The Criminal Mind (NJ/1970s Edition)

When I lived in New Jersey, which requires annual vehicle inspections (unlike Florida, no doubt among others), I once went without getting a car inspected for almost a year.

(This was in my idiot youth days, also known as my 20s, a fact which barely excuses the following story.)

The NJ State Police were notoriously (and justifiably) unforgiving about lapsed inspection stickers, and notoriously eagle-eyed as well. Thus, for a while I stopped taking interstates and other highways, where troopers spent most of their time. Yet I’d gotten so paranoid about getting caught that whenever police cars passed me going in the opposite direction — even on two-lane country roads, in dusk’s dim light — as we blew by each other, I’d keep glancing at the rear-view mirror to be sure the officer wasn’t turning around to pursue me.

Once — just once — this tactic actually paid off.

At the time, I was on Springdale Road in Cherry Hill Township, headed south towards Kresson Road.* I don’t know about now, but back then this was a pretty rural stretch, lined with wooded areas and fields on the precipice of subdivision development. Dairies. Roadside fruit-and-vegetable stands, that kind of thing. As I approached a hill, just over the top and headed towards me came the characteristic** front-end profile of a law-enforcement vehicle.

As it happened, the officer in question was a State Policeman, out on patrol in the boondocks. It was morning, but after rush hour, so there weren’t many people out and about yet. Maybe the trooper himself was just starting or ending his shift.

Whatever he was going there, my mind was already kicking into getaway-route mode: If he turns around, I won’t be able to get off this road until I hit Kresson… And then if I turn left I can head for… or if I turn right I can do this other thing…

We whooshed by each other and my eyes flicked to the left (side-view), and up to the right (rear-view), and straight ahead (because I was, like, driving). Just as I approached the crest of the hill, I saw his brake lights flash red, and he wheeled his car into a K-turn now maybe not quite a quarter-mile back.

What would be your reaction at this point?

I don’t know, either, but I know what mine was. As I topped the hill, I floored the gas pedal.

Now, although I was over the hill and he was still probably forward-and-backing, I wasn’t far enough ahead to really have much hope of escape. I wasn’t in a Ferrari but a Chevy Impala, and he rode a fiery horse with the speed of light, a steed bred expressly for outrunning mere civilian swaybacks. But I was moving pretty fast — the synapses in my brain firing even faster than the sparkplugs under the hood. Where can I go… where can I turn… he’s too close, too close…!

That was when I saw ahead, on the left, a housing development still under construction.

Eyes still on the road — still looking back, still looking ahead, and looking back and looking back and looking back and ahead — now I had to turn my attention veryquickly to what I imagined might be salvation.

A couple houses close to the road were near completion. Towards the back, they’d barely been framed. In the blocks between the two extremes, they stood in various states of undress, watching the high-speed drama unfolding before them, unaware that the famous fourth wall was about to be smashed and they hadn’t even put their pants on yet. But most importantly to my eager eyes, the streets appeared at least to be paved…

Hallelujah.

Barely slowing, with a couple last final glances at the mirrors, I made the left; I must’ve been going close to 40mph at the time, but luckily managed not to leave telltale skid marks either on the road or on the street I was now on. Braking, I went a block into the development, to a cul-de-sac, and turned my car around.

I haven’t seen the recent animated feature Cars, but even decades ago, even in black-and-white, a stock image of cartoons was the anthropomorphized car: the headlights become eyes, the grill a mouthful of teeth, the frame amazingly limber, the tires stretching and contorting into arms, hands, legs, and feet. You can sometimes see these vehicles, in these cartoons, tiptoeing along, peeking furtively around buildings.

That was my Impala at that moment.

We — the car and I — crept veeeeeerrry carefully forward. We extended our necks, turned our heads to the right to face the road, which we could see just beyond the walls of the future home of a family whose members would never know a fugitive had once gone to ground by their mailbox—

Whoosh! The trooper blew past the entrance to the development, lights flashing. We — the car and I — shrank back a bit, hunkered down, tried to blend into the landscape of construction rubbish: odd variegated mounds of dirt and concrete and shingles and tree limbs. Tried… and succeeded.

My heart was hammering in my chest. Part of what was racing through my bloodstream was exhilaration, for sure: I got away with something, and I did it in a cool way.

Part of it was terror: You jackass — any second he’s going to realize what happened, he’s going to turn around, he’s going to come back and his own damned car will be walking on tiptoes and they’re going to see us and they are going to clap us in irons…!

And part, a very tiny but noisy part, was a confused sort of reasoning: You haven’t really done anything wrong. You’re… you’re in the market for a house, that’s why you turned in here. And anyway, it’s a free country. And anyway, what’s he going to do? Sure he’ll be pissed but he can’t possibly jail you for this stunt, can he? … I bet he wasn’t even turning around for you, you’re just small potatoes, he probably just happened to get a real 10-28 or whatever they call it…

(Even now, just writing that, I want to delete it all. What if that trooper has been out there for 30+ years, licking his wounds, biding his time, setting a Google Alerts speed trap…?)

I smoked a cigarette. I smoked a second, and a third. And then — on very gingerly toes, my eyes cast far ahead, far behind, far to the left and right — we crept out of the development, back onto Springdale. I turned right instead of left, and went way the hell out of the way, the very very long way around, all the nerve-wracking way to work.

[Thanks to The Querulous Squirrel for inspiring this bizarre confession — in many fewer words, I might add. And thanks as well to inspectionsticker.net — an amazing resource when you just have to have the right inspection sticker (and don’t we all at some point?) — for the illustration, which I’ve intentionally messed up so as to leave the high-quality version to them. They did all the work, after all.]

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* And if you don’t think it thrilled me to remember those roads’ names just now, you must be new around these parts.

** “Characteristic,” especially if you imagine yourself on the lam and are used to being your own lookout.