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The powerful black and silver Dodge Charger rolls to a stop in front of a house on 35th Street, and bounty hunters B.J. Walker and Cedric Polk jump into action.

The house in their sights has peeling paint, and Christmas lights dangle from the eaves on this humid night in July.

Walker rushes to the rear of the house to cover a possible back-door escape—the fugitive inside escaped that way just two weeks ago. Polk rattles the front gate in the chain link fence. A snarling black dog rushes at him, so he squirts pepper spray in its face, backing it off. He climbs onto the porch and knocks on the door.

Bail bond duo B.J. Walker and Cedric Polk have been hunting fugitives for three years.

“Who is it?” a voice asks from behind the door.

“Bond enforcement agent!” Polk calls out.

The door cracks open. Polk asks if the fugitive is home, but the person inside says no. Polk steps inside anyway for a peek around. No fugitive.

Walker moves on to the next name on his list. The address is a dumpy apartment building in Melrose East, a development that plunged into the crime-riddled neighborhood known as Mall City.

A few young guys are shooting dice in the front breezeway, but as soon as the Dodge bounds into the parking lot, the guys bolt. One disappears inside an apartment while another sprints through a field behind the building. The bounty hunters chase the guy running in the field, but they come up empty.

Well, almost empty. He dropped 20 bucks. “He bought us lunch,” Walker says.

Back at the apartment building, Walker recognizes a car in the parking lot that belongs to another of his fugitives. As he looks the car over, a man sticks his head out of a second-story window and demands to know what’s going on. “Why do you keep running?” Walker asks, although he knows the man is not one of the people he’s looking for.

“I ain’t running from you,” the man says.

“Why don’t you come down and let me see if you got any bench warrants.”

Incredibly, the man complies. A minute later, he’s in the parking lot, where the bounty hunters pat him down for weapons. “I got a City Court bench warrant,” the man volunteers.

Walker tells the man the name of the fugitive he’s looking for, but the man claims not to know him, even though they live in the same small apartment building. A couple of hours later, though, the guy whom Walker and Polk were hunting calls Walker’s cell phone and makes arrangements to come in.

Walker and Polk have been hunting fugitives for a living for three years.

B.J. Walker pats down a man while fellow bounty hunter Cedric Polk searches the ground. The man was released without incident.

Theirs is an American job steeped in brawny history: tough-looking men with guns riding into dusty Western towns on horseback, reward posters proclaiming someone wanted Dead or Alive. And then there are those blaster-carrying alien freaks who tried to capture Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie.

Sometimes, bounty hunters do track and hunt violent felons. But on most nights they pursue people who face misdemeanors or have skipped out on court dates and couldn’t afford to pay fines.

There’s a lot of waiting. And waiting. Walker and Polk often watch DVDs like Men in Black in the Charger while they’re waiting for a fugitive to poke his head out of a hiding place.

Still, any pursuit or capture can turn violent quickly, so they must always be prepared.

Their industry operates by simple if dangerous rules: For a fee, usually equal to 10% of the court-set bond, bounty hunters track down people who’ve hired a bail bondsman to get out of jail but then dodged their court appearances.

It’s important to catch fugitives quickly; delay can cost money. Once a court notifies a bonding company that a defendant has skipped a court date and absconded, the company has six months to capture the fugitive, or the company must cut a check to the court for the entire amount of the bond.

So Walker and Polk use tools of the trade to help them hunt more efficiently. The Charger, for example, is equipped with a head-snapping Hemi engine. And it has a GPS navigation system that lets them pinpoint any address.

Catching criminals is risky. Some are charged with violent crimes, so weapons are essential. They pack Glock pistols—Walker’s has a laser sight—and pepper spray. Their unofficial uniform: black golf shirts with “BOND AGENT” emblazoned on the front and back.

Thus equipped, the bounty hunters set out with a stack of bench warrants and bond forfeiture notices.

Just before dark, the bounty hunters roll into the FEMA trailer park on Greenwell Street. They are looking for a couple, a man and woman from New Orleans wanted for theft. Each got out of jail on a $5,000 bond, and they’ve been avoiding the law for six months.

Walker bounds up the wooden steps of a trailer and knocks on the door. A woman named Marlene answers. She’s one of the fugitives. Marlene has a short glass tube in her hand. To Walker, it looks like a crack pipe.

Saying she has to go to the bathroom, Marlene slips into the back of the trailer. Walker goes after her.

There’s a man in the living room named Michael. He’s the other fugitive.

