My car windows were open and Chino Moreno’s voice is blaring through the stereo. Shove it! Shove it! Shove it! Shaaaaaaarwrrrrrrr! My dad reeked of tequila and is in a coma riding shotgun beside me.

I’m doing 120kph on Regalado
yet my road kill count remains at zero so far and I intend to keep it
that way. One thing you should know about my dad is that hitting any
animal with the car, whether it’s a cute fuzzy cat, a stray dog or a
venomous snake – it’s going to cast a dreary shadow for the rest of the
night and I can’t have that considering he’s already piss drunk and I
need all his smooth talk to work its magic on the cops.

I’ve
seen it happen before; we were cruising down South Luzon Express way on
our way to Tagaytay when I felt something go under one of the car’s
tires. Strangely enough, when I looked in the rearview mirror I
realized it was a dog. How the hell did it get there? ‘You killed it!’ my dad shrieked in horror. ‘That
poor dog! She was probably on her way home to her little dog family and
now she can never go home again. The decent thing to do is get off the
next exit and go back and give the poor thing a proper burial.’ My
dad has a really twisted idea of how ideal vacations should go. After
all, nothing beats spending two hours under the scorching sun burying
an animal carcass in a shallow grave along the expressway using only a
spoon and a tire wrench as makeshift shovels. Genius runs in the family
you see.

I
pulled into the parking lot of the ramshackle structure of a police
station and seeing that my dad is still lulled in his befuddled state I
decided to leave him alone for the time being and see how my brother
was doing. The desk officer on duty was a feisty looking female. She’s
wearing the standard issue blue uniform and a small silver chain with a
pendant around her neck. Her shoulder-length black hair was parted and
pulled back neatly from her face revealing her forehead. She’s cute…