The Last Handful of Clover - Book 2: Gifts Both Light and Dark

2.43 Car 4057

June 14, 7:31 am

In the morning drizzle, a police car that had been sitting in a quiet residential cul-de-sac in the suburb of Poplar Grove started its engine.

The squad car had been sitting there quietly for some hours as the neighborhood came to life on that early Sunday morning. Several cars full of families on their way to church had already passed by, looking into the police car with grateful curiosity. The way only middle-class white people ever look at cops. The heavy-set man in the white shirt-sleeves behind the wheel just waved at them and grinned, wiggling his fingers in a wave that seemed strange, childish, and out of character for a man of the law. The children in the passing cars waved back, trustingly, and the adults gave the man a warm smile—but everyone felt a flash of uneasiness, and looked back over their shoulders after they had passed.

The number on the roof and right back bumper of the car was 4057. Later, when one of those young mothers saw the squad car on the news, smashed and covered with blood, she would remember that number as being the car that had been parked on their street. And she would shiver.

In the gray light of the cold and rainy dawn, car 4057 started its engine, and eased slowly down the suburban street. It made a slow and legal right at the stop sign, using its turn signal properly, and then stopped at the end of the block. The car and its driver waited patiently, humming a tune from an old nursery rhyme, as a man in a gray suit and walking a cocker spaniel ambled slowly through the crosswalk.

When the light changed, the car headed directly west, crossing underneath the I-15 freeway on University Boulevard. A careful observer might have noticed that the car was weaving slightly to the right and left as it passed down the quiet street. It wasn't out of control, but it was almost as if the car was not mechanical at all—more like a lazy shark, cruising the depths in search of prey.

At Main Street, car 4057 took a left and began slowly working its way north, toward Temple Square. The street here had been converted into the main route for the light rail system, known as TRAX, in 1999. And it was busy this morning.

You might expect the downtown streets to be quiet on a Sunday morning. But Salt Lake no longer rolled up the sidewalks on the day of the Lord. It was a modern American city now, and even this early on a Sunday morning the coffee shops were full and the lines waiting for the trains stretched out along the sides of the stations. The car worked its way past the knots of people; the driver smiling and waving as he went. It looked like any other squad car on the streets of Salt Lake, except that the driver was in white shirtsleeves, with no jacket. That, and the slight weave in the car's tail—the unmistakable sense that it was sizing up the pedestrians, like a wolf sizes up a herd of sheep.

At exactly 7:38, as the official police report later stated, everything on Main Street changed.

Car 4057 suddenly accelerated down Main Street. If its sirens had been blaring, it would have looked like an officer on the way to a crime scene. But in actuality, the car itself was the weapon, preparing to be wielded.

With a squealing of tires, the squad car veered off the side of the wet road and into a group of a dozen men, women, and children, who were waiting for the next TRAX car. It happened so fast and with such little warning that nobody in that crowd even had time to leap clear. Instead, the metal rack bumper of the squad car, which was designed for pushing vehicles off the road, hit them like a bowling ball hitting the pins, or a snowplow crashing through a high bank. The lucky ones just careened over the hood of the squad car. But the head of an unlucky delivery driver by the name of Winters shattered the windshield of the squad car. Later, it was suggested that the impaired visibility caused by Mr. Winters' death might actually have saved many lives.