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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Mystery
- Subject: Adventure
- Published: 07/22/2013
Uncle Bob
Born 1941, M, from Santa Clara, CA, United StatesUNCLE BOB
What I am about to tell you took place a few days before Thanksgiving last year. I guess this is as good a time to let someone know what happened, but before I do you should know some things about me. My name is Jeramy Colombo. I am forty-two years old and have been a member of the Metro Police Department for fifteen years. I think you should know these things because this information will help to establish my creditability. OH, one last thing, I do own a trench coat but don’t wear it for one simple reason, I look too much like a flasher when I do, and lastly, the guy on TV can’t spell.
Now that that is out of the way, let me tell you what happened. It seems that ever since Halloween the days have been overcast, damp and just generally lousy. They were the kind of days that made you want to pull the covers over your head and call the rest of the year off. Then, four days before Thanksgiving the sun came out. It was a beautiful day there was even a hint that the rest of the week would be just as nice. It made going to work a pleasure.
When I reached the department I went to the briefing room, it was still empty. We are a small department, only seventy-five sworn officers. We have ten sergeants, who have been there since sand was invented, two lieutenants, an assistant chief and the chief, who was there before sand. This means that when we have a briefing there aren’t a lot of people here. Today there would be me, the sergeant and maybe three other officers, it seems the closer to a holiday you get the sicker others become and the rest of us work double shifts.
Sergeant Tim Evans marched into the room followed by the day shift officers. The officers came and sat next to me. Sergeant Evans took his position behind the podium. He reminded me of a history teacher I had in a military high school that always brought images of a bridge and a headless horseman to mind. He began thumbing through the reports of the night before, that didn’t take too long because there isn’t much happening in our little corner of central no where California, but he tried to give the taxpayers their moneys worth anyway. Suddenly, he stopped. Something caught his eye and he stood reading the report very carefully. “This one is from the SO,” he said with a hint of disdain in his voice. You see most city cops feel that sheriff’s departments died with the old West and what ever was left of them wouldn’t be able to tell what a crime was let alone solve one. “It seems that our little brothers in green were busy last night,” he continued. At this point the sergeant paused to let his mind catch up to his mouth, “It seems that three Asian males in their mid-twenties were involved in one of those big city home invasion things. Says here that our boys meant business ‘cause two were armed with MAC 10’s and the third was armed with a Dirty Harry six-shooter.” Sergeant Evans stopped to check the report for more information, and added, “The three heroes pistol whipped the head of the house in front of his wife and kids,” and more to himself than to us, “son of a bitch, no class.” He then said, “The reporting officer indicated the take was about five thousand in cash and an undetermined amount in gold and jewelry. The three were seen leaving in an older four door Ford, red in color, and a partial California plate of one X-ray Robert Sam. The plate and the description of the car come courtesy of neighbors who would have provided more but our three geniuses opened fire in front of the victim’s house. The report also states that the responding deputies found over a hundred spend casings in the street. Only God knows where all the slugs went.” Finally, as an after thought, Evans added, “well boys in the words of the immortal somebody, ‘never have so few been expected to do so much,’ so drag your lazy butts out and hit the streets. Make someone proud of you.” He always did have the right words to inspire us to perform at our max.
Being the conscientious police officer that I am, I loaded my car with a department issued shotgun, evidence kit and a ton of other stuff I very seldom needed or used. With that done I immediately drove to my beat and my favorite doughnut shop, a place called Wee Willies. Wee Willies is actually owned by a man named Fred. Fred did say that the name was given to him by his high school football team, but refused to tell me any more about the reason behind the nickname. I met Fred by accident one day. I was stopped at a red light and he plowed into me. There was no damage to the patrol car, and when he told me about what was occupying more of his mind than driving, I didn’t have the heart to cite him. He told me that his seventeen-year-old son had hooked up with some burned out kids led by a twenty-three year old idiot. Fred’s son and the lump of dog dirt planned to rip off a biker dope dealer. It was easy; they set up a buy and when other genius showed up they would pull their guns and ride off into the sunset, yeah sure. What the high school drop out and the rock forgot was the fact that bikers look stupid but they aren’t. Well anyway, under all that crap they wear they also carry guns. The meet went down as planned and the guns came out but the biker didn’t produce the dope. He was just as big a man and just as stupid as the dynamic duo, out came his gun, bigger and better than theirs and the shooting started. The biker was killed, Fred’s son was wounded and almost died and the other idiot ran like hell. Fred’s son was convicted of second degree homicide and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in the California Youth Authority. Fred wasn’t as dumb as his son and knew that his boy had just been sentenced to death. There must be at least a thousand other kids in there waiting to make a name for themselves by killing this poor unfortunate soul. Fred was desperate. The thought of his boy in with all those other animals was giving him nightmares. He was making himself sick with worry. He didn’t know where to turn and fate drove him into the rear of my car.
