“What?” gasped Sergeant Oberon in disbelief.
“We got ‘im downstairs,” Constable Dick Fry told his superior. “Do you want to come on down to the cells real quick, or should we bring him up to the room?
“What do you like him for?” asked the sergeant.
“Dangerous driving is a little iffy, but he admits to speeding on the Lake Road.”
The constable took a look at his note pad.
“He borrowed his dad’s sports car, an antique. He didn’t have permission, but parents typically don’t charge the kid for that. He had a couple of joints. He’s insisting on talking to a police artist.”
“He must be watching too much, ‘CSI,’ on TV,” the sergeant grinned.
The popular TV show’s science-fiction lab was totally at odds with reality.
Crime labs were grubby, disorganized little cubicles with old, broken-down equipment; staffed by hack, over-the-hill technicians otherwise unemployable in any normal industry. Still, it gave the public confidence in the system, and that’s always good.
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll get him an artist, and then charge him with making a false report,” muttered Sergeant Oberon. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“Mike Anderson,” said Constable Fry.
“And he turned up here drunk and stoned and with a borrowed car, no permission; and insisted on making this report?”
“Yep,” agreed the other copper.
“Okay, bring him up. Play it straight and serious, okay?” raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, sir!”
Sergeant Oberon opened up the room, snapped on the lights, and arranged his notes. It impressed the perps when they were brought in. The sergeant rarely relied on written facts, and such. He preferred the, ‘impression,’ as they were, ‘presented’ to him.
Well, the young man made a good impression, and that confused Oberon. He was expecting something akin to delirium tremens, or a PCP-crazed psycho, or a high school boy tripped out on LSD, recent sexual misconduct, and cheap wine. Pot and stuff. Some kid high on Ecstasy; temporarily in love with the universe.
The kid seemed all right.
Twenty years old, the guy had a job and a girlfriend, and no previous beefs.
“Tell me what happened, son, and I’ll do my best to keep you out of trouble,” he suggested kindly.
“Look, I’m sorry sir. I know I must have looked pretty drunk and crazy when I came in here, but this is real,” the young man began, but Oberon held up a hand.
“I know all that,” he said calmly and coolly, letting the kid collect his breath. “Just tell me what you saw.”
“My old man’s going to kill me,” groaned the kid.
“Oh, we won’t let that happen,” joshed the sergeant. “Look, you were driving down Lake Road, enjoying the, what was it?”
“A Triumph TR-250. My old man’s heart and soul. Oh, I’m in deep shit now, man,” moaned the kid.
“Is that the red one?” asked Oberon.
The kid sat up straighter. He nodded.
“I’ve seen your dad driving it,” Oberon noted.
A real nice car, but the sergeant had a Corvette. Half the guys on the force had Porsches, Corvettes, Jags, Cobras, Healeys...Lagondas. One guy had a Maserati. The other half of the force had yachts and stuff.
A couple of the guys had planes. Link had a jet.
“Where were you? What direction were you traveling?”
The kid let out a deeply-held breath and after some hesitation, began anew.
“I was out near Le Gran Binge, and it was getting pretty late,” said the kid.
“Your dad’s working in Kuwait?” asked the Oberon, reading the notes provided to him.
“Yes, sir,” said the kid.
“Any damage to the car?” asked the sergeant. “Mike, is it?”
“No, there’s no damage,” acknowledged Mike.
“So what exactly happened out there to upset you so much, Mike?”
“Upset? Upset? Holy, Jesus,” Mike seemed about to go off again, but the sergeant calmed him down by phoning out for a coffee for the kid; who slurped at it gratefully when it arrived.
Finally the guy got down to it. He was headed west, doing about eighty-five in a fifty zone, eight or ten kilometres out of town.
“I was coming over the brow of the hill, just before Dead Man’s Curve, and that’s when I saw it,” he told Oberon. “It was fucking huge! Excuse me, normally I don’t swear too much, but I mean fucking huge. I jammed on the brakes and watched it go off into the fields.”
“And what do you think it was?” asked the sergeant.
“A fucking lizard, a fucking iguana, a fucking dinosaur! I don’t fucking know,” said Mike. “I know damned well you don’t believe me, sir. I swear to God, it was thirty or forty feet long.”
He seemed pretty miserable. This was no prank.
“I’m sure you saw something out there, Mike,” said Sergeant Oberon. “Promise me you’re not on anything? Like a few hits of acid or something? Ecstasy? No?”
“I don’t need to lie to you guys,” said Mike. “I had a couple of beers in Le Gran Binge. Look, you got to find that thing, man!”
“Only a couple of beers?” questioned the sergeant a little more aggressively.
“It’s a borrowed car,” said Mike. “I have some fuckin’ sense.”
“We’re going to put you back in the cell while we try to figure out what to do,” allowed the Sarge. “Then we’ll just get you to sign for the impound of the vehicle.”
The kid put his head in his hands and moaned a little at that one.
“Look Mike, play it my way, and maybe we can keep you out of jail, okay?”
Oberon opened up the door and beckoned Fry in. As Fry led the boy out, he tipped him the wink: ‘come and see me when you’re done.’ Fry grinned over the kid’s head in
acknowledgment. There was an unspoken humourous comment that went around sometimes.
‘Looks like we got us a live one here.’
Phillip Oberon went to his desk and pulled out a Ministry of Health Form 42, an order to commit an individual for three days of psychiatric observation. He looked at the clock, and picked up the phone. He needed a doctor to sign it for him. At this time of night, he was at a bit of a loss. Normally he worked the day shift exclusively, but a fellow officer fell while trimming branches, and he got tapped for the duty. Taking an unused sick day on Monday, and returning to work Tuesday seemed like a good plan.