Polk twists Michael’s hands behind his back and cuffs him.

Walker returns with Marlene and her pipe.

“Michael, please take your crack charge,” Marlene, 47, shouts at her boyfriend. It turns out she’s already on probation for possession of crack and is terrified of violating her probation, which means she’ll be sent to prison.

Michael, 53, shrugs her off.

Marlene tells Walker and Polk that the crack pipe belongs to Michael.

“Why don’t you be quiet, Marlene, and shut up!” Michael says.

Marlene is worried that along with the pipe, Walker and Polk might have found a piece of crack in her trailer. Moments before the bounty hunters knocked on her door, Marlene says, Michael had just gotten back with a rock of crack he bought elsewhere in the trailer park.

“What you did with that crack?” she asks Michael. “It wasn’t smoked. You had just bought it from that man.”

All the way to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, Marlene pleads with Michael to admit the crack pipe and any crack the bounty hunters found belongs to him.

Michael just keeps telling her to shut up.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. At the prison, the Sheriff’s Office refuses to accept the pair of accused thieves. Both had been charged with misdemeanor theft, and the sheriff doesn’t have room in the jail for them.

Walker takes a couple of release forms a sheriff’s deputy hands him and turns Marlene and Michael loose.

He crushes the crack pipe under his heel.

Because the Sheriff’s Office refused to accept the two captured fugitives, the bond company will be released from its bond obligation, and Walker and Polk will pocket $1,000 for bringing the pair in.

Later, after spending an hour scouring the area around 71st Street and Scenic Highway for a fugitive who walks with a limp, Walker and Polk spot Michael walking across Harding Boulevard, headed home from the Parish Prison. Michael waves. Marlene is nowhere in sight.

“We don’t give rides away from the prison,” Walker says.

A little while later, the bounty hunters make a run through East Brookstown. They’ve had trouble in the neighborhood before.

“I’m probably going to have my gun already out,” Walker says.

On Byron Street they’re looking for Tasha, a 25-year-old mother of four. The cops say they caught Tasha with a gun in her purse and some marijuana. They also charged her with simple battery and aggravated assault. She got out on a $25,000 bond. Walker wrote the bond himself, and although catching Tasha won’t earn him a 10% commission, bringing her in will get his insurance company off the hook for the $25,000. Both Walker and Polk aren’t only bounty hunters; they’re also licensed bail-bond insurance agents. In addition to bounty hunting, they operate Walker and Polk Bail Bonding Co. at Florida and North 23rd streets.

At Tasha’s house, the bounty hunters get an earful from her mother. Tasha’s not home, and her mom insists she doesn’t know where Tasha is. They can’t come into her house without a search warrant, she says. Where’s their search warrant? Turns out bond agents don’t need search warrants, and wouldn’t receive one if they asked for it. Only cops get search warrants. But their job routinely takes them onto private property to nab fugitives.

Leaving Polk to deal with Tasha’s mom, Walker goes next door to Tasha’s boyfriend’s house. Tasha is in the bathroom, the boyfriend says. Walker runs back over to Momma’s house.

“Go catch that house,” he tells Polk.

Polk sprints next door just as the boyfriend is unlocking the burglar bars covering the front door. Walker tries to jump over a wooden privacy fence to cover the back door, but a pit bull runs him off.

Inside the house, Tasha surrenders.

Bail bond agent B.J. Walker puts a suspected fugitive, who gave her name as Marlene, into the car for the drive to parish prison.

As Walker and Polk walk their captive outside, Tasha’s mother is in her front yard screaming at them.

“Next time that f---ing Walker is gonna get his,” she threatens.

She also screams at Tasha’s boyfriend. “You should have never opened that door!”

The boyfriend agrees. “If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have.”

On the way to the parish prison, Tasha explains that she didn’t go to court because she couldn’t afford to pay her lawyer. He wanted $500 the next time he saw her. “I just don’t have it,” she says.

The father of her two oldest children died in May, Tasha says. His girlfriend stabbed him to death. “She’s kind of crazy,” Tasha adds.

The financial help Tasha’s ex-boyfriend provided her and their two children died with him.

At the parish prison, Tasha catches a break. Just as in the case of Marlene and Michael, the Sheriff’s Office refuses to accept her because her charges are misdemeanors.

Once again a sheriff’s deputy hands Walker a release. This time, Walker and Polk give Tasha a ride back home. Her mom is glad to see them—all three of them.

“I like what I do,” Walker says.

First in an occasional series.