Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

She says when they decided to separate, one was going to leave with the car and the other would stay. Then there was more arguing about who got to take the car and who had to stay with the baby. She jumps in the car and tries to leave, and he runs after her. That's when I saw him throw the baby at her in the car. I thought it was a beach ball. Then I thought, Shit—it's a baby. Luckily it passed right in through the window."

"Where's the baby now?" I asked him.

He pointed to the shade of the willow trees next to us. "Those two women in the crowd offered to hold it."

I looked over at the trees. The baby was naked but for a paper diaper, face flushed, in the arms of a woman forty feet from where we were standing. She and another woman were making worried-looking ministrations over it.

"Is it okay? You wanna call an ambulance?" I asked.

"Seems okay. I've called Child Protective Services to pick the little guy up and have him checked at the hospital. Anyway—then the crowd turned on the man and I thought they were going to kill him. The guy saw what was about to happen to him and ran into the brush down there." Finch gestured toward the thickets by the beach. "That was a good twenty minutes ago, and I have no idea where he is by now."

As Finch finished his account, the other rangers arrived, rumbling along the road in clouds of dust. Finch went back to questioning the woman. I walked over to where the others were getting out of their rigs. They were surrounded by bystanders who wanted to tell them what had happened and demand that something be done about it. When I told them what Finch had told me, the rangers were only too happy to leave their petitioners and search for the missing suspect.

The way it worked with us, as soon as the adrenal part was over, someone would have to pay for all the fun. You paid by having to write the whole thing up, a process that could take an hour of note-taking in the field and several hours to a couple of days back at the ranger station. As a rule, the first ranger on the scene was the one who paid. You labored over your account of the incident, all the while knowing that the DA would flush most of the nefarious acts you described down the drain and deal the guy out on a felony specified as a misdemeanor. At sentencing, the judge would impose a suspended sentence because the jail was full, or maybe once he was out on bail the guy wouldn't bother to show up for his arraignment. A bench warrant would be issued and when he got picked up a year and a half later on that and the seven other warrants he'd accumulated by then, expediency dictated that all his cases be bound up and sold at a discount, and your charges might not even make the cut. So in the end he'd do a little jail time on some unrelated beef and no one would ever know what a beautiful job you'd done on the investigation. Year after year you wrote up these stories, and they'd wind up archived in a pile of cardboard boxes in the warehouse, flattening and drying like pressed flowers under the weight of all the stories above them—the unknown stratigraphy of your career.

In this case it was Finch who got to cut paper. To assist him while he continued taking the woman's statement, I began circulating to talk to the witnesses. The sweat ran down my face and fell in big brown dusty drops from my nose, staining my notes. My ballpoint refused to write on the wet spots. Our radios crackled with inarticulate static from Folsom Lake. The bystanders began to drift away, back down to the cool water.

It went on like this for a while. The whole affair had the usual combination of gripping danger and utter senselessness. Then I heard Finch on the little speaker-mike from the radio on my gun belt, clipped to the epaulet of my shirt: "One seven nine ... that's the guy—long hair, no shirt—coming toward us."

I looked at Finch. He was pointing to a lanky man with unkempt hair walking up the sandy track from the willow thickets. The remaining spectators around us began to yell: "That's him! Aren't you going to do anything? That's the guy who tried to kill her baby!" I took a few steps toward the man, placing myself between him and the angry bystanders. He wore only dirty athletic shoes and a pair of cut-off jeans. He looked dazed.

"Put your hands up," I commanded him, pulling my baton from its ring. I didn't brandish it. Instead, cocking my wrist, I aligned it along the back of my forearm, where it wasn't threatening but was instantly ready.

"Turn around. Interlace your fingers and put your hands behind your head. Spread your legs. Don't move." I stepped around behind the man and patted the pockets of his shorts for weapons. Then I handcuffed him and, leading him over to my Jeep, put him in the back seat behind the expanded-metal prisoner cage. His sweaty back made a muddy smear across the dusty vinyl of the seat back. He looked weary. He said nothing and avoided my eyes. I didn't question him. He wasn't going anywhere, and now that he was captive, he had to be read his rights. I was more eager to question the witnesses on the beach before they disappeared, so I left him in the Jeep with the air conditioner on full blast and we went back to work on our notes and interviews. A breeze off the river stirred the leaves on the willow trees and momentarily cooled me, blowing through the sweat-soaked shirt on my belly, below