The Lumberjack

by Erik Martin Willén

  “Hopefully they’ll blast a hole in the mountain next year and widen the road on that part. It’s ridiculous how many people get in accidents there. Well, Christina, it was nice talking to you. If you’re ever lonely, me and some friends normally hang out now and then, and you’re welcome to join us.”

  “That would be wonderful!”

  Adrianna took another one of her business cards and wrote her private number on the back, then handed it to Christina. “Well if you’ll excuse me, I have a missing truck to look for.”

  “Good luck.”

  Adrianna had been driving for about an hour now, stopping every now and then at people’s homes to ask questions about the missing truck. She looked at her watch, and figured she had time for one more stop before she had to head back and finish her shift, so she followed the mountain road until she came to a three-way intersection. The road to the left would take her to a gold mine almost at the top of a mountain, and the road to the right to another gold mine; that one was a longer ride, while the one to the left was closer, but at a much higher elevation. Both mines would be a problem, given the elevation. She would have difficulty breathing, because she still wasn’t used with the high altitude. She chose the left-hand road. One hour later, with no information that could help her, she was back at the same intersection.

  Adrianna muttered to herself, “Should I go back and punch out for the day, or…nah, might as well go to the second mine while I’m here. I would hate having to go back this way tomorrow.”

  She called it in and got the approval for overtime.

  The gold mine looked almost identical to the one she had just visited; both of them reminded her of the gold mines from all those reality shows on television. Thinking about the word mine, she thought of a hole in the ground and a bunch of dirty dwarfs wobbling around with pickaxes, long beards, large noses, singing stupid shit. This mine and crew, not so much.

  She had never been a nature freak, but she did love nature over any concrete desert, and that was why she worked in Skull Creek. However, the devastation to nature from huge bulldozers, semi-trucks, excavators, and dump trucks was just awful. The land was completely ruined, all for a few measly grains of yellow dust.

  With narrow roads and huge dump trucks driving very fast back and forth between two large clearings on the mountain plateau, it was a miracle that there were no accidents. More than once she almost got hit, so finally she turned on her light bar, and that worked. The trucks finally slowed down. She looked for an office, and found several trailers and tents. Adrianna parked on a gravel lot occupied only by pickups. She looked over the trucks, but couldn’t see the one she was looking for.

  A fat fellow greeted her; she turned off the lights and exited the car. A dust cloud from a dump truck slammed grit into her face; she’d left her hat in the car, no reason to get the thing dirty. She coughed some, and could barely hear the guy facing her. He gestured with his hand for her to follow him to a temporary office on top of low hill, half a tent with a wooden front frame, just like in a western film. The sound from below had almost faded away by then, due to the wind.

  “Howdy, officer, Bob’s the name. What brings you to us, and how can I help?”

  Adrianna frowned. The man needed a long shower, but she noticed that he was very calm and not nervous at all, just like the guy at the other mine she had questioned. Good sign. She explained her business, and handed him the picture of the truck. He removed his helmet and ran his fingers through his sparse hair. When she mentioned the white hood he instantly grabbed his enormous goatish beard, squinted, and strained a smile.

  Bingo, she thought, and knew that she was on something.

  Bob grabbed his shortwave radio. “Harrington, where ya at?”

  The radio crackled I return. “I’m out by the Nugget-Crusher, Boss. We got a leak—gotta take care of this shit ‘fore we lose all our profits.”

  Bob looked up at Adrianna. “Officer, you mind a short trip?”

  “Not at all.”

  They got in what looked like an electric golf cart’s sturdier older brother. Bob drove quickly over a bluff, and then down the side of the mountain to a second dig site. This one was almost twice the size of the first, where Adrianna had parked her car.

  Bob shouted, “There’s a small wooden road this side of the mountain, you might have missed it, but it’s a short cut and it saves you about five minutes. Too small for our larger trucks, excavators, and dump trucks, though.”

  “Yeah, I must have missed that one.”

  “You all right, ma’am?”

  Adrianna hated the word “ma’am”, as it made her feel old and she was only in her mid-twenties, but at least it wasn’t “miss.” She replied, “Altitude sickness. Having a little problem breathing, that’s all.”

