Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

numbers of involved parties and witnesses whose slurred statements all had to be written down. O'Leary knew that the district attorney would never prosecute anyone, for there were no clear perpetrators or victims in these things, just winners and losers cut from the same belligerent cloth. Yet he was as diligent in reporting on them as he was in his other work. He was respected both by citizens and by fellow officers, and senior cops from other departments always greeted him first when we worked a scene together, for he was possessed of that amiable reticence seasoned cops admire in others.

But what he had been through in those canyons by the time I met him had taught O'Leary that the government cared not a stitch for this river—he was right about that—and he had decided not to get himself killed for it. And so he maintained a compassionate truce with the lost and hopeless, the minor misdemeanant and the drunk, and unless forced by circumstances beyond his control, he didn't go out of his way to pry into their activities, providing they behaved themselves and paid their camping fees once in a while.

But I was young and brash and I had no real understanding of what O'Leary and the others had been through before my arrival. I thought that what was now forming in my mind was original—the idea of making a real park out of this hopeless dam site, whipping it into shape with diligent enforcement of park regulations and driving off the scary people so that birdwatchers, kayakers, and families would feel safe coming to it. Now, of course, I know all of the rangers had started with that notion.

And so I set out to violate O'Leary's truce. Because I hated begging camp fees from armed men, I began systematically seeking out and seizing every pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, dagger, brass knuckles, or club I could get my hands on. In the next ten years I confiscated 125 weapons in criminal cases. To store them, I put up evidence cabinets and, eventually, a property room.

Because I didn't want to be seated in a truck while my partner negotiated with an armed man for camp fees, I put down on my career development plan that I wanted to become a defensive tactics instructor, and that winter I went off to school for training. For the next several years I stood over my fellow rangers in long practice sessions on wrestling mats until their wrists and knees ached, drilling them on how to take away a gun from an armed man, what to do if he tried to grab their gun, and how to search and handcuff him safely. They must have thought I was a prick. I guess I was. But they were good-natured about it and trained hard, and we began to look like we knew what we were doing. Meanwhile, MacGaff worked his accounting magic on the Bureau to replace two of the old Ramchargers. When the new Jeeps came in, I found a welder who built racing cars down in Sacramento, and we put together the first of a whole string of very businesslike new patrol rigs, with all the trimmings.

For the rest of that summer and the next I went back to Cherokee Bar alone, over and over. With a shotgun in my arms and my heart in my throat I tiptoed down the riverbank through the brush, seeking out the miners illegal camps and dredging operations. I arrested them on their various warrants—a lot of them seemed to have had previous problems with the law. I towed their vehicles away.

One day it was Sherm Jeffries who went to Cherokee Bar to collect camp fees, and when he arrived at that troublesome campsite, he got bitten by the Great Dane. When he recovered, he and I went back there together. The dogs came out to meet us as usual, followed this time by several miners. We faced each other and words of unhappiness were exchanged. Between us, the Dane started growling and lunged at my crotch. Without thinking, I hit it hard on the nose with my aluminum ticket book. The animal drew back, whimpering. I wrote the owner another ticket for dog-off-leash. Within a week he filed a grievance with Internal Affairs. It was eventually dismissed. After that my life was threatened several times. One of the Cherokee Bar miners told me he'd been a sniper in Vietnam and one day soon he was going to do what he did best—to me. But in the end, Cherokee Bar began to turn around.

In my first eight months in the beautiful desolation of the once and future Auburn Reservoir, I made twenty-nine arrests. Bell made one, O'Leary three, MacGaff six, Finch—who was spending much of his time at the union office down in Sacramento working for the betterment of all rangers—ten.

At least fifteen cars had their windows broken and their contents stolen that year in our canyons. I suspect there were many more, but the reporting rate was miserable. There were eight assaults and batteries, two rapes, a grand theft, a wife beaten by a husband, one arson, ten drunk-in-public arrests, twelve cases of vandalism—mostly shot-up signs. The operators of ten motor vehicles were arrested for drunk driving. We apprehended fourteen people on arrest warrants for offenses they'd committed elsewhere; of those, twelve were misdemeanors, two felonies. We recovered nine stolen cars and investigated the deaths of four people in accidents or suicides. Twice that year we were involved in high-speed car chases.

We know these things because of what Finch put down on his career development plan. His project involved entering selected data about every incident we rangers handled into a computer database program. From 1986 on he distributed an annual digest of statistics on how people had behaved on the condemned ground of the Auburn Dam site—and the news wasn't good. Of course, this was before Microsoft Access and Filemaker became the industry