Images et Échos D’autres Réves

He was on a two lane road that approached a school playground, set up where the speed limit dropped from 45 to 30, and he looked down the road, saw a little red car headed in at close to 70; he watched as the car passed the 30MPH sign and pulled the trigger.

"72," he grinned -- and the little car's brakes locked up, the driver looking at him as she skidded past. He put on his strobes and pulled out behind her, but she was already pulling off the road into a faculty parking lot at the school. He pulled in behind her and killed the strobes, then checked out on traffic with dispatch and dismounted, approached the car.

He saw blond hair, long, wavy blond hair -- and black skin. As he got closer, long legs and purple fishnet stockings, a gold lamé dress -- and the shoes, too. Big hands, and aircraft carrier sized shoes.

"Yes, good afternoon..." he began, scanning the car for weapons.

"Well, it was. It sho ain't now," the woman said, lightly laughing.

"Yes, well, you were observed doing 72 in a 30, and I'll need to see you license and proof of financial responsibility." He watched her closely now...hand on his Sig.

She opened her purse, pulled out a license and an insurance card and handed them to him.

He looked at the license and did a double take. "Uh, it says your name is Harlan T Polk. Is this your license -- that your name?"

"Yes it is," he said, his voice now a deep baritone. "Any problem with that, officer?"

He bit his cheeks, tried not to laugh as he walked back to the Harley. "Uh, 2141, need 27,28, 29 on..." he said as he called out the driver's and vehicle information, then he added. "I'm out on a female, black, in a gold lamé dress in heels."

When dispatch read out Polk's information the radio erupted in squelch pops, a sure sign that everyone knew what was going down, and sure enough, by the time he finished writing up Polk's ticket two patrol cars drove by, the officer's hooting as they passed.

He walked back to the car and handed over the ticket book. "Press hard, you're making three copies," he repeated as he did for all his paying customers, then he took the ticket book back and tore out Polk's copy and gave it to him. "By the way," he continued, "I've heard that talking in a falsetto like that really damages your vocal cords, and there's an increased risk of cancers in the throat associated with that."

Polk looked up at him like he had just stepped out of the mothership and said "Take me to your leader." "You for real?"

"Yessir. I read that in an Otolaryngology Journal a few months ago."

"You what?"

"There are speech coaches that can help you with this, over at Parkland."

"Say what?"

"Where were you going, I mean, why so fast?"

"I'm late...for one of my customers, if you know what I mean..."

"Ah...well, you have a good afternoon, Ma'am, and please try to drive more safely."

Polk shook his head, rolled up his window and drove off -- slowly -- and he walked back to the Harley shaking his head, too.

A patrol car pulled up, windows rolled down.

"Was she cute, at least?" the FTO in the passenger seat asked.

"Not my type," he said. "Hands too big, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, you like them trannies with teeny peckers?"

"Yeah, man," he said, grinning, and everyone laughed.

"You get many of those?" the rook behind the wheel asked.

"No, not many. A couple, I think, in the last year."

"How did you keep from shooting it?" the rookie said next, and he looked at the boy's FTO. The old man scowled, rolled up his window and they drove off while he mounted the bike and started the engine. He cleared from traffic, stowed his ticket book and the radar, then rode off for another fishin' hole.

Another good one, too. An alleyway, heavily shaded, another speed transition zone. He was about to open his saddlebag when he saw a car headed his way...weaving across two lanes of traffic...and he saw two black men in the front seat. As their car passed he saw one man with a glass pipe in his mouth, then a sudden fiery flare-up coming from the pipe.

Free-basing? While driving? He called into dispatch: "2141, signal 61 on traffic, southbound Clark at Big Stone, two male blacks -- and get a unit headed this way."

"1310 hours."

He pulled in behind the black Camaro and it was obvious the driver had no idea who was behind him, let alone why. There was a small strip shopping center ahead and he flipped on his strobes, and -- still no reaction.

Just another fireball, this time from the driver's seat.

He saw a patrol car ahead, in the shopping center -- but they apparently didn't -- and he flipped on his siren, finally causing an -- immediate -- reaction. Paraphernalia started flying out the window, most into the hands of the officer standing by his patrol car's door, then the driver decided it was time to try and flee. His speed leapt from an annoying 20 to, perhaps, 35, but the kid obviously couldn't see well, at least well enough to see the lane markers -- or the sharp curve in the road ahead.