I am a soft touch and I did what I could. Really the effort on my part wasn’t much at all, but to Fred it was nothing short of a miracle. From that day on, I never had to buy another doughnut or a cup of coffee, the staples of life for cops.
But back to what I was going to tell you about that day. I had been in Fred’s place about twenty minutes before my first call. It was one of those biggies you see on TV, a garbage complaint. The trash collectors were making too much noise. This was the peak of my day because it was down hill from there. Time dragged so that I even stopped in the shops on my beat trying to make the administration happy knowing that at least one of their officers were trying to make this “community policing” thing work. That meant stopping at the only mini-mart our town had and talking to all four shopkeepers. The chief heard about community policing from a cop publication that had an article from one of those big shots in Silicon Valley. They dream this stuff up and our chief tries it out. What the hell have we been doing since the dawn of time? Before community policing I would have to justify my stopping and killing an hour or so with people I liked to talk to, but now I call it community policing and I can spend all day, go figure. About twelve-thirty Sergeant Evans requested a meeting with Officer Anthony and me. He wanted us to go to the south end of our city putting the three of us very close to the Sheriff’s jurisdiction, and surprise surprise, the location of the home invasion of the night before. Even though we aren’t a big police department, most of the Metro cops believe that the SO never gets anything done without our help. In reality, I think that is a rumor started by Evans himself, because four years ago his house was burglarized and the SO investigated. According to Evans the case was screwed up from the start, the fact that he worked it too and got no farther than they didn’t mean a thing.
We met behind an out of business warehouse in a part of the city that the city fathers would have seen located in another city all together. I kind of looked forward to meetings with Sergeant Evans because he always provided the coffee and doughnuts.
He showed up late and smiling from ear to ear, “looks like a beautiful day to do the sheriff's office job.” Any time Evans could step into a case they had he jumped headfirst like a swimmer leaping into a pond he hadn’t checked out before the leap. He said, “I was able to find out that the car they used last night was seen in the Spring Wood area. The way I see it, we got three locations to cover, and that way we tie up the entire Spring Wood neighborhood,” Evans stopped his briefing to go to the trunk of his car. After fumbling through all the essential stuff a sergeant carries, he came back with maps. He handed Anthony one, kept one for himself and gave the last one to me. “You can see,” he continued, “where you will set up by the marks on your maps. I know it’s going to be hard to be inconspicuous in marked units but try anyway.” Then looking at me, he said, “no Jerr’ I didn’t put you out in the boonies because you’re old, I put you there because you can respond to either me or Anthony faster than either of us can.”
“Hell it’s great to be needed so much.” I added the last bit sarcastically to let both of them know that they always seemed to put me the farthest from the action. I had talked to Evans about this kind of thing and his response was that I took too many chances. I thought then and now that when you know what you’re doing, it ain’t chance, it’s skill, and I didn’t want some kid getting hurt doing something stupid, so I did the stupid things for them. But, he had the stripes and “right or wrong, the boss is always right.” Where Evans got his information about the car and the suspects was never an issue open to discussion.
My assignment took me to the only street that led into the foothills; in California we call them mountains. The area was a little better than our meeting place but not by much. It was a low-income neighborhood filled with people struggling to make ends meet. It was just as full of people trying to milk society, steal, sell drugs; murder and all the other crap they do to people too poor, or too scared to fight back. In the early fifties it was a moderate-income area, two, three and four bedroom homes selling in the fifteen to twenty thousand dollar range, big money then. As the houses got older the people started to move out and the area started to dive. Still, hope burns eternal and can be seen in the Christmas decorations that were beginning to pop up on the lawns. None were worthy of newspaper coverage but they made the residence feel good, isn’t that what the season's about anyway?
I found an over grown driveway at the end of Tulip Lane. It is the only street that goes into the hills and is the only exit to the east from the city. By using this road you can get to the Central Valley. I wonder if Evans thought about that, a perfect opportunity for me to do something-stupid if the opportunity came up. I backed into the drive to a point where I had a clear view through the overgrown bushes of the street approach from the west.
I hadn’t been there long before the folks living on the street began to send their kids over to check me out. In that neighborhood there are people that may just not want to see cops. For the life of me, I can’t understand their feelings. One little boy kept insisting, “You’re here to bust Floco!”
