Pride goeth before the fall.
—Proverbs 16:18
She was probably no more than a hundred pounds, tops, barely 5 feet tall (her height was hard to judge while she rode her old beat-up, fat-tired one-speed bicycle). Though her size and mode of transportation were typical of adolescents and young teens, I knew she was probably closer to forty than fourteen, just from pacing my squad car slowly behind her for a block, before I ever saw her face. She wore dirty blue jeans and a stained white tank top. It was about an hour or so out of roll call, and the sun was bright and warm, but the night’s chill still lingered on this bright, sunny March morning, just a few weeks past Mardi Gras. The sleeveless cyclist had to be cold. Her afro was shaggy and wild, not shaped or brushed, but shooting straight up from her head like a cluster of celery stalks. When she sensed me following behind her and stole a quick glance over her shoulder at me, I recognized the feral look of an addict.
What caught my attention was neither her clothes nor her hair but her cargo. A large purse dangled from a handlebar, bulging so full that the zipper remained open, and objects not resembling a cell phone or hair brush jutted out—they were pipes and odd-size hunks of metal. Even more suspicious was the filthy canvas sack, easily twice the size of her purse, propped horizontally across the handlebars. The rucksack could have accommodated a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a few tire irons, and enough baseball bats for a little league team.
She was attempting to hold the canvas sack in place with the thumb of each hand, but its weight and bulk were hard for her to manage, especially with the laden, clanking purse swinging from the handlebar, bumping her left knee with every downward stroke on the pedal. Her shifting load was unsecured and unevenly distributed, and the bicycle rocked and lurched precariously.
We were headed southbound on Pinehill, not far from the WhatABurger across from police headquarters, and approaching the bridge over Eslava Creek. She quickened her pedaling, despite the instability of her loads, after the quick, over-the-shoulder glance at me. The neighborhood comprises numerous abandoned or vacant homes. Soaring scrap metal prices made the wiring and plumbing fixtures of unoccupied houses prime targets of crackheads. My bushy-headed bike rider’s load, if it was mostly copper, would probably fetch her more than enough to buy a day or two’s supply of crack rocks for her and her boyfriend. What was unusual was that she was female. Most copper thieves are male; it’s hard, dirty work to cut, pry, and wrench copper out from behind sheetrock walls, from filthy crawl spaces creeping with insects and vermin, and from sweltering attics. I figured her boyfriend did the wrecking, and she did the trekking, so he could lay low from the Po-po.
I continue to pace my quarry, who I’m guessing is headed to a nearby scrap recycler popular with copper thieves because he asks no questions, requires no photo ID of his scrappers, and keeps no records.
Over my PA speaker I inquire, “What’s in the bag, ma’am?” She ignores me and pedals harder. I smile at her determination and intone “Ma’am? Ma’am? What’s your hurry? Please pull to the side of the road.” Not only does she fail to comply, her pedaling becomes a furious blur. I check my odometer: we’re up to a blazing 7 mph.
I activate my blue lights and give her a couple “whoop-whoops” from the yelp setting on my siren. She’s standing to pedal now, leaning forward over her handlebars like Lance Armstrong in a Tour de Maysville, nothing but elbows and butt bones from my perspective, and she’s not looking back.
When she crosses the Eslava Creek bridge, she hooks a sharp left down a rutted, bumpy dirt road that parallels the creek. I follow, my Crown Vic rocking and scraping bottom on the uneven, unpaved surface, used by Water Board and Public Works trucks. “Three-twelve to radio, I’m following a signal 63 black female subject on a bicycle, refusing to stop. We’re eastbound on the dirt road just south of the Eslava Creek bridge on Pinehill, the utility road that comes out by Ward’s Recycling at Halls Mill and Fairway.”
“Ten-four, 312. We have no backing units at this time,” Dispatch replies.
“No backing needed,” I answer.