The Camaro left the road at 43 miles an hour and nosed into a very deep drainage ditch. And both were not wearing seat belts, as it happened. He checked out on traffic, called for an ambulance as three patrol cars screeched to a stop behind his Harley. Five officers, three with shotguns, emerged -- and advanced in a line on the steaming Camaro. Guns aimed, spreading out as they approached -- he joined the advance, the crawled down into the ditch, then down to the passenger's door -- and he looked in.

"Y'all might as well start traffic control," he said to men above,"because these kids are about 90% dead."

"Well, shit," one of them, the rookie from earlier that afternoon, said, "thought we was gonna get to shoot us some coons."

He looked at the FTO again, then walked over to him. "You need to get this kid off the street, now. He has no business being out here, and you know it."

The man nodded his head. "I know, but my hands are tied on this one."

"Yeah? Well, y'all just go on. Really. Get him away from me."

They left, the rookie still driving, and he walked back to the Camaro, got down to the bottom of the muddy ditch and felt for a pulse on the driver's neck, but the neck flopped over, obviously broken when it impacted the steering wheel, so he crawled around to the passenger's door and reached in. Firm, steady pulse, barely conscious...

"Hey, amigo, can you hear me?"

"What...what happened, man?"

"You've been in an accident. Try and hold still, we'll get you out of here in a second, okay?"

"Yeah...like where am I?"

"Don't worry about that now, just try to hold still...the firemen are here now...so just hang on..." he made way for firemen and paramedics as they jumped down into the muddy ditch and he crawled up the steep bank -- just as another patrol car drove up.

He smiled. Dickinson, The Duke, another kid he'd trained two years ago.

"Hey," he said as he walked over to Dickinson's patrol car, "they finally took the training wheels off your car, huh?"

"Yeah, solo -- three months. What is this shit, anyway?"

"Total clusterfuck," he said, running down the sequence of events.

"Well," Dickinson said, holding up an evidence bag full of paraphernalia and baggies full of white powder, "lookie what I found?"

"Holy shit...what say we go pull this car apart and see what else we find...?"

V

Betty Sue Rollins walked out to her '63 Rambler Cross Country station wagon -- with two buckets full of the Colonel's Secret Recipe fried chicken in a big paper sack -- and she put the chicken behind her seat and got in her old car, started the motor and drove through the parking lot for the exit...

Mark Tyler was stopped at the red light on his brand now Honda VF1000F "Interceptor", revving the engine with sharp, sudden twists of the wrist, and when the light turned green he hammered the throttle and dropped the clutch --and the Interceptor popped into a 'wheelie' for a second, then rocketed away from the intersection. He looked down, for a split second, and saw he was passing a hundred -- when something caught his eye...

A beige station wagon, pulling into the road just ahead --

Before his mind had a chance to register the event, before his hands and feet could react and engage the Honda's brakes, the motorcycle penetrated the driver's door -- at what would eventually be measured between 127 and 129 miles per hour.

The motorcycle penetrated the drivers door and metal was fused to metal in the instantaneous friction of the collision. The motorcycle's engine and chassis collided with Betty Sue Rollins, vaporizing her torso and arms, literally, leaving her dancer's legs intact -- severed from mid-femur down.

The Rambler slid a few inches to it's right, but the overwhelming force lifted the left side up and the car began to flip, sideways, through the air. Tyler's abdomen and legs were fusing to metal at this point, his chest and head arcing down into the car's roof, the force great enough for his face to break through the thin metal roof, flesh fusing to metal again, in the process. When the overturning motion was complete the Rambler slid on it's roof another forty three feet, grinding Tyler's head and chest into the concrete roadway well before the car stopped sliding.

Witnesses and onlookers ran up to the Rambler and stopped dead in their tracks; most turned away in horror, a few dropped to their knees and vomited. The first patrolmen on the scene blocked off the scene, called for more units -- and an accident investigator.

