Part I: Debbie
Alan Burnett listened to the same 'oldies' station he had for years now; the music was predictably comfortable and the commercials were kind of funny – sometimes anyway, and besides, almost everyone else in the department listened to the station. You could always count on a happy mix of sixties stuff, but usually they played more seventies music. The mix filled his time with memories of his parents and his childhood, and when things on the street were slow, like they were this morning, sometimes the music kept him awake.
So, Burnett was cruising down memory lane while driving through suburban neighborhoods in the southwest part of the City of Dallas, keeping an eye out for drunk drivers and suspicious vehicles at two thirty in the morning, and he was bored, but not tired, yet. Still, he wanted some coffee in the worst way, and lunch couldn't come soon enough.
ELPs Lucky Man came over the radio, one of his dad's favorites, and he turned up the volume a little as he crossed over the interstate highway that bisected this part of the city. Traffic on the broad roadway appeared light, so he turned down the 'on ramp' that led to the highway and pulled over onto the left shoulder and turned off his patrol car's engine. He listened to the music, but even so he turned it down a bit, and began 'listening' for drunks.
It was something one of his FTOs, or Field Training Officers, had taught him years ago – when he was a rookie. Drunk drivers have a hard time keeping their cars in one lane, or so he was told, and they tend to drift wildly from lane to lane the drunker they are. Highway lanes have little raised bumps on them, called BotsDots after the engineers who developed them, and even though drunks swing from lane to lane they tend to drive on the Dots for extended periods of time, too, and probably because they know – if they are – they're not weaving too badly. His FTO, a great cop named Everett Tomberlin, had called this rumbling sound 'the mating call of the DUI,' and Burnett had never forgotten the lesson. When you heard that distinctive extended rumble coming your way, you almost knew there was a drunk behind the wheel.
He hadn't been on 'Deep Nights' in years, 'Nights' being the midnight to eight in the morning rotation, but the shift sergeant had called him in to work when a couple of guys called in sick. He really hated this shift, as well as the types of calls you got on 'Nights', but one good thing could be said for 'Nights: the shift was rarely dull. You could always count on lots of family disturbances, more than a few businesses would be burglarized before sunrise, and there were always a handful of really, really bad accidents as the night wore on, yet there was a real rhythm to the work because more often than not all these types of events happened at curiously predictable times.
Disturbances were most predictable from midnight until two in the morning, yet even so Thursday nights, that night before 'payday', were the worst. People fight about money – a lot: their lack of money, who is spending the most money, and how irresponsibly, and it was really odd how violent these fights became. Even so, fights late on a Thursday night and into Friday morning were usually bad ones, by any standard. Thursdays with full moon out? Awful, really awful 'knock-down drag-out' fights were the norm, and lots of women went to the hospital after these, and more than a few would make the one way trip to the Medical Examiner's in the basement at Parkland.
Burglaries were, generally speaking, less predictable timewise, yet even so burglaries on 'Nights' followed definite patterns. Most occurred at businesses closed for the night – and not houses, and they usually occurred between three and five in the morning, after cleaning crews left for the night but before the targeted company's earliest employees showed up for work the next morning. Burglars on 'Nights' tended to be well armed too, and therefore more dangerous, but they were only marginally more intelligent than their daytime brethren – which is to say they tended to be a little less stupid than the almost moronic burglars you typically ran into on Days.
Drunks, on the other hand, tend to be out all night, but from two in the morning on, drunks tend to view streets and highways as their personal playground, and as a result that's when the really bad MVAs, or Motor Vehicle Accidents happen. Still, the really, really bad drunks hit the street about a half hour after bars and saloons are required to close, or two thirtyish, and Burnett knew that as entertaining as it sometimes is to tuck in behind a drunk and tail them for a while, doing so carries risks. Drunks can simply loose it at any time and pass out behind the wheel, and there's no telling what that might lead to but it's never anything good. Even more entertaining, Burnett remembered from his time on Nights with Tomberlin, is to stay behind a drunk for a while, then pull up along side their car and stare at them while driving along. This approach carries risks too, like the drunk freaking out and taking a sudden detour through your patrol car, but more often than not it's like watching someone undergo an intensely religious experience, what cops call the 'come to Jesus' moment. Drunks, when they saw a patrol car driving alongside their car, tend to become the best, most attentive drivers imaginable – for about thirty seconds, anyway. Then they forget the speed limit and before you know it they're driving along at thirty 'miles per' – in a fifty-five zone on the interstate. Still, the most hilarious thing to do to a drunk is to simply follow them for a few miles, then flip on the strobes. This usually results in all kinds of wildly amusing gyrations, Burnett recalled, both outside the drunk's car, and in, and if the drunk makes it to the side of the road intact you could almost always count on finding the poor wretch sitting in a puddle of urine and excrement.
