link between the two. Gibb took the shoulder, spitting gravel as his tires sought traction. As he passed the Caddie, he glanced at the horrified faces of the septuagenarians behind the wheel. By their expression they were ready to stop for the day. They might even turn around and go back to the land of mint juleps and courteous drivers.
“Being responsible for your family is a harder prospect altogether,” his father had drilled into him. “Attaching yourself to a higher principle is easy compared to a wife and kids and cousins and aunts. Familial responsibility is something that everyone can attain. Who was it who said that marriage is the great equalizer?”
Certainly someone who’d never been divorced thought Gibb as he surged forward, siren blaring as his Crown Victoria bore down on the Chevrolet. Divorce was the great equalizer. Knaves rose as great men tumbled.
Just as Gibb was about to shout commands from his loudspeaker, the driver of the Corvette eschewed a felony and rationally slowed the vehicle. An arm emerged from the driver’s side window and waved back at him as if Gibb were an Avon dealer invited in for tea and an order of soap.
One thing was for sure, the person who initiated the divorce could be accused of gross irresponsibility. His father never would hear of it. Once, when a good friend fell ignobly out of love with his wife of ten years, his father had given up the friendship without even a care. Never again did his father speak to the person whom he’d fished with and played poker with every weekend for ten years. Never again would he be in the same room with the man who'd been forced to resort to divorce. So polarized was his father by his beliefs, that young Dolan grew up with two choices—either be with Dad or against him.
The Corvette coasted to a stop beside a worn saguaro. At least three hundred years old, pieces of the immense cactus had fallen dead from the affects of vehicle exhaust. Other parts showed signs of drive-by cactus shootings.
After radioing his location to dispatch, Gibb stepped from his cruiser into the still warm night. The temperature had fallen from a daytime high of 100 degrees to 80. Dolan could still feel the heat of the day radiating from the asphalt through the soles of his shoes. It might drop another ten degrees by midnight if they were lucky.
He placed his hat on his head and adjusted his baton. Although wary, he wasn't too concerned with the driver. This one was the type to throw money at a problem rather than fight it.
"Sir, please place your keys in your hands and hold them out the window."
Once the driver complied, the rest was paperwork. Gibb found that he'd been right about the man. No hardened criminal here. In fact, he was a fire chief in San Diego.
"I didn't see you back there, officer. Sorry about that," the driver said.
Gibb allowed the man to believe his own lie and wrote him a ticket for the maximum.
“Taking responsibility for one's actions is sometimes the hardest,” his father had said to young Gibb as he was growing up. “Not only do you have to make up for your own mistakes, but if those mistakes affect others, you have to make it up to them as well. What was it the Chinese do? If you save a life, you're responsible for guaranteeing that life forever? Once again they got it all wrong. The truth is that if you adversely affect someone's life, it is your responsibility to correct it. If you save a life, you're a hero. But if you kill someone... if you kill someone outside of war, or protecting your family, your life is no longer your own.”
Gibb finished writing the ticket and passed it to the indifferent driver. The sun was nearing the horizon, etching the sky in reds and yellows. The driver stuffed the ticket into a glove compartment already overflowing with paper and sped off towards Los Angeles and the sunset.
He glanced around at the landscape. Amidst the scrub and skeletal remains of tumbleweeds, Gibb counted seven sets of crosses on his side of the road. There was nothing especially dangerous about the area. The road ran straight for miles. So why so many deaths? The only logical explanation he could come up with was the night drivers from Los Angeles to Phoenix and back falling asleep at the wheel.
Gibb's father's belief was