96529Q
'Hold it, hold it,' Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of. He was in the lot of the Westport I-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this. Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.
'What have we got here?' he murmured this time, and reversed the cruiser. Past a Camaro. Past a Toyota which looked like a slowly aging horseturd in the beaten copper glare of the arc-sodium lights. And . . . ta-DA! An old GMC pick-up truck that looked orange in the glare, which meant it was - or had been - white or light gray.
He popped his spotlight and trained it on the license plate. License plates, in Trooper Hamilton's humble opinion, were getting better. One by one, the states were putting little pictures on them. This made them easier to identify at night, when varying light conditions transformed actual colors
into all sorts of fictional hues. And the worst light of all for plate ID were these goddam orange hiintensity lamps. He didn't know if they foiled rapes and muggings as they were designed to do, but he was positive they had caused hard-working cops such as himself to bugger plate IDs on stolen cars and fugitive vehicles without number.
The little pictures went a long way toward fixing that. A Statue of Liberty was a Statue of Liberty in both bright sunlight and the steady glare of these copper-orange bastards. And no matter what the color, Lady Liberty meant New York.
Same as that f**ked-up crawdaddy he had the spot trained on right now meant Maine. You didn't have to strain your eyes for VACATIONLAND anymore, or try to figure out if what looked pink or orange or electric blue was really white. You just looked for the f**ked-up crawdaddy. It was really a lobster, Hamilton knew that, but a f**ked-up crawdaddy by any other name was still a f**ked-up crawdaddy, and he would have gobbled shit right out of a pig's ass before he put one of those f**king crawdads in his mouth, but he was mighty glad they were there, all the same. Especially when he had a want on a crawdaddy license plate, as he did tonight.
'Ask Mamma if she believes this,' he murmured, and put the cruiser in Park. He took his clipboard from the magnetized strip which held it to the center of the dash just above the driveshaft hump, flipped past the blank citation form all cops kept as a shield over the hot-sheet (no need for the general public to be gawking at the license plate numbers the cops were particularly interested in while the cop to whom the sheet belonged was grabbing a hamburger or taking an express dump at a handy filling station), and ran his thumbnail down the fist. And here it was. 96529Q; State of Maine; home of the f**ked-up crawdaddies. Trooper Hamilton's initial pass had shown him no one was in the cab of the truck. There was a rifle-rack, but it was empty. It was possible - not likely, but possible - that there might be.someone in the bed of the truck. It was even possible that the someone in the bed of the truck might have the rifle which belonged in the rack. More likely, the driver was either long gone or grabbing a burger inside. All the same . . .
'Old cops, bold cops, but no old bold cops,' Trooper Hamilton said in a low voice. He snapped off the spot and slowly cruised on down the line of cars. He paused twice more, snapping the spot on both times, although he didn't even bother to look at the cars he was fighting up. There was always the possibility that Mr 96529Q had seen Hamilton spotlighting the stolen truck while on his way back from the restaurant cum dumpatorium, and if he saw the trooper car had passed on up the line and was checking other cars, he might not take off.