The cruiser A/C blew against my sleeves.
The scanner popped with half-clear voices, the kind of broken radio noise you stop noticing after enough years unless somebody says your unit number.
I had been rolling that lonely stretch of Route 66 at forty miles an hour with one hand on the wheel and the other resting near the console.
Then that square of brown caught my eye.
For a second, I almost kept driving.
That is the part that stayed with me later.
Not because I had done anything wrong.
Because I had been tired.
Because I had been human.
Nineteen years in uniform teaches you how cruel boredom can get.
People think cruelty always comes dressed as rage.
Sometimes it comes dressed as a joke.
I had pulled mannequins out of ditches.
I had stood over fake blood smeared on culverts.
I had been called to backpacks staged like crime scenes, only to find a teenager fifty yards away trying to keep his phone steady while his friends laughed behind a mesquite bush.
