Passion In James County X: Badge of Dishonor
Chapter seven
Rod Billingham finished his paperwork at the state patrol office, then he headed out to do a few hours of traffic patrol, the primary focus of which was speed enforcement. Not long after he'd been assigned to the Jamestown office, he had found a spot on one of the state highways outside Jamestown that allowed him to clock speeders without being seen. He was guaranteed to write five or more speeding tickets in less than three hours.
The patrol's brass adamantly denied they had quotas for the number of tickets troopers were expected to issue but, like any bureaucracy, the patrol depended heavily on statistics to rate the performance of their troopers. Every trooper knew they needed to write a certain number of traffic tickets every shift if they wanted a chance to advance up the promotional ladder. Rod very much wanted to move up in the department. In fact, he could imagine himself being head of the patrol one day.
He had just gotten in position when the alert tone on his radar unit went off. He glanced at the display, which read "68." The speed limit on that particular stretch of road was 40 and, when he glanced at the highway, he saw a red sports car whiz by. The operator looked like an attractive blonde.
"Here we go," Rod said. He pulled his cruiser into "Drive," and pulled out onto the highway after the red car. As he neared it, he flipped a switch on the panel above the two-way radio and siren. The blue lights mounted on the roof of his car began blinking. He saw the driver of the car he was behind check her mirror. She slowed down, but didn't stop.
"What the hell?" Rod thought. He was about to reach for the radio mike, to alert dispatch he had a subject who was failing to yield, when the car's right turn signal and brake lights came on. He was even more puzzled when the car turned onto a barely visible dirt road and proceeded in a little way, then stopped. His jaw nearly hit his chest when the driver waved to him, as if she were beckoning him to come up to her car.
Rod pulled up behind the car, shut off his flashing blue lights, grabbed his ticket pad, and got out of the car. He should have called dispatch to let them know he was making a traffic stop and what his location was, especially since the driver of the car he had stopped was acting pretty weird, but he didn't do that. The driver was a woman. How much trouble could a lone woman give him?
Rod did practice some safety measures. He unsnapped the strap that held his pistol in his holster and held his hand on the gun as he approached the red car. Once he was able to look down into the car, his jaw hit his chest again and he began gasping for breath.
"Hello, officer, was I speeding again?" the driver asked in a very husky, sexy voice.
The speeder he'd stopped was an extremely attractive blonde, who was wearing a tan cotton dress that had buttons all the way down the front, and a black belt around the waist.