could keep on believing he was a prick, and by not meeting her low expectations, he was proving her wrong.
And yeah, okay, after all the guff she’d given him over the last few years, he liked the fact that his being a good guy and cutting her some slack would piss her off a hell of a lot more than his issuing her another ticket.
So maybe Ellie wasn’t far wrong; maybe he was a bit of a prick after all.
He waited until her old blue Beetle disappeared around the curve near the bridge, then slowly got back into his patrol car and turned off the flashing lights. A small part of him would kill to be a fly on the wall when her letter from the Motor Vehicle Branch finally arrived and she saw the list of driving instructors in the area.
Until the MVB found a replacement for Larsen, Brett was the only one in a fifty-kilometer radius, and maybe if she hadn’t called him “Poncherello” he might have warned her about that.
“Seriously,” he grumbled. “Anyone who’s ever seen a single rerun of CHiPs knows I’m way more Baker than Ponch.”
But Ponch was better than some of the other names she called him, like Dudley Do-Right or Barney Fife.
Ellie’s past brush with the Ontario police was no secret to him; he’d known about it since the first time he pulled her over and ran her name through the system. It didn’t surprise him to see drug charges attached to anyone’s name, not with the number of cases he saw day to day, but after getting to know Ellie a little, none of that made sense. Hell, so far as he knew, the only time she’d even been intoxicated in the last four years was the night she, Regan, and Maya threw a post-wedding bachelorette party for Jayne.
She liked her wine, there was no question about that, but heroin? No way. And if she’d been wrongly charged and dragged through the courts, he couldn’t really blame her for having such a hate-on for law enforcement, especially after her stalking complaints against her ex, Kurt Neill, seemed to have gone nowhere. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy to Brett, but even if the cops hadn’t been able to help her with Kurt, surely her dad, some big hotshot attorney, would have been able to secure a restraining order against him. Yet there was no record of that having been done, either.
Given her complaints against Kurt, Brett had added him to the list of suspects in the hit-and-run but had crossed him off when the info from Toronto came in stating that Kurt had been on probation at the time, part of which included restricted travel. According to the Toronto detachment, Kurt had spoken to his probation officer on the phone the day of the accident, just like he’d done every week, as required.
One thing about Ellie: she didn’t seem to lie about anything, so it didn’t surprise him to hear bits of her past come out in conversations when they were all together. Regardless, it wasn’t his place to comment on any of it. What had happened was her business, and as far as Brett was concerned, the case had to have been thrown out for one of two reasons: either she was innocent or the cop assigned to the case hadn’t done his job properly.
Brett slipped his notebook into his vest pocket, making sure her license was still tucked inside. Jayne wasn’t wrong about him having Ellie’s info memorized. He only asked for her license and registration every time because it was procedure, but he’d long since stopped needing it in order to fill out her tickets.
Palmer, Elleanor Grace, DL #4885210, date of birth 1983-12-05, eyes brown, hair brown, weight 59.4 kg, height 171.5 cm, address 2649 Graemsay Road, Class 5 license with Restriction 21.
Technically, her hair was more of a chestnut shade, her eyes weren’t just brown; they were…well, brown brown, and the right one had a tiny gold speck near the bottom of her pupil. The only reason he knew that was because he’d once questioned her on the corrective lenses restriction and she’d responded in typical Ellie fashion; instead of simply telling him she wore contacts, she’d opened her eyes as wide as she could, pointed toward her lenses, and given him one of her all-too-familiar “dumbass” looks. It was his job to make sure she was actually wearing them, and in the time it took to