“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” I asked him.
“Because Floco has a gun and his gang does dope,” he told me.
At that point my ears turned on and I began to think that I should be taking some kind of notes, and file them under things to do tomorrow. “Where does Floco live?”
The look on the boy’s face was more a question of how dumb cops could really be in the eyes of the public they serve. He said, “You’re kidding me aren’t you? Floco lives in the house right in front of you.” Well, this looked but for tomorrow. Today we got the wise men to work on.
The radio had been quiet most of the day, and then, at fourteen hundred hours, two o’clock in the afternoon for you lay people, dispatch blurted, “all west side units shots fired.” It turned out that two kids tried to hold up a liquor store and found out that the clerk had other plans. The kids, scared shitless, then barricaded themselves in a storeroom near the rear of the store. This one call left the sergeant, Officer Anthony, myself and one other officer to cover the city. Sergeant Evans was quick to call the obvious to our attention and added that Anthony and I were to stay in our present locations.
I like talking to kids but things were picking up. I really wanted to learn more about Floco, but the safety of the kids was more important, and I had to get them out of there, a task more difficult than it sounds. If I told the kids to beat it, I would cut off a source of information, a source I really wanted to develop later. And, then the more I insisted they leave the more they were convinced that I was there to bust Floco and that they wanted to see. I finally promised them that when we came back to arrest Floco, I personally would find them all a safe place to watch from.
Even as the lie was slipping out of my mouth, something red caught my eye. Through the overgrown brush I could see a red car coming toward me from the west, it was a red Ford. The plate on the front of the car was missing and the car was a two door not the four door put out by the sergeant in the briefing, but there were three men inside. As the car drove past my location, the two men in the front seat continued to look forward. The man in the back seat looked right at me, he was Asian. The icing on the cake was the rear plate; it was California one X-ray Robert Sam. The witnesses last night couldn’t provide any more because the rest of the numbers had been covered over with brown tape. My guess is that the three rocket scientists in the car ran out of tape and couldn’t think of an alternative like just taking the plate off.
As the car passed, I could see the person in the rear seat telling the other two something. The driver sped up and the other two began fumbling with things on the floor of the car. I reached for the mike to my radio and as we all know, help for a cop is as near as the radio in his car, yeah right. I put out a description of the car and its occupants as well as its direction of travel. Finished with that, I made sure the kids weren’t under my tires before I gave chase.
The time I took to make sure the kids were all right gave the trio a good start. The road didn’t help matters much either. It twisted and turned as it climbed into the hills putting the dynamic trio out of sight for minutes at a time. The hills played havoc with my radio and my ability to communicate. With my radio fading in and out, I couldn’t be sure anyone was even listening to me.
About fifteen minutes into the chase, I lost the trio around Harps Curve. Just the other side of the curve was a five-mile straight stretch of road before it began to twist and turn its way down the other side to the Central Valley. It would be the perfect place for them to lose me by driving flat out. I was still stuck on the incline not knowing where my help was. If they heard me when this thing started they could have asked for the High Way Patrols helicopter. The fact that I haven’t seen anything even coming close to a helicopter led me to believe that I was alone in this and losing. I hadn’t counted on the intellect of the three geniuses, however. I should have remembered that they didn’t have all their oars in the water and didn’t think the way I did. When I made the last turn, there they were. The driver had pulled to a stop with the car blocking the road. At the same time my windshield disintegrated. Glass was exploding all over me. All three were hiding behind their car and all three were shooting at me. All I could think of was this is the kill zone I had heard so much about. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be.
I hit the brakes as hard as I could causing the car to skid to a stop with the front nosed into the hillside. I crawled out as bullets continued to slam into every inch of my car. Glass and bits of metal were being pushed by the impact and they were cutting my face and other exposed body parts. They were shooting in turn keeping me pinned and unable to return fire. I was out gunned and had no where to run. I was going to die here. It was only a matter of time before they felt safe enough to walk over and finish me off. As it stood I had the sun behind me, and that seemed to cut into their accuracy.
Until this moment, I had never been very religious but I was feeling very much like a GI in a foxhole. I was promising God anything if He could see His way clear to save me. I had asked Him to help me once or twice before and I am sure that He did, I was hoping that He was listening now.
