MAX FREDELL

Unlawful Discharge Outside of Sauk Centre

The floor of the aging Crown Victoria was a fast food mess. Jimmy would clean out the passenger side if that door was ever opened for a replacement partner. It never would, the state was pinching its pennies. So, alone, his nights were quiet. Parked under billboard lights, he had spent the last half-hour playing with the glint of his burger’s silver wrapper. The light was pink, reflecting off an advertised swaddled baby. Must be a girl. He cleared his throat to talk to himself but found he had nothing to say. His eyes returned to the road, his foot readied over the pedal.   
             He commanded the stretch of highway that ran from some indeterminate section past St. Cloud all the way to Moorhead. He knew the guy who picked up the badge at Fargo, they'd get dinner after working Thanksgiving night, this year was on Jimmy, which the other guy hated because Jimmy never sprang for cranberry sauce. No one ever told him who patrolled between St. Cloud and the Cities—no one ever sticks around long enough for him to catch a name. MPD pays better, and no one even wants to be a pig anymore. Anyways, no one speeds through St. Cloud, for reasons as varied and vast as the grasses of the great plains plowed through by the diagonal road towards the Dakotas. He normally picked the trail up around Sauk Centre. 
             On that particular night, he was camped out along some anonymous median halfway between everything. He kept his lights on. The young guys, they liked to leave them off, catch people by surprise, pull out on the hot rods doing a hundred. But his mentor, and former partner, Frank Leary, may he rest in peace outside of Bemidji, told him that the job isn't always about catching dumb kids with an iron foot, it's just making sure most people are driving alright. That gave him some peace on nights spent idle, sucking on his plastic spoon. It gave him hell, though, whenever he got into the central office, and his boss had a word about quota this quota that. He'd been on the job since his boss was swimming in his daddy's balls, so he can quota hell—is what Jimmy would say as he sat heavily back into his comfortable Crown Victoria after getting chewed out. 
             It was a comfortable life, though. Right up until the flower-spotted VW Bug shot by going east, faster than Jimmy had ever seen something so steel and so small go, farting out jet-black clouds of exhaust. As he crunched the Crown Vic into drive to tear after it, a bellowing thunder strike rang out, but no lightning. He jumped in his seat, his bell properly rung by the surprise of the clap. Jimmy smacked his head with the heel of his palm to regain a little focus, a little hearing, and took off down the rolling hills of interstate. No tire tracks were left behind, he was still careful to accelerate at a reasonable speed. 
             Out here, headlights cut through deep trenches of darkness. The last streetlight was fifty miles ago. The only other lights were the ones advertisers put under their billboards, and the moon so omnipresent Jimmy practically forgot about it. The Bug swerved in and out of the careful and the foolish roadsters who drove the speed limit. Yellowed incandescents cast sideways shadows about the cornfields. Normally no one ever honked their horns out here, but a symphony emerged just for this strange driver, and shot a shimmering murmuration of crows into the sky. 
             Jimmy's V8 engine pounded away, periodically gasping for air. For his many years on the road, he still slammed on the gas harder than he should. His ride had been in its fair share of high-speed chases by this point. They were never exciting. You just drive straight real fast until the bad guy gets bored and you pull over. There was, however, something unusual about the Bug. It shivered side to side, like the driver was preoccupied with something beyond driving. He wasn't quite close enough to see what. Then, another thunder strike. His side windows rattled. 
             The sound took form in a strike against a billboard baby some hundred meters out, right in the face. The advertisers had promised a heartbeat at eight weeks, and the baby was smiling. The attack left hot holes in place of baby eyes and the shot-through paper sailed south across the highway. Jimmy had never seen anything like it. No one should be able to hit that kind of shot. This being thunder strike number two, Jimmy realized he was dealing with a serial shooter. Assuming they'd been doing this all up and down 94, at least since Fargo, there'd have been a lot of practice. He revved up the engine and blared the siren. The old folks who hadn't yet pulled over did so. Now it was just him and the Bug. 
             The chase was slow going. Every time he gained, some half-snoozed Civic driver forgot to pull over, doing fifty in the left lane. He never cursed about this, always charmed by his homeland's lack of urgency, but it wasn't helping tonight's cause. The Bug slowed and shimmied whenever a smiling baby's face birthed from the horizon; Jimmy assumed the driver was reloading. The dance between hunter and hunted happened at walking speed, like two curling stones gliding slow into the night. Life felt stable at sixty miles an hour anyways. 
             A pink blob floated in inky darkness. Against a black-painted billboard, a peanut-shaped fetus, photographed in scientific detail, asked those driving by, "Mom, would you abort me?" Another thunderclap, and the question was shot through, and became a statement, "Abort me." Jimmy chuckled, though it began to dawn on him that this may be a crime. He slowly grabbed for the radio and clicked on his string can to the real world of office chairs. 
             "Hey, uh, you guys get any calls about someone shooting all up and down 94?" 
             Because it was that time of night, when all the semi drivers had already pulled off to their roadside rest sites, floating into vodka and oxy-fed cat naps, when the world wandered into half-real nightmares of sitting in the backseat while no one, or perhaps their dog, drove them off the road, when the central command night shift played Sudoku on the can instead of sitting by the radio; Jimmy got no answer. He grinned darkly to himself and felt a cold sweat formulate in the small of his back, beginning to wet the elastic band of his briefs. He was a lone ranger tonight. Nothing new, but never a happy fate 
