The Fermented Fish Emulsion Sprinkler And The Obstructed Speed Trap
CHAPTER 6: THE MAD ESCAPE DOWN ORCHARD RIDGE
Inside the cabin of the box-van, the environment was an absolute chamber of horrors. Every single square inch of the interior was dripping with dark, oily amber condensation that reeked of three-month-old rotting harbor docks. Tyler’s eyes burned with such agony that he could barely see the steering wheel, his throat closing up in violent, spasmodic coughing fits as the heavy oily vapor coated his lungs. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his designer sweatshirt, but his sleeve was already soaked in the brown emulsion, smearing the greasy fish slime directly across his forehead, into his eyelashes, and over his open lips with every frantic wipe. The greasy brown emulsion was dripping from the rearview mirror, running down the steering column, and squelching beneath Tyler’s trembling hands. The windshield wipers were on, but without washer fluid to cut the heavy fish oils, the rubber blades only smeared the dark brown slurry into a thick, opaque film that completely blocked his forward vision.
“GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!” Tyler screamed to himself, his voice muffled by the violent heaves wracking his chest. Every instinct in his body screamed for survival, for fresh air, for any escape from the rolling gas chamber his luxury truck had become. The brown greasy film had penetrated the air ducts so thoroughly that even with the blower turned off, the natural ram-air pressure from the vehicle’s forward speed continued forcing the foul vapor through the vents like a blowtorch of biological rot.
Desperate to escape the suffocating cloud, Tyler stuck his head completely out of the driver’s side window into the seventy-mile-per-hour wind.
He stomped on the accelerator.
The sixteen-foot box-van lurched forward, its rear tires throwing crushed gravel thirty feet behind it as it leaped off the shoulder. Tyler did not bother looking for oncoming traffic; he did not check his mirrors. With tears pouring down his cheeks, snot dripping from his nose, and brown fish slime caked around his ears, he gunned the heavy diesel engine, the tires screaming as the vehicle careened onto the asphalt of Orchard Ridge Road.
The van roared down the hill like a runaway locomotive, trailing an immense, billowing cloud of brown fish fog and diesel smoke that stretched two hundred yards down the highway, smelling like an abandoned seafood processing plant on fire.
Officer Dan Cooper watched the vehicle disappear over the crest, then calmly stepped over to the curb.
With the massive box-van gone, the optical path of the radar station was completely, immaculately restored. The sunlit corridor of Orchard Ridge Road stretched out for thousands of feet, framed by the dark green foliage of the apple orchards. The gentle breeze carried away the last traces of the diesel exhaust, leaving the air clear and transparent. Cooper adjusted the aluminum vernier dials on his tripod, centering the optical crosshairs on the white stripe of the distant highway bridge. The wide asphalt straightaway of Orchard Ridge Road stretched out before the laser sensor like a sunlit runway, clear for over two thousand feet.
Cooper looked through the red-dot sight of the lidar unit.
“Speak of the devil,” Cooper murmured, his finger lightly resting on the laser trigger.
At the bottom of the ridge, three modified sports cars—a lowered black Nissan GT-R, a bright-blue Subaru WRX with an immense rear wing, and a red BMW coupe—had just turned out of the staging pit on Old River Road. Their drivers were focused entirely on the digital timing displays mounted on their dashboards. Believing the road was completely clear, they drove with reckless, criminal abandon, crossing the yellow center line, drafting inches from each other’s bumpers, and completely oblivious to the precision optical crosshairs painting their front grilles from two thousand feet uphill. Believing Tyler’s text message that the police checkpoint was permanently blinded, all three vehicles dropped into third gear and went wide-open throttle side-by-side, their exhaust notes screaming in a synchronized symphony of horsepower.
They were accelerating past eighty, then eighty-five, then ninety miles per hour, heading straight up the crest toward Arthur’s driveway.
“Target acquired,” Cooper said with cool, professional precision. “Lead vehicle: ninety-four miles per hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour agricultural corridor.”
Cooper keyed his shoulder radio microphone, his voice smooth and relaxed. “Sergeant Keller, this is Unit Twelve on Orchard Ridge. I have three Class One speed contest vehicles inbound on my laser beam at ninety-plus miles per hour. They have zero idea I have them locked. Trip the box at the intersection of State Route 24 and set up the spike strips.”
‘Copy that, Dan,’ the radio crackled with grim satisfaction. ‘We have three cruisers waiting at the crossroads. They’re driving straight into the net.’
Curiosity Lock: As the three screaming sports cars flashed past Arthur’s driveway straight toward the waiting roadblock below, a second radio call came across the frequency from Deputy Henderson two miles west: “Dispatch, we have a white commercial box-van driving on the wrong side of the road with the driver hanging out the window screaming about dead fish!”