Most of what I could see of the red Ford was from under my car; I didn’t dare stick my head up for fear of getting it blown off. What I saw, I couldn’t believe. There was a fist size ball of fire punching a bowling ball size hole into the side of the Ford. I got to my knees and peered over the top of my hood, what was left of it, to see more balls of fire slamming into the car. The balls were coming from behind me and I turned to see where they were coming from, all that was there was the sun. I watched the balls impact the car with a force that compressed the shocks pressing the body of the car down onto the road and bouncing it up as the pressure eased. A roar that got louder and louder as a flash of gleaming silver flew over my head followed the balls. It was a World War II P 51 Mustang. It swooped down and at the end of its dive it began a climbing turn to the right circling for another run on the car. I watched as the plane positioned itself between the sun and the car, and they were watching too.
Before the pilot began his second pass, I heard yelling. The three heroes were yelling for me to call him off. They wanted to surrender. Well I did that cop stuff about put your guns down and come out with your hands over your heads, standing there like superman; I’d check my shorts later. They came out from behind the lump of metal that used to be their car and lay down in the road so nice and quiet, I couldn’t believe it. The pilot completed his turn and flew past. He wasn’t more than fifty feet above me. Both he and his plane were so clear that I could make out every detail of the plane and its markings. The pilot’s face was covered by his oxygen mask, but even that was so clear. He dipped his wings as he passed as if to say, “You’re welcome.”
Sergeant Evans was the first car on the scene. The look on his face was an expression of shock, “what the hell happened here?”
“You wouldn’t believe it even if you had been here to see it.”
The Sergeant asked, “What were you shooting, a cannon?”
“No, there was a World War II Mustang…”
With a disbelieving look Sergeant Eavens said, “A Mustang, you did say Mustang? You want me to believe a World War II airplane did this.”
“Yes! I even got his tail number – 47874, but I didn’t know those restored planes could carry live ammo.”
An hour and a half later and we had both my patrol car and the suspect’s vehicle on a flatbed truck and the bad guys were on their way to jail. I still had a lot of questions. My patrol car was shot full of holes and I should have died on that road. I should have except for that pilot and his plane. He came out of nowhere. Who was he and how did he know I needed help? Somehow I had to find him. The ATF would want to ask him some questions, but I wanted to thank him. I used the department’s computer to access the Internet and hit every web site that had anything to do with restored World War II anything. When I came up empty, I phoned the military archive in St. Louis Missouri. A young lieutenant there told me that they had a fire about twenty years ago that destroyed a lager amount of their records. No matter where I went or what I did, I was getting a big fat zero. It seemed that I would never find this guy.
There was nothing to do but get ready for Thanksgiving at Moms. I put my investigation aside, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I wouldn’t be here eating with my mother had it not been for him. I don’t know how to describe the feeling, but there was a debt that I owed and I didn’t know how to contact the man I owed the debt to. I guess, while I couldn’t put my feelings into words, my attitude at the dinner table said what I couldn’t. I had become the wet blanket. Mom didn’t know why, but that never stopped her in the past. She tolerated my moods and me all my life; she is truly a saint. After dinner I drifted into the living room and more or less isolated myself from the others. I guess Mom took all that she could and came to me near the fireplace where I was standing looking at some of the family photos Mom had there.
“Are you going to join us sometime tonight?”
“Huh, OH, I’m sorry Mom. I was thinking about something that happened at work the other day.” I didn’t go into too much detail because she is Mom and I don’t want her worrying about me. She is the kind of person that spends twenty-three hours of every day worrying and the last hour convincing herself that she is right to worry. The plane opened the door for her to tell me about my father and his brother. After dad passed away she would spend a lot of time talking about the things he and his brother did when they were young. At any rate, the story goes this way, the day after Pearl Harbor, my dad and my uncle tried to join the Army Air Corp. There was a problem with my dad’s eyes, nothing that made him four F, but something bad enough to keep him out of the air. Anyway, Uncle Bob went into the air corps and dad joined the Seabees. Uncle Bob was killed during one of those big raids over Germany and dad came home.
All the while Mom talked, I could see her lips moving so I knew that she was talking. Still her voice faded, and as it seemed to get softer the roar of the plane's motor got louder. Then I saw it, behind Mom on the mantle, a picture. I had seen the photo thousands, no millions, of times before but never really saw it until now. There was a picture of my Uncle Bob standing near his plane. He was between the tail and the trailing edge of the wing. He was resting his hand on the fuselage near the big American star on the side of a P 51 Mustang. He was smiling, a proud accomplished smile, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the tail. Behind him I could make out the last three numbers of his tail ID – 847.
“Uncle Bob?”
