Relentless

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This stretch always tempted the drivers who had Le Mans fixations: it came down off the mountain like a ski slope and two-laned straight out across the twenty-mile flat below.

It was a Friday forenoon at the dying end of October. The aspen forest had turned gold. Watchman and Stevens lay in wait in the Roadside Rest Area, parked under the trees. There wasn’t a billboard to hide behind but the ritual was the same. Under the molten brass sun the shadows were black and had sharp edges; drivers barreling down the highway wouldn’t spot the cruiser until it had them nailed.

Downstate on more populous roads you could poke along five miles under the limit and gather a clot of traffic tamed and intimidated by the presence of your Highway Patrol car, and it would create a chain wave of caution that would slow them down for miles ahead and behind. But up in this corner of Arizona you seldom got more than one car in half an hour and the strategy of Visible Presence didn’t work. They had put Watchman and the rookie on this beat four months ago and it had been easy to size up: State Highway 793 was the only through route in the district but it was wide open for a hundred and fifty miles. Watchman had planted the word with gas stations and cafes from the mountains to the Nevada line and now the tourists were getting the warnings: You want to watch out, there’s a cop car posted somewheres between here and the Nevada border-speed trap, watch your step. Up here they didn’t assign a ticket quota and Watchman didn’t care about writing up violations but back in August a Cadillac going down this stretch at a hundred and five had dropped a tie rod and they had spent two hours with a blowtorch scraping the remains of the five passengers out of the wreckage.

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