Somehow, I’ve developed a weird knack for making friends with assholes.

A few days before I flew to Chicago to run the Chicago Marathon, I took Roxy on an easy run on the trails near my house. It’s a route I run a lot, mostly because it gets me a good five miles with almost 500 feet of elevation. Some of the trail is pretty rocky and technical, but there are sections of smooth dirt and sand. Roxy gets to spend about four miles off leash, and I can zone out and listen to podcasts. Here’s the Strava record of my course, though it doesn’t tell the full story of what happened that evening.

The first three and a half miles were easy and chill. There’s a long downhill section in miles three and four, and I took a little side-trail that gets me a bit of extra distance on soft dirt. As I crested a little hill, I saw a white sedan creeping toward me up the trail. This area really isn’t made for sedans (it’s an ATV track), so it seemed odd that this vehicle was even there.

I moved to one side and made sure Roxy stayed out of the way. I could see two young men in the front seats: early 20s, scuzzy tweaker-looking guys. Pretty rough, but that’s not surprising for this area. I gave the requisite half-wave, and just as I was passing them, the guy in the passenger seat dumped a handful of trash out the window.

Of course, that meant I had to make friends with them. As I passed the driver’s open window, I said, “Seriously, guys? Pick up your trash.” I wasn’t a dick about it—just tried to sound kind of disappointed. After I passed them I looked back. The driver was still creeping his way up the dirt road.

I ran a bit further, then stopped to check again. The guys still hadn’t done anything about the garbage they tossed. So I got out my phone, set my camera to 2x zoom, and got ready to take a photo of the car. (You can see the little jog in my GPS-generated path where I stopped and backtracked for the photo.) As I did this, the driver braked abruptly and the passenger got out. He ran down the hill and collected the papers and other crap he’d thrown out of the car. Then he trotted back up and climbed back into the car.

Mischief managed. Time to finish my run.

As I turned to go, I heard shouting from behind me. The driver was out of his car, and he was screaming. “Delete that photo, motherf***er! Delete it now!” For whatever reason, he seemed pretty pissed. Like I said, I’m great at making friends with assholes.

Ignoring them, I restarted my podcast, looping around some piles of fill dirt and heading down a stretch of single-track trail that I knew the car couldn’t negotiate. I was maybe 75 yards down the dirt road that turns into Wedgewood lane a mile and a half to the southwest when I heard shouting again.

I looked back. These two tweaker-dudes had backtracked to the piles of dirt, and the driver had climbed to the top so he could see me on the road below. “F***ing come back, you f***ing n***er! You’d better delete that motherf***ing picture off your motherf***ing phone!”

At that point I was maybe a quarter mile away, with another mile of dirt road before the pavement started again. All I could think about at this time was, Why is he so worried about me having his photo? What’s he planning to do? Does he have warrants out? I also remembered—it had barely even registered—the two gun stickers in the back window of the guys’ crappy sedan.

So … I picked up the pace a little. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I could hear tweaker-dude screaming at me again. They’d cranked the car around and were approaching quickly on the dirt road.

I didn’t have a lot of options. There’s a long stretch of single-track that would be impossible for them to drive on, but it was still at least a quarter mile away. I could cross over to the Love’s gas station, but I’d have to stop and leash up Roxy. Instead, I bent down and picked up two fist-sized rocks, then kept chugging south.

In less than a minute, they were right beside me. The driver was practically hanging out of his window, his eyes wild. “Listen, motherf***er, you better delete that picture right now or we’re gonna f**k you up!”

I stopped maybe five yards from them, holding the rocks at my side. If I got a good windup, I could probably crack the driver’s skull. Or at least his windshield. I said, “Guys, all my photos back up automatically to the cloud, so even if I delete them off my phone, they’re already synched up.” (Okay, that only happens when I’m connected to WiFi, but tweaker-dude didn’t know that.)

“I don’t give a shit,” the driver snarled. “Delete it now, you motherf***ing n***er.”

They were just so friendly. Also, persuasive! Now I was really curious about why they wanted those photos nuked. What the hell are these knuckleheads up to? I found myself wondering. Glancing left, I happened to see somebody approaching from the south, walking a big dog. Oh good, I thought. A witness.

Taking a chance that my new friends didn’t want anyone else to see them or their car, I gave what I hoped was a friendly smile. “You guys have a great evening,” I said, then started running again. I’d popped out one of my earbuds, so I was listening hard for any sound to indicate that they were still following me. So far, so good.

I forced myself to go 50 yards or so before looking back again. The tweaker-dude had turned his car around and was heading back the way they’d originally been going, up into the hills. To do what? Who knows?

The guy with his dog turned out to be one of my neighbors, who happens to be a police officer. I filled him in on what had just happened, and texted him the photo of the tweakers’ car. I also warned him: “Be careful … they might be armed.

“So am I,” he told me with a grin. And off he went.

The adrenaline from the weird, slightly scary encounter had mostly worn off by the time I finished my five miles. When I met up with my neighbor again after I got back from Chicago, he said he never saw them that evening or anytime after that. I’ve been on those same trails several times, and I couldn’t see any signs of anything nefarious. Of course, if they’d had a body in the trunk or something, I assume they would’ve been smart enough not to be obvious about disposing of it.

Unfortunately, when I checked the two photos I snapped of the car and the litterbug, they weren’t even good enough for me to read the license plate. Oh well.