Power and Empire

Now on the way home a second time, Calderon thought about calling his wife to tell her he was fifty minutes out — the baby was probably keeping her up, anyway — but decided he’d better not, just in case she’d been able to drift off. Thinking about her made him smile. He hoped the kid was a redhead like her.

The trooper rarely had time to listen to the good-time radio during a normal shift. He preferred to keep his mind on the job between traffic stops, but there were no cars on the road this late — or this early, considering the fact that the sun would be up in a couple hours. The night was wonderfully cool, so he rolled down the windows on his Ford Mustang interceptor and turned up the volume on the AM to let Coast to Coast blast conspiracy theories into the darkness.

He caught the glimpse of taillights fifteen miles south of the Mansfield city limits. Trained to be inquisitive when it came to vehicles on “his” highway, Calderon stomped on the gas. The Mustang’s V-8 roared to life, throwing him back into his seat like a good interceptor should. The other car was going slow — too slow, really — and the Mustang closed the distance in a matter of seconds. The trooper silenced the good-time radio out of habit and fell in behind the vehicle.

The car, a maroon Chrysler 300, kept a constant speed of sixty-three miles an hour, two miles an hour less than the posted limit. It bumped the center line a couple times but didn’t cross it, and that could have been a function of trooperitis. Nobody could drive a quarter-mile without committing some kind of violation, least of all someone with a black-and-white staring at them in the rearview mirror. Still, there was a gnawing in Trooper Calderon’s gut that came from one part experience and two parts instinct — something about this particular vehicle — that made him want to do a little more investigation.

He asked Ellis County to run the license plate, gave the dispatcher his location, then decided to follow it for another minute or so. This guy hadn’t really done anything wrong. Calderon was exhausted, and he wanted to get home to his wife’s pregnant belly.

Then the face of a young girl popped up in the rear window. She hadn’t given him a long look. If fact, the face vanished as quickly as it had appeared, as if someone had ordered her away.

Calderon had seven years on with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Way back during his field-training days, a senior trooper in the Highway Patrol had once told him that only three kinds of people were out during the wee hours of the night — cops, paperboys, and assholes. Thousands of violator contacts over those seven years — many of them after dark — had proven the notion.

Ellis County came back over the radio and said the LP was registered to a guy named Carlos Villanueva, aka Parrot. The dispatcher was on the ball and had already run a triple-I, checking Villanueva’s criminal history as well as any outstanding warrants. He wasn’t wanted, but his record showed two convictions for driving while intoxicated.

Calderon followed the car for another mile, thinking about the girl — and whoever it was that ordered her out of the window.

“That’s too nice a car for a paperboy, asshole,” he muttered, and flipped on his red-and-blues.

Troopers in the Texas Highway Patrol are endowed with buckets of swagger by the time they graduate the DPS Academy in Austin. But swagger could get you killed if it wasn’t backed up with good procedure. As tired as he was, Calderon was careful and precise as he prepared to make the stop.

He gave Ellis County his new location and followed the Chrysler over to the right shoulder, stopping far enough back that the other car’s rear license plate was just visible over the front of the Mustang’s hood. He cheated the cruiser over a few feet to offer a little cover from traffic coming up behind him. Instead of walking up immediately, he flipped on the white, forward-facing halogens on the interceptor’s light bar. These “takedowns” flooded the back of the vehicle with bright light. Never one to engage in a fair fight when it came to his own safety, Calderon did one better and turned the dash-mounted spotlight so it hit the rearview mirror, effectively blinding the driver to his approach.

Then, instead of going up on the driver’s side, the trooper skirted around behind the Mustang so as not to cross in front of his own headlights, and made his approach on the right shoulder. He thought the guy with the peach-colored polo shirt was going to crap himself, he jumped so bad when Calderon tapped on the window with the butt of his flashlight.

Once the driver got over his initial shock, he blinked up at the trooper but kept both hands on the wheel. A lone girl was seated directly behind the driver. She was tiny — just a child, really — with long hair hanging down and obscuring her face. This was surely the girl he’d seen in the rear window. She pretended to be asleep, but her breath was uneven.