Page 109 of The Man I Hate

I turned off the clippers. “Yes, once.”

“What for?”

“Resisting arrest.”

“What were they arresting you for in the first place?”

“That’s the exact same question I asked the judge. I wasn’t really resisting arrest. It was more just me being resistant to an overbearing cop’s attitude.”

“Let’s hear the story,” he said.

I grinned at the thought of it. “I got pulled over for speeding out in the middle of nowhere. I was test driving a customer’s car before taking it in on trade. I wanted to see if it had any drivability issues. On an open stretch of road outside of Tulsa, I got up to 160 miles an hour. Just as I was getting ready to slow down, I whooshed past this cornfield. There was a cop backed into the farmer’s entrance, eating a barbeque sandwich and clocking—”

“If you were going 160, how do you know what he was eating?”

“Because it was all over his shirt when he pulled me over five minutes later.”

“Proceed with the story, my dear.”

I liked it that he called me my dear. My father did it regularly, and I missed it.

I smiled. “I slowed down to a crawl, and he pulled me over five or six miles down the road. He came walking up the car with his hand on his gun and barbeque sauce from one end of him to the other. The first thing he said—even before ‘do you know how fast you were going’ or ‘can I see your driver’s license?’ was, ‘I’ll be taking this purty blue sum bitch to the impound yard.’ I threw a fit. He told me to settle down. I didn’t. It really wasn’t a big deal.”

“Had you hit the brakes before you blew past him?”

“No, I was still on the gas.”

“How fast did he clock you?”

“168.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said with a laugh. “What were you driving?”

“A Lamborghini Aventador. Someone was trading it in on a Ferrari.”

“Do you always drive customer’s cars like that?”

“Supercars?” I asked. “Sure. I need to make sure they don’t problems. If I took one on trade, giving a customer $200,000 for it, and then when the next customer took possession he brought it in and said, ‘hey this thing wobbles and makes weird noises at 160, I’d might be spending 20 grand for a suspension overhaul.”

“Sounds reasonable,” he said. “So, when the cop said he was going to tow it, you threw a fit?”

“Pretty much. After he made his comment about the impound yard, I said, ‘hold on a minute.’ He said he had the right to tow it. I said, ‘You might have the right, but you don’t have my permission.’ He said, ‘You’re not in charge, Missy.’ I said, ‘My name is Anna.’ He smirked a shitty little smile, showing me the bits of pulled pork that were still stuck in his teeth, and said, ‘Well, Anna, I’ll be taking this shiny blue sum bitch to the impound yard, like it or not.’”

“He sounds like a horse’s ass.”

“He was,” I said. “I explained that I could have someone there to get it in five minutes. It only had about two inches of ground clearance, and I didn’t want them to damage it when they tried to load it on a truck. He called for a tow truck, anyway. That’s when I called him a fat sloppy piece of shit.”

He coughed out a laugh. “Calling a cop a fat sloppy piece of shit is like calling the first base umpire a cocksucker. It’s a surefire way to expose their bad side.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Did they tow the car?”

“They did. It had $4,000 worth of damage when I got it back.”

“You’re not afraid of standing up for yourself,” he said. “That’s a quality not often found in a woman.”

“If anything, I have a problem keeping my opinions to myself.”

“How much was the speeding ticket?”

“$4,000 damage to the car, I lost my driver’s license for a year, paid a $2,500 fine, and did 160 hours of community service.”