I’m familiar with—and fond of—this road, which runs through the heart of my beat. Eslava Creek is a typical urban waterway: largely neglected, unseen, obscured by residential backyards and the rear loading docks of strip malls. It often stinks, especially in the heat of August, of sharp chemical smells and sewage. Choked with discarded tires, the rusting hulks of long-abandoned cars, half-buried shopping carts from behind the Food World, floating plastic Faygo and Fanta soda bottles and soiled Huggies, the creek’s course was long ago “stabilized” by the Corps of Engineers and Public Works, who lined its banks at the crooks and bends with chain-link-encased ric-rac rock and hunks of broken concrete to inhibit erosion when spring and summer rains turn its normal six inches into a swollen, churning brown torrent.
The levees along each side of the straight parts are a gently graded 30-degree slope covered with tall grasses and reeds, inhabited by at least one granddaddy-size ’gator and many graceful white and blue herons, who seem unperturbed by their habitat’s scents and sights of decay.
I’ve recovered more than one stolen car from the banks of Eslava Creek. They are often torched by the carjackers before being pushed ablaze down the gentle slope to the water’s edge. It’s favored by carjackers because in many places the tall weeds and vines along the banks fully obscure the vehicles for weeks before neighborhood kids or the occasional fisherman will discover and report them.
The two-track down which I’m now in active pursuit is one I typically bounce along several times during a twelve-hour shift, when the radio traffic is slow. I may happen upon a drug transaction, or a stolen car, but mainly it’s simply a welcome departure from the streets and from the watchful eyes of the public, a place that’s quiet, and calm, where I can step out and take a pee, pick my nose, read the Press Register, ask an old fisherman what he’s catching, and what he’s using to catch it with, or just gaze at the waterfowl for ten or twenty minutes. It also provides me some strange small pleasure to take a road posted with signs at each end declaring “Authorized Vehicles Only.”
So I know this little road at least as well as the bushy-haired bicyclist attempting to elude me. She probably didn’t think I would follow her down this path, but I know where the holes and humps are and maneuver around them, staying right on her rear fender.
Over the PA again, I adopt a calm, conversational tone.
“Ma’am, this is a restricted road. Private. You’re now trespassing.” Her posture and effort remain Olympian. “Don’t hurt yourself, just give it up. You can’t outpedal me.” For all her effort we’re still at the 7 or 8 mph range. Either she’s tiring or my avuncular reasoning is working on her: she slows down. But doesn’t stop. “I’ve already got backing units en route to the other end of this road,” I bluff.
This works, finally. She abruptly stops and dismounts, breathing heavy. I skid to a stop, and she drops the bike, the rucksack, and her purse to the ground. Without a command from me, she even assumes the position, leaning forward, hands on the hood of my car, legs spread, as I put it in park and get out.
“Three-twelve, subject detained, about halfway between Pinehill and Halls Mill, on the dirt road along the south bank of the creek,” I advise Dispatch, trying hard to sound matter of fact, tamping down any hint of triumphal tone to my transmission. This is, after all, just a ninety-pound female suspected of being in possession of maybe thirty bucks worth of copper scrap that will be all but impossible to prove is stolen. Not exactly a major apprehension.
I come around the front of my car, and in the blink of an eye she bolts down the passenger side of my cruiser, back down the road we had just traveled, and then cuts down the levee through the tall weeds toward the creek as I run behind her, barking “Three-twelve! Subject’s running down into the creek!” into my shoulder mike.
When she gets down the levee near the water’s edge, the reeds are as tall as she is, and thick, and she slows. Right behind her, I discover why: it’s a wet, thick, boot-sucking bog. She struggles, and I struggle, and then I’m on her with all my weight, tackling her, and we both go down into the oozing muck. She struggles, but not against me. She struggles as I do to keep from getting hopelessly tangled in weeds and sucked under the black muck. I manage to regain my feet and she reaches up to me. We’re both soaked and slathered in a dark, thick, reeking ooze. I jerk her to her feet and we struggle together back up the levee, back to my idling cruiser.
I wipe the muck from my hand and key my shoulder mike. “Three-twelve, subject’s in custody, everything’s 10-4 here,” again trying to sound calm, cool, and in control, though enraged at my mud-caked uniform and embarrassed that she played me after I said on the radio that I had her detained.
