Scott Pratt - Injustice for all

As she descended the other side of the ridge into a cove, Katie stopped suddenly. Something wasn’t quite right ahead. She peered through the branches of a rhododendron and could see that the forest had been cleared in the cove below and replaced by a vast field of… what was it? Whatever it was, it was a fluorescent green, almost glowing. She crept toward the break in the trees and reached into her pack for her binoculars.

The marijuana patch was vast, close to five acres, Katie guessed. The plants were at least four feet high and waved gently back and forth in the breeze. As Katie scanned with her binoculars, she saw two all-terrain vehicles at one end of the patch. At the other end, about a hundred yards to her right, she saw three men sitting on lawn chairs. They were eating. All three of them appeared to be Latino, probably Mexican.

Maggie must have caught their scent, because she started to growl.

“Hush, Maggie,” Katie whispered. She knelt down next to the dog and reached out for her collar with her left hand. Maggie’s ears were standing up straight, as was the hair on the back of her neck. She let out a weak bark.

“No, Maggie, no.” Katie took another look through the binoculars. One of the men was standing now, pointing in her direction. He’d seen her.

“Let’s go, Maggie.” Katie turned and started running as fast as she could back up the ridge. Maggie followed her but continued to bark.

When Katie reached the top of the ridge, she heard the sound of engines. They were coming after her. She veered left through a large area of Fraser fir deadfall, scrambling over tree trunks and branches, crawling beneath rhododendron. Even if they saw her in the deadfall, they wouldn’t be able to follow on the four-wheelers, and Katie felt confident she could outrun or outhike anyone in these mountains.

When she heard the engines top the ridge behind her, maybe three or four hundred yards back, she crouched behind a huge tree trunk, wrapped her hand around Maggie’s snout, and waited. About twenty seconds passed before she saw two men on four-wheelers tearing through the trees, heading in the direction she’d been going before she broke for the deadfall. They stopped at the edge of the deadfall, turned off the engines, and listened.

“Shhh,” Katie whispered as she clutched Maggie close to her. “Shhh.”

After an agonizing minute, the engines started, and the four-wheelers tore off up the ridge. As soon as they were out of sight, Katie started running due west. The sound of the engines faded with every step she took.

Katie kept telling herself she was safe now.

She was safe.

Katie arrived home after dark on Sunday. The route she took back after her run-in with the men at the marijuana patch had taken longer than she expected. The terrain was as difficult as any she’d encountered in the park. As soon as she walked through the back porch and into the kitchen, Aunt Mary appeared.

“Oh, Katie, are you all right?” Aunt Mary asked. She immediately embraced Katie.

“I’m fine.”

Aunt Mary stepped back and took stock of her.

“Look at you. You’re scratched all to pieces.”

Katie had debated much of the way home about whether she should tell Aunt Mary what she’d seen. Aunt Mary despised the “druggers,” as she called them. Every year in the fall, they hauled their harvest out of the mountains past the farm, led by a sheriff’s department vehicle. A couple of years after Katie moved in, Aunt Mary finally told her what the annual parade of trucks contained.

“They hide deep in the mountains where no one can see them, they do their business, and they pay off the sheriff,” Aunt Mary had explained. “Everyone’s afraid of them. It’s best to just let them be, but I swear it goes against my grain. They’re making millions of dollars illegally, and nobody’ll do anything about it.”

“Why are you so late?” Aunt Mary said. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”

Katie couldn’t bring herself to lie.

“I had to take a detour. A big one. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”

“What kind of detour? Why?”

“I ran across something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was hiking cross-country toward Laurel Top. I came to a clearing in a cove and it was full of marijuana plants. There were some men there, and they chased me.”

“Oh my Lord!” It was Lottie, who had just walked into the kitchen. “Chased you? You mean they saw you, child?”

“I think they may have seen me from a distance,” Katie said. “They chased me on four-wheelers, but I ran and hid in some deadfall, and they didn’t see me again.”

“Thank God you’re all right,” Aunt Mary said. “I’ve told you to be careful in those woods.”

“I’m sorry,” Katie said. “I wasn’t looking for them or anything. I just sort of stumbled across them.”

“How big was the field?” Aunt Mary said.

“Big. Really big.”

The three of them were silent for several seconds. Katie wondered what her aunt and Lottie were thinking.

“How’s Luke?” Katie said, hoping to get the focus off her ordeal.

“He’s sleeping like a little angel,” Lottie said. “He missed watching cartoons with you yesterday.”

“I missed him, too,” Katie said. She began to pull her pack off.

“Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “do you know where this marijuana field is? I mean, could you tell someone how to find it?”

“Sure, I know exactly where it is.”

“Miss Mary, I want you to slow down just a bit now,” Lottie said. “We don’t need to be getting involved in something like this. You know they got the sheriff in their pocket.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the sheriff,” Aunt Mary said. “I was thinking about maybe the DEA. They’re always on the news making big drug busts. I’ll bet they have an office in Knoxville. Maybe they’d be interested. It’s time somebody put a stop to this nonsense.”

“I don’t know,” Lottie said. “I don’t believe in meddling in other folks’ business. Nothing good ever comes of it.”

On Monday afternoon, as soon as Aunt Mary got home from work, she and Katie drove to Knoxville. The DEA offices were housed in the rear of a nondescript shopping center off Kingston Pike. Aunt Mary told Katie that she’d called that morning and spoken to an agent. He asked her if she could come in immediately and bring Katie with her.

There was a security keypad on the door and a dead bolt lock. Aunt Mary knocked on the door, and a few seconds later it opened. A young man with short dark hair was standing on the other side. He was medium height, muscular, and wearing a shoulder holster that carried a pistol. Katie immediately noticed a deep cleft in his chin. “Butt chin” was what the kids at school called it.

“I’m Mary Clinton,” Aunt Mary said, “and this is my niece, Katie. She’s the one I told you about on the phone.”

The man introduced himself as Agent Rider and led them through a large, open room filled with desks. There was no carpet on the floor, and the steel beams that framed the building were exposed. The space was very much like a warehouse, with several people milling about, talking on telephones, talking to one another. Most of them were men, and nearly all of them were armed. They passed a cabinet filled with rifles and came to a small office with paneled walls and a fake fern in the corner. On the wall behind the desk was a map of East Tennessee. Agent Rider motioned for them to sit down.

“So, Katie, right?” Agent Rider said. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

Agent Rider folded his hands in front of him on the desk. His fingers were thick and leathery, and the veins running down his arms looked like rivers and streams on a map.