It was Sunday, and his day off when the pager started beeping. He was sitting with his father and Deb by the pool, but he was on-call and in uniform, his Harley was in the driveway out front. He went inside and called dispatch, wrote down the particulars and turned, saw his father standing there -- his old man's hopes dashed once again.

"You have to leave, I take it?" his father asked.

"Yup."

"I suppose you're getting back at me. For all the times I left, when you were growing up?"

He walked over to his father, hugged him. "Look, I'm happy for you, for you both. Have you set a date yet?"

"Christmas Eve. I'm hoping you'll be able to drop by," his old man added, more than a little sarcastically.

He laughed, a little, then leaned over and kissed Deb on the cheek. "Gee. Bye -- Mom..."

Everyone laughed at that, and he walked out to the Harley and got on, checked in service -- and his father jogged over, put his hands on his son's shoulder. "I'm proud of you, son," his father said, and he choked-up a little.

"You know? That's the first time you've ever said something like that to me?"

"I know. I know, and I'm sorry."

They looked at one another and he slipped the transmission into first and let go of the moment, flipped on his strobes and siren, riding through Sunday afternoon traffic out Preston to Royal Lane. The scene secured, he made his measurements, took his photographs, then called in, asked for a department photographer to bring some High Speed Infrared and a Wratten 25A filter. He talked to witnesses, dozens, as it turned out, and every recounted version was uniformly the same: high speed acceleration for a few hundred yards, perhaps two seconds, then a shattering impact.

Another one for lawyers, he sighed. Cumulative negligence. The driver of the Rambler: failing to yield right of way; the rider: speeding, obviously, but reckless conduct as well. Insurance companies and their lawyers would struggle to apportion blame, divvy up all the various liabilities, but he looked at the senselessness of the scene, again, and wondered what it would take to stop the carnage?

The boy? Seventeen years old. His motorcycle endorsement not even a month old. The bike: three hours off the showroom floor, a father's last words to his son -- "be careful out there." Rollin's son called to the scene, his breakdown, then murderous rage. News crew walking the scene, their camera man walking behind the reporter, imaging the carnage, interviewing the boy's father, the mother's son. All the tears, all the anger, and it would all be forgotten by tomorrow morning, and by next weekend he would be at another scene almost exactly like this one. More father's burying sons, more grandmothers and aunts and uncles would be driven to the basement at Parkland for autopsies in an endless parade of gasoline fueled misery.

"Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends..."

He couldn't, of course, rely on witness statements to establish the motorcycle's velocity -- not speed, mind you, but velocity. He would have to derive that using simple physics, and he had to make sure he had all the vectors to make that work. All the approach angles, all the departure vectors, the coefficients of friction: for the roadway, for the car's roof -- and he'd have to establish a baseline acceleration vector, too, but he'd have to wait, do that tomorrow -- with a real Honda. A new one.

Once Rollins' body was removed he had a department's wrecker hook up to the Rambler, tow it up to 30 miles an hour, then cut it free, slide to a stop, with Tyler's body still fused to the metal, and he measured the distance it took the car to stop and wrote that down. He took a patrol car and did the same thing, measuring the braking distance to determine a baseline coefficient of friction for the concrete. He measured the roadway. He observed the traffic lights, for time and operation. He marked witness locations.

This preliminary part of his investigation took five hours, then he rode downtown to Central, to his office in the Traffic annex, and he fixed coffee then laid out all his notes on the huge drafting table. There were no computers to help him with the math, no drawing programs or pre-packaged Accident Investigation programs to do the work for him; in fact, the courts insisted that all the math be done in pencil on paper, so that each step could be checked for error.

With his notes on the table he drafted the scene, in pencil, right down to the correct radius for each corner, all the medians too, then the exact placement of traffic signals and drain openings, the locations of man hole covers and every surface irregularity he'd noted on the pavement -- right down to large cracks in the concrete.

Two hours later he began placing vehicles and witnesses on the drawing, down to the inch, noting where they were located at the time of impact. He penciled in the approach angles, then the departure angles, and with that established he began to construct the vector diagram he would use in his 'conservation of linear momentum' calculations.

