Shit! Now you’ve 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. You’re not chasing some hopped-up nineteen-year-old flier; you’re 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 can’t miss the spinning lights now flashing into her car’s interior and making everything pulsate in blue, even her white hair. Sure enough, she doesn’t 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 it’s somebody else getting yanked, they all jack it back up to seventy.

You know this is true because you’re a cop and you know the paranoia you invoke. And you’re kind of proud of it. But what the hell is wrong with this old biddy, who’s 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 isn’t one of those Chicken Little, the sky is falling, dipshits who’s 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, you’ve heard it, too, but never with any detail as to what jurisdiction and exactly what was threatened, or specifically what was stolen. You’re not sure it isn’t just one of those urban legends, like the alligators in the sewer and the boa constrictor in the toilet plumbing. But shit, this broad ain’t reacting at all.