The story was edited by Vixen4770. I wanted to thank her publicly for her efforts and advice, it was gratefully appreciated.
This is a work of fiction, the names used are fictional. Any relation to any person, real or imagined, living or dead, is purely unintentional and accidental.
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Sherri drove her bright yellow Kia Sportage home. It was after 9:30, earlier than she had expected, or perhaps hoped would be a better word, and she was depressed. She was also a little tipsy she admitted to herself. "You should have waited and sobered up before leaving the bar" said her little voice, which had the annoying habit of speaking in the voice of her Grandmother. The above two conditions would have been enough to make the night ripe for disaster, but it was also raining. One of those late spring downpours that Saint Louis and it's surrounding area are well known for. She had been in the bar, hoping to find Mr. Right, and unwilling to settle for Mr. Right Now. The usual collection of losers and Jackals included married men pretending to be single, single men trying to pretend to be cool or hip, or sensitive, or whatever they had read in Vogue this week. Sluts trying to play hard to get, mixed with middle aged desperation trying to find someone to address their own personal biological clock. Sherri knew something was missing, and she was searching for it, or more precisely, him.
She had tried online dating, and that was the most dismal of all failures. The six guys the computer decided she would match up with were in order; a wannabe Minister who was hoping to find a wife to help him spread the Gospel. Look, she believed in God, she just had trouble with the idea that God's messenger had no chin. The second one was a used car dealer, and he acted just like a used car dealer, even at the restaurant, guiding her carefully to the cheap and easy to pay for choices on the menu. Sherri rolled her eyes at that one. The others had been going downhill and gaining speed quickly. Where were the cowboys, and the John Wayne types. The men who would be men instead of some shallow imitation of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible IV, addicted to mirrors.
She like to say she lived in Saint Louis, but the truth was, she was a small fish, in an even smaller pond. She lived in Wildwood Missouri, and worked in a slightly larger bedroom community called Clayton, which is just outside of Saint Louis. She was three years out of Law School, after graduating Cum Laude from the University of Illinois, with a dismal future ahead of her.
She had screwed up, in her Constitutional Law class by losing her temper. She had submitted a paper, well researched, referring to the Federalist Papers no less than 12 times. Letters to and from Hamilton and Adams were noted. Pointing out that the Supreme Court had, in Marbury V. Madison, violated the Constitution and all the activist decisions since had been based upon that improper decision, in which the US Congress had abdicated it's responsibility and done nothing.
Sherri regretted that paper more than she could have imagined. Granted, she believed it, but she knew the professor, and knew that he thought the sun rose and set on the collective asses of the Supreme Court, and how much he loved their glorious decisions to which there was supposedly no constitutional bias. That had buried her. She rubbed her eyes, hoping to get the inevitable tears to stop before they began. After that, she might have saved herself the time, and dropped out of law school. Except she was stubborn, and too stupid to quit. She graduated, not at the bottom of her class, but in the bottom ten percent. Her other professors had been scandalized to learn of her un-lawyerlike beliefs. Now, she was here, on the backside of Saint Louis.
Sherri wiped her eyes, and tried to ignore her future. All she now qualified for was twenty five or even thirty years of tax law, the most anal portion of the law. With luck, she might show enough promise at Whitman and Parker, the firm she worked at, to be trusted with corporate law or with Byzantine regulations that made real estate seem simple and concise. The only bright spot in her life was the fact she didn't have to resort to chasing ambulances. Personal injury, God what a nightmare.
Sherri sighed, she wanted to prosecute criminals, or defend the innocent. She wanted to help good and decent people with little or no hope, and here she was doing tax law for minor league corporations who were pretending to be mediocre. If she was going to do corporate law, she wanted to answer to one person, or one man perhaps. Anything but an endless chain of command.
Sherri looked away from the road and down, trying to find a CD to listen to, to get her mind off her worries. She never saw him, she never looked up in time. She felt the bump as her wheels drove over him. First the front tires, then the back, at thirty three miles an hour. Sherri jammed her foot on the brake, and the Kia skidded to a stop. She jumped out, and ran back, and saw immediately that the man was dead. His chest was caved in, he was an old man, wearing a dark jacket and dark gray pants. He was laid out on the street where her rolling car had hit him and shoved him along. She stared in shock, unable to move.
"Shit I'm drunk, I'll blow positive, and get a DUI, coupled with Vehicular Manslaughter, that would equal Murder Two, 20 years in prison." she screamed in her head. "I killed that man, and now I'm really screwed."
She had just decided to run, to try and save her life, pathetic as it was, when headlights came around the corner from the rear. Bright ones, but it was a quarter mile or more. She could do it, she could run and get away.
Sherri fled to her car some 60 feet away, and rammed it into gear, flooring the accelerator, she sped away as fast as the car would go.
The mini-van was driven by Robert Louis Mason, and it was the worst possibility for Sherri, or best depending on your point of view. Robert Louis Mason was among a number of other things, a Private Detective, who was cursing his luck and searching in vain for a target he was tailing. It was an insurance scam which wasn't really his style, but he was bored and looking for something to tempt his intellect. He knew this wasn't it, but it might fill a few hours. He had left the digital mounted surveillance camera on and if he found the scamming son of a bitch he was looking for, he could easily edit out the past hour of driving blindly around looking for him. If he didn't find his target, the digital camera storage system would erase with the click of a couple buttons.
Robert saw the man, and saw the girl run. "Shit!" he thought, "She hit him, and now she's running." He saw the car accelerate away, and he stopped by the man in the street. One glance to Roberts experienced eye let him know it was too late, the man was dead. What was he doing out here? Robert killed his lights and raced after the fleeing car.
Sherri saw the lights stop, and then vanish. "He must have automatic lights, and he turned the engine off." she thought. She turned another corner, and headed for home. "Another ten miles", she told herself, "Another ten miles and I'll be safe." She could hide, and think it through.
Robert was behind her, invisible in the dark. If a cop saw him, he would have a hell of a time explaining why he was driving with no lights. He followed her to a house, and slowed with the emergency brake to keep his tail lights from flashing on. He made a mental note to have a switch installed to kill that feature, then he noted that it wasn't the first time he had made that note.
He turned the camera and watched the woman rush into her house. "Shit!" he groaned, "She's in a blind fucking panic." He saw Sherri stumble, "No, she is in a blind, drunk fucking panic!"
Robert shook his head and almost called the police. He had dialed the first digit of 911 on his phone, and then hesitated. Robert then wondered if he should consider ignoring this night. He checked the video to see if it was something they could use. He downloaded the video onto his laptop, and then scrolled through most of it. It would be in the last 15 minutes or so. There he was going around the corner, and there. He grabbed the frame and put it into a photo editing program. He increased the zoom and the light, enhanced the picture and there she was, Miss Drunken Runner. Not a great pose for her he decided, with her eyes bugging out of her head, blind panic on her face.
Robert looked at her, Who was she he wondered?
