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By Rose Ann Venham
The night was damp and dreary. It had been raining hard off and on all day. Deputy Sheriff Mac was sitting along the side of the road in his patrol car doing paperwork to the sound of the windshield wipers and the defroster, trying to keep the windshield clear in case he had to pull out quickly.
Earlier he had pulled over a young mother with a new baby for having both tail lights out. She started crying and said she knew about it, but there was a problem with the wiring and she didn't have the money to get it fixed. Officer Mac didn't give her a ticket, just a piece of paper with the number of a local handyman that would fix it for her cheap. He still had to write it up as a warning. Always paperwork for everything.
Suddenly the radio gave a loud squawk. So loud he gave a jerk on the clipboard he was holding. Over the air was a desperate call from "Officer 679 needs assistance at Mile Post 4 on State Route 550...Officer involved crash with possible fatalities." In a split second with a quick look for traffic, he pulled onto the highway with lights flashing and sirens blaring into the night.
While enroute, Mac began wondering what officer it was who requested assistance. He thought he heard 679, but that couldn't be right. Mac knew every officer's unit number in his rural county. As he approached the area, the curve in the road ahead of him looked clear. The road was wet, with shining red and blue rain sparkling in the damp night, but no one was there. No cars, no people, nothing. Mac radioed dispatch, afraid he heard the location wrong like he did the officer's unit number.
The voice of the dispatcher hesitated and finally said she hadn't heard the call for assistance and there were no other officers in the area. What just happened? A prank Mac wondered. Earlier when he was parked along the highway an old car went by with what looked like a couple good ol' boys inside waving at him. They didn't look like pranksters, but it is Halloween so who knows.
Mac made a broad sweep of the area, using his spotlight, looking all around and over the side of the steep curve. He remembered the story about this place. It was several years before he joined the force. There had been a terrible wreck in this very spot. There were two young boys and a patrol officer killed here when the boys went left of center to avoid hitting a cow and hit Officer Davis head on. Now it is called Dead Man's Curve.
Cows still graze nearby but all looks clear tonight. Officer Mac got back in his patrol car, made another wide searching arc with his spot light, and headed back to where he had been parked before getting the bogus call so he could finish his paperwork. "Officer 679 needs assistance" still pulsing in his head.
There ahead of him was a large landslide with a huge boulder lying directly on top of his muddy tire tracks where he had been parked! Mac thought to himself, if he hadn't sped out when he did, he would have been crushed under that rock...saved by the desperate call from Officer 679, Officer Davis, the officer that had been killed in that curve 20 years ago.