Page 381 - NIXBOOK

Panic time? Why was he asking me where I was? Did he already know? Was he in fact watching me right now? I couldn’t help
but glance up and start looking around. “Six oh one,” I replied, “Um, I’m in Legion Park.” I was frozen, wondering if he was
going to ask me what I was doing or worse, if he wanted me to come meet him somewhere. Or maybe he would come find me.
Any scenario would benefit from me finishing the job with extreme speed, which I did. Got the spare on, threw the damaged
tire and rim into the truck, and left the scene.

The next day I found a nice matching wheel at a junkyard, and had a tire put on it, and I put that into the truck and got rid of
the damaged wheel and tire. Problem solved, and nobody ever found out about. So no harm, no foul. Of course the two reserve
officers knew; one of them later became a full-time officer and a couple times in the decades to follow he’d laugh about that
time when I looked so panicked trying to fix my blown-out tire in the dark.

Another time I backed up a little too far - literally
only just a few inches – off a road and I got stuck.
Specifically, I had backed up where a side road was
being added to a main road and I went there on the
first day of the new construction, when the main
road shoulder had been cut and prepared to have the
side road paved in to it. The cut was at least a foot
deep and when I backed up too far the back end of
my car when THUMP and both rear wheels fell off
the road and I was totally immobile with the frame
of the car right in front of the back wheels resting on
the pavement. Oh did I mention this was at about 3 am. So at least there were no witnesses, except for Officer Romaine who I
had to call to come help me. He was so happy that there was a stuck patrol car and it wasn’t his that he was downright gleeful.
He immediately called the night sergeant, who had just ended his shift and was sound asleep. “What”?!” I said. “No you don’t
need to call the sergeant!” I told him. “Oh yes I do,” Romaine said. “It’s in the policy book. Anytime you crash a patrol car, you
have to inform the sergeant.” I pointed out the car was not crashed, it just went off the road a little too much. Too late, Romaine
had called Sergeant Playter and woken him up and he was busy describing the scene. “Is there any damage to anything?” asked
the sergeant. When Romaine admitted no, no apparent damage, the sergeant growled “then just call a tow truck and get it back
on the road.” And he hung up. Romaine was still so thrilled about somebody else instead of him having a problem with a patrol
car that he took a Polaroid picture of the scene, despite my pleas and protests. Tow truck guy came, hooked a cable on to the
front end, and pulled it like one foot forward to get it up on the road. Again, no harm and no foul. Although I was pissed at
Romaine for trying to make a big deal out of it.
I’ll also add here that upon reflection, I believe I can say that I definitely operated an above-average number and wider variety
of different makes and models of police cars than most other cops did, or do. For example, I knew some cops who drove literally
only two different kinds of cars during their 20+ years of police work; for me though, I can say that I spent considerable time in
at least 9 different kinds of patrol vehicles.

Last memory of my Gran Fury days was the time I went down Forest Rock Lane, a brand new road on a pretty steep hill. Oh this
was around 2 am. The road was so new it hadn’t even been paved yet; it was just a single dirt lane being cut through a thick
stretch of woodland. When I saw it was open (but still under construction) I drove down to check it out, and discovered too late
that the very bottom was cordoned off with a couple of large concrete barriers. The only way out was to go back up, but since it
was still only a single lane dirt road there was no room to turn around. And it was at that point when I found out that the hill
was too steep for my car to go back up it in reverse, because it was a rear-wheel drive car and the engine was in the front,
meaning the rear end was too light to get enough traction. I called another officer (Not Romaine who off that night thank God)
who came to my rescue. He parked at the top of the hill (good idea) and walked down, and then he got up on the back bumper
while I put my car reverse. He had just enough weight to get the back wheels some traction, although more than a few times he
had to literally jump up down to get the whole thing bouncing enough to bite into the loose dirt and gravel to keep the
momentum up. Other than those incidents, I never crashed into anything or anybody and nothing else remarkable happened.
Below: you can see my fancy portable/hand held radar gun, which rested on a mount on the dashboard.