"You don't know if you want to tell me, or you don't know what you were doing?"

Goober looked at me. "I ddon't kn, kn, know."

I'd talked with Deputy Mike, and he'd told me that he'd been doing routine patrol in the area where we'd been having some residential burglaries, and he'd seen a car sitting on the side of the road, honking its horn. He turned on his top lights, and was just getting out of his patrol car to see if the occupant needed help, when the suspect vehicle had turned on its lights and taken off, scattering snow clogs all over him.

He'd very reasonably gotten back into his patrol car and started the pursuit.

Mike and Nine, John Willis, were still across the road, sitting in Mike's car, and waiting for a wrecker. When we'd taken Fred out of his car, I'd noticed several tools on the floor of the front seat. Whether they were carpenter's tools, or auto repair tools, or burglar's tools was open to question. That was the trouble with tools… they were pretty much described by whatever you wanted them for. We did have several area burglaries that had used a half-inch pry, and that could be just about any screwdriver. On the other hand, just looking at Fred's car led me to believe that most of the tools on the floor could easily have been used just to get the ugly thing started. Mike leaned toward charging Goober with Possession of Burglary Tools. I disagreed, but we'd left it kind of dangling, ready to be used if we could prove Goober had been about to go into a place. But any way you cut it, all we had was traffic on him at this point… and minor traffic at that.

We couldn't even get him for "eluding pursuit," because in Iowa you had to be doing at least 15 mph over the posted limit for that to come into effect. The limit on gravel roads was 55, just like rural highways. None of us thought we could prove 70 mph, because Mike was pretty well keeping up with him at 60. And 70 on those roads was just about out of the question.