Ticket To Paradise

Oh, no! Toni Matthews thought as she saw the red, blue, and amber emergency lights flashing in her rear-view mirror and heard the shrill siren of the police car shrieking like a banshee. She was being pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer. She’d been speeding, she knew, but maybe, if she was flirtatious, the officer would let her go with a warning. It would be her luck, she thought, that the cop would be a woman instead of a man.

She watched the officer open the door to the patrol car and step out into the bright sunshine, and she smiled. The cop was a man!

He wore the familiar tan uniform, with the dark stripe down the outside legs of the trousers, brown jackboots, a wide utility belt equipped with mace, a holstered revolver, a holstered baton, Mace, and handcuffs. A small microphone was clipped to his shoulder, and he wore mirrored sunglasses and the mandatory badges-one on his breast, the other on his hat. He walked toward Toni’s Mustang convertible with a brisk, no-nonsense stride, noting to himself that the top was down.

When he reached the driver’s side of the vehicle, he stopped just behind the front door. Good afternoon, ma’am, he said. May I see your driver’s license and registration, please? The name badge on his shirt, Toni noticed, read Rogers.”

She took her license from the wallet in her purse and handed it to the officer. The registration’s in the glove compartment, she announced.

Patrolman Rogers nodded, and Toni opened the compartment, found the registration, and handed it to him.

“Do you know why I stopped you? Patrolman Rogers asked.

Toni was tempted to answer with a smart-ass question of her own: Don’t you know why? Instead, she said nothing, as if his question had been rhetorical.

‘You were going seventy-five miles per hour in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone.”

Still, Toni said nothing.

Abruptly, the patrolman said, his voice no longer matter of fact, but curt, Step out of the car.”