His father, being older, wiser, or just less intoxicated, shoved his son. “Listen to the warden, Don.”
“The deer blood places you at the scene of the accident at the time of Ashley Kim’s disappearance,” I said. “That makes you prime suspects in her murder.”
“What about her dead professor boyfriend?” Dave gave me a sly smile. “Yeah, we heard about that. Or maybe someone else was there that night, too. You ever think of that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Figure it out, asshole.”
“If you boys know what happened to that girl-”
Disregarding my warning, Dave and Donnie sauntered toward the bar entrance.
“Have a good evening, Warden!” Dave called over his shoulder.
I bit my tongue rather than let loose with some profanity.
I thought that was the end of it. But as I was fiddling with the keys to my Jeep, one of them gave a loud shout: “Don’t drink and drive, Warden!”
Inside my vehicle, I tried to make sense of what had just gone down. For scrawny little men, the Driskos definitely had hog-size balls. What did Dave’s crack mean about someone else being at the crash scene the night Ashley Kim disappeared? Was he referring to the man who made the anonymous 911 call?
Trying to start the ignition, I dropped my set of keys on the floor. Sarah was absolutely correct: My judgment sucked. Driving to Seal Cove was the textbook definition of reckless. And to top it off, I hadn’t even gotten my hamburger.
I started the engine, backed carefully out, then headed back up the peninsula. After just a few minutes, I was passed by a Maine state trooper’s patrol car, a powder blue Ford Interceptor, moving in the opposite direction. The trooper continued around the piney bend behind me without decreasing speed.
A few moments later, I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw the patrol car behind me. It didn’t have its blue lights going, nor was it gaining velocity. It just tagged along at a distance of about a quarter mile, pacing me.
You think that cops spot impaired drivers primarily because drunks speed or weave across the center line, but just as often you can spot someone who is intoxicated because they are driving too slowly, overcompensating for their diminished capacities. As such, I kept close watch on the speedometer, maintaining a constant forty-five miles per hour.
But it was to no avail. As I crossed the line into Sennebec, the trooper suddenly accelerated and switched on his pursuit lights.
There was nothing else for me to do but steer carefully onto the mud shoulder and wait. The trooper pulled in behind me at an angle, as all law officers are trained to do, and paused there, reporting my tags, assessing my movements.
I decided to remove my splint. The pain was excruciating, but I thought it would look better to be driving with a blackened hand than with a splint. I retrieved my auto registration and proof of insurance from the sun visor, but I had a hard time getting my wallet out of my pants with one hand. My fingers found the Vicodin in the pocket. Quickly, I tucked the bottle under the seat.
The trooper emerged from his vehicle. Looking in my side mirror, I watched him approach closely along the side of my Jeep. He rested his right hand on his holster.
I rolled down my window.
“Can you step out of the car, please?” said Curt Hutchins.
32
I’d known it was Hutchins all along. He regularly patrolled this peninsula. The question was, had someone called him from the bar? A conviction for operating under the influence-or even its lesser cousin, driving to endanger-would mean the end of my law-enforcement career.
His voice was a monotone. “I need you to step out of the car.”
I climbed awkwardly out of the Jeep. “Jesus, Curt, is this necessary?”
“I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance.”
Never once making eye contact with me, he examined the papers I gave him as if he expected them to be riddled with errors. I’d forgotten how large a man he was. “How much have you been drinking, Warden?”
“Just a beer.”
The trooper was exuding anger from every pore. “What are you taking for the broken hand?”
“Ibuprofen.” At that moment, I remembered the loaded Walther in my pocket and my heart skipped a few beats. As a game warden, I had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but I was obliged to disclose that I was carrying. More important, I was prohibited from packing a gun while consuming alcohol or certain prescription medications.
I decided to keep mum.
In the process of handing the papers back to me, Hutchins deliberately dropped them in the mud. It’s a trick we all use. Lack of coordination is another marker of intoxication. To secure a conviction, you needed probable cause to do a Breathalyzer or blood test. I bent down awkwardly and gathered them.
“So what do you want to do first, the nystagmus test?” I asked, figuring my only way out of this mess was to be bolder than he expected.
He stared out from beneath the crisp brim of his trooper’s hat. He appeared drawn and tired. There was a patch of stubble on his throat that he’d missed when shaving. He didn’t respond.
“Or do you want me to recite the alphabet,” I continued. “Which way-forward or backward?”
A white pickup sped past, the driver slowing down to see what we were doing. I glanced at Hutchins’s cruiser and figured he had the video camera on his dashboard rolling. To a prosecutor, a tape showing a drunk trying, and failing, to walk a straight line was like money in the bank.
“I’d cut the wiseass shit if I were you,” he said in a flat tone.
“I know what’s going down here. You’re hounding me because you’re pissed about that night at the Westergaard house.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Your career is in the shitter because of Ashley Kim, and you’re guessing this is your chance to flush me down with you.”
“You really don’t know when to shut up, do you?”
“People tell me that.”
He peered into the front and back of my Jeep, looking for God only knew what. I wondered if he would search the vehicle; he would be within his rights to do so. He circled the Jeep, and then without a word, he returned to his cruiser, leaving me standing there along the side of the road to wait and worry.
My mind was racing. So what would happen after he busted me? He’d take me to the Knox County Jail for a blood test. Then would come the mug shots and fingerprinting. I’d have to call Sarah to bail me out. The union might be able to protect me until a guilty verdict came in-if it came in-but how long would that take? In the meantime, Colonel Harkavy would find some excuse to fire me. It wasn’t like I was the beloved mascot of the Maine Warden Service.
I was fucked, in other words. Maybe Sarah was right about self-destructiveness being hardwired into the Bowditch genes. And now, for all I knew, she might be bringing another generation of us boneheads into the world.
Hutchins climbed back out of his Ford, fastened the chin strap on his hat again, and came striding in my direction.
“Go home,” he said.
“What?”
“Get the fuck out of here.” His mouth became a sneer. “I think you’re probably impaired, and I could give you some field sobriety tests. Maybe you’d fail the blood test for real. But if you didn’t, it would look like I’m harassing