I open the backdoor to my car and sling her into the cage, slamming the door shut. I pop the trunk and pull a couple towels out and smear most of the thick muck from my face and clothes, but there’s no way I can do this shift without a shower and a change of uniform. I’m dreading the ribbing I face from my squad and sergeant.
My prisoner pleads from the cage to roll down the window. “It ain’t no aih up in here! Cain’t breathe! Please, officer, I’m sorry, but I be suffercatin’ up in dis mug!”
I don’t reply because I’m too pissed at her to say anything without triggering a profane tirade I might regret, and I’ve got enough to regret already this morning. I lower her window from the control panel on my door’s armrest and walk around the front of my cruiser to empty the contents of her purse on my hood and the rucksack on the road in front of my car. Freshly cut copper plumbing lines, faucets, and fixtures clank into the dust. Among the contents of her purse on the hood of my car are a pack of Newports containing a glass crack stem and a small baggie of weed and another containing three little crack rocks that look like broken baby teeth. I sigh with relief that at least I have something more than a misdemeanor to arrest the bitch for, and look up just in time to catch a glimpse of her with her skinny bone-thin hand reaching through the bars of the cage on the door with the window down, opening the door from the outside handle.
Oh, shit, I think, I didn’t lock the backdoor! Who knew she was so skinny she could reach between the bars of my cage and let herself out? My thieving little mudbug has jumped out, escaped! I leap around the front of my car just in time for one of my outstretched hands to slither down her bog-slicked arm as she rounds the trunk and slips my grasp. My duty boots feel like they weigh a ton with the muck still clinging thickly to me from the knees down. She circles around my car and is off in a flash, scampering lickety-split down the road in the original direction I’d pursued her. I lumber along behind her, reporting her direction of travel and clothing description on the radio, hoping somebody’s 10-8 to catch her at the end of the road, because I’m just not all that into this thing anymore.
I hear Tyrone on the radio report he has a visual on my subject just as I see him zooming toward my scampering Mudbug from the other end of the road where it ends at the back of the seafood place. I’m about “give-out,” a half a football field from my fugitive and losing ground, when I see ’Rone jump out of his car and draw his Taser. Mudbug stops dead in her tracks, looks back at me huffing toward her, leaves the road and runs behind a clump of bushes and small trees. ’Rone pursues, and they run circles around the bush as if they’re schoolkids playing ring around the rosie, till Balzer rolls up in a cloud of dust, jumps out, fires his Taser from three yards as the circling Mudbug comes ’round the bushes directly toward him, and drops her. One Taser prong strikes just below her left nipple, the other embeds in her neck. Balzer gives her the whole five-second ride, and she’s screaming in satisfying agony as I drag myself to the scene wheezing, mud caked, and humiliated.
Yeah, back at the precinct, where they take Mudbug for questioning by a detective, I catch a ration of shit. Everybody comes in off their beats to get a look at me and Mudbug and yuck it up at my expense. But Mudbug is a changed, chastened woman. She’s had an epiphany and wants to change her ways. She tells the detective where she and her ole man have been staying, and tells him about all the copper he’s been stripping from houses in the neighborhood, which she’s been taking to Ward’s for him, several times a day. Mudbug recognizes now that she’s been used by her boyfriend, she’s been taking all the risk, and not even getting her fair share of the money, and she is more than happy to testify against him, if the detective could just see his way to overlook the paraphernalia, marijuana second, cocaine possession, receiving stolen property, failure to obey, escape, and eluding charges. She tells them right where they can find her old man, who’s waiting for her to return from Ward’s Recycling with the cash.
By the time I come back to the precinct in a fresh uniform, Mudbug has been sprung and her old man is in custody, charged with eleven felonies: eight counts of burglary, one receiving stolen second, possession of burglar tools, and possession of controlled substance. The detective thanks me for helping him to clear a backlog of cases. Four weeks later he gets Officer of the Month for his multiple case clearances through the arrest of one of Mobile’s most prolific burglars.