by John R. Somers
Maryland State Police,
Ret'd.
The green car was stopped
dead, right in the middle of the country road,
headlights blazing.
At first, Trooper First
Class Jim Koenigs thought the occupants might
be headlighting the field, trying to spot deer,
but he couldn’t see the telltale glow of deer
eyes anywhere in front of it. He decided he
didn’t know what they were doing, but it wasn’t
a very good place to be doing it.
He slowly pulled his
patrol car up behind the Honda and flipped on
his red and blue emergency lights. No movement
from inside.
He got out, draping his
microphone cable across the steering wheel and
out the driver’s window. He closed the door
quietly and put on his tan Stetson.
“V-19, Berlin.”
“V-19, go ahead.”
“Suspicious vehicle,
Maryland HKT 119, green passenger car, west end
of 627, ‘bout a… quarter mile from 363.”
There was a pause, then
the dispatcher replied, “Not stolen. Local
owner.”
Koenigs took his
flashlight in his left hand and quietly moved
to the left, staying out of his headlight beams
as he swung wide. Two occupants, as far as he
could tell, a young, blonde-headed male, and a
chubby redheaded woman, were engaged in a
toe-curling liplock.
As he approached the car,
keeping his right hand in front of his holster,
the woman pulled away, looked toward the patrol
car, and said, “Ronnie!”
Ronnie, the driver,
looked around, startled.
“Well, that explains what
you are doing in the middle of the road,” the
trooper said, switching his flashlight on and
doing a quick check of the vehicle’s interior.
“Ronnie, get out of the car. Ma’am, get
yourself decent, too, and find me your driver’s
license. Both of you.”
There was a flurry of
activity inside the car, then the driver got
out, stammering. “We were just…”
“For Pete’s sake, pal - I
know what you were doing!” the trooper cut him
off. “I don’t care about that as long as she’s
agreeable. I do care about you doing it
in the middle of the road.”
He reached out and took
the offered driver’s license. Seventeen.
“Raise your arms and turn
around, Ronnie.”
The driver did as he was
told.
“Been drinking?”
“No, sir. I don’t drink.”
“Ok, good. Walk up there
about fifty feet and stand on the shoulder,
back to the car. I need to talk to your
girlfriend. Don’t be looking back here.”
The driver did as he was
told and the trooper walked around to the
passenger door. “May I have your driver’s
license, please?” The word ‘please’ was
superfluous; there was nothing of a request in
his tone.
“Please don’t tell Dad,”
the girl begged.
The trooper looked at the
driver’s license and quickly at the girl.
“Well, hello, Chrissie! I assume you’re OK with
this?”
She put her hand on her
forehead and halfway covered her face. “It was
my fault. He’s not even really my boyfriend; we
just work together and he was taking me home.”
“You weren’t making much
progress, stopped in the road.” The trooper
looked up and shouted, “Ronnie, come back
here!”
The boy turned and
trotted back to his car.
“Look, I don’t care about
all this, but I do care about you getting hurt,
or somebody else getting hurt, running into
you. Go somewhere else, if you want. Just get
off the road.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Chrissie, I haven’t seen
you tonight, so don’t tell your Dad I did.”
“Don’t worry. I haven’t
seen you in years.” She laughed, nervously.
“Don’t go that far – I
see you in the restaurant every weekend,
almost.”
“How am I going to look
you in the face, Mr. Jim? I’ll die if I have to
wait on you. And my boyfriend’s going to shoot
me.”
“Honey, if everybody died
that I had caught in… compromising situations,
it would be a great year for the undertaker.”
He paused and smiled. “I
see myself like a preacher; I know all kinds of
secrets on all kinds of people. Go on, get out
of here. And if you don’t tell your boyfriend,
I won’t.”
He walked back to his
vehicle and got back inside, tossing his hat
onto the passenger seat.
“V-19, Berlin.”
“V-19, go ahead.”
“Correct the tag number
numerals to 719.”
Pause. “That’s a Ford,
from Marydel. Want me to save you a copy?”
“Negative. I have it
straightened out.”
‘That’ll take care of the
people listening in on their scanners,’ the
trooper thought, ‘and her boyfriend.’
He looked at the sky for
a few moments; pitch black, not a star showing.
‘Probably rain before long,’ he thought. ‘Nice
night for a fatal accident.’
He popped his trunk
release, got out and retrieved his raincoat. As
he was putting the plastic cover on his
Stetson, the first big raindrop struck his
windshield. He put his car in gear and turned
off on the spur that ran through the little
town of Oriole.
Neat and tidy, he had
often thought he might light to live there one
day. ‘It wouldn’t take much adapting, I know
nearly everybody here.’