Uncle Bob(Anthony Colombo)
UNCLE BOB
What I am about to tell you took place a few days before Thanksgiving last year. I guess this is as good a time to let someone know what happened, but before I do you should know some things about me. My name is Jeramy Colombo. I am forty-two years old and have been a member of the Metro Police Department for fifteen years. I think you should know these things because this information will help to establish my creditability. OH, one last thing, I do own a trench coat but don’t wear it for one simple reason, I look too much like a flasher when I do, and lastly, the guy on TV can’t spell.
Now that that is out of the way, let me tell you what happened. It seems that ever since Halloween the days have been overcast, damp and just generally lousy. They were the kind of days that made you want to pull the covers over your head and call the rest of the year off. Then, four days before Thanksgiving the sun came out. It was a beautiful day there was even a hint that the rest of the week would be just as nice. It made going to work a pleasure.
When I reached the department I went to the briefing room, it was still empty. We are a small department, only seventy-five sworn officers. We have ten sergeants, who have been there since sand was invented, two lieutenants, an assistant chief and the chief, who was there before sand. This means that when we have a briefing there aren’t a lot of people here. Today there would be me, the sergeant and maybe three other officers, it seems the closer to a holiday you get the sicker others become and the rest of us work double shifts.
Sergeant Tim Evans marched into the room followed by the day shift officers. The officers came and sat next to me. Sergeant Evans took his position behind the podium. He reminded me of a history teacher I had in a military high school that always brought images of a bridge and a headless horseman to mind. He began thumbing through the reports of the night before, that didn’t take too long because there isn’t much happening in our little corner of central no where California, but he tried to give the taxpayers their moneys worth anyway. Suddenly, he stopped. Something caught his eye and he stood reading the report very carefully. “This one is from the SO,” he said with a hint of disdain in his voice. You see most city cops feel that sheriff’s departments died with the old West and what ever was left of them wouldn’t be able to tell what a crime was let alone solve one. “It seems that our little brothers in green were busy last night,” he continued. At this point the sergeant paused to let his mind catch up to his mouth, “It seems that three Asian males in their mid-twenties were involved in one of those big city home invasion things. Says here that our boys meant business ‘cause two were armed with MAC 10’s and the third was armed with a Dirty Harry six-shooter.” Sergeant Evans stopped to check the report for more information, and added, “The three heroes pistol whipped the head of the house in front of his wife and kids,” and more to himself than to us, “son of a bitch, no class.” He then said, “The reporting officer indicated the take was about five thousand in cash and an undetermined amount in gold and jewelry. The three were seen leaving in an older four door Ford, red in color, and a partial California plate of one X-ray Robert Sam. The plate and the description of the car come courtesy of neighbors who would have provided more but our three geniuses opened fire in front of the victim’s house. The report also states that the responding deputies found over a hundred spend casings in the street. Only God knows where all the slugs went.” Finally, as an after thought, Evans added, “well boys in the words of the immortal somebody, ‘never have so few been expected to do so much,’ so drag your lazy butts out and hit the streets. Make someone proud of you.” He always did have the right words to inspire us to perform at our max.
Being the conscientious police officer that I am, I loaded my car with a department issued shotgun, evidence kit and a ton of other stuff I very seldom needed or used. With that done I immediately drove to my beat and my favorite doughnut shop, a place called Wee Willies. Wee Willies is actually owned by a man named Fred. Fred did say that the name was given to him by his high school football team, but refused to tell me any more about the reason behind the nickname. I met Fred by accident one day. I was stopped at a red light and he plowed into me. There was no damage to the patrol car, and when he told me about what was occupying more of his mind than driving, I didn’t have the heart to cite him. He told me that his seventeen-year-old son had hooked up with some burned out kids led by a twenty-three year old idiot. Fred’s son and the lump of dog dirt planned to rip off a biker dope dealer. It was easy; they set up a buy and when other genius showed up they would pull their guns and ride off into the sunset, yeah sure. What the high school drop out and the rock forgot was the fact that bikers look stupid but they aren’t. Well anyway, under all that crap they wear they also carry guns. The meet went down as planned and the guns came out but the biker didn’t produce the dope. He was just as big a man and just as stupid as the dynamic duo, out came his gun, bigger and better than theirs and the shooting started. The biker was killed, Fred’s son was wounded and almost died and the other idiot ran like hell. Fred’s son was convicted of second degree homicide and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in the California Youth Authority. Fred wasn’t as dumb as his son and knew that his boy had just been sentenced to death. There must be at least a thousand other kids in there waiting to make a name for themselves by killing this poor unfortunate soul. Fred was desperate. The thought of his boy in with all those other animals was giving him nightmares. He was making himself sick with worry. He didn’t know where to turn and fate drove him into the rear of my car.
