Hammurabi, traffic cop, wore the uniform of an RCMP officer. He still had his beard—long and jet-black and curlicued all the way down. The yellow stitching on his jacket denoting rank, name, department, was all written in cuneiform script as though the man was made of clay. He was solidly built, dark-skinned, his eyes almost as dark as his beard. He stepped out of the Crown Victoria cruiser and strode up to the beater he’d pulled over here, on a road that looked very much like Highway 21 between Camrose and Edmonton, Alberta. If the driver of the other car had bothered to listen more carefully, had he known what birdsongs to listen for or how to read the moving shapes in the pitch black of night beyond his headlights, however, he’d have known he was very far from home indeed.

The other man, Melvin Smythe, was twenty-two-years old with long curly brown hair, a scraggly beard struck with patches of blond and red, thick-rimmed glasses, a slight beer paunch that would someday blossom into a gruesome beer gut. His car was an ’81 Monte Carlo, light blue, with an exhaust improvised out of flex pipe spot-welded to the old system just behind the muffler. He sat behind the wheel, aggravated and afraid, watching Hammurabi close in with no idea what he could’ve done wrong. He rolled down the window, and it only came down about halfway.

“Sorry,” He said to the cop, “The track’s busted. Here’s my license and registration. What’s the problem? I wasn’t speeding.”

Hammurabi eyed his documents carefully, then brought his gaze to meet Melvin’s. When he spoke, it was in an accent appropriate to the region Melvin believed he was still in.

“You tell me what the problem is.”

“I don’t…” Something flickered in the cop’s eyes.

In an instant Melvin shifted to confessions. He told Officer Hammurabi of a cold, sunny day four years ago, on 104th Ave close to downtown Edmonton, when he’d seen an elderly woman fall off the kerb and onto the street, brittle hands splashing in little piles of slush on the asphalt. For a few seconds he watched, unsure, until someone else stepped up and helped her to her feet. The man who’d assisted gave him a dirty look, and he felt terrible shame.

Next he spoke of a rainstorm when he was sixteen. Him and his girlfriend at the time were charging through the rain trying to get back to her house in Stony Plain, trying to escape one of the cold early September downpours. On their way they stopped to see a kitten in the gutter, sheltered under the body of a car, shivering and mewling at them, begging for help. They made the mistake of petting it, greeting it, and then, soaked through, decided to run along. Melvin looked over his shoulder and saw the kitten had followed them partway and now watched them in the middle of the street, soaked and freezing to death. Something about its expression betrayed bewilderment, and Melvin knew it was at the creature’s understanding of its own mortality, and its recognition that those who could help wouldn’t.

Finally, he told Hammurabi about the drunken summer weekend less than three months ago, about the woman who kept him from passing out with little bumps of cocaine, about dancing with her on the floor of a skid bar, about eating her pussy on a friend’s couch after everyone else had gone to bed. He told Hammurabi this, and he told her about the girlfriend he had back at home at the same time, a soulmate, someone he really loved, and how in the morning he’d felt no guilt, only pride. The officer listened and nodded.

Writing in his ticket book, the cop handed Melvin a yellow slip of paper. Written on it in pencil, in shorthand, was the price he had to pay for his crimes. It told him what he must do, how much blood he must spill, and whose. He looked up from it in terror, tears in his eyes, and said;

“I can’t do this…I can’t pay this.”

“Tell it to the judge, pal.” Hammurabi turned leisurely away, walked back to his cruiser, started it up, and pulled out of the shoulder. As he did, the road gradually became Highway 21 again and Melvin realized the cop car looked nothing like a Crown Vic at all, looked like something far more ancient and animal. He sat there for a time, paper still in his hand, a feeling he would never place weighing down on him with the heft of all his sins.