nervous skydiver holding the rip cord. His body was stiff, his teeth clenched. Joey D., on the other hand, manipulated the traffic riddle like a tennis match. Gently and effortlessly returning every volley sent his way. All with only one hand on the wheel as the other was busy demonstrating the proper use of the open-handed slap to the back of the head. The technique Joey referred to as an “attention getter” when dealing with an uncooperative subject. “Sometimes all they needed was a reminder that they should be respectful when talking to the police,” he mentioned.
Joey slowed and slid the IROC off the interstate amid shouting drivers and honking horns. They exited the car and stood on the side of the road as traffic buzzed and screamed by them at a dangerous speed and far-too-close distance.
“According to the traffic report of the crash, your father was in the outside lane right about this time of day. You can see that this is a pretty busy area. Well, it was a lot worse back in those days because this was only a four-lane blacktop, so you had a lot of cars speeding through the area in half as many lanes as it is today. Pretty dangerous. Our traffic guys worked a lot of traffic fatalities around here in those days. Your dad got cut off by a small passenger car. He went off the road to avoid a crash. He locked up the brakes and the truck slid up an embankment and flipped on its side. The top of the trailer blew out and the bodies came shooting out and slid onto the roadway. No one really paid that much attention to them because they were bound together with rope and wrapped in plastic. They probably just looked like a big side of beef or something. They weren’t discovered until your dad was at the hospital and the tow trucks were cleaning up the scene. They were frozen. The trailer was used to ship grocery items, so the front area was refrigerated. The dry storage area extended from the middle of the trailer to the rear. There were groceries and shit scattered all across the road. The report said the road was shut down for about four hours after the crash for the investigation and cleanup. When they found the bodies, they closed it down again for the rest of the night and called Homicide. Geez, what a fuckin’ mess that had to be.”