Page 100 of Done with You

If he were on duty and in a patrol car, his lights would be on so fucking fast and he’d be after that chump, chasing him down and issuing him a ticket.

But he wasn’t.

So he couldn’t.

He pulled out and sped up a little, catching up with the gray Chevy Equinox. Then the motherfucker behind the wheel ran a goddamn red light. Cars honked and skidded to avoid a collision, several of them swerving out into the middle of the convoluted intersection.

Fucking hell.

It wasn’t even that late at night and there was already a fucking drunk driver on the road.

Your dad was wasted mid day and hit a kid. Time of day means nothing to an addict.

Right. It didn’t.

It was also the holiday season, which meant people were drinking at all hours of the day at get togethers and company parties. And some people had a very low tolerance and were inebriated after only a couple of drinks.

Clearly, this person had tied on a few too many and was now putting everyone else on the road in peril with their selfishness.

He might not be on duty, or even from Victoria, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something. He was still a police officer. Still a sworn-in member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and with that oath, he would serve and protect the people of Canada until his dying breath.

The light turned green and Aiden gunned it through the now clear intersection in the direction of the perpetrator. It didn’t take long for him to catch up to the SUV. It was on the highway now, having taken the on ramp, and now it wasn’t just speeding but it was zigzagging all over the road, too. Into both lanes, eliciting honks and emergency braking from other drivers, then over onto the shoulder and nearly into the ditch that made up the median between the four-lane highway.

Aiden wove through traffic and pulled up beside the Chevy. He memorized the license plate. G5P 4T8. When he had a minute where he wasn’t distracted, he’d call 911 and report the driver. But right now, he needed to make sure the driver didn’t cause an accident and hurt someone.

It was in the left lane, so he pulled up on the right and rolled down his window preparing to tell the driver to pull over. Only, when he looked through the passenger window into the dark interior of the vehicle, he saw that the man behind the wheel was unconscious. Or about to be.

His head fell back against the headrest and his eyes were drooping closed. Yet, the vehicle was still going. His foot was still on the accelerator.

It appeared to be a man in his mid to late fifties. Of Asian ethnicity and upper middle class, based on his watch and the leather interior of the vehicle. The man’s hands fell away from thesteering wheel and his body slumped sideways into the driver side door.

The Chevy veered to the left even more.

“Oh fuck!” Aiden cried when he realized the car was going into the ditch at fucking ninety kilometers an hour.

He checked behind him to make sure there wasn’t anybody riding his ass and about to rear end him, then he slammed on his brakes, knowing that it would take him a moment to actually come to a complete stop. He maneuvered the rental car onto the left shoulder and watched in horror as the Chevy drove right into the ditch at full speed and rolled over onto its side, then roof, the wheels still spinning in the air.

Aiden put the Young’s rental car into park, put on his hazard lights and jumped out, racing down into the ditch to the driver’s side door.

It wasn’t crunched in too badly, so he was able to open it, but that caused the man to fall out of the Chevy, since he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and he crumpled to the grass in a heap at Aiden’s feet.

Aiden crouched down and gently rolled the man over onto his back. “Sir. Sir, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Another driver stopped and came down. “Everything okay?”

“Call 911. I don’t want to move him. I think he was drinking and driving,” Aiden replied, the sizzling sound of rubber tires on wet pavement a deafening buzz around him.

The young man nodded and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

Aiden returned to the man on the ground. “Sir. My name is Aiden and I’m a police officer from Montreal. Can you hear me?”

The man made a noise, then his head lolled to the side. Aiden returned to the vehicle, reached in, put it into park and turned off the ignition before dropping back to his knees beside the unconscious man. That’s when he noticed that the left side of the man’s face was severely drooping. He got back up and went to the Chevy, taking a big inhale of the interior. Then he dropped to his knees once more and brought his nose right down to the man’s face.

There was no smell of alcohol. Not on the man’s breath or in the vehicle. Normally if someone was intoxicated enough to pass out and roll their vehicle, they smelled like the inside of a rum bottle.

He checked to see if the man was breathing.

He wasn’t.

---