I am a soft touch and I did what I could. Really the effort on my part wasn’t much at all, but to Fred it was nothing short of a miracle. From that day on, I never had to buy another doughnut or a cup of coffee, the staples of life for cops.
But back to what I was going to tell you about that day. I had been in Fred’s place about twenty minutes before my first call. It was one of those biggies you see on TV, a garbage complaint. The trash collectors were making too much noise. This was the peak of my day because it was down hill from there. Time dragged so that I even stopped in the shops on my beat trying to make the administration happy knowing that at least one of their officers were trying to make this “community policing” thing work. That meant stopping at the only mini-mart our town had and talking to all four shopkeepers. The chief heard about community policing from a cop publication that had an article from one of those big shots in Silicon Valley. They dream this stuff up and our chief tries it out. What the hell have we been doing since the dawn of time? Before community policing I would have to justify my stopping and killing an hour or so with people I liked to talk to, but now I call it community policing and I can spend all day, go figure. About twelve-thirty Sergeant Evans requested a meeting with Officer Anthony and me. He wanted us to go to the south end of our city putting the three of us very close to the Sheriff’s jurisdiction, and surprise surprise, the location of the home invasion of the night before. Even though we aren’t a big police department, most of the Metro cops believe that the SO never gets anything done without our help. In reality, I think that is a rumor started by Evans himself, because four years ago his house was burglarized and the SO investigated. According to Evans the case was screwed up from the start, the fact that he worked it too and got no farther than they didn’t mean a thing.
We met behind an out of business warehouse in a part of the city that the city fathers would have seen located in another city all together. I kind of looked forward to meetings with Sergeant Evans because he always provided the coffee and doughnuts.
He showed up late and smiling from ear to ear, “looks like a beautiful day to do the sheriff's office job.” Any time Evans could step into a case they had he jumped headfirst like a swimmer leaping into a pond he hadn’t checked out before the leap. He said, “I was able to find out that the car they used last night was seen in the Spring Wood area. The way I see it, we got three locations to cover, and that way we tie up the entire Spring Wood neighborhood,” Evans stopped his briefing to go to the trunk of his car. After fumbling through all the essential stuff a sergeant carries, he came back with maps. He handed Anthony one, kept one for himself and gave the last one to me. “You can see,” he continued, “where you will set up by the marks on your maps. I know it’s going to be hard to be inconspicuous in marked units but try anyway.” Then looking at me, he said, “no Jerr’ I didn’t put you out in the boonies because you’re old, I put you there because you can respond to either me or Anthony faster than either of us can.”
“Hell it’s great to be needed so much.” I added the last bit sarcastically to let both of them know that they always seemed to put me the farthest from the action. I had talked to Evans about this kind of thing and his response was that I took too many chances. I thought then and now that when you know what you’re doing, it ain’t chance, it’s skill, and I didn’t want some kid getting hurt doing something stupid, so I did the stupid things for them. But, he had the stripes and “right or wrong, the boss is always right.” Where Evans got his information about the car and the suspects was never an issue open to discussion.
My assignment took me to the only street that led into the foothills; in California we call them mountains. The area was a little better than our meeting place but not by much. It was a low-income neighborhood filled with people struggling to make ends meet. It was just as full of people trying to milk society, steal, sell drugs; murder and all the other crap they do to people too poor, or too scared to fight back. In the early fifties it was a moderate-income area, two, three and four bedroom homes selling in the fifteen to twenty thousand dollar range, big money then. As the houses got older the people started to move out and the area started to dive. Still, hope burns eternal and can be seen in the Christmas decorations that were beginning to pop up on the lawns. None were worthy of newspaper coverage but they made the residence feel good, isn’t that what the season's about anyway?
I found an over grown driveway at the end of Tulip Lane. It is the only street that goes into the hills and is the only exit to the east from the city. By using this road you can get to the Central Valley. I wonder if Evans thought about that, a perfect opportunity for me to do something-stupid if the opportunity came up. I backed into the drive to a point where I had a clear view through the overgrown bushes of the street approach from the west.
I hadn’t been there long before the folks living on the street began to send their kids over to check me out. In that neighborhood there are people that may just not want to see cops. For the life of me, I can’t understand their feelings. One little boy kept insisting, “You’re here to bust Floco!”
“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” I asked him.
“Because Floco has a gun and his gang does dope,” he told me.