  “I know what you mean. Look at my fat ass, it’s a real torture sometimes, but hey—it’s worth the gold.”

  “I bet it is.”

  They stopped by an enormous machine; Adrianna had seen similar ones on the television shows. Several men were working around a large black hose, making repairs, all wearing hard hats. Bob handed her one. It was pink; his was black.

  “Hey, Harrington, can you help us out here?”

  An average-sized guy with a perfectly trimmed Amish-style beard joined them; he too needed a shower. Bob explained what Adrianna was looking for. The noise from the machines on this part of the mountain was less than on the other side, and they could talk normally with each other.

  “Sounds like Butch or Vern. Neither one of ‘em had any vehicle before; we use to pick up them and a couple of other guys every day and give them a ride up the mountain. Either they lost their driver’s licenses or didn’t own their own vehicle. Pretty sure it’s one or both, because they’ve been driving a truck like you describe for a few days. Never thought much about it. Wait a minute…is it stolen?”

  Harrison looked back at his partner, Bob, and both looked upset now. “Ma’am, if it’s stolen, we don’t want no problems. We’ll cooperate with you completely, we don’t need no problems with the locals.”

  “For now, I just need to see the truck, and then talk to them to see if it’s the right truck. And no, it hasn’t been reported stolen that I know of.”

  For all she knew, it could have been purchased, but the tingling feeling in her gut told her that she was on the right track. She contemplated contacting her superiors, but decided to get more flesh on the bone before she did.

  “Well, I don’t know where Butch is, but Vern is down by the 400.”

  They got back into the little vehicle with Harrington in the back, then drove down a man-made road on the side of an enormous cut. The people behind them had stopped working on the hose to observe them. When they got closer to a huge excavator, the person inside didn’t notice them. The top of the giant machine rotated, turned, and with a boom, the bucket dug out the side of the mountain while a large dump truck waited to be loaded. The driver in the dump truck waved, looking bored, not even curious when he saw the police officer. When the top of the excavator turned again, the driver noticed them. He stared in shock at Adrianna, who immediately knew that something was up.

  Vern, a very large man, or maybe just very fat, lunged out of the cockpit and started to run. But he tripped and fell hard immediately, before turning his head and starting to crawl. His hard hat rolled away towards Adrianna, who motioned for Bob and Harrington to back off. She walked calmly towards the big blob on the ground; and when he saw the officer he started to crawl on all fours again towards the side of the mountain he had been digging at, screaming and crying like a baby. Adrianna had enough experience to know that whenever anyone ran from the police, something was up.

  There was panic in Vern’s eyes now when he staggered to his feet and tried to climb the wall facing him. He made it a few feet up, but then slid back down. His shirt lay puddled around his chest and he was filthy and now very dusty. Like all the men on the mountain, he needed a shower. Theirs was a dirty job.


  Adrianna’s main concern right now was that panic-stricken people could sometimes do very stupid things, and if he was armed, he might end up committing suicide by cop. Vern kept climbing, losing one of his steel-toe boots in the process. But he finally fell back and started to cry, hiding his face behind his surprisingly small hands.

  “Man, man, I sorry, I sorry, didn’t mean anything by it, I’m so sorry…”

  Adriana removed her hand from her revolver’s grip and just observed him. If a suspect talked, then the rule was simple: shut the fuck up and let them.

  From the blob’s blather, she was pretty sure she had scored in this respect, but she needed to know more. She crossed her arms and rested one elbow on her left hand while taking up a thinking gesture with the other, touching her chin. She did gather from the unusual confession that this suspect was most likely not the alpha, but then again she could be wrong; criminals could be very good actors. She was definitely onto something, since there were words like body, truck, loose head and so on.

  “Well, sir, why don’t you take it again from the beginning?” she said at last.

  “I told Butch not to do it, the head and all,” Vern blubbered. Then he up and got sick, puking his guts out all over himself.

  “Great, now my car will stink from this piece of shit,” Adrianna thought, and didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Vern looked up at her voice and started crying, tears cutting through the dust caked on his fat face.

