Hadn't they already got me rounding up a million chickens at an East End golf range, and wild dogs, morning after morning in the West End? Played a hilarious "I can't hear you - Didn't you get the message?" on my police radio until I wondered whether my voice, hearing or naïve empty mind had ejected this mortal coil. Often I had been dispatched with merriment to lonesome inebriated ladies desiring a chat - or quickie - with a young stud? "Here, offisher, enjoy a drinky-poo on me! Yer a loverly one they sent thish time, aintcha?" Whew!
I still sweat with embarrassment at a three-in-the-morning patrol incident on the blackest night in world history. Parking old Twenty-Four to walk the orifices of a large isolated warehouse, I returned to find a vacant spot where the car had been. "My God," I cried to the sky. "Is there no justice in this mad mad world? How can this be happening?" No telephone, no way to call for help, futilely I walked a quarter mile north, and then south into a shallow canyon. There beside a wooden bridge I heard the tick-tick-tick of a running V-8, my vehicle. It seemed the extent of my ignorance had no bounds. The car magically rolled into that draw, I surmised, then stopped, parking itself in those trees.
Yep, I actually believed that impossible nightmare until I returned: "Hey Rookie. Anything go missing on your patrol this morning?" Yep. That was Cliff Laye, and Smart laughing as I broke out in a scarlet complexion to: "Gotcha!" while Jack Western beamed. Ooooooh!
Or the third watch roadblock. We'd set that up and now after midnight I was driving the whole squad back to the station down a gravel road in Cruiser Twenty -Four. "Hurry up!" cried Cliff.
"Yeah, get a move on, Don," Ready Freddy seemed impatient. I stepped it up to seventy, then eighty.
"You some kind of pansy driver, Youngster. Pedal to the metal," laughed Pederson.
"Move over and let a man drive," Dave Smart was as smart-assed as his name implied. Bang!
"Blowout," I cried, struggling to hold the car on the road, nearly wetting my pants.
"Hang on gang!" Some yelled.
"We're going over!"
"It's the end for us all!"
When finally I brought the car to a halt, I was met with great laughter and merriment, for Oscar had merely fired his pistol out the rear door. No blowout - except maybe the brain of a half-witted rookie.
"Hey You," whispered Laye one afternoon, with Western over his shoulder. "Here's the license number of a stolen vehicle. It's real special to the Chief that it be recovered quickly, so be on the lookout every second of every minute of every day. Got that?"
I must have spent the next week scouring plates as they passed by, scanning the numbers of each parked vehicle. No parking lot, field nor concession road did I leave un-reviewed. And each day they would ask, "Well didja find that stolen vehicle yet?"
"Well get busy. The Chief is getting mighty impatient about it."
It was a Saturday afternoon. Third watch was just beginning when I slowly discovered the whole rest of the squad encircling me. "Sheesh Guy, you still haven't found that missing vehicle, have you?"
"Nope, not one sign of the blessed thing. I give up on that, fellas." By that time I was quite used to failure, I reckon.
"Well just go to the parking area and I do believe you will suddenly see that particular vehicle. Got the plate number in your book?"
"Don't worry, I memorized that one." Trembling, I moved in cold anticipation. And there it was like some mirage dropping upon me, a whole Chicken Little sky falling in a horrifying nightmarish epiphany. The plate number that I'd lived with and dreamed about for endless days, the numbers that kept me up nights, loomed there large - bolted fast to car number twenty-four, my own police cruiser!
Like I say, in those days I seemed to be scorching the track to gain the London Township Stooge Silver Cup. Or more likely, the Mortimer Snerd Gold Medal.
And every once in awhile, quite absentmindedly, I still find myself looking for that damned license plate.
How's that for police training?
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