My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten. High Speed Chase. Louis Shalako.

Mine was Primrose yellow, and was slightly modified...

Louis Shalako

High speed chase. High speed chases are a very bad idea. Zipping across a public park, at night in an Austin Mini, was dumb enough, and yet it was also purely impulsive.

One dark and stormy night, I was alone in my 1971 MGB, heading west along Lakeshore Road in what was then Sarnia Township. It was freezing rain. The road was ice. For that reason, I was probably only doing 60-65 kilometres per hour, admittedly in a 50 kph zone. I’d lived with the car for a while. I had put in a lot of time in that seat. The fact that I had Hooker tube headers, an Ansa free-flow exhaust system, I had ported and polished the head, probably resulted in another five or ten horsepower to an engine that was rated at 94 brake horsepower. I had lightened up the vehicle, and substituted a 12-volt battery in the trunk for two six-volt batteries under a panel behind the seats. The hood was aluminum instead of steel, I’d pulled this off a scrapped ’69, this is also where I got the new cylinder head to work on. This may have improved the forward-rear balance of the car. Looking at the photo, my car had the steel ‘rallye’ wheels, not wire wheels. Even the stock air cleaners were big and heavy, but I had fabbed up a couple of metal plates for each of the dual carbs and used little circular filters from a Pinto or something. This is a frequent mod for the vehicle, one barely frowned-upon by the purists, who could be a real pain the ass sometimes.

Interestingly, I had taken out side-marker lamps, a requirement for the North American market. What did that save, a fucking pound or two? I had removed the air pump, a pollution control device…I had the head milled down by thirty-thousandths of an inch to up the compression. I had driven, (crazy as it was), at night, eighty miles per hour (or more), on gravel roads.

Remember, I wanted to drive Formula One, even though poor boys don’t stand a chance in hell…

And there is a set of oncoming headlights on what was a pretty empty road, understandable considering the weather conditions…it was probably eleven-thirty at night. I was a lonely guy, and long tours around southern Ontario were a form of recreation. I didn’t smoke and I wasn’t drinking…I wasn’t high on drugs. This was before I met my girlfriend.

I was real clean back then, with reflexes like a cat.

As that other car passed in the opposite direction, the reflective markings on the vehicle, and the typical ‘cherries’ on top told me it was a cop. And I just gunned it. I didn’t even think.

Sure enough, the fucker hits the brakes, and I saw the flash in the rear-view mirror.

He is turning into a driveway…he’s backing out, but I had a head start. The sensible thing to do, would be to simply pull over. Admittedly, he never really did put on the flashers, he did not turn on the siren. I could see him, a half a mile back at this point, and I was doing eighty or a hundred kilometres per hour by now. On the map, it looks pretty straight, but it did twist a bit, back and forth. Since then, they’ve leveled out some of the humps and straightened out some of the bends, but even now, it is not dead straight.

One of the things I did on that car was to put on bigger tires. The stock tires were 165 millimeters wide, originally, (on early-sixties cars), they would have been bias-ply tires, not radials. I had 175s on the front, and 195s on the back end, the benefit of a bit of reading up on mild performance modifications for the MGB. People thought I was nuts, of course. I worked at a tire shop, trying to get through the academic upgrading program at Lambton College…I could beat any other MGB in town, and that was just a fact.

The cop car was slowly gaining on me. It’s not a real long stretch, and at that time, Murphy Road was the boundary between the City of Sarnia and Sarnia Township.

The conditions played a role. I could imagine him on the radio, trying to coordinate between the two police forces. If the Sarnia cops could get into position, they could head me off. Just west of Modeland Road is a sharp right-hander, which drops off and then bends back to the left.

At some point, I saw that he wasn’t catching up any more…he was still a good half a kilometre back, and I could imagine the thoughts going through his head. He’s thinking these are really shitty driving conditions, especially in a big, V-8 powered Dodge.

He’s thinking of his wife and kids. He thought of the asshole in the little sports car, what with Dead Man’s curve coming up fast…by this time he might have gotten a ‘negative’ from the dispatcher. Sarnia cops unavailable. He stayed right where he was, probably wondering when I’d lose it and then he’d either have me, or they’d be scraping me off the road and out of the trees.

...you won't come back from Dead Man's Curve...

Rather than hit the brakes, which would show braking lights. I let off on the throttle…rolled on past the end of Modeland Road, down the drop and turn to the right. I haven’t lost him yet. I had just enough time. Turning off all the fucking lights, pitch black out there, I had it in second gear, using the emergency brake just to slow her down a bit. This did not throw brake lights; a good thing to know, right. I hung a left turn at Notre Dame Place, a short stretch, which leads to a right hander onto Sylvan Court.