As he drove slowly into
the town – sixteen homes and a church spread
out over half a mile – the thought struck him
that he was like a benevolent shark, cruising
its habitat: nobody had anything to fear but
the bad guys.
The black sky and
uniformly spaced streetlights down both sides
of the road had the interesting effect of
making the little town appear pristine: bright
cones of light shown down on manicured
shrubbery, combed lawns, and spotless homes.
Outside of the circles of light, it was pitch
black.
He watched each house as
he slowly passed them. ‘I’m probably the only
person awake in the whole place,’ he thought.
An enjoyable feeling of both pride and
satisfaction rose in his chest.’ I’d rather be
doing this than anything else in the whole
world!’
He rode slowly with his
windows down, listening intently for the sound
of glass breaking, an unwelcome car’s exhaust,
or a cry for help.
‘Try it now, dirtbag.
I’ll have you before you can say Jack Squat.’
He would, if somebody
would just call. He sighed at the memory of a
woman in a nearby town who reported – the next
morning – a pair of legs that had slithered in
through her neighbor’s window. “I didn’t want
to bother you,” she had told the investigator
the ten hours later. That was the twentieth of
nearly forty burglaries that went unsolved for
the better part of a year. If she had only
called…
As he passed the last
houses, he debated momentarily about turning
around and
going back through, but he
decided to run by the jail and have a cup of
coffee with the turnkey, who was always good
for a good story or two.
“V-19.” Two words, three
syllables, and he knew something was up.
“V-19, Berlin, go ahead.”
“Report of a loud crash,
east end of 627, east of Oriole. ¾ mile from
363. Complainant said he lives half a mile from
the road and it was loud enough to wake him.”
“V-19, 10-4. Fire company
enroute?”
“And the ambulance
squad.”
“10-4.”
He put his foot down on
the accelerator and the powerful motor roared
into life. He quit glancing at the speedometer
when it passed 80 and kept climbing. A few more
raindrops struck his windshield, disintegrating
due to his speed. As he passed the cemetery, he
saw a vehicle stop at the intersection and pull
out, turning toward him. He reached down and
flipped on his emergency lights and siren and
began flashing his headlights, slowing to about
70. The approaching vehicle pulled to the side
of the road and turned off its lights,
leaving only the parking
lights on as an indication he had seen the
rapidly approaching patrol car.
“Somebody has some
sense,” Koenigs told himself. He put his
accelerator foot back down and rocked the other
car as he passed, immediately switching off the
blinding emergency lights. A mile further and
he slowed, experience having taught him that
estimates of distance were usually wrong. Sure
enough, not far ahead, he saw the light from a
highway flare. Evidently, somebody had stopped
and placed it in an effort to warn oncoming
traffic.
As he appeared the
flickering light in the middle of the road, he
realized it wasn’t bright enough for a flare,
and it looked strangely dim. He slowed even
more, and as he passed it, he realized it
wasn’t a flare at all – it was an entire engine
block, ripped out of a vehicle, gasoline
burning as it dripped out of the fuel line.
At the same moment,
Trooper Koenigs saw the twinkling reflection of
broken glass all over the highway, mixed with
clods of dirt, pieces of metal trim, and broken
tree branches. His skilled eye told him that
the vehicle had left the road on the right
side, struck one of the huge oaks growing
there, and ricocheted off, heading into the
woods on the left.
He flipped the switch
on his spotlight and panned it through the
trees. Sure enough, there among the broken
saplings and uprooted greenbrier was a car, or
something that had once been a car but which
was now crushed and mutilated beyond
recognition.
The trooper stopped
and turned his emergency lights on, popped the
trunk, and retrieving his first aid kit, he
trotted across the road and into the woods.
As he approached, he
realized the rear end of the green car had been
completely severed from the rest of it, and was
sitting bumper up, so that he could look down
on the license plate: HKT 119. He wasn’t
surprised – he had expected it from the moment
he had received the call.
The trooper fought his
way through the greenbrier, oblivious to the
tearing of the thorns. He threw his first aid
kit up on the roof of the car and shouted,
“Ronnie! Chrissie! Answer me!”
As he played his
flashlight across the inside, he realized they
wouldn’t be answering. Ronnie was jammed under
the dashboard, between the seat and steering
wheel, with one arm stuck up between the wheel
and shift lever. Chrissie was also in the
floor, head on the transmission hump and almost
totally hidden by the twisted metal and
uprooted seat.
Koenigs smashed the
remainder of the glass out of the passenger
side window with his flashlight and felt
blindly for Chrissie’s carotid artery. He
changed the position of his fingers repeatedly,
but felt nothing but warm blood.
He climbed over the roof
of the car and reached through the missing
windshield. Taking Ronnie by the wrist, he
again felt for signs of life. Nothing. He
rolled over and slid off of the vehicle and
tried to enter through the jagged metal where
the rear end of the car had been, but it was
too crushed. He stretched his long arm through
the opening, grabbed the seat back, and pulled,
but he could only rock it; every time he
relaxed his efforts, it fell forward again. He
climbed onto the hood of the car and carefully
tried to untangle Ronnie’s arm. Failing that,
he desperately tried to break the wheel off the
steering shaft.
Nothing worked.
He had paused for a
moment to catch his breath when he heard the
distant sound of the approaching ambulance. He
grabbed the handle of the first aid kit,
dropped back to the ground, and sat on the
trunk of a fallen tree and waited.
The ambulance and a fire
truck arrived at almost the same moment and
Koenigs distractedly watched the firefighters
and medics scurrying around.
Mark Mulcahy, the captain
of the ambulance squad, came bounding through
the briers, flashlight in hand. “Jim, whatcha
got?”
“Two of them in there.
The boy’s seventeen and the girl’s twenty.
Nineteen or twenty. Both of them dead.”
Mulcahy spoke into his
walkie-talkie and two medics came running with
what appeared to be a large circular saw and
first aid box. Close behind them, two
firefighters struggled with a 2” hose. When
they had gotten into position, one of them gave
a shout and they held on to the nozzle as the
hose charged with water.
Koenigs watched the
action as if he were distantly watching a rerun
of an old television show for the umpteenth
time. On one knee, one of the medics yanked the
pull rope and the saw roared into life.
Carefully, he began cutting pieces of the car
away so they could reach the lifeless bodies
inside.
“You ok, Jim?” Mulcahy
asked quietly, in spite of the noise.
The trooper shook his
head, “No.”
“Know ‘em?”
“Seen him. Knew her, a
little. She waited tables at the Hotel Inn.
Good girl, I always thought. I think they both
were good kids.”
“How much of that blood
is yours?”
Koenigs looked at his
arms, streaked with blood from his elbows to
his fingertips. “Some of it, I guess.”
“Tony!”
Mulcahy bellowed.
A young medic came
bounding toward him, repeatedly tripping over
the vines.
“Go get a big bucket of
water, some soap, and a sponge and clean
Trooper Koenigs up.”
Tony took off toward the
ambulance and returned quickly. He carefully
poured the water over Koenigs’ arms, then
proceeded to start scrubbing them with the
medicinal soap.
“Hey, Chigger. Bring that
first aid kit over here.” Mulcahy shouted, and
a second medic, equally young as the first,
headed toward them, lugging a big blue satchel
with one hand and a huge flashlight with the
other. “Trooper Koenigs is bleeding all over
the place. Take a piece of gauze and dry his
arms, then put some bandages on ‘em.”
Taking off his white
hardhat, Mulcahy sat on the tree trunk next to
the trooper. “I’m getting too old for this
stuff.”
“Did you see the girl? I
bet I know what caused this accident,”
Chigger said.
“What do you mean?”
Mulcahy asked.
“She was clear across the
seat,” he leered. “Clear on his side.
“Inertia.” Koenigs,
muttered softly.
“What?”
“Inertia. Car stopped
suddenly, she kept going.”
“You expect me to believe
that?”
“I don’t care what you
believe, Chigger.” Mulcahy growled. “You get a
little more time around here and you’ll learn
to listen to people who know. I’ve seen
inertia rip a pair of laced-up combat boots off
a guy.”
Chigger didn’t answer,
but sheepishly began to collect the bloody
pieces of gauze from around Koenigs’ feet,
putting them into a plastic bag. Then he
quietly headed off, toward the ambulance.
“Heck of a thing,
inertia.” Mulcahy whispered to Koenigs.
“I ain’t going to have
the memory of those kids ruined by some guy
going around, running his mouth.”
“I agree with you.
Particularly where they weren’t doing anything
we wouldn’t have been doing ourselves years
ago, if we had the chance.”
They sat together on the
log, watching the flashing lights and
firefighters and medics running around. Despite
the fact that they were all volunteers, it had
the well-practiced
look of a complicated
dance. A tow truck pulled up, it yellow lights
blinking, and the operator began to play a
cable out through the woods. Finally, the
trooper stood
up.
“I have to go tell a
couple sets of parents their kids are dead.”
“You going to be ok,
Jim?” Mulcahy asked.
Koenigs said nothing for
half a minute or more. Finally, he responded,
“Yeah.”
He straightened his
Stetson and was trying to brush the worst of
the dirt and debris off his uniform as the
storm hit. He mumbled, ‘What a job.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sergeant John R. Somers, Maryland State
Patrol (retired), completed a 27 year career
in law enforcement; all of which was in the
field, as a field supervisor or in a command
capacity. He can be reached at
jr_somers(at)msn.net