Donald Harstad: The Big Thaw

"No, negative, Three. Uh, I just saw him and, uh, tried to stop him and he took off…" The "uhs" told me that he was really concentrating on his driving.

Damn. I backed my car up, being sure I was leaving enough room for the suspect to get safely by. You aren't allowed to really get serious about blocking a road unless there's a felony charge on the oncoming driver. I got out of my car, taking my shotgun with me. I deliberately didn't take time for my parka, because I felt the suspect should be there within a few minutes or less. I did, however, put on my down-filled vest. God, it was cold. I pulled my gloves on, and jacked a round into the chamber of the 12-gauge pump. I stood well off to the side and rear of my car. No point in getting run over if he lost control. I pulled my turtleneck up to cover my face.

The only sound was the purring of the engine on my car. Dead quiet. There was either no moon, or it wasn't up yet. I looked up, and the stars were just everywhere. No twinkling, just millions of little steady points. The way it gets in Iowa when it's so cold the moisture freezes and precipitates out of the atmosphere.

I became aware of a faint whining sound, growing louder. Then the squeaking of tires on fresh snow, and faint headlights coming right toward the intersection. He'd been traveling so fast, and busting through drifts, the snow had covered his headlights. He probably couldn't see much of anything except my headlights. I could barely see him as he slid past me, disoriented by the sudden appearance of my car's bright and flashing lights, lost control, and shot off the road and the shoulder and straight into the ditch on the other side of the paved road, disappearing in a cloud of snow.

"Uh, Three's got him stopped at the intersection!" I said into my walkie-talkie, as I walked quickly toward the suspect's car. Through the snow piled up on the roof and the snow stuck to the windows, I could just barely see someone inside trying to get the door open. The depth of the snow was making that pretty difficult, as it was piled up nearly window high in the furrow he'd made through the drifts.

I stopped at the edge of the ditch, and watched the driver's door being opened, closed, slammed open an inch farther into the snow, closed… After five or six repetitions, I just pointed my shotgun at the struggling driver, and yelled, "Hold it right there!"

The door stopped moving instantly. Then, after banging on it a couple of times to loosen the ice, the suspect rolled the window down. "I surrender!" he yelled. "Don't shoot! I surrender!"

I got my first good look at him. "Fred?" I looked at the thin, frightened face. "Is that you, Fred?"

"Mr. Houseman?"

I was sitting in my patrol car with Fred Grothler, a.k.a. Goober; the driver of the car that now sat comfortably in the ditch. I had Fred in the front passenger seat. He was no threat, and seemed sober. I was filling out the officer's section of a state motor vehicle accident report. I had to do it instead of Five, Mike Connors, as Mike had been involved in a chase with the vehicle in the ditch. He would be assumed to be biased, and unable to be objective in his assessment of the cause of the accident. I, on the other hand, the proximate cause of the accident, was assumed to be emotionally uninvolved. Attorneys. But having to fill out the accident report was just another reason I hated assisting with chases. I had unzipped my down vest, and had donned my gold-rimmed reading glasses. I turned to Fred/Goober.

"You wanna tell me what the hell you were doin'?" Goober just sat there, shivering. Nerves, I thought. It was cold, and he was a bit damp, but it was warm enough in my car. He shouldn't have been shaking from the cold. "I, I, I dddon't know," he said.

"You don't know if you want to tell me, or you don't know what you were doing?"

Goober looked at me. "I ddon't kn, kn, know."

I'd talked with Deputy Mike, and he'd told me that he'd been doing routine patrol in the area where we'd been having some residential burglaries, and he'd seen a car sitting on the side of the road, honking its horn. He turned on his top lights, and was just getting out of his patrol car to see if the occupant needed help, when the suspect vehicle had turned on its lights and taken off, scattering snow clogs all over him.

He'd very reasonably gotten back into his patrol car and started the pursuit.

Mike and Nine, John Willis, were still across the road, sitting in Mike's car, and waiting for a wrecker. When we'd taken Fred out of his car, I'd noticed several tools on the floor of the front seat. Whether they were carpenter's tools, or auto repair tools, or burglar's tools was open to question. That was the trouble with tools… they were pretty much described by whatever you wanted them for. We did have several area burglaries that had used a half-inch pry, and that could be just about any screwdriver. On the other hand, just looking at Fred's car led me to believe that most of the tools on the floor could easily have been used just to get the ugly thing started. Mike leaned toward charging Goober with Possession of Burglary Tools. I disagreed, but we'd left it kind of dangling, ready to be used if we could prove Goober had been about to go into a place. But any way you cut it, all we had was traffic on him at this point… and minor traffic at that.

We couldn't even get him for "eluding pursuit," because in Iowa you had to be doing at least 15 mph over the posted limit for that to come into effect. The limit on gravel roads was 55, just like rural highways. None of us thought we could prove 70 mph, because Mike was pretty well keeping up with him at 60. And 70 on those roads was just about out of the question.

The other problem was that, out of the three possible rural residence burglary targets in the area where Mike had made the first contact with the horn-blowing Fred, there were no tracks in the farm drives. The snow had come down a couple of days ago, and any movement into those drives would have been immediately noticeable. After we saw the tools in Goober's car, Mike had driven back up the course of the chase and had checked himself. No tracks. No evidence of any crime. Well, not yet, anyway.

"So, Fred," I said. "What were you doin' out on a night like this?"

"De, de, deer," he said, still shaking.

"Deer?" I asked. "What deer?"

"The ones I was honkin' at," he replied. "I was hon, hon, honkin' at deer."

"Honkin' at deer…"

"Well," he said in a whiny voice, "… yeah. I heh-heh hit one a year ago, and I stop and honk at 'em nuh, nuh, now. That's all." He looked so serious and honest in such a studied way, it was almost painfully obvious he was lying through his teeth.

"Fred… you really expect me to believe that?"

There was a long pause. Then he said the most honest thing he'd said all night. "Well, it'd bu, bu, bu, be nice if you di, di, di, did…"

We had nothing, we couldn't hold him much longer than the time it would take to do an accident report and get his car out of the ditch, and I was very, very tired. "Tell you what, Fred… You think about it, and we'll talk again in a minute or two." I looked at him for a long moment. "Just don't lie to me, Fred. You know how I hate that."

He nodded. "Okay."

I picked up my mike. "Comm, Three. I'll be bringing the driver into the department as soon as the wrecker gets here. Any idea on an ETA for that?"

"Just a few minutes," she replied. "I called him about fifteen minutes ago, and he said he'd go right out."

"Ten-four," I said. I felt sorry for the wrecker driver. Bundling up, going out to an ice cold garage and getting into an ice cold wrecker, just to come out here and pull out some idiot's car that shouldn't have been here in the first place…