Ten o’clock. Two o’clock. I knew the drill.
It had been many years since I had been pulled over by the police, almost as many years since I was a young deputy sheriff doing traffic stops myself. When I did, I wanted to see the driver’s hands right where mine rested now.
Ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel. Left hand at ten. Right hand at two. Where I could be sure he wasn’t concealing a gun.
Extra points if he had shut down the engine and held his driver’s license and vehicle registration.
Unless the driver was being extra careful because he was a bad guy.
Then I would be on extra guard.
Traffic stops were scary, especially if they were on lonely roads after midnight. It was you and the driver and anybody else in the car and the darkness. Backup might be miles away.
You might think you were pulling over a driver to tell him his taillight was out. Unless the driver had killed his girlfriend or robbed a Circle K five minutes before and didn’t know you were only being Deputy Helpful.
When I was a rookie, these stops were the only part of the job that scared me.
Now I was the driver and Sharon Peralta, my partner’s wife, sat beside me.
My hands rested at ten and two, and the digital clock read one o’clock in the morning.
I had taken a chance roaring north out of Phoenix on Interstate 17 in her silver Lexus IS 250C convertible.
I took a chance doing ninety-five when the posted speed limit was twenty miles-per-hour lower. With budget cuts, traffic stops by the Department of Public Safety-the highway patrol-had plummeted so low that people started calling it the “shadow patrol.”
But the shadow patrol nailed me as I climbed out of Camp Verde. Red lights and blue lights followed me as I took an exit that led down a cut to a crossroads. I pulled off the pavement onto the dirt ten yards before a stop sign.
A spotlight swept the inside of the car, then focused on our rearview mirror. That was standard procedure to keep the occupants of the stopped vehicle from seeing into the police car behind them.
I had already used the button to roll down the window when I heard the officer’s voice.
“Do you know why I stopped you, sir?”
A Southern accent washed through my ear canal.
“I was speeding.”
A flashlight beam flashed across the interior, lingering on our laps and our feet. She asked for my driver’s license and registration. I handed them over.
