Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Fifty-Three

It took three hours, but the eight-car pileup had finally been cleared and traffic at the intersection of Commerce Road and 129th Street was once again flowing in all four directions.

Still, Gonzalez was not happy. He had even been given a reasonable, if immediately unprovable, explanation of the headcount from the accident scene that would have put one of the hospitalized victims behind the wheel of the green Jeep.

He was also bothered by the presence of G-Force.

Since Gonzalez' latest promotion, Forsythe had used get-out-of-jail-free cards to get his old friend and now superior officer to bail him out of trouble three times – twice, when Forsythe appeared to be the aggressor in bar fights, and once when the patrolman had gotten drunk in uniform and crashed a car into the rear of an SUV driven by a local high school senior.

That third bailout was the last Gonzalez would ever give Forsythe, he swore.

The victim in that crash wasn't just any high school senior. He had recently quietly earned a spot on the University of Minnesota's football team, as a walk-on. And he even had a chance to work himself up to number two in the quarterback rotation. That sort of status is almost unheard of for a D-I walk-on.

The kid didn't die, but his SUV was destroyed and his right leg broken in three places. After four surgeries, doctors said he'd walk again and maybe even run but always have a limp. Regardless, his dreams of being the next Rudy Ruettiger, a version of Rudy who actually could play football well, were dead.

Gonzalez was almost knocked off his own upward trajectory when he answered his phone that fateful night to hear Forsythe's slurring voice on the other end.

When he arrived on that dark side street of weed-covered vacant lots begging for a visionary developer to claim them, Gonzalez could make out the skeletons of a dozen McMansions under construction.

He found a groaning, broken seventeen-year-old boy, and one very lucky patrol officer whose only apparent injuries were a nasty lump on his temple from his head hitting the windshield and a cut to his left forearm.

Years later, Gonzalez would ponder whether Forsythe, jock that he was, had suffered concussions in his youth and exacerbated them in adulthood. The guy did seem to slam his head into hard surfaces quite a bit. And he made plenty of mind-numbingly stupid decisions.

"Drink this! Drink it, now!"

Gonzalez pressed firmly on Forsythe's shoulders, forcing him to sit at the curb. Dutifully, Forsythe drank every drop of the gallon jug of water, Gonzalez had forced him to hold. Then, like the good friend he was, Gonzalez punched him in the stomach, causing Forsythe to vomit back up half the jug.

After the water came six ounces of castor oil...and another punch in the stomach, then another sixteen ounces of water and a few slugs of coffee.

By the time Gonzalez dialed 911that night, Forsythe was by all appearances sober. He may not have met the scientific definition. But he wasn't carrying himself in a way that would even hint he had been under the influence.

Both men agreed that the story would be that Forsythe was following the teenager's SUV intending to pull it over for failure to signal and possibly speeding. But he lost track of the vehicle after it turned down a side street.

When Forsythe turned down the same street to try to find the SUV, he suddenly came upon it stopped on the side of the road with its lights out. He wasn't able to stop in time to prevent the crash.

The truth was that the teenager may well have failed to use a turn signal, but he didn't realize the car behind him was driven by a police officer and had turned down the side street and killed his lights to escape what he thought was a suspicious person following him.

Forsythe had borrowed his ride that night from the police impound lot – a car confiscated during a vice sting. So, Gonzalez was able to cover up the accident by virtually burying a car that no one was looking for. He simply had it towed back to the impound lot and placed at the rear of the lot and hid it in plain sight.

"Lieutenant, we're all clear but need you to sign off on inventory."

The voice —that of a department maintenance technician and tow driver who worked closely with the accident reconstruction team— broke into Gonzalez's reminiscence.

"Did you find anything useful," he asked, "or was it just more of the same – more taillight fragments and pieces of bumper and fender?"

"Mostly the busted parts, but there was one weird thing you should see."