The floor of the aging Crown Victoria was covered in butter-greased Culver's wrappers. Add another one to the count, an order of fries and a concrete mixer for dipping was the only way Jimmy got his substantial ass on the road for the nightshift. Those wrappers would have come spilling out the passenger side if the door ever opened, that is, if the state ever paid to get Jimmy a partner again. But they didn't. Sometimes he imagined his trash was a ballpit for some trash baby come to break up the night; he did like the way babies smelled anyways. He always got a small fry, under the auspices of austerity, to dip in his dairy sweet. The ratio of fry to dip was always off, and he would finish off the Oreo shake with the plastic spoon. The sweetness hurt his teeth. In a few years, that'll be the pension's problem.
His stretch of road 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, 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 Jimmmy 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 50 miles ago. The only other light was 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 who drove the speed limit, and 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 cast 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 clutch 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 pre-occupied 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 heart-beat at 8 weeks, and the baby was smiling. Now, the painted eyes sailed past the highway to the Southern side. Jimmy had never seen anything like it: no one should be able to hit that kind of shot. 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. After all these years, 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 the inky night. Against a black-painted billboard, a peanut-shaped fetus, photographed in scientific detail, asked those driving by, "Mom, would you abort me?" Another thunder clap, and the question was shot-through, and became a statement, "Abort me." Jimmy chuckled, though he wasn't sure he had to give the artist credit. It began to dawn on him that this may be a crime. He slowly grabbed for the radio-caller 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 Candy Crush 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
All of a sudden, he passed the last bystander. This moment always came, the moment where it was just him and the prey. The hunter's advantage, as told by his father on their late autumn hunting trips of old, was his knowledge of that which he sought. A deer was 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 as a child, staring into the cold dead eyes of the lean buck his father 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.
Then, a squeal of rubber, plumes of smoke and tire spittle scattered across the road, as the 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 his dad 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. The scattershot tore through the blanketed outline of each advertised baby's head. As the shot fell away, two burning red coals stared into the night, where the final billboard baby's eyes would have been.
The infant gaze 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 tussel just barely louder than the rustle of summer corn tassles. 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 black night. The engine made a sound like it was dying, though she fed it gas all the same. Jimmy entered a trot, quickly catching his prey. It was all, somehow, underwhelming.
He tapped the driver's side window with his flashlight, walking alongside the Bug's deathcrawl. 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, looking the old woman over, she didn't posture as if she'd present him any harm. "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 her 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 the faded hues of fun-loving printer paper: peuce, 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 cue-ball, 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.
Quietly, she spoke, while picking up the tool, "Tonight, this is my cane. 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 bones. She was strong, though, and released a brief uff-da as she got up from her seat. She too had been riding this diagnoal line for far too long. Jimmy walked her, and 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 may rest her elbow against the muzzle of her gun.
"They feed you alright in jail?"
"They feed you terrible."
"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.