WRECK — #TrueCrime by Harvey Stanbrough

I invited my buddy, Harvey Stanbrough — a prolific writer whose penned over 45 novels, novellas, craft books, and 200 short stories — to share an experience from his cop days. Boy, did he deliver! Wait till you read what happened on the graveyard shift one night. WRECK is a true story.

Take it away, Harvey!

WRECK

As was the case with most warm June nights on the graveyard shift — ours ran from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. — I was in my patrol car, cruising along the south end of the 4-lane main street checking light reflections in windows and looking for doors ajar, strange cars, and other anomalies. We also regularly showed a presence near the convenience store on that end of town around closing time to scare away any would-be robbers.

I had my driver’s side window down. The aromas of the bakery, Mrs. Johnson’s orange trees and a stockyard made for an interesting mix and filled the night with the sense that all was well.

The town is a little place of around 15,000 people in southeast New Mexico.

It’s one of those places where, when a hard rain comes in at just the right angle, every alarm in town goes off, keeping all the officers busy leap-frogging each other until all the alarms are checked and cleared.

It’s a place where most Friday and Saturday nights, the routine of listening to music on the AM radio is broken around midnight or 1 in the morning with calls to bar fights or the occasional drunk driver, domestic dispute, or breaking and entering.

In that small town, those were pretty much the highlights (or lowlights) of a typical graveyard shift.

So it was that at 2:34 a.m. on just such a Friday night, I was listening to Conway Twitty’s “Linda on My Mind” on WBAP Fort Worth/Dallas when the official radio crackled to life.

“All available units, check the rumored one-vehicle accident at Railroad and 24th.”

“Rumored” was the dispatcher’s code to tell us a concerned citizen who didn’t want to get involved had called it in anonymously. Probably an impaired driver had gone off the road into a side ditch or something. You know, something typical. Because it was “rumored” the dispatcher wouldn’t roll an ambulance until we requested one from the scene.

On that particular night, only three city units and one county unit were available.

On a direct line from the center of town, the location was a rural turn about four miles out, a place where Railroad Drive took a sharp right and became 24th Street. There were no cross streets.

In the daylight, and at night if you weren’t impaired, if you were on Railroad you could see the turn coming well in advance. It was marked with a young elm tree with a bushy, full top. The tree set some ten feet off the end of Railroad past the turn.

I happened to be the first to respond, followed a minute or so later by another city unit (my sergeant) coming out Railroad and the other city and county cars coming up 24th Street.

As I approached the turn, I noticed three things.

Where the ghostly green of the bushy elm tree used to be was only black sky.

The sky itself was partially hidden behind a thick white column of steam.

And below the column of steam was a broad white square.

I hit my overhead lights, sped the last half-mile, and stopped at the corner. I left the overheads on just in case there were any other drivers out at that time of morning. I got on the radio, told the dispatcher I was on the scene and requested an ambulance. Then I grabbed my 6-cell Maglite and my fire extinguisher and ran toward what was left of the car and the tree.

That turn is banked. There were no skid marks to indicate the driver caught a clue as to what was about to happen. The car, a heavy mid-1970s Plymouth, had launched off the road at a high rate of speed. The front bumper struck the six- to eight-inch diameter trunk of the elm tree almost 3 feet off the ground. The bulk of the tree lay in the scrub mesquite and creosote some twenty feet away. The front of the car rested on the stump. The rear bumper was dug into the dirt bank that sloped down from the edge of the road.

The driver’s side window was down and the passenger door hung open. The staunch, grating smells of alcohol and marijuana permeated the air.

I shined my light through the window and in a few seconds took in the scene. The driver hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, and the driver’s side of the windshield bore the shattered imprint of his forehead and pate. The rest of the windshield was torn loose and shattered, lying on the hood of the car.

The top third of the steering wheel was bent toward the dashboard. The front left side of the driver’s blue, short-sleeved oilfield work shirt was soaked with blood. His jeans were blue-black, whether from the oilfield or also from blood. There were beer bottles all over the inside of the car and a half-joint with a glowing ember on the end slowly burning a hole into the car seat.

In the beam of my flashlight, what I could see of the driver’s face he looked to be in his mid-20s. He had slammed forward, striking the windshield and the steering wheel, then backward, and eventually collapsed to his right, his upper torso and head slipping off the seat into the passenger-side floorboard.

Despite all that, he was conscious.

Just as my sergeant ran up behind me with his flashlight and fire extinguisher, from inside the car came the drowsily delivered, “My baby… my baby.” Electricity fired through me.

I shoved my way past my sergeant and shined the beam of my light into the back seat, then the back floorboard.

As I continued to peer through the driver’s side rear window, my sergeant said, “What’re you doing?”

“He said something about a baby. I’m looking for it.”

“Oh god.”

The was no baby in the car.

The man on the floor continued to mumble, “My baby.”

The other city officer and the county deputy ran up to the passenger side of the vehicle, their flashlights also on.

My sergeant yelled over, “You’ll have to take him out of the passenger side.”

I yelled, “Look under the car. Is there a baby under there?”

The deputy knelt, flashed his light underneath, then rose. “No baby.”

A distant siren wailed and the ambulance, its lights flashing, turned from the highway onto 24th street some two miles away.

My sergeant managed to get the hood open. He sprayed down the engine compartment from near the left fender.

I dropped my fire extinguisher next to him and moved past him and the former tree and started shining my light around the nearby creosote and mesquite.

No baby.

Could the baby have gone through the passenger side of the windshield and into the thick of the tree?

I started scanning the light through the brush of the tree.

By then the deputy and the other city officer had pulled the man from the floorboard and laid him on the tarmac of 24th street. He was still mumbling about his baby.

As I started around the tree to check the limbs on the other side, I noticed the deputy was already searching on that side.

I turned away and continued searching deeper in the desert.

How far could a baby fly, having hit a windshield at probably 60 or 70 miles per hour?

The deputy and I both continued our search. Probably the baby was dead. Probably he wouldn’t be crying to let us know where he was.

Finally, just as the ambulance arrived, the other city officer called to us.

We canceled our search and walked toward him.

“Found his billfold,” he said. “There was a phone number with the name Carmen with a heart beside it. The officer had the dispatcher call the number.

Carmen answered.

Yes, she and the man had a 15 month old baby, their first. Why did we want to know?

The dispatcher didn’t answer, but asked where the baby was now.

“In her crib asleep.”

The young man died on the way to the regional hospital.

At least the baby didn’t go with him..

His latest novel is Blackwell Ops: Jack Tilden, the origin novel for a series. You can find it at this universal link (https://www.books2read.com/u/4jD8Xl).