Using an H-P 41 calculator he ran through the math, arrived at a speed of 129, then he filled out the State accident form, reducing the accident to a series of simple written explanations. With that complete he started in on the much more detailed, infinitely more complex departmental forms, and all his notes and drawings were folded up and put in a large manilla envelope, attached to this report, then put in the L-Ts in-box. Fifteen hours after he sat down at his drafting table, twenty one hours after he took the call, he left the station and rode home -- just as the sun started to peek above the horizon.

She was gone by then, of course. An angry note on the corkboard by the refrigerator signaling her cold fury, her growing contempt for his lingering absences. He groaned, walked to the little bedroom he was sleeping in now, and he fell into sleep -- as images of crashing motorcycles pushed their way into his dreams.

VI

Her belongings were boxed up, waiting for movers to come and pick them up, and he walked around the house looking at a world without her in it. Only his pictures on the walls -- her's all packed. His stuff in the kitchen -- but nothing she'd bought over the years. He walked out back, looked at the swimming pool, looked at memories of parties they'd had out there over the last two years, when his father had come out for dinner with Carol.

That's the night they met, wasn't it?

She was a scrub nurse, and he'd asked her to come with him that night. That was when all this started, the long slide to "goodbye and good luck."

He walked further out into the yard, looked over the fairway. His father had bought five lots out here at Preston Trail, and had built five very large, very fancy "spec" houses on Club Oak Drive. Then he'd simply leased one to him, and to him alone. Her name wasn't on one piece of paper.

"Why not, Dad?"

"Because I don't trust her, son. I never have. There's something different in her eyes, something I don't recognize, and I don't trust it."

Yeah, he whispered to the trees, he always was better at people.

"Right again," he sighed, "one more time."

He looked up, saw a Baron on base, in the pattern for Addison, and he squinted into the sun, tried to make out the color -- but no go. He turned away, looked at his watch and nodded his head. That was probably them, coming back from New Orleans after the long weekend. Said they were going to drop by on the way home, too, so he went inside and stripped off his uniform, jumped in the shower and washed the day away. He dried off and put on some shorts and a polo shirt, then walked out to the mail box and picked the letters out, looking over three days of mail. He flipped through, found one envelope from TWA, another from American -- and he looked at them both for a long time, his hands shaking a little, then he went inside, put them on the entry table -- still unopened -- and walked to the kitchen, poured himself an orange juice.

Nine years. Nine years -- and that's it? Just turn and walk away? Like it all never happened?

He laughed long and hard, wondering what life was really all about -- while he wiped sudden tears from his eyes. 384 fatality accidents. Three shootings. Too many felony arrests to count. Shot twice. Two motorcycle accidents resulting in forty-plus fractures. Fifteen fellow officers trained -- including Deb -- his new 'mother.' Too many funerals attended. Too many friends gone. Lost. Some shot, some run down out there on the streets.

He thought of MacCarley, still out there on Awaken. In France, with Sarah, on the canals. "Living the dream," Eddie said. He'd found the dividing line, found his way out of the blue. Not a bad way to go, he thought.

He heard a car pull into the circular drive out front, saw his father's Jaguar stop on the far side of the glass door, and he watched his old man go around and get Deb's door. She was his pygmalion, he thought, his diamond in the rough. The country girl with the pure heart he'd been smart enough to recognize, and now she was his elegant wife, beyond gorgeous -- yet still working for the department, though behind a desk now. Assigned to 'Crime Prevention' -- working schools, talking to classrooms full of kids again, teaching them about the world 'out there.'

He watched her as they walked in, so beautiful it made his heart hurt -- literally hurt. Anything money could buy, hers now. And he couldn't think of anyone more deserving.

He let them in and led them past mounds of stacked boxes to the living room, but his father darted to the guest bath and they heard him let go -- the loud "Ahhhhhh" audible, he felt sure, all the way to Oklahoma. Washing hands, then the loud fart -- just for good measure -- and he bounded back into the room, grinning.

"Good one, Dad."

"What? Good what?"

"About a seven point four on the Richter Scale."

"Y'all head that one?"

"They heard it in St Louis, Dad."

"Bosh!" his old man said as he walked to the kitchen. "Deb? Anything?" he called out.

"Ice water! Gallons of ice water!"

"K."

"How was Brennan's?" he asked.

"Heaven, as always. John and Claire send their best."