Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

You should have seen it coming-been smarter. Been quicker. Been wiser.

But it always works like that, doesnt it? Its only after the fact that you start looking at it from that useless what if viewpoint. What if youd seen the signs? What if youd done things differently? What if youd seen it coming and avoided having your legs sheared off by five thousand pounds of speeding metal?

Why couldnt you see it was all working backward that night? You always liked the night shift, the change in people, the way they walked different, talked different, and looked different: the way they eased up from their daytime drudgery and let loose a little bit. It was at night that people dropped the layer of inhibition that made them a bunch of boring civilians. Working the night shift was always better than punching the clock in the daytime world, with all its mind-numbing rules and procedures.

The other upside is that nighttime is also when the street criminals come out. The same darkness and shadows that make regular folks feel a little more obscure also spike up the chance of shit hitting the fan. As a cop, you can have a little fun busting some asshole for breaking and entering, or holding up a Stop and Rob, or actually attempting a real rape down on the beachfront. But any patrol cop will also tell you that despite the so-called crime rate, real shit doesnt happen nearly enough in one guys sector to keep the boredom from creeping up your spine and making you wiggle your ass in the seat of the car, or making you wanna just get out and run a few laps on the empty high school track under the security lights, or prop your toes up on the front bumper of the patrol car and do a hundred push-ups on the parking lot in front of Fire Engine Company No. 5. You know those pussies are inside watching you from their cushy break room, and that theres no way theyre gonna come outside and get challenged on how many reps they can do.

So youre cool with the night shift. But that night, it was all goddamned backward. And you didnt see it coming.

Instead of covering your usual sector, you were gonna have to shift gears, because the local highway patrol division was short three troopers. The sergeant told you that you had to drive out of the neighborhoods and do a few runs down I-595, cause thered been some bullshit reporting of speed gunners doing hundred-mile-an-hour blow-downs from the tollbooth at the entrance of Alligator Alley; some poor civilian might freak out and get whammed in the contest. Yeah, whatever.

Now instead of creeping the streets, you were doing the opposite, laying a speed trap on the interstate, cruising the inside lane at fifty-five m.p.h., and occasionally pulling off onto the shoulder with the lights off, waiting-being bored out of your fucking mind. No speeders. No high-speed chase-just the opposite. Nobodys shooting more than five or ten m.h. over the posted limit, and what the hell, you aint wasting your time running them down. So you pop some super protein tabs and crank up the iPod, which is completely against the rules, and youre listening to some good old classic AC/DC when there in the rearview is some driver whose got to be doing thirty-five m.h. in the middle lane, screwing everybody up.

Youre watching, and it makes you cringe just to see how slow this idiots going. Then just as the car passes, you see the drivers profile: one of those old white-hairs leaning toward the windshield, eyes squinting and nose nearly touching the steering wheel as though that extra six inches is going to allow her to see a hundred feet further down the road. And then you hear the horn of the guy coming up behind her, who has been fooled by the taillights of her old Lincoln Town Car. Unexpectedly, those lights come racing up into his face, he hits the horn as he swerves past the old lady, and there goes that yeeeeeowwww of sound that gets bent by the Doppler effect.

Shit! Now youve got to do something, right? You are out here with the fucking mandate to stop accidents from happening, right?

So you pull the iPod buds out of your ears, and on go your headlights. On go the spinning blues on the light bar, and out you pull onto the interstate to catch up to Miss Marple. Everything is backward. Youre not chasing some hopped-up nineteen-year-old flier; youre stopping your grandmother for going too slow.

Cussing, you push the patrol car to fifty m.h. to catch up. For now, you stay off the siren, not wanting to scare the shit out of the old lady. You slow up just behind her and slide just to her outside mirror so she cant miss the spinning lights now flashing into her cars interior and making everything pulsate in blue, even her white hair. Sure enough, she doesnt slow down a bit. Other cars around and behind you are slowing because they can see the damn lights. And like most drivers in the world, their natural tendency is to slow down when they see a cop, because God forbid they did something wrong, or were running ten miles over the limit themselves. So they all slow down for thirty seconds. But once they see its somebody else getting yanked, they all jack it back up to seventy.

You know this is true because youre a cop and you know the paranoia you invoke. And youre kind of proud of it. But what the hell is wrong with this old biddy, whos not stopping or even slowing down but instead sticking to thirty-five m.h. like her life depended on it.

Then you think: God, I hope this isnt one of those Chicken Little, the sky is falling, dipshits whos heard the story of the fake officer who pulls people over with a red light on their dash, and then rapes and robs them. OK, youve heard it, too, but never with any detail as to what jurisdiction and exactly what was threatened, or specifically what was stolen. Youre not sure it isnt just one of those urban legends, like the alligators in the sewer and the boa constrictor in the toilet plumbing. But shit, this broad aint reacting at all.

So against all rules of procedure, you finally get frustrated, flick on the siren, and pull around in front of the Town Car and slow down yourself, using this maneuver to make her stop behind you. See what I mean? Backward-just fucking backward.

Now you get out. And against the shine of her headlights, you shade your eyes and walk back to her vehicle. Youre absolutely second-guessing why the hell you even decided to do this, thinking you should have just let her get rear-ended and not wasted your time. But you do, without malice or forethought, just by habit, have your right hand resting on the butt of your 9 mm. Maybe thats why the old girl is already crying, with her hands raised up into the fabric ceiling of the Town Car, pleading in a high hysterical voice, Please, Officer, please dont shoot me. Im sorry. Im sorry. I was just trying to get to the airport to pick up my daughter. I didnt mean to be unlawful. Im sorry! Please dont shoot me!

Its OK, maam. Its OK, youre saying, now showing her the palms of both of your hands and spreading your fingers and flapping them down with that international sign language to just calm the fuck down.

Take it easy, you say. Im just trying to help you, maam. Please.

As you bend to show your face in her window, you see the watery blue eyes and the tension in the wrinkled forehead and the flaccid muscles of her arms shaking with the effort to keep her hands up.

Please, maam. You can put your hands down, please. Just let me see your drivers license and registration, please, you say, now falling back into procedural mode and realizing that you havent done due diligence by calling in the tag number before making the stop. Now you have to rectify your own miscue.

I was only concerned, maam, that you might be having trouble negotiating the freeway. It is dark, maam, and traffic moves fairly briskly along this stretch of road. I was afraid you were traveling at a dangerously slow rate, uh, Mrs. Mitchell, you say, now looking at the license, which is a renewal shes probably received through the mail for the last forty years without having to take an eye or reflex test. Her date of birth, you can now see, is 1936.