Predator!

As weird as you please. That’s the most I can say about this story.

Oh, it’s scary, too.

In fact, you’re likely to be left with a full case of the creeps after you’ve finished. You’re definitely going to pay more attention to your surroundings.

The Futility Of Seeking Answers

We read articles. Watch documentaries. Read volumes of books, and although intrigued, we never understand what goes on in the mind of a predator, men so empty of everything that is good that we’re never going to get what it is that makes them monsters. What it is that went wrong, so very wrong. Or how God can allow them to live at all.

And it’s true, what they say; you could be in line at the deli counter in your supermarket and never know that the man behind you has killed 13 people. Or raped 10 women.

But what about the ones who set off alarms, the ones who chill your blood to the last red cell? The ones you do notice?

I’m sure you’ve seen them. They can leave an impression not with mere looks, but words. Words that give them away as being dangerous. Words, or moments of silence. Either one is inappropriate in its turn.

And so I come to the one man I can never forget. The one I kept crossing paths with. A predator without a soul.

The First Encounter

There was a car wash, a self-serve with bays and high pressure wands and islands in back for vacuums. I was at one of them, cleaning the carpet in my 1985 Mercury Cougar, a car so shitty that none could be seen on the streets after 1990.

At the island closest to the Baltimore Diesel building there was a woman of about 25 years using the vacuum on her Jeep. With the top down I saw that she had a wee baby in a carseat carrier. She was taking too long and it was getting too much sun, but the little one just chilled.

She was very beautiful, a blonde in cutoff blue jeans and a bikini top. I’d have given her a stare, but then I saw something that took my attention well away from her.

At the same island, opposite her but mere feet away, a young man who had supposedly been using the other vacuum stood still, rigid, unmoving as if posing for a portrait. He stared hungrily at her and immediately set me hyperaware. The potential threat he posed to her was inescapable; I had never, ever seen anything like it. I can’t tell you exactly what I saw, but I can tell you what I did not see.

It wasn’t sexual attraction.

It wasn’t sexual arousal.

It wasn’t remotely the look of one who’s lovestruck.

Surely a more feral, hungry creature in a human body never existed. This was the closest thing to my father I could have imagined seeing. And yet, he struck me as far more dangerous than my father had ever been, and that is saying something. A man who held a .357 magnum to my head.

This guy, this thing I was looking at, it was some beast straight from Hell. It’s really all I registered, as I was focused on his proximity to the woman and seeing if I could detect any movement that indicated his gathering for attack.

I hated it…him…and I knew that if there was anything that could keep her safe from him, it was me. No one else was using the car wash. No one was outside at Baltimore Diesel. The Glen Burnie Mall sat to the north behind me, but someone there would be unlikely to see anything. Less likely to intervene. All my life I’d seen the watchers, chickenshits who saw but never acted. I’d been one. But today, no. Not this day.

The woman probably took too long because she refused to look at the fucking creepy guy. I’m positive that she wanted him to leave first. She was almost certainly afraid that he would follow her. The intensity of his stare would have unsettled anyone.

But he wasn’t leaving. And she finally had gotten her fill of pretending to vacuum the carpet in her Jeep. She got in, cranked the motor up and left. And, as she knew he would, I also knew that he was dead on her six when she turned through the gate onto Holsum Way toward Ritchie Highway.

And, unnoticed, I was dead on his ass, leaving no room for anything to get between us.

She turned north on Ritchie Highway headed toward Brooklyn Park. Left lane. Went past Holiday Inn, Hardees, up the hill. She turned left onto Hammonds Lane, and by then I knew that he was aware of me. I’d been on his bumper the whole time. Nobody fails to notice that.

He made the wise choice of not turning to follow her. I made sure that he continued on, giving her enough time to get home or cut through to Linthicum Heights. He wasn’t going to find her. I broke off and went home.

