The Eden Express Read Online Free

always dopeless. Holding tended to wreck whatever pleasure there was to be derived from these little vignettes.
    I had been stopped for some pretty flimsy excuses before and Trooper Suchadolski was no exception, but at least he had a new line.
    “I thought you might be having some trouble with your vehicle.”
    “No, Officer, not really.” Car Car was doing beautifully, cruising with an incredible load between fifty-five and sixty. I had slowed down some when I saw the trooper because I didn’t have that much faith in my jury-rigged speedometer and didn’t want to give him any excuse. My muffler did something a little funny over fifty-five, but he never mentioned it so that wasn’t the problem.
    He looked at all the stuff in the car. “Going to California?”
    “No, Officer, we’re headed for British Columbia.”
    He never caught on.
    “Seems like everyone I meet on the road is headed for California. What’s out there?”
    “We’re going to British Columbia.”
    Three months later. “I asked the defendant where he was going and he said he was going to California.”
    “Can I see your driver’s license and registration, please?” All his concern for the condition of my vehicle was gone.
    I opened the glove compartment and got my license and registration. He craned his neck, trying to see if he could see anything more interesting in there.
    “What else you got in that glove compartment?”
    “Not much.” I rummaged through it naming some items. “A screwdriver, some pliers, some gum, a can opener, some more papers, and our first-aid kit.” I had mentioned the first-aid kit last, sort of mumbling it. There was nothing really illegal in there but I knew he’d hassle us about it.
    “Let’s see that first-aid kit. What’s in there?”

    I did the same routine I had gone through with the glove compartment. It was like Twenty Questions. “Some Band-Aids, some gauze, some iodine, some adhesive tape, some scissors, a butterfly suture, and some pills.”
    “What sort of pills?”
    “Well it’s mostly just leftover prescriptions for one thing or another.” Which was true. “We’re going to be doing of lot of camping out and we might be pretty far from a doctor at times.”
    He wasn’t impressed. “What sort of pills?”
    If there had been some rule about how many questions he got I might have had a chance. But there wasn’t and I could tell that this man’s curiosity wasn’t the sort that would stop, having merely exhausted the possibilities of my glove compartment. I knew he’d get around to being interested in what was next to my battery and I knew that’s where I had stashed the tail end of my Jamaican grass, such nice stuff, and Virge’s mescaline. I knew I was going to be busted.
    I opened the vial of pills and poured them into my hand. “These little white ones are penicillin. The prescription is right on the outside of the vial, with the name on it and everything. These gray-and-red ones here are Darvon for pain. Virginia’s got a prescription. These here are Bufferin. See the little B right on them? They’re easy.”
    For some reason, he was attracted by the penicillin. There was more of it than anything else. He went back to his car to study his little drug identification book—which I saw later—and came back and told me that the penicillin pills were amphetamines and that they were illegal. He handed me a little piece of paper and told me to sign it. I just sort of looked at the paper and then back at him and then back at the paper. Someone had done a dreadful job of typing.
    “It waives your right to a search warrant,” he explained.
    “I’m not so sure I want to waive it.”
    Three hours of constitutional debate and assorted other fun and
games, culminating in a search that left Car Car’s contents and innards in shreds. Later I was checked for lice and crabs and clunked into jail. I blew my one phone call on a bondsman who refused to handle drug cases.
    The next morning I