             He passed the last bystander. This moment always came, where it was just him and the prey. The hunter's advantage, as told by Frank Leary on their late autumn hunting trips of old, was his knowledge of that which he sought. A deer was a deer. As the strange beetle rolled on into their infinite night, he felt he had as much information now as he did in his greenhorn years, staring into the cold dead eyes of the lean buck Frank killed for them. This was to say, very little. 
             A field of billboards bloomed alongside the highway, fast approaching. Each pictured a twenty-something woman swaddling a newborn; a number was listed beneath their sacred joy, promising confidential pregnancy advice. They stood in an array, and Jimmy realized, at a perfect angle, they would align. The moment passed; the Bug flew by without firing. Maybe they were driving too fast.  
             The mistake was corrected in a flash. Rubber squealing, smoke spitting, the wild driver threw their might behind the emergency break and swung in a pendulum while ripping into reverse. Just like that, the vehicle shot backwards past Jimmy's cruiser. He considered what old Frank would always say after his conclusive notes on deer--you can't know a fawn. 
             Through his rearview mirror, he finally caught a glance at the perpetrator. Bunsen-burner glasses, baby-blush mesh bonnet, bee-stung lipstick. She was the oldest woman he had ever seen behind the wheel of a car. As she pulled the trigger, he considered that, when she was a young woman, she would have been rather handsome. Once again, two burning red coals blew out from the billboard—another set of bulls-eyed baby eyes, Jimmy could presume, though on his side the ad was blank, unknowable. Angry gunsmoke settled for a moment; the anger unsettled Jimmy. The natural order was off, when a woman had fury like that. 
             This last shot shocked Jimmy into the unconscious action every policeman finds in himself. The Crown Vic stopped. The trunk popped open. The spike strip rolled across the highway, the final curl not quite unfurling. Outlining his car like the chalk of a dead body, Butter Burger wrappers caught the evening wind, their tussle just barely louder than the rustle of summer corn tassels. Minding nothing but the calling of its soul, the Bug fell back into drive. Standing aside his steed, Jimmy's entire vision became vintage headlights, the color of sunset. 
             He felt a tinge of guilt at the sad puff that gave from the Volkswagen Beetle's front tires when they popped, then the back tires. A plumage of sparks lit the asphalt. The engine made a sound like it was dying, though she fed it gas all the same. Jimmy entered a trot, quickly catching up to his prey. It was all, somehow, underwhelming. 
             He tapped the driver's side window with his flashlight, walking alongside the Bug's death crawl. The elderly woman seemed shocked that anyone could notice her at all. With great effort, she hand-cranked her window down. The scent of potpourri poured out in a rush, alongside the air conditioning, and Jimmy was reminded of his mother, though she had passed on years ago. In any case, this woman would have been many years her senior.  
             He kept his left hand on his holster, but the old woman didn't posture as if she'd present him any harm. His first words were croaky. "Ma'am, do you know how fast you were going?" 
             "No."  
              She had spoken to police before, he determined. "It was much faster than the speed limit." 
             "I see."  
              She kept his eye contact. He could see every vein of her gossamer eyelids, magnified as they were by her glasses. 
             "Can you step out of your vehicle?" 
             "What for?" Her tone belied the question. 
             "Because I'm going to place you under arrest." 
             "Why?" 
             He paused before answering. Her question was somewhere between sincerity and provocation. The back of her car held pamphlets, printed in the faded hues of fun-loving printer paper, puce, buff, flesh pink. They were bound, like dollar bills, in hundred-counts by rubber bands, stacked nearly to the headrest. The gun bag, a leather more ancient and faded than its owner, hung loosely over the cloth passenger seat. Beneath it sat the gun. A child's vision of a flower was etched into the wooden handle. The chrome bolt, a space-age cueball, gleamed Jimmy's flashlight beam back into his eyes. He lowered the light. 
             "Because you can't shoot those things willy nilly." 
             "Who says willy nilly?" 
             He did, he supposed. "I do." 
            "Then you must not have seen what was shot." 
             The cool of the door handle settled Jimmy as he opened the driver-side door to escort the perpetrator to the squad car. She reached for the rifle. He unholstered his gun and commanded her to stop. 
             She spoke with a snarl and Jimmy clocked her false teeth. "This is my cane tonight. Help a dame out." 
             With careful attention, he held her left hand, her right supporting herself along the barrel of what Jimmy assumed was her daddy's rifle. Her hand so small and brittle he felt he would pop the veins and tendons that were plainly visible through the skin, each rigid as bone. She needed a moment for her bones to prepare for a walk. She too had been riding this diagonal line for far too long. They began. With every other step she placed her weight against his shoulder. She was like a breeze; she was so light. The rhythmic pounding of her gun against the gravel shoulder grew slower and slower, until she asked graciously for a break. 
             She slouched and caught her breath. There was something girlish about the sounds she let out. Her braided hair beat against her chest, rising and falling with the wind. Her hip jut out, however slightly, so that she could rest her elbow against the muzzle of her gun. 
             "You like women officer?” 
             "I’m not sure I understand the question.” 
             "I know." With that, she spit her dentures out into her hand, and handed them to Jimmy. Then the old woman walked herself slowly to the back of the squad car to fall asleep. 

MAX FREDELL is a part-time writer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When he isn’t developing his social work practice, he can be spotted on his futon, crafting short fiction, under the watchful eye of his wife and two cats. His other published work can be found in The Under Review. More work to come.