The Northeast Kingdom

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There are two types of police traffic stops: “high risk” and “unknown risk.”

“High risk” are stops of vehicles fitting the description of a stolen automobile or of one suspected of being used in the commission of a crime. Every other stop represents an “unknown risk” because a police officer never knows, as he or she approaches a vehicle, what might be going through the operator’s mind at that moment on that particular day. The element of surprise, and therefore the advantage, is always on the side of the driver. The “low risk” traffic stop does not exist, unless the officer finds that he has pulled over his own mother.

The big man wedged behind the steering wheel of the white Ford cargo van was not Deputy Sheriff Brian Kearney’s mother. Brian’s mother was a fading violet named Annette who, at six o’clock on a dusky August evening in Huddleston, Montana, was already settled in on her back porch not three miles away, a second small bottle of Michelob Light soaking a water ring in the imitation redwood patio furniture Brian’s father had been assembling for her on the night he died. Brian’s mother’s second husband, Perry, a semiretired bank manager and the reigning Border County Tenpin Champion, always took care, Brian had noticed, never to set his own drink, nor the little cigarillos he left smoking in plastic Bank of Huddleston ashtrays, on any of the porch furniture, the assembly of which Brian had completed himself that long night between his father’s wake and funeral. That bit of family respect was what had sold Brian on his stepdad, that and the fact that his mother was happy again and no longer alone.

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