  It took twenty minutes before they were back at her car. Adrianna had to use the ankle cuffs and her regular cuffs to cuff him. She read him his rights in front of many witnesses, but she wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to book him for. She needed to see the truck, but she definitely felt she was on something.

  She turned to Bob and Harrington, who were watching open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “Call this number when the other guy is back with the truck. I’d appreciate some discretion, so we can avoid chasing him down or letting him slip away.” She gave both a very stern look.

  Both men held up their hands in a defensive gesture, and tried to speak at the same time. Bob raised his voice over Harrington’s. “I promise we’ll hold him here for you guys. We don’t want any problems; we got enough problems getting permits mining here as it is, and the other prospectors are after our claim, so trust us—we don’t need more problems.”

  Harrington said, “By the way, what have they done?”

  She looked at Harrington. “For now, this one is a suspect in a homicide and possible grand theft auto, at the very least.”

  Both Bob and Harrington’s eyes widened, and they began speaking to each other in low voices, saying something about how it was someone’s else’s fault for hiring them. Meanwhile, she tried calling it in over her radio, but got nothing but static. Then she tried her cell phone, but there was no reception. “You’d think being up this high, there would be excellent cell reception,” she muttered, annoyed.

  “Sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn’t,” Bob said. “Depends on the time of day. We can try and call from the office, if you want.”

  “Thank you, Bob, please do that. Use the number on the card I gave you, and tell them I’m bringing in a suspect.”

  She drove away with the big crybaby in the back, wearing his seatbelt. She tried repeatedly to call in to HQ, but to her growing frustration—compounded by the grown man crying in the back—she got nothing. When she almost ran off the road trying, she tossed her cell phone on the passenger seat and focused on her driving. She was about to pass the small wooden road, which was well hidden if you drove up on it from the opposite side, when a reddish-orange rusty pickup truck with a white hood rammed the right front fender of her car, hard, making the car spin. She hit the brakes, and watched as the truck vanished down the road. She never had time to check the plates, but she was one hundred percent sure that this was the truck she was looking for.

  Now she was faced with a dilemma. Adrianna couldn’t—or rather, shouldn’t—take up pursuit on the hit-and-run, because she had a suspect in the back. She had to make a quick decision. She tried radioing and calling her headquarters again, but that still didn’t work. She looked in the rearview mirror. The crying had stopped; she looked into the eyes of Vern, who had a very creepy smile on his face. He said nothing, and he didn’t have to. He knew that his partner had scared her…or so he thought.

  In a squeaky voice, beginning with a short laugh, Vern said, “You in trouble now, bitch!”

  She backed up fast, put the gear in drive, and hit the accelerator. Speeding up, Adrianna tried to remember the road ahead, and decided to slow down. The entire time, her passenger kept talking in an unpleasant voice: “Once we catch you, I’m going to come all up on your face, cunt, and then I wanna bust all those perfect little teeth in your mouth.”

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. “What happened to all the crying, little bitch?”

  “You callin’ me a bitch? Go home south across the border, you fuckin’ Mexican whore.”

  She turned her attention to the road, and hit the brakes hard. The car swirled to the left; the stolen truck was about fifty yards down on the narrow road, and she could see someone leaning over the hood. Her instinct made her pull the hand brake, and the very moment she opened her door she ducked for cover. A shot rang out, followed by the sound of glass exploding from the passenger’s side window next to her. Calmly, conditioned by her training, she rolled over on the ground and took cover in the ditch. At first, she didn’t realize what had just happened; then another shot rang out, striking her car’s door panel, and she understood that the idiot was shooting at her. Adrenaline pumped into her system and she got very nervous, hands trembling and breathing hard. Adrianna had never before used her sidearm against a living person as a police officer; she’d used it for protection, yes, but had never actually fired it at someone.

  She peeked over the grassy ditch below on the truck, then pulled out her revolver and aimed. She took one shot at what she thought was a pair of legs, and another shoot at the front right tire of the truck. She missed both; it was hard to hit anything at distance with a handgun. Another shot from the rifle came, hitting the ground nearby, kicking dust and grass into her face. Vern was laughing his ass off now, screaming and shouting with joy. Adrianna emptied her revolver at what she thought was the suspect, but of course it was hard to tell from this angle.