The Second Encounter

I can’t remember how much time had passed. I was now a driver for Bob’s Transport in Dundalk. I’d lost my job at B. Green & Sons, a job I loved. One night while at the dispatch window, checking out my paperwork so I could go home, the Predator walked in. He was a driver too, and I told Hawk, another driver, that I’d seen this guy before. I said, “watch this guy. He’s a psycho.”

A few nights (we worked graveyard shift) later, Hawkins said he believed me, that he’d seen Predator do something screwy with a woman at the window at some place where we picked up freight. But I lost that job not long after because of an accident. I thought, at least, there was an upside to it: I’d never have to see the Predator again.

I was wrong.

The Third Encounter

Sometimes when I fell down, I fell very far. So in the summer of 1992, I was a lowly security guard stationed at Brandon Shores BG&E power plant. On office duty at the gatehouse one day, in walked the Predator. In uniform, same as me. He never recognized me. But I knew him. I was never going to forget him.

For some reason, starting swing shift that day, he’d brought his mail with him. Sitting in an old swiveling office chair, he opened a letter and let out a whoop. He said that he had been accepted into the Baltimore City Police Department academy. He said, spinning round like a kid in his chair, “Finally I get to kill people!”

It was the last time I saw him.

I never did get to know if I had made a difference the day I tailed him. When we act to protect someone from harm, we don’t often get to know if we made a difference. It is this fact that keeps me not merely humble but hard on myself. I don’t know and tend not to believe that I ever made a positive difference to anyone.

But at least I tried.

That’s more than a lot of other people do.

And the Predator?

I don’t know what became of him. My guess is, logically, that he was rejected by the BPD and went on to another shit job. And that eventually he took his psychotic anger and hatred out on someone who crossed his path and never lived to tell the tale. Because predators always end up showing the world just how evil and depraved they are. They can’t hold back the beast within. They don’t even want to.

The mom with the bikini top wasn’t out to tease anyone. She was catching some rays and staying cool. And predators aren’t moved to action by skin. They’re motivation is hatred toward women and a need to control and dominate. He was possibly angry, but not aroused, by her summer attire. Perhaps he thought himself some avenger for God against sin. Perhaps that’s why a badge also appealed to him: it would be a mark for him to wear as a killer angel. It would be legal. I truly hope that he met his end trying something evil like that. It is a sin for me to think it. But is it not also out of concern for others?

It is. And if that is true, then am I not somewhat vindicated?

He would have already been replaced by a thousand others, some like him. Some worse.

And the decent among you must be vigilant and willing to intervene. So you may not get to know if you made a difference. So what? You don’t do the right thing for recognition. You do it because it is the right thing.

From The Files The FBI and Maryland State Police Surely Shredded: The Interstate 70 Chase

He was already gone from the “yard”, as we called the outside of the warehouse on Wellham Avenue, across from the Glen Burnie Mall. You’d see it on a map today as “Holsum Way” which was because Hauswald’s Holsum Bread lived there.

The 318 Detroit Diesel stuck under a maroon GMC Astro had duel exhaust running underneath instead of vertically, behind the cab. Though it stood tall, the tractor was designed for something we weren’t using it for. It only had a three-quarter size cab length. That meant the sleeper bunk behind the driver was more narrow than what cabovers usually had. This was because it was a short wheelbase single-axle, meaning that the rear didn’t have a “twin screw” or two axles behind, which you see under the nose of the trailers they pull. It had, as a result, stricter weight limits than a TS, and if caught at the scales on Interstate 70, was a sure overweight ticket. No one gave a shit. Least of all, the owner of Comet Fast Freight, my father. He told Jerry to leave late in the day to hopefully cruise by the weigh station when it was closed.

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Above: A GMC single axle, 3/4 cab Astro

Well, before we could lock up for the night, George, the dispatcher, got a phone call. It was short. We were both in the dispatch office but when he hung up he went straight to the driver’s lounge and lit a Raleigh with a battered Zippo he’d carried as a Marine in the Korean War. I followed him, lit a Camel with no filter with a Zippo I’d bought at a kiosk in the mall one day on lunch hour. “What the fuck was that all about,” I asked. He was clearly distressed.