So, Alan Burnett sat by the side of the road, listening to Lucky Man and checking his rearview mirror from time to time for the loom of approaching headlights when – voila – he heard the mating call...the sustained rumble of tires thumping over BotsDots. He made sure his car's headlights were off, then turned on the engine just as the suspect car rumbled under the overpass just behind his patrol car.
It was a red sports car, he saw, some sort of ovoid shaped Infiniti or Lexus, and the driver was having a really hard time keeping it between the lines. The eastbound highway was five lanes wide here and traffic was light, yet this poor slug was having a hard time keeping the car in any one of them; Burnett slipped his patrol car into Drive and sprinted down the on ramp, easily catching up to the red car in less than a minute. Burnett decided to try the 'drive alongside the drunk's car' technique for a while and pulled all the way over to the leftmost lane; once he was tucked away nicely off the car's rear quarter he started watching the drunk – a middle aged man with disheveled blond hair – then almost immediately he caught sight of another person in the car.
This other person in the car had very red hair, but that was about all Burnett could see because this person's head was bobbing up and down in the driver's lap at a pretty fair clip. "Oh boy. Here we go," Burnett sighed as he called dispatch. "2112, possible signal forty eastbound on I-20, passing 67 at this time, on X-ray seven, Tom Oscar Peter, George Union November."
"2112 at 0-2-40 hours.
Burnett watched as the bobbing head picked up the pace, and the driver began frantically gripping and releasing the steering wheel as things seemed to approach that climactic moment – which apparently was much sooner than expected because the red car veered sharply to the right and ran right up the steep grassy embankment that lined the highway. Burnett braked hard and flipped on his strobes and pulled onto the shoulder behind the red car.
Burnett got out of his patrol car and walked up to the driver's side window and knocked on the glass.
The guy behind the wheel looked up at Burnett like he'd just swallowed a squirrel, while the girl still down in this guy's lap was apparently unfazed and boring on in for the kill, dancing away on the head of the poor fella's dick like she was auditioning for a porn flick. His hands still flexed on the steering wheel, but he looked up at Burnett and grinned.
"Let me know when she's through, okay?" Burnett said, and the guy actually shot him the 'thumbs-up'.
"Un-fucking-believable," Burnett said, just as another patrol car slid-in behind his on the side of the road.
"What's up?" Paul Cotes asked as he walked up to Burnett.
"Gal up front is playing a solo on the bone-a-fone. I think she's about to finish the piece."
"No shit. Will wonders never cease." Cotes yawned, rubbed his nose. "Slow night, huh."
Cotes and Burnett walked up to the window and peered inside. The driver's face now looked a little strange; his eyes were squinting, his teeth were locked in a tight over-bight, and his upper lip and nose were quivering.
"Ya know, that man kinda looks like a rodent," Cotes said, scratching his ear.
"Woodchuck," Burnett replied. "Definitely a woodchuck."
"I can see that. Whoops, I think we're about there!"
Woodchuck-man's head was flailing back and forth now, and his partner-in-crime's head was bobbing up and down so furiously fast neither Cotes nor Burnett could see her distinctly anymore, then Woodchuck-man grabbed the steering wheel so hard it looked like it was bending, and his legs went rigid.
Both Cotes and Burnett started applauding, and Cotes let slip a whistle that nearly deafened Burnett. The girl looked up from Woodchuck-man's lap when she was finished, her mouth utterly full of the rodent's cum, and she smiled at them.
Cotes lost it at than point and started laughing so hard that Burnett did too, a little, anyway, then he walked up to the driver's window and motioned the driver to roll down the window.
"Are we through now?" Burnett asked.
Cotes, still laughing, declared: "And the East German judge gives that one a ten, ladies and gentlemen. Perfect form, and what wonderful form on that follow through!"
The girl started blowing bubbles with the rodent's cum. Cotes grew silent, almost mesmerized before saying to one and all: "Hot damn. I think I just met the next Mrs Cotes."
"Got a driver's license, sir?" Burnett asked dryly.
"Yup. Gimme a minute to get it together, okay?"
"Been drinking, sir?"
"Actually, no, I haven't."
Burnett leaned over and looked into the car more closely, saw the shoulder boards of a four-striper on the man's uniform jacket – and the wings over his left breast pocket.
"American?" Burnett asked.
The man nodded.
"Married?"
He nodded his head again.
"This your wife?"
"Nope," the Captain said.
"Can you get where you're going without killing anyone, Captain?"
"Yessir."
"Well, y'all have a good night."
"Yeah," Cotes added, "y'all come again, and real soon now, y'hear!"
Burnett rolled his eyes, looked at the girl, a really pretty flight attendant who did indeed look like she was pretty good at what she was doing.
"Thanks, Officer. I mean it. Thanks a million."
"I know the score, Captain. I write this up, you lose your job. That about right?"
"Yessir."
