When my eldest son was young I used
to terrorize him by calling myself Hairy Man Wallace (not sure why I picked
Wallace) and chasing him screaming through the woods. He credits his stellar
high school track abilities in 800 and 3200-meter races—along with a few
incidental nightmares—to these frenzied pursuits in the dark forests of
northern Idaho when he was a small boy.
He too chose a career in law
enforcement and now has sons of his own. I’m not sure if I worry more about how
he’ll terrorize my grandsons or the stories he’ll pass on about how mean I used
to be.
I’m not a particularly competitive
person when it comes to games—unless there’s a chase involved. Cars,
motorcycles, horseback, or on foot—in books, movies and in life, a good pursuit
ignites my predatory instincts. And I don’t think I’m unique. Evidence suggests
that in major battles throughout history, soldiers rarely used their bayonets
in face-to-face battle. But, when an opponent turned to flee, it was a
different story altogether. Some sort of chase drive kicked in and…well, it
wasn’t pretty.
In literature, the chase pulls or
pushes us along in the story. We run after the same goal as our protagonist or from
whatever it is that happens to be chasing him—or both.
The title characters in Butch
Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, pursued by E.H. Harriman’s posse, turn to look
over their shoulders time and again to say, “Who are those guys?” I have to
admit that though I loved Butch and Sundance, when it came to my job, I wanted
the guys I chased to be thinking the same thing. Hunting men requires dogged determination,
sometimes to the detriment of much else in life. Birthdays, anniversaries, ballgames
and track meets slip by, noticed, but unattended. Even opportunities to be
Harry Man Wallace become fewer and farther between.
Every deputy marshal I know has a
deep understanding of Tommy Lee Jones’ character in The Fugitive when Harrison
Ford turns at gunpoint and says, “I didn’t kill my wife.” Jones, as Deputy Sam
Gerard says, “I don’t care.”
Basically, if you want me to stop
chasing you, quit running.
No one I ever worked with got into
law enforcement for the paperwork. We were in it, in part at least, for the
quest. There are few more despondent looks than that of a young patrol officer
called off by a supervisor in the middle of a vehicle pursuit. I’m not saying
standing down isn’t sometimes the right thing to do. I’m just saying it sucks.
It’s like putting a shock collar on a sheepdog, then jolting him while he’s
chasing off a wolf.
Many of the surveillances, fights
and pursuits into which I drop Jericho Quinn are stolen from my experience and
the experiences of my cohorts. Even now, nearly thirty years from the day I
first started police work, I feel a particular tightness in my chest when I
write a scene where a pursuit is involved. Quinn chases bad guys on foot and on
all manner of motorcycle. Though I’ve
never actually been in a motorcycle chase, every ride has that feel to it. Foot
pursuits and car chases though, I have plenty of experience with those.
For sheer comfort, nothing compares
to a foot pursuit from the back of a horse. Prior to my time with the U.S. Marshals,
I worked mounted patrol with a police department in Texas. My horse, Max, and I
once chased a lady who’d stolen some clothes from a local department store.
Head down, arms pumping, she ran as fast her legs could carry her across the
parking lot. Max fell into an easy trot.
“Ma’am,” I
chuckled. “You cant’ get away.”
She redoubled her efforts, digging
in with all she had.
Ears pinned, Max seemed to be
enjoying the game.
Had the shoplifter been a man and been
wanted for more serious crime, I might have spilled him with a little shove from
the toe of my boot. As it was, this lady
made it about twenty more yards before collapsing into a heaving pile of sobs
and stolen merchandise.
Most
pursuits aren’t that easy.
Early one
Sunday morning, I ended up behind two outlaws who’d just shot it out with a
Texas Highway Patrolman and were making a break down the interstate. One of the
most frightening yet exhilarating moments of my career was trying to keep up
with them in my Plymouth Grand Fury patrol car. The pegged out speedometer was
one thing, but my light sedan drifted back and forth over every lane on the
interstate like an air hockey puck. Thankfully,
the bad guys bailed into the woods before I turned into a fireball. One was
caught quickly but we looked for the other one all day with helicopters, horses,
house-to-house searches and roadblocks.
Later that evening, while we were still searching the woods, the Texas
Rangers announced they’d found the guy in Fort Worth, dead. I often wonder if
they found him dead or if they found him and he died. Back then, one just did not
shoot at a Texas lawman and get away with it.