He even came out a thousand bucks in shift premiums ahead on the deal, but the lack of sleep was getting to him. He’d always hated the night shift. In the early days, that merely spurred his ambition. Back then, he and Connie had big plans, high hopes for the future.
‘Twenty-five and out,’ he promised.
As senior sergeant, it would look bad to refuse. A nap this morning; he hoped to get back to sleep tonight, and then back to normal for work on Tuesday. But it wasn’t working out. Normally a cheerful man around the workplace, he assumed that he was liked and respected by his people. Tonight he was trying very hard not to be grumpy.
Finally someone picked up over there at the hospital.
“This is Sergeant Phil Oberon over at Lennox Police Services,” he began to smooth- talk the duty nurse at the hospital emergency department’s admitting desk. “Who’s on tonight?”
“Well; there’s Dr. Davy,” she began.
He would insist on examining the patient.
“Nope,” he said.
“Dr. Haseltyne is in,” she went on.
Again he said, “Nope.”
Haseltyne got burned once too often. Someone even threatened to sue him.
“Dr. Chickadee is
in,” she told him.
“Put me through,” he said.
New guy, just over from somewhere…New Brunswick. Moved to town six months ago. Immigrated from Africa, looking to set up in practice and let’s see…wife, two kids, the whole gig. They had a file on every doctor in town.
“Hello? Doctor Chickadee,” he heard on the line.
“Yes, Doctor, it’s Sergeant Phil Oberon over at Lennox Police Headquarters. Listen, I’m going to need you to do me a favour.”
The doctor listened. He seemed okay with it.
The Sarge had some time to kill. Monday in the early morning hours was pretty dead until crush-hour traffic got going. He began to chat up the young doctor, who seemed a friendly enough type.
A lot of police work went on behind the scenes and the general public had no idea of how it was done. That’s one of the major reasons why; as a young officer, he volunteered to do public speaking. To kind of let the public know the cops were human and that following certain procedures was the best way of controlling crime. If truth be told, TV shows that led people to believe that any crime could be solved by science; the problem with that was; some guy finds a beer bottle on his lawn, he’s screaming for a DNA test to catch the perp!
A three-thousand dollar test for a fifty-buck fine on conviction! Considering how cranky some taxpayers could get, it might even be worth it in some cases.
“The key to police work is personal relationships.”
He remembered the first line of his first speech in front of an actual audience as if it were yesterday, and quite frankly it was no real trouble to re-iterate a tired old speech for the umpteenth time.
“I mean, let’s face it. Everyone wants to be in good with the cops,” et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah, ad infinitum.
Oberon was used to talking to judges and juries. A little old country doctor simply couldn’t stand up to him. Immigrants, they were always scared shitless of anyone in a uniform, any person with the symbols of authority.
“So anyway, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, ‘Night Court,’ like on TV, but the truth is we don’t have anything like that here in Canada, and we’ve got this kid. He’s high on drugs or something, and we hate to give a good young guy a bad police record or anything like that…” blah-blah-blah. “Lots of untreated mental illnesses here in this town. I don’t know if you’ve noticed…”
Blah-blah-blah.
“That’s right, Doctor. Claims he saw a giant lizard out the Lake Road. Alcohol, pot…
maybe something else. We just don’t know. No, he’s not violent…seems pretty sincere.”
He let the other guy talk for a while.
Blah-blah, blah-blah-blah, blah.
“A pretty nice kid. Really. That’s why we don’t want to take any unnecessary chances.
I’m sure you would agree? I’d sure like to get your impression before we go ahead with any heavy charges on the boy.”
It was like taking candy from a baby, in the final analysis. Fry stood at his shoulder with his partner, Gottschalk.
“Get all that?” he asked.
They nodded.
“Off you go then,” he nodded at them pleasantly, and that was that.
The Sarge gathered up most of yesterday’s paper, and headed for the coffee urn.
The bright lights of the lunch room and, ‘a cuppa Joe’ would help him make through until dawn. The squawk of the radio and the occasional buzz of the phone came and went.
He began to read, feet up on his desk.
The coffee was still way too hot after that first sip.
* * *
Crystal Waters fined for leaky trucks…
by Bill O’Keefe
Krystal Waters hazardous waste facility received a $42,500 fine in a Lennox court yesterday for operating trucks that leaked toxic chemicals and heavy metals. A guilty plea was entered in response to numerous offences under the Environmental Protection Act between June 9 and Oct. 4 at a landfill six kilometres east of Schmedleyville. Toxic materials escaped from nine trucks; reaching the ground but posing no environmental impact. This is according to an agreed statement of facts presented in court by the company and the Ontario Environment Ministry. Justice of the Peace Norbert Krapholtz indicated the firm’s history of violations is, ‘not that bad,’ but he would not alter the penalty.
Krystal Waters Inc. was fined $1,000 for each of the offences and the remainder on other offences involving other vehicles. Krystal Waters has fourteen priors, for offences in 2009 and 2010, resulting in fines of about $300 each. The company has fifty-seven priors under its previous appellation; Sparkly-Green. Government guidelines insist that vehicles be leak-proof. A Ministry of the Environment employee inspecting the trucks on an ongoing basis found the leaking trucks over the five-month period. One was spotted leaking a number of times. The leaking materials included pesticide, paint, chromium and lead, as well as phenols. The company was given sixty days to pay.
Chapter Forty-One
The attack of the giant mutant salamanders…