrested’ us is no more a police officer than I am a five-ring-winning quarterback with a killer throwing arm and a bubble butt.
I think I can go ahead and assume that Marlboro Man was a plant, and that he never intended to rape and kill Grace and kill me. And that his attacking us was a ruse so that the imitation police officer could swoop in, stop the guy, making himself appear to be a lawman in the process.
It’s the rest of it I’m not sure about—why he’s doing it.
All I know is that letting on we know he isn’t a police officer might be a bad thing. I go to whisper this to Grace, but before I can, Marlboro Man and the fake police officer finish up their conversation, and I don’t get the opportunity.
Marlboro Man runs off into the night, behind us, probably towards and then down the highway, where I’m sure his vehicle is waiting for him.
And the fake police officer—let’s call him Officer Jockstrap from now on—turns to us. Says, “I’m going to put you two in the back of the squad car. We’re going for a drive.”
He leads us to the rear passenger seats. Now that his headlights aren’t shining into our eyes, I can see that, had they not been, I would’ve smelled a rat. His uniform looks legit, but his car, while it’s ostensibly painted like a police car, has a shoddy paint job, like a five-year-old did it who hasn’t quite mastered how to color in without going over the lines.
He puts me in the back of the car first, guiding my head under inside safely, up until the point he says, “Watch your head,” when he rams it into the window frame. Hilarious.
With me in the back, he guides Grace in, refraining from banging her head.
Wanting to let Grace subtlely know it’s not a good idea to out the guy, I say, “Where are you taking us, Officer?”
Grace goes to speak, gets as far as, “Let’s drop the bullshit—” before I elbow her.
She looks at me, makes a face that asks, what the fuck? and I raise my eyebrows a couple times, which only adds to her confusion.
Officer Jockstrap asks, “Let’s drop what bullshit?”
I get there before Grace does: “The bullshit that we weren’t the perpetrators of that hit and run.”
Grace looks at me and I reassure her with a slight nod.
He doesn’t say anything, just starts the car.
We pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway, heading in the opposite direction we were headed before we retired for the night in the motel room. The direction that eventually leads back to Pants, Oklahoma.
As we drive past the parking lot, both Grace and I watch Winnie Pooh, whose doors are still open. Jesus, even I’m starting to think of that old thing as anything but an inanimate object. I wonder if we’ll get to feel the bump of her shitty suspension again.
I wait till another car goes past, distracting Officer Jockstrap, before I take the opportunity to lean over to Grace, looking like I’m kissing her on the cheek, and whisper into her ear, “Don’t let him know we know,” before actually kissing her.
“Hey, no kissing back there.”
“Sorry, Officer. It’s just that my wife, she’s a little spooked by this whole thing, and I wanted to calm her down with a soft caress of my lips. We’ve never been in trouble with the actual law before. Isn’t that right, honey?”
Playing along like he’s a real police officer, Grace says, “The closest I’ve come to a bona fide police officer is when I went to a ladies’ night at some bar in Hollywood I can’t remember the name of and there was a stripper there. Dressed as a police officer, before he, well, took it off, which isn’t what I expect you to do or that your uniform would suggest that you’re going to do.”
“You folks from Hollywood?”
“Not from there. No one who lives there is. I’m from some place where people are religious and God fearing, a place where people use corn instead of chewing gum,” I say.
“And where would that be?”
I think a second, and then quote a line from one of my favorite movies. “A little place called Shooter’s Bay.”
“And where’s the little missy from?”
Grace says, “Am I the little missy?” A little sass.
“You see any other little missies in the vehicle?”
“I don’t, including me.”
“You’re not a little missy?”
“I think you’ve said missy enough times for tonight.”
“Ooo, someone’s sensitive.”
“I just think other adjectives exist.”
Either Officer Jockstrap doesn’t know what an adjective is or he’s bored of the conversation, as he goes quiet, at least talking-wise. He starts whistling a tune.
We need a plan to escape this lunatic, but any plan, I imagine, if it’s to be effective, needs to involve Grace. Problem is, I can’t exactly communicate a plan to her.
Or can I?
I start rocking back and forth, groaning a little.
“What’s going on back there?” Officer Jockstrap asks.
“I need to pee, and bad.”
“Can’t you wait?”
“Until what? We arrive at the station?”
“Who said we’re driving to the station?”
“I just thought as much, with you having arrested us and all.”
He thinks a second. “You’re just going to have to hold
it.”
“I’ll try.”
I wait a minute before saying, “I’ve got to go really bad, now. It came on suddenly. I knew I shouldn’t have drunk that motel room espresso.”
“I’m not pulling over.”
“Suit yourself. But I have to go in the next five minutes, and that’s assuming there aren’t any bumps in the road. My diet today has consisted of Sugar Puffs for breakfast, very little fluids, and an asparagus salad.”
Seemingly cottoning on, Grace adds, “And that chef, he didn’t skimp on the asparagus.”
He sighs. “Hold on a second. I’ll find a place to pull over.”
A couple hundred yards down the highway he pulls over. He gets out and comes around to the rear passenger door.
Unsurprisingly, he has his gun drawn and trained on us as he says, “The little missy gets out first, waits by the car, and you can go over there and do your business. You try to run, I’ll shoot you in the back.”
I look around Grace to where he pointed, a bush that goes up my knees. And then say, “That’ll work. But shouldn’t you just leave my wife in the car, locked?”
“Nice try, but she’s coming with us.”
I shrug. “If that’s the way you want it.”
Grace gets out and does as he says, standing by the car.
I shimmy out next. He pushes me in the direction of the bush.
I make it a couple steps before I stop and think. “Wait a minute. Who’s going to get my dick out?”
He’s quiet a second, thinking.
“It has to be outside of my pants if I’m to avoid stinking out the backseats of your car,” I say.
He shakes his head, thinking. “The little missy can lie on the ground, on her stomach, and I’ll accompany you over there. I’ll take your cuffs off, and you can get your penis out and do your business. You try any funny business, I’ll—”
“Shoot me in the back. I get it. Honey, if you wouldn’t mind…”
“I need some help getting down. My hands are cuffed behind my back.”
“Would you mind, Officer?”
He helps Grace get into a lying position. When she’s face down in the dirt, she says, “Thanks,” blowing up a puff of dust with her breath.