Terry Jarnigan was a troublemaker. He was always having brushes with the law, and he was especially well known for starting fights and somehow managing to get away just before the police arrived.
One Friday night Terry tried to pick up another man’s wife in a local tavern in a Midwest town, and a fight ensued. Soon the whole place was involved in an old-fashioned barroom brawl, with chairs and glasses being thrown and broken amidst a frenzied free-for-all.
Then someone yelled “Cops!” The crowd broke for the door, and Jarnigan was one of the first ones out. But the squad car pulled in, lights flashing, just as he was making his way across the parking lot. With no time to think and few places to run, Jarnigan opened the door of a brown Pontiac Bonneville and stretched out along the back floorboard.
In a matter of minutes, more officers and squad cars had pulled into the parking lot. Jarnigan would have to sit tight for a while. He just lay there in the back of the Pontiac, watching the shadows of the flashing lights and listening to the voices outside. He couldn’t hear everything that was said as the police began arresting the people involved in the donnybrook. But he did hear his own name over and over as bar patrons explained the origins of the fight.
Then Terry Jarnigan heard voices coming closer to his hiding place.
“It’s not fair to arrest me!” a man was protesting in a shrill voice. “I didn’t start the fight. Some jerk was hitting on my wife, and she didn’t like it. Well, I didn’t like it either, so I just . . . ”
“Yes, sir,” another voice answered calmly. “We’ll get all of that sorted out down at the police station. But we don’t have any more room in the cruisers, so you’ll have to follow me downtown in your own vehicle.”
“He’s the one you ought to be arresting . . . ” The man was still muttering as he swung open the door of his brown Pontiac Bonneville. Terry Jarnigan blinked as the dome light came on, and the car’s owner jumped back and yelled.
“Hey! Here he is—here’s the punk that started the whole thing! You just wait till I get my . . . ”
The officer stopped the furious husband just before he took hold of the cowering troublemaker. Jarnigan was duly booked for inciting a riot and for committing illegal trespass in entering the man’s car. And then he was thrown into the same holding tank with the people he had provoked into fighting in the bar only an hour earlier, including the enraged husband of the woman he had flirted with.
They were all very glad to see him.