In the mirrors, I saw the fucking cop car go past the end of the street, still proceeding west along Lakeshore Road. I reckon he was out of his jurisdiction, but whatever. And I popped out onto Cathcart Boulevard, having turned the lights back on as soon as I knew I’d lost him.

It was a bit of a tough call, but to go left would lead back to Modeland Road. Only so many options down that way. I turned right, ending up at the intersection of Cathcart and Murphy Road. I knew the area well, as we had been racing shitty cars through some of the subdivisions, which were made of curving streets, little crescents, cul-de-sacs in a more modern, upscale residential area. I made a left on Murphy, no sign of any cops…

I took the first right, and by this time I was well and truly away, even if they had caught up to me, Sarnia or Township cops. At this point, all I had to do was drive the speed limit, signal my turns and lane changes…

The officer had lost sight of me, which sort of equates with losing the ‘chain of evidence’ or something. Without even a radar reading, what in the hell were they going to say?

I made it home, no problems.

Why did I do it? I could have handled a hundred-dollar ticket. It was just pure testosterone, at that age.

***

Not too many years later, in a similar incident, I outran the Ontario Provincial Police. I was northbound on Highway 19, coming out of Tillsonburg, Ontario. I was working as a reporter in Delhi, Ontario, and this was the best way to get home to Sarnia. I was on the curve at Salford, basically a hamlet at a crossroads, and I was probably doing over seventy in a sixty-mile per hour zone. Not that serious, I would be the first to agree, but there is this cop coming along from the opposite direction, and of course the OPP had the radar, what with policing major and regional highways.

Fuck, ladies and gentlemen. I was driving a 1972 Chrysler New Yorker, I’d paid $750.00 for it. A big, wide, long vehicle, admittedly lower to the ground than the typical modern SUV. It might have even weighed less, basically just a big metal envelope, two-door, with a fucking 440 cubic inch engine—7.2 litres in modern parlance. At a minimum, 225 horsepower, with bags of torque. Okay, bias-ply tires, hell, I had snowies on the back. But those vehicles loved the highway, they could cruise, essentially, at 80-plus miles per hour all day long, (or until you ran out of fuel), with no fuss and bother—also, they were a hell of a lot more comfortable than small, drafty, leaky old British sportscars…

We had adequate power, ladies and gentlemen...

Yes, fuck, ladies and gentlemen. I saw that cop, saw a couple of cars, headlights at least, in my rear-view mirrors. There was a car ahead of the cop and a couple of cars following along pretty close. What with the cop being there, they were all scrupulously going along at about 60 mph. Fuck, I just nailed it, ladies and gentlemen, with barely two and a half kilometres to the overpass just south of Ingersoll.

So, the poor cop has to figure out what’s going on. He has to put on a signal, pull into a driveway. He can’t even accelerate—the other drivers have no idea, and they’re just moseying along. He has cars behind him, and I have a few coming along behind me.

It all clicked in. Going by the map, it’s maybe two and a half kilometres, and then, up and over the overpass. What with the gathering gloom, all I had to go on were headlights in the mirror, but I had gotten lucky in that there wasn’t much ahead of me, and when there was, the road was clear and I could pass. I blew past one or two folks and then onto the overpass, letting her coast on the uphill bit to avoid braking…drop her down one gear, the transmission moans a bit, slowing her some more, back up into drive. I eased on down the ramp and got onto the Highway 401, westbound for London, (and then, the 402, westbound for Sarnia, just for detail.) The trip was about 140 miles.

And he must have caught a glimpse of that action, because he decided to go westbound on the 401. He could have gone eastbound 401, or he could have gone north into Ingersoll.

The 401 is a busy highway. I managed to use the fast lane, get ahead of a few vehicles.

I dropped her down to 65 miles per hour—no metric on those old gauges, and sure enough, someone gets a little pissed off, snapping on a signal and getting into the other lane. He passes, then another. They want to do 70, which is pretty safe as cops would prefer to write a ticket for something real.

...just coming around the Salford curve...

Fuck, at this point, I’m just some little old lady out for a Sunday drive, right.

There were transport trucks behind me, and right about then, that fucking cop car blasts past my door handle at eighty, ninety or a hundred miles per hour. No lights, no siren—just speed, ladies and gentlemen.

I watched him sail off up the highway…

Why did I even do it? We shared weekend duties at good old Cash Crop Farming Publications. With only so many reporters, and so many publications, every third week I had to pull the weekend. That meant two whole weeks away from my girlfriend.

It had been a long two weeks and I just wanted to get home…a young healthy male, right.

I guess.

It just struck me—if they had put the lights and put the sirens on, I might have stopped.

It’s a purely psychological thing, but I probably would have.

END

 

Image. MGB. By Mr.choppers.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

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Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

Thank you for reading, and listening.