Clayton and Krystal: Low-hanging fruit

Clayton finally worked out a system with Ed where Ed worked down in the swamp for half-an-hour and then they would switch off. Ed worked the skid-steer while Clayton worked the swamp end.

Clayton, being young, worked an hour in the swamp. After an hour-and-a-half they would take a break, drink a quart of water each and eat some biscuits. Then they worked for another hour-and-a-half hour.

After lunch Ed worked short shifts in the swamp while Clayton took up the slack. Being tired and low blood-sugar while working a chainsaw was not a good plan.

Ed was a quick learner with the rigging. Clayton showed him the fundamentals.

One rope to a log worked OK for a simple extraction. 

The gray square at the bottom of the image is the "log" and the anchor at the top is the standing tree.

Running the cable through a snatch-block on the log with the free end attached to a strategically placed tree that was still standing doubled the pulling power. 

A two snatch-block set-up with the free end attached to the log, then the cable run through a snatch-block on the standing tree, back to a snatch-block on the log that was being moved and then finally to the skid-steer tripled the pulling power.

That came at the price of only gaining one foot of moving the log for every three feet the skid-steer moved. And that was optimistic because some of the skid-steer's motion was needed to take the slack out of the rigging. Consequently, the triple-advantage rigging was only used to break the log free and get it through heavy snags.

Clayton told Ed the simple way to figure it. “The number of ropes leading away from the log being pulled is the force multiplier.” The limiting factor was not the power of the skid-steer but the traction it could achieve on the soft ground.

Ed had grown up on the farm and had driven trucks and tractors his whole life. It did not take him long to get the hang of the skid-steer. The biggest problem was that Ed was a little hard-of-hearing and Clayton had to work to get Ed to slow down when he was driving the skid-steer.

Clayton liked to be at least one log-length away from the pulling operation when Ed started pulling. Ed was impatient and wanted to start pulling as soon as Clayton stepped away.

Some words were exchanged.

Ed decided that he like running the skid-steer and if slowing down was the price of getting a break from the brutally physical work down in the swamp...well, it was Clayton’s skid-steer.

It really didn’t slow them down all that much.

Within ten minutes, the spat was forgotten and the men enjoyed the physical activity in the cool, autumn weather.

***

Sergeant Yusef tossed four more folders on to Detective Willis’s desk. “Detective Mulholland blew out her back this weekend. You and Twinkle-toes are going to have to pick up the slack.”

Willis cursed.

Looking over the folders it looked like the usual mix of property crimes. One was clearly a whacked out crack-head who made the case easy. Rookie!

The second was done by pros, at least they hadn’t left much for the Detectives to work with.

The third was very high-value theft that occurred at the business of one of the Mayor’s most reliable campaign donors. Willis would have to tippy-toe through that one. He didn’t want to be TOO good of a detective if it was an inside job.

The fourth case had almost no information in the folder.

“What can you tell me about the arson case?” Sergeant Yusef asked.

“The phone records place him and the other phone in Lolium Township when the fire started” Detective Willis said.

“How far is that from the fire?” Yusef asked.

“About 25 miles, give or take” Willis said. "Maybe 35 minutes if they drove fast."

“Do you have an interview scheduled?” Yusef asked.

“Next Friday” Willis responded.

“Concentrate on the low-hanging fruit” Yusef told him. “Squeeze him in the interview. Squeeze him hard. If you get anything worthwhile then hand if over to the prosecutor’s office. If you don’t get anything, then drop it. The prosecutor is getting shitty with the Captain about the, quote 'low quality cases' unquote we are sending them.”

Before leaving, Yusef reminded Willis, "You have a 3:00 court date. Take a two-hour lunch. You know we are under budget pressure and cannot pay overtime. If you have to, come in late tomorrow to comp anything extra."

Yusef left before Willis said anything Yusef would have to address.

***

Krystal was numb. She plodded through her shift wondering if this was the last time she was going to see any given patient.

Her grandmother once told her “The curse of scar-tissue is that it has no live nerve endings. And that is its blessing. There are times when you don’t want to feel the pain.”

Krystal was distant after she came home from work. She grabbed Mattie and Charlie and worked at cutting burdock and piling it on the burn pile. Every night she torched what she had collected and watched it burn.

Dead burdock burned as if soaked in kerosene, quick-and-hot.

Note: A huge tip of the hat to BillieBob who used to work in a police department. His help made this segment possible. 

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