He rested his elbows on a high window ledge, dragged heavily, and didn’t answer me. I was a forklift driver and an all-around jackoff who had no set job limits. As the boss’s son, nothing was outside of my job requirements.

“Hey, bud. What’s up?” I asked again. George Shanabrook was a friend. We’d talk about anything. But he clearly thought I didn’t matter at the moment.

I found out that was true quickly enough. After the silent burning of the Raleigh, he went back to the dispatch office and called my father, home early for a change, probably to beat the shit out of my younger brother for some trivial shit. Or to rape his favorite daughter, whom I later learned he called his “second wife.” What a piece of shit.

“Howdy Doo,” George said. That greeting told me that what George had to tell him was going to bring dad back to work.

From North Shore, up Route MD 100, no small trip. Route 100 was unfinished. He had to exit near the end of Mountain Road. Then go the rest of the way up Ritchie Highway. It would piss him off, the sick bastard. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but my gut told me I’d best be there when he arrived. It didn’t matter if I knew what was happening. It didn’t matter if I could not help. I just knew to be there. At times I was a devious and clever problem solver, a critical thinker who could override emotion and be helpful. I had my moments.

This day wouldn’t have such a moment.

“Howard County Police called. Someone reported one of our drivers has a woman tied naked to the passenger seat!”

A pause. “Yeah, he’s hauling ass, Ralph. They haven’t seen him. They’ve got the troopers on it. Heading west. It can only be Jerry, he left 45 minutes ago. I think you’d better come back in.”

I’d heard some weird shit growing up around truckers, but I was speechless. It was hard after 1975 to render me speechless. I’d turned into a smart, dirty-mouthed, mean asshole. Yet here I was, mouth hanging open. I wanted coffee to wash out the loose tobacco from the Camel and ease the dryness in my mouth. A dozen flies could have flown in there, and I’d have never noticed.

The phone rang again. An old phone with buttons for different incoming calls plus a Watts line. And a red hold button that flashed.

George’s eyes bulged wide under his strong plastic-framed glasses. My gut sank.

What the fuck was going on?

I knew the driver well. Jerry was from West Virginia and had a sick and very willing sense of humor. In other words, he didn’t just think up funny things; he spared no effort in doing them. He was a big fan of bottle rockets and used to aim them over the back fence at Baltimore Gas and Electric’s service trucks — and drivers — at night. I laughed at the yells of consternation as the poor bastards tried in vain to figure out what was going on.

George was no novice to sick humor either; our back yard where trailers were dropped (sitting on their landing legs) was open to the main parking lot. One night he was supposed to hook up to an empty trailer and take it to a glass company in Keyser, West Virginia to pick up empty soda bottles. It was dark. He hooked up to it, kicked the tires, then went to close the swinging doors.

And noise was coming from inside the trailer, up in the nose. Two teens, fucking their brains out. Before they could react, being naked and all, he shut both doors and took them for a ride around the entire Baltimore Beltway, or Interstate 695. Let me just say, riding in an empty box trailer at highway speeds, in complete darkness, is not something you want to do. Not for a minute, and not for the hour he took. He even paid toll at the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the couple never knocked on the sides or anything. They were probably thinking the ride was over.

When he returned to the yard, opened the doors and let them out, they had somehow managed to get dressed. They slowly and very shakily got out and left without a single word. George closed the doors and went on his scheduled trip. He had been in Korea. Killed Chinese regulars and North Koreans. This wasn’t shit to him but a hilarious torture ride for kids who were trespassing. He may also have been a bit jealous. His teenage humping days were so far in the past that he probably got pissed over that, too. We all miss those years, don’t we?

