They saw Hank’s pickup, figured someone was there, and began knocking on the door. Hank panicked and dumped Eaudelein in the tank. Then he gave the men bait and sent them on their way. Even though the men weren’t locals, Randy figured they’d be easy enough to track down, if need be.
“The way things look now,” Randy said, “Hank’s gonna plead guilty. Says he was temporarily insane.”
“Hell,” said Freddy as Randy returned his personal belongings and signed the release papers, “I guess that explains my whole marriage to Eaudelein. Too bad I couldn’t plead that during the divorce.”
Freddy stuck close by me the whole ride home. “Babe, you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“Freddy, I’m fine,” I insisted. If the truth be known, I was enjoying myself.
“Babe, I just don’t know how I can ever repay you,” he said for the umpteenth time.
“Aw, Freddy,” I said, patting his knee, “we’ll think of something.” I was thinking a June weddin’ would be nice. We’d hitch a knot in the tail of matrimony yet.
The Domino Drug Bust: A Love Story
by Bobby Lee
If the truth were known, the whole business actually got started with a nap. An untimely nap, maybe. But a nap, nonetheless. Which isn’t exactly what you’d call an auspicious beginning, considering that the outcome was the biggest, not to mention the strangest, drug bust in all of Miller County history.
It’s just that Sheriff Duncan was really tired, and really sleepy. And the midafternoon sun coming through the windshield had warmed the car up so nicely that, with speeders out on Highway 17 being so rare anyway, well, it was only natural for him to conclude that his daily afternoon patrol out past Harvester’s Maw would be a perfect opportunity to catch up on some of the sleep he’d lost on account of his weekly game of dominoes with Miss Petula running so late the night before. After all, who knew?
Who knew that dusty old pickup full of out-of-towners would come racing down the highway at twenty miles an hour over the posted speed limit? Who knew they’d come roaring right past the very spot where the sheriff had chosen to pull off the road and park that shiny new squad car the mayor had bought to help fight the rising tide of crime in America, just like he’d promised to do during the last campaign?
Well, the fact of the matter is, nobody knew. Least of all Sheriff Duncan, a man going on seventy-four years of age and in dire need of sleep. But in point of fact, that’s exactly what they did. And that’s when things began to get a little out of hand.
Because that transition from deep sleep to wide awake isn’t easy. Not for anybody. Just consider the last time your phone rang in the middle of the night, and how that surge of adrenaline carried you halfway down the hall on the way to answer it before your brain even figured out what it was you’d heard. Well, that’s pretty much how it was for Sheriff Duncan when that old truck went whizzing past and woke him up so unexpectedly. His body more or less just jumped right into action, even though his brain was still asleep and his body was acting pretty much at the complete discretion of adrenaline.
Not that you’d have known it from looking, the way he slammed that new high performance engine into gear and went squalling and slip-sliding out onto the highway. But if the truth were known, he was halfway down to Harvester’s Maw and riding right up on the rear bumper of that truck before his brain even considered switching on.
Well, it goes without saying that when his brain finally did switch on it was only to discover that it was facing a fair-sized dilemma, what with him racing bumper to bumper with that old pickup right into Harvester’s Maw. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t anything compared to the dilemma facing the driver of that pickup truck, who’d not only been more than a little bit spooked at the way that car he was watching in his rear view mirror had raced up and parked right off his rear bumper, but was well on his way to becoming downright terrified from the realization that the car that was tailgating him was a police cruiser.
The thing is, what with him being from out of town and all, the driver of that truck was totally unaware that the Maw had gotten its name from the way local harvesting equipment, when it’s being transported out on the highway, has a tendency to swallow up whole unsuspecting motorists who insist on going too fast around that big curve out on the edge of town. And of course, when he panicked at the thought of being pulled over, at the thought of being caught redhanded with the contraband he was carrying, and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator and began to pull out ahead of the police cruiser, he had absolutely no way at all of knowing that he was already staring down the throat of the Maw. And wouldn’t you just know that, true to form, right when he started banking into that ninety degree turn, that ugly mechanical monster reared its massive body up in the road ahead, blocking out the whole world except for what looked to him like acre after acre of John Deere green.
Now, about the time that old pickup went fishtailing out of sight around the curve of the Maw, the sheriff, who had finally wakened to the point that he was beginning to question the wisdom of stampeding a speeding out-of-towner right into the depths of the Maw without nary a by your leave nor word of warning, was also beginning to more fully appreciate his own predicament. Because, being a local, he understood all too well how few options the Maw leaves.
You see, Highway 17, being an old stretch of road, was built back in the days when roads still followed property lines and went around rather than through hills. This particular stretch of Highway 17 comes down on a pretty straight line from the north until within a mile or so of the outskirts of Crenshaw, at which point it runs up at a forty-five degree angle onto a long narrow hill that locally goes by the name of Beaumont Ridge. To avoid going either all the way over the top or right through Beaumont Ridge, after the highway climbs partway up the side of the ridge it bends through a ninety degree turn to the east, forming the curve known as Harvester’s Maw. From there it runs pretty much in a straight line east, angling away from the crest of the ridge, until it reaches the heart of Crenshaw.
Now, what all that means is that, as you round the Maw, all you’ve got on the right as a buffer between you and the ridge is the shoulder of the road, a ditch, a stretch of ground maybe six feet wide. Off to your left, of course, you’re looking at a pretty sharp dropoff down to the bottom of the ridge. So when you come around the curve too fast and find yourself overtaking one of those big, slow-moving harvesters that take up all of their own lane and the better part of the other lane, you don’t have a lot of choices. What most folks faced with that dilemma choose to do is to panic, which generally means they end up driving right up the tail end of the harvester.
What the driver of that pickup, who in fact was a mighty fine driver in his own right, chose to try to do was to veer sharply off to the right, leap that ditch, and glance off the bluff on the other side before finally straightening back out on that little stretch of ground between the bluff and the ditch. What in fact he did was veer to the right, clip the tail end of that harvester with his front left bumper, slide down one side of the ditch and back up the other, and skid across that short stretch of ground on the other side and into the bluff. Which was pretty close to the outcome he’d been looking for, even if the method was a bit different from what he’d planned. The only problem was, he hadn’t anticipated that there might be a utility pole standing there right in his way, and before he could bring that truck to a stop, he’d slammed into that pole and snapped it right in half.