At that point my ears turned on and I began to think that I should be taking some kind of notes, and file them under things to do tomorrow. “Where does Floco live?”
The look on the boy’s face was more a question of how dumb cops could really be in the eyes of the public they serve. He said, “You’re kidding me aren’t you? Floco lives in the house right in front of you.” Well, this looked but for tomorrow. Today we got the wise men to work on.
The radio had been quiet most of the day, and then, at fourteen hundred hours, two o’clock in the afternoon for you lay people, dispatch blurted, “all west side units shots fired.” It turned out that two kids tried to hold up a liquor store and found out that the clerk had other plans. The kids, scared shitless, then barricaded themselves in a storeroom near the rear of the store. This one call left the sergeant, Officer Anthony, myself and one other officer to cover the city. Sergeant Evans was quick to call the obvious to our attention and added that Anthony and I were to stay in our present locations.
I like talking to kids but things were picking up. I really wanted to learn more about Floco, but the safety of the kids was more important, and I had to get them out of there, a task more difficult than it sounds. If I told the kids to beat it, I would cut off a source of information, a source I really wanted to develop later. And, then the more I insisted they leave the more they were convinced that I was there to bust Floco and that they wanted to see. I finally promised them that when we came back to arrest Floco, I personally would find them all a safe place to watch from.
Even as the lie was slipping out of my mouth, something red caught my eye. Through the overgrown brush I could see a red car coming toward me from the west, it was a red Ford. The plate on the front of the car was missing and the car was a two door not the four door put out by the sergeant in the briefing, but there were three men inside. As the car drove past my location, the two men in the front seat continued to look forward. The man in the back seat looked right at me, he was Asian. The icing on the cake was the rear plate; it was California one X-ray Robert Sam. The witnesses last night couldn’t provide any more because the rest of the numbers had been covered over with brown tape. My guess is that the three rocket scientists in the car ran out of tape and couldn’t think of an alternative like just taking the plate off.
As the car passed, I could see the person in the rear seat telling the other two something. The driver sped up and the other two began fumbling with things on the floor of the car. I reached for the mike to my radio and as we all know, help for a cop is as near as the radio in his car, yeah right. I put out a description of the car and its occupants as well as its direction of travel. Finished with that, I made sure the kids weren’t under my tires before I gave chase.
The time I took to make sure the kids were all right gave the trio a good start. The road didn’t help matters much either. It twisted and turned as it climbed into the hills putting the dynamic trio out of sight for minutes at a time. The hills played havoc with my radio and my ability to communicate. With my radio fading in and out, I couldn’t be sure anyone was even listening to me.
About fifteen minutes into the chase, I lost the trio around Harps Curve. Just the other side of the curve was a five-mile straight stretch of road before it began to twist and turn its way down the other side to the Central Valley. It would be the perfect place for them to lose me by driving flat out. I was still stuck on the incline not knowing where my help was. If they heard me when this thing started they could have asked for the High Way Patrols helicopter. The fact that I haven’t seen anything even coming close to a helicopter led me to believe that I was alone in this and losing. I hadn’t counted on the intellect of the three geniuses, however. I should have remembered that they didn’t have all their oars in the water and didn’t think the way I did. When I made the last turn, there they were. The driver had pulled to a stop with the car blocking the road. At the same time my windshield disintegrated. Glass was exploding all over me. All three were hiding behind their car and all three were shooting at me. All I could think of was this is the kill zone I had heard so much about. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be.
I hit the brakes as hard as I could causing the car to skid to a stop with the front nosed into the hillside. I crawled out as bullets continued to slam into every inch of my car. Glass and bits of metal were being pushed by the impact and they were cutting my face and other exposed body parts. They were shooting in turn keeping me pinned and unable to return fire. I was out gunned and had no where to run. I was going to die here. It was only a matter of time before they felt safe enough to walk over and finish me off. As it stood I had the sun behind me, and that seemed to cut into their accuracy.
Until this moment, I had never been very religious but I was feeling very much like a GI in a foxhole. I was promising God anything if He could see His way clear to save me. I had asked Him to help me once or twice before and I am sure that He did, I was hoping that He was listening now.
