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EXILE, TEXASByRoxanne Longstreet Conrad
Conrad -
Exile, Texas
- 2 -Copyright © 2003 by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad
Conrad -
Exile, Texas
- 3 -
Chapter One
I first saw the silver Lexus in my rear view mirror as I was writing up my ninth ticket of the day.Ticketing speeders on small state highways, like the ones I patrolled, was sort of a catch and releasesystem: tourist conservation. Unless it was breaking the land speed record, I was inclined to let the Lexusgo about its business. Too many tickets in a morning looked, well, overzealous.Truth was, I sympathized with speeders. There isn’t much else to do out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas; not many cars to bother you, not much to look at but orange-brown sand and spikymesquite bush, and a whole lot of clear, clean, bowl-shaped sky. The Lexus would flash its brakes assoon as it saw me sitting in the shadow of the John Birch Society billboard. They all did.I was still signing ticket number nine when the silver Lexus blasted past me like a mirage,shimmering, the exact color of the early winter sun. She hadn’t hit the brakes, she’d hit the gas, and if itwasn’t a land speed record it was certainly a contender. I handed over the ticket, waved the tan SUV onits way, and got back in the car.The Lexus was still hauling ass.All right, I thought, and flipped on the lights. If you want it this way . . .I chased her for about three miles before I caught up. She—I was fairly sure the driver was ashe—played hard to get, buzzing along for a good thirty seconds or so before she flared brake lights and pulled off to the shoulder in a orange swirl of dust. I parked behind her, left the lights flashing, andreached for the radio.“Dispatch, this is Nine,” I said. It still felt odd. In Houston, where I’d come up as a patrolman anduntil recently worked as a detective, radio cars had, well, bigger numbers. And nine was deceptiveanyway. There were only four cars in the whole department. There’d probably only been a total of ninesince the invention of the internal combustion engine. “Dispatch, come on back.”
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