At about 2 o’clock in the morning, a JCSO deputy
pulled over a gray Volkswagen with Oklahoma plates after it wandered over a
double-yellow on Brook Forest Road and nearly joined him in the front seat of
his patrol car. The talkative young lady behind the wheel sloppily explained
that she was merely headed home from her bartending shift at an elegant
Kittredge restaurant. Since her shift ended at 10 p.m. and her breath was
stripping the finish off his badge, the officer wondered if maybe she’d used
the 4-hour interval to knock back a few, or a few dozen. “I’m not going to say
anything because I don’t want to incriminate myself,” she barely pronounced,
right before launching into a rambling explanation about how she’d spent the
time doing “paperwork, employee evaluations, etcetera, etcetera.” As luck would
have it, a noble Samaritan sporting Georgia plates and claiming to manage her
place of work stopped at the scene. He explained that he was “following her to
make sure she got home safely,” although he couldn’t explain how following in a
separate vehicle ensured anything besides a good view to her misfortune. On the
way down to Jeffco’s lock-up, the synthetically emotional woman ran by turns
hostile and sarcastic, surly and depressed, sullen and loudly musical. On
arrival, she sought to confound her tormentor by standing board-stiff just
outside the door, but he artfully countered the ruse by physically dragging her
into the booking office and citing her for driving while high as an elephant’s
eye.