I know one thing, knew it without being told: those kids were bruised, sprained-up, and terrified. I’ll bet anything, they never went near any kind of trailer after that, probably not even a camper with a bed. And they probably broke up, too. A thing like that will definitely end a relationship fast. I roared when he told me this story. He told it without smiling, face impassive, voice like the narrator of a fucking episode of some old and boring documentary when TV had censors who wielded the power to end careers. Oh, it happened, alright. I still laugh when I think of that story. Hey, easy. I’m an avowed, confessed asshole, okay? I admit it.

When dad got back to the office, more phone calls had come in. About three or four, all from the Maryland State Police. One thing I forgot to mention about the old GMC Astro: The windshields were huge. From the front you could see the driver’s knees. And according to the trooper’s dispatchers, people had reported seeing a woman tied to the passenger seat of a maroon tractor pulling a Comet Fast Freight trailer. Must have been thick rope, I guessed.

But they couldn’t catch him.

Because that 318 Detroit motor could shit and git. And Jerry and his CB always knew where the bears (state troopers) were. Except this evening as the hot summer sun was setting, because he had no idea that he was being chased. Dad took a call that some weenie of command rank used to tell him, “If he crosses into Pennsylvania or West Virginia, he’s guilty of kidnapping and…”

I’d seen my father upset. I’d seen him red-faced with savage rage usually, it seemed, directed at me. But never had I seen this expression on his face. Helplessly enraged and frightened all at once.

Several more calls followed, the police wanting to know if our driver had checked in. I heard that come through the handset and laughed out loud. By now, I was appalled that Jerry was doing this, but at the same time, laughing at the desperation of the state police. Without being told, I knew that they even had a Bear in the Air, a term back then for a police helicopter.

They were waiting for him. He had passed the exit to go north to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and he was, as my father had told them, heading straight into West Virginia on Route U.S. 48-40.

When they pulled him over, cops and feds ordered him out of the cab. They had guns drawn. One opened the passenger door and shone his flashlight up. He cussed. Then he laughed. And soon, everyone had to take a turn looking at what all the fuss was about.

There in the passenger seat, secured not with rope but tarp straps, was a stark-naked, vinyl, inflatable, blonde-haired love doll.

And so, Jerry rode on, not even a ticket in his pocket because he had been caught doing nothing illegal.

And of course, you know me, because, if the story ended there, I probably wouldn’t bother writing it.

It’s funny, but it’s not as weird as the stuff I love to write. Well, now it’ll get weird.

Because a few months later, after Jerry was fired, another West Virginia trucker told me the end of the story.

Jerry had often taken his doll along with him for gags. He often got reported for violating kidnap laws and as the police caught on, they stopped responding. “It’s a blowup doll,” the dispatchers would tell the complainants. It was just Jerry.

But there was a sad fate in store for that doll.

Because Jerry once got a case of the clap from a truck stop hooker. And even people who don’t drive trucks know about those. Often people in cars with CB radios cruise truck stops looking for some love on the tarmac; everyone has their vices.

Well, how was Jerry going to tell his wife how he had given her VD (as venereal disease was called back then, replaced today by STDs) and how was he going to explain to her how he got it in the first place? That was the problem. And being Jerry, he had the perfect alibi.

Like the Grinch, faced with Little Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than two, he thought up a lie and he thought it up quick.

“I loaned my love doll to another driver, and I guess he musta given it to her.”

The implications of this lie are so grotesque that I was hesitant to go this far with the story, but then again, I’m an asshole.

But his wife believed him.

No, I’m not lying, you couldn’t make up shit like this even drunk. Not even high on anything you’d care to name. Because real life is so much more bizarre than fiction.

His wife wanted revenge. Pissing razor blades, dosed with antibiotics, she took the doll, cut it to deflate it, tied rocks to it and then tossed it into the Tug River.

I would not see Jerry again, but for a brief time we spoke on Facebook. I’m back on there for a very short time to cause trouble, but so far they seem to consider me rather tame.

It’s time to be an asshole. Excuse me, please, and thanks as always for visiting my house. I love having you here.