Most of what I could see of the red Ford was from under my car; I didn’t dare stick my head up for fear of getting it blown off. What I saw, I couldn’t believe. There was a fist size ball of fire punching a bowling ball size hole into the side of the Ford. I got to my knees and peered over the top of my hood, what was left of it, to see more balls of fire slamming into the car. The balls were coming from behind me and I turned to see where they were coming from, all that was there was the sun. I watched the balls impact the car with a force that compressed the shocks pressing the body of the car down onto the road and bouncing it up as the pressure eased. A roar that got louder and louder as a flash of gleaming silver flew over my head followed the balls. It was a World War II P 51 Mustang. It swooped down and at the end of its dive it began a climbing turn to the right circling for another run on the car. I watched as the plane positioned itself between the sun and the car, and they were watching too.
Before the pilot began his second pass, I heard yelling. The three heroes were yelling for me to call him off. They wanted to surrender. Well I did that cop stuff about put your guns down and come out with your hands over your heads, standing there like superman; I’d check my shorts later. They came out from behind the lump of metal that used to be their car and lay down in the road so nice and quiet, I couldn’t believe it. The pilot completed his turn and flew past. He wasn’t more than fifty feet above me. Both he and his plane were so clear that I could make out every detail of the plane and its markings. The pilot’s face was covered by his oxygen mask, but even that was so clear. He dipped his wings as he passed as if to say, “You’re welcome.”
Sergeant Evans was the first car on the scene. The look on his face was an expression of shock, “what the hell happened here?”
“You wouldn’t believe it even if you had been here to see it.”
The Sergeant asked, “What were you shooting, a cannon?”
“No, there was a World War II Mustang…”
With a disbelieving look Sergeant Eavens said, “A Mustang, you did say Mustang? You want me to believe a World War II airplane did this.”
“Yes! I even got his tail number – 47874, but I didn’t know those restored planes could carry live ammo.”
An hour and a half later and we had both my patrol car and the suspect’s vehicle on a flatbed truck and the bad guys were on their way to jail. I still had a lot of questions. My patrol car was shot full of holes and I should have died on that road. I should have except for that pilot and his plane. He came out of nowhere. Who was he and how did he know I needed help? Somehow I had to find him. The ATF would want to ask him some questions, but I wanted to thank him. I used the department’s computer to access the Internet and hit every web site that had anything to do with restored World War II anything. When I came up empty, I phoned the military archive in St. Louis Missouri. A young lieutenant there told me that they had a fire about twenty years ago that destroyed a lager amount of their records. No matter where I went or what I did, I was getting a big fat zero. It seemed that I would never find this guy.
There was nothing to do but get ready for Thanksgiving at Moms. I put my investigation aside, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I wouldn’t be here eating with my mother had it not been for him. I don’t know how to describe the feeling, but there was a debt that I owed and I didn’t know how to contact the man I owed the debt to. I guess, while I couldn’t put my feelings into words, my attitude at the dinner table said what I couldn’t. I had become the wet blanket. Mom didn’t know why, but that never stopped her in the past. She tolerated my moods and me all my life; she is truly a saint. After dinner I drifted into the living room and more or less isolated myself from the others. I guess Mom took all that she could and came to me near the fireplace where I was standing looking at some of the family photos Mom had there.
“Are you going to join us sometime tonight?”
“Huh, OH, I’m sorry Mom. I was thinking about something that happened at work the other day.” I didn’t go into too much detail because she is Mom and I don’t want her worrying about me. She is the kind of person that spends twenty-three hours of every day worrying and the last hour convincing herself that she is right to worry. The plane opened the door for her to tell me about my father and his brother. After dad passed away she would spend a lot of time talking about the things he and his brother did when they were young. At any rate, the story goes this way, the day after Pearl Harbor, my dad and my uncle tried to join the Army Air Corp. There was a problem with my dad’s eyes, nothing that made him four F, but something bad enough to keep him out of the air. Anyway, Uncle Bob went into the air corps and dad joined the Seabees. Uncle Bob was killed during one of those big raids over Germany and dad came home.
All the while Mom talked, I could see her lips moving so I knew that she was talking. Still her voice faded, and as it seemed to get softer the roar of the plane's motor got louder. Then I saw it, behind Mom on the mantle, a picture. I had seen the photo thousands, no millions, of times before but never really saw it until now. There was a picture of my Uncle Bob standing near his plane. He was between the tail and the trailing edge of the wing. He was resting his hand on the fuselage near the big American star on the side of a P 51 Mustang. He was smiling, a proud accomplished smile, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the tail. Behind him I could make out the last three numbers of his tail ID – 847.
“Uncle Bob?”
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Valerie Allen
10/09/2022Nice story of a near miss and being saved by the "hand of God" reaching from one family member to another.
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Anthony Colombo
10/10/2022I am glad you liked it. Thank you for your knid comments, they make an old mans heart feel good. God bless! Tony
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