Seems like my foot chases always
happened after a buffet day at the pizza joint. There’s a certain rhythm to
running with a gun, extra magazines, handcuffs, radio, stick, ballistic vest
and wad of keys. Thankfully, a great many bad guys are out of shape. I won’t
address the image of the donut eating copper here, except to say that, though
there are plenty of plus-size officers out there, most of the men and women I was
fortunate enough to work with are on the fit side of the norm—some, extremely
so.
In TIME OF ATTACK, Jericho chases
an assassin down the Las Vegas Strip and through several casinos. Quinn of
course, is uber-fit, but he’s also smart—and in the pursuit of outlaws, that’s
every bit as important.
In real life, I rarely ran into a
master villain. In fact, the guys I chased were far from the brightest lights
on the Christmas tree.
When I was
on patrol, a guy I pulled over sped away from me because he had a gallon
baggie full of weed. His plan was to get just far enough ahead that he’d be
able to hold the bag out the window and get rid of the evidence. Aerodynamics worked
against him at that high speed, blowing the entire contents of the bag back
into his face and lap.
I got the chance
to drive fast and he went to jail.
A Trooper
friend of mine in Alaska had a couple of fugitives flee out of their house
and into the nearby wood line. My friend knew that there was nothing but miles
of tundra on the other side of the trees, filled with mosquitos and tiny biting
no-see-ums. Instead of running after the fugitives, he simply slathered himself
with bug dope and waited for them to run back to him. If you’ve ever spent much
time in the Alaska Bush, you know that it didn’t take them long.
I once chased
a hooker, wanted on drug charges, who climbed out the back window of a duplex
then ran along the rooftop. We’d interrupted a…business deal, so she was
barefoot and wore nothing but panties and a light tank top. She was tough as a
boot, and even half naked went over several privacy fences that slowed me down
and nearly gutted my partner on an exposed nail. In the end, it was Alaska’s
below-zero winter that stopped her. She gave up before she froze her assets
off.
Not all
chases are after bad guys.
A couple of weeks before I left for
the Marshals job, my partner, Horace and I were sitting on our horses on a
little knob hill that overlooked the county golf course. The saddle lends
itself to waxing philosophical so we talked about our futures, the life of a
lawman, working for the feds, etc. It
was a brisk evening, cold enough you could see your breath. A big winter sun squatted
just off the end of the fairway. Horace, ten times the horseman I will ever be,
snugged down his black Resistol then turned to me and said, “Marcus, you don’t
have a hair on your butt if you don’t race me right damn now” before galloping
off toward the eighth hole in a blur of palomino and black and gray.
Well, hairy
behind or not, I could not let such a challenge go unanswered.
The next morning, I found myself standing
tall in front of the chief’s desk. Hard to hide a bunch of size #2 horseshoe
divots on a golf course. Our only defense was that we stayed off the
greens.
Though I write people killin’ Adventure
Thrillers, I still work at putting in a few pursuits of the heart. Gunny
Jacques Thibodaux still chases his wife around the house—and has seven sons to
prove it. Veronica Garcia pursues
Jericho Quinn— and Quinn still hasn’t figured out if he should chase Ronnie or
his ex wife.
Me, I know exactly
what I’m chasing. I’ve been married to her thirty years today.
She made me
chase her over two years before she
asked me to marry her. We were on the hood of my rusty old Dodge
Dart, looking up at the Texas night sky and the conversation went something
like this:
Crickets….
Bride to be: “So, are you going to ask me to marry you?”
Me (slow as ever): “I was planning to.”
Bride to be (chewing on this as if it was news): “Well,
don’t ask me yet.”
Nothing but crickets…for a long time…
Me, finally: “Well, er…when I do ask, are you going to say
yes?”
Bride to be: “Of course.”
We went another couple of weeks, her back in college 1200
miles away, me working and wondering if I was engaged or not.
I guess I was a little slow on the
uptake. She told me later how important it was to her to be pursued. Maybe I should have tried out the Harry Man
Wallace thing a little earlier. Maybe, just maybe, if she’d enjoyed being
chased through the woods by a crazy man, we would be celebrating our thirty-second
anniversary right now—or maybe I’d just be coming up for parole.
Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He's published ten novels, six of them Westerns (several as a ghost writer and two under his pen name, Mark Henry).
TIME OF ATTACK fourth in his Jericho Quinn Thriller series, will be released from Kensington February of 2014.
Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.
Visit him at:
www.marccameronbooks.com
http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor
