The Voice Rambles On - 6. The Ditch Prompt 348

The Ditch

“Can you give me one good reason why I should believe you?”

“Lady I don’t really care if you believe me or not! Now do you want me to send this truck for you when he is done or not?”

“NOT!” Sarah shook her head. She could walk the 5 miles to the parts store and back and do the repairs herself in the amount of time this guy wanted her to wait for a tow.

“I simply cannot believe that there is only one f*&^%&$ tow truck functioning in this state right now and it has a 5 hour wait time!”

“Fine – have a nice day lady.” The guy disconnected. It was all Sarah could do to keep from throwing the phone across the parking lot.

This was supposed to be such an easy day. The job didn’t start till noon. Plenty of time to get up, take a leisurely shower, go out to breakfast and still be to work with time to spare. The weather was supposed to be perfect, they had the best crew lined up today, and everything should have gone off without a hitch.

Except the weather man had been wrong, the mechanic that serviced the truck apparently has no skills, and the flu is making the rounds.

Sarah sat in the truck with water around her ankles. The rain this morning had flooded just about every low lying area in the county. Her stomach rolled, not much caring for the BLT she had grabbed for breakfast. This was really going to cost to clean up. She looked up at the road as a trooper pulled off and turned his lights on.

“Oh thank goodness! PLEASE tell me you have some pull with a towing company somewhere?”

“Please step out of the truck miss. License and registration please.”

“Certainly sir.”

Sarah handed him the paperwork he had asked for along with her insurance information. After perusing the information he walked back to his car. After what seemed like forever he returned with the documents and handed them back, along with what looked like a traffic ticket.

“What’s this?”

“It is a ticket for failure to control your vehicle.”

“You haven’t even asked me what happened and why I am sitting in a ditch yet! How can you issue me a ticket?”

“Why you are in the ditch is irrelevant. Had you controlled your vehicle you would not be in the ditch. Now, I need a full accounting of what happened for the report.

Sarah shook her head. She couldn’t believe he wrote the ticket without even asking what happened. Failure to control a vehicle? She had never heard of that being a ticketing offence.

Sarah set about explaining to the patrolman how she was cruising along the isolated stretch of highway when two cars came roaring up behind her. The first swung out into the oncoming lane to pass with the second hot on her heals. As the second car cleared her front bumper he cut back into the lane and floored the gas trying to pass the gal, leaning on the horn all the way and barely missing Sarah’s bumper. Swearing, Sarah had braked hard, trying to give Frick and Frack space to argue it amongst themselves, when her brakes decided they had enough. The pedal sank to the floor. Sarah half panicked, took the truck out of gear, and applied the emergency brake. She must have stepped on the pedal a tad too hard though, as they locked up and she slid every way but straight. When she finally came to a stop she was sitting in the huge mud puddle between the road and the closed hardware store.

To add insult to indignity, every towing company she could find on the net using her tablet was either too busy to come out or didn’t even bother answering.

“That is an interesting story, very interesting. I’ll be right back.”

The patrolman went back to his car for a few minutes, returning with more papers in his hands.

“I called a tow for you. They said it will be a while.” He handed her the papers and smiled. “About 5 hours.” He turned and strode off like he wanted to get away quickly.

Sarah looked at the paper he had just handed her. It was a second ticket for “Failure to maintain vehicle”! In the notes section he had written “Driver admitted to brake failure causing the accident”. She put her head down and began to beat it against the steering wheel.