I have this need to get something right.
So I researched airbags. And I emailed two friends who'd been in cars when the airbags deployed.
Armed with that information I set about to write a scene in the next book that would properly show an airbag. Of course, I had to come up with the correct conditions for such an incident.
My next book is set in Spencer County, Indiana. And the number one ticketed offense there is drunk driving.
Ingredients for the scene:
1 drunk driver
1 sheriff in a Ford Explorer
1 county road
Then I had to figure out who's airbag would go off and under what circumstances.
I put the drunk on a tractor and had him back into my sheriff, setting off her airbag. The scene sounds simple, right? And by itself the premise sounds boring.
But I had great fun with it. And the scene was not in my original outline. Accidental fiction can be good for your book.
Here's my scene (or at least the start of it):
It was a big red Case tractor, double wheels on the back,
hitch, with a raised disc harrow attachment used for cultivating the ground
prior to planting—all of it caked with dried mud and in need of washing. Piper
was stuck behind it on 66, on her way to Hatfield, an unincorporated dinkburg where
Mark the Shark lived.
Piper figured this ten-mile endeavor would take her an hour
away from her cold case…fourteen minutes to Mark’s, fourteen minutes back, and
a half hour at the bank or looking through his records to show him the
bookkeeping error and ease his conspiracy fears.
But the tractor was fouling her time-frame.
It belched fumes; her windows rolled down, the stink wafted
inside and made her eyes water. It was noisy; overwhelming the oldies station
she’d had on and just now clicked off. It was slow, riding in the center of the
road, impossible for her to pass on either side without risking the ditch. And
it wasn’t traveling straight, sometimes in the proper lane, sometimes veering
into the left lane. Usually it held to roughly the middle.
She honked.
The driver raised his left hand and flipped his middle finger.
“Really?” Piper stuck her head out the window and hollered:
“Pick a lane!” Then thinking he might not be able to hear over the racket the
tractor was making, she used the PA in her car. “Pull over. Spencer County
Sheriff. Pull over.”
The tractor had no rearview mirrors that she could see, and
the driver hadn’t turned around to notice who was honking at him.
She honked again, this time laying on the horn. Piper really
didn’t want to further delay her return to the alluring skeleton case by citing
the farmer for a simple traffic violation, but— She honked a third time, the
driver took both hands off the wheel and gave her the dancing double middle fingers.
The tractor, which according to the speedometer in Piper’s Ford was going about
twenty miles an hour, shimmied to the right. As she started to pass, and reached
to turn on her flashing lights, it sped up, drifted back to the left, and
nearly clipped her front fender. She pumped the brakes and eased behind it,
matching its speed—twenty-five miles an hour now. A boxy station wagon pulled
behind her, and another car was coming farther back. Fortunate no one was in
the opposite lane at the moment.
The tractor wobbled farther right, then left, shuddered, and
went faster still. Thirty miles an hour.
“What the hell?”
Then the driver tossed an empty whiskey bottle off to the side
of the road.
“That’s it.”
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USA Today
Bestselling author Jean Rabe
has written 35 fantasy, urban fantasy, and science fiction novels. The Dead of Winter, her 36th,
is her first mystery. She has roughly 100 short stories in print, has edited a
couple dozen anthologies, and has edited more magazines than she cares to
tally. When she isn’t writing or editing, she tosses tennis balls to her cadre
of dogs, visits museums, and tries to find gamers who will play Axis &
Allies with her.