  She flipped open the cylinder and dropped the casings from her revolver; some struck her wrist and stung her with the heat, but she didn’t care. She was sweating profusely, and her hair lay like glue over her face. She grabbed a speed loader from her belt, fumbled some, and bit down hard on her lower lip, trying to force herself not to tremble as she finally reloaded. She felt dizzy from all the action, and started to feel panic fill her like a dark shadow. She rolled over, and now there were a couple of cowboy boots not too far away, heading towards her. She was shaking by now and emptied her revolver at them. There was a scream of pain and a shot came from the perp; she rolled back down into the ditch and grabbed her last speed loader, reloaded, and crawled further down in the ditch, hurting both elbows and knees, but hardly noticing it. There was the sound of an engine accelerating; she peeked up from the ditch and hurriedly climbed up onto the road, but tripped as she got up. From a kneeling position, she aimed and fired off one more round.

  Adrianna got up and ran back to the squad car. She brushed some glass crumbs off her seat, and when she did she cut her hand a bit. She ignored the pain. The fat bastard behind her—who by now reminded her of some fucked-up opera—was howling loudly. She backed up the car, burning rubber, and just as she was about to hit the accelerator, Vern’s fat face popped up.

  “Told you, bitch! You’re fucked! My buddy and I gonna get you!”

  Calmly, she turned to face Vern’s wide grin, smiling pleasantly. “No talking to the driver while the vehicle is in motion, please.” She was about ready to stick the revolver up under his double-chin and pull the trigger.<
br />
  “What did you say, you crazy fucking cunt? You almost got me killed, you bitch! Ima sue the fuck outta you!”

  She smiled again and winked an eye seductively. Vern never saw the stun gun, but he did feel the twenty thousand volts when Adrianna showed it up under his jaw, and he felt the piss when it drained down his leg.

  She hit the accelerator, but drove with more caution this time. She noticed a dust cloud down the road and sped up. Suddenly, there was a voice on the radio. The reception was very poor, but she shouted that she was in pursuit of a homicide suspect, and shots had been fired. When she reached the three-way intersection, she could see the truck a bit ahead, but not that far away. There was mist coming up from the hood. She increased her speed, and turned on her lights and sirens. The chase was on.

  She lost site of the truck briefly as she came to a long curve, but as she rounded the curve, she could see that it and its billow of steam were getting closer. A huge eighteen-wheeler logging truck pulled out in front of the suspect’s truck from a side road , and he had to hit the brakes. She got closer and closer, but the pickup sped up and made a dangerous attempt to pass the logger on the left side of the road. She followed, but to her horror, another eighteen-wheeler faced her. She hit the brakes and saw that the truck with the suspect barely missed the oncoming traffic. The semi in front of her tried to pull to the side and slow down, but that didn’t help. The driver motioned with his arm that she could pass. She put the gas pedal to the metal and did. Adrianna noticed in her rear mirror that the driver was a woman, who gave her a thumbs up while honking the horn.

  She and the suspect zig-zagged between traffic, and the chase was taking its toll on both drivers and their vehicles. More steam spewed out, from not only the perp’s truck, but also from her police car. A few miles before the last intersection, where Deadman’s Curve was coming up, the old pickup truck pulled over to the side. Adrianna hit her brakes as Vern woke up screaming. An arm reached out from the driver’s side of Vern’s truck, holding an automatic pistol, firing several rounds at Adrianna. Then the firing stopped as the gun clicked; either it had misfired or was out of ammo. She got out of her car, aimed carefully, and fired one round. The pistol exploded into a hundred pieces, and she suspected Butch’s hand wasn’t in much better shape; but he only glared back at her, ignoring her shouts for him to stop and exit his vehicle. He gave her the bird and drove off. She got on her radio, and found that she now had good reception. She related what had happened, as whining cries came from the back seat. When she turned her head, Vern had blood oozing from his shoulder. The crybaby was back; he cried and screamed, tossing in curses and threats once in a while. Suddenly, another police vehicle passed her, moving fast.