The Crossland Shootout

A Novel by JOHN MYERS

Chapter 1

The Story Leading To The Story Behind The Story,
Or, The Shootout Before The Crossland Shootout

  Ever seen an AK-47? Sure you have. As Clint Eastwood said in one of his war movies, the Russian-made gun is the weapon of choice of all communist bloc countries, including the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong, who used it so effectively as the primary weapon to kill 58,183 Americans G.I.'s who died in the Vietnam War. And even if it wasn't such an efficient killing machine, it's looks alone are deadly. The low-slung barrel with recoil cylinder on top gives it a bulldog-snout look, with a wicked bayonet folded back underneath it. The curved magazine which holds 30 high-powered rounds angles aggressively forward like a saber-toothed tiger fang.
   And its short, stubby stock makes it quick to swing into action as well as convenient to hide beneath a long coat so you can walk around armed and dangerous in public, which was the case for Lemuel T. "Slats" Thomas, alleged perpetrator, now a resident of the Richland County morgue after being taken with a fatal case of lead poisoning.

  By the time I arrived on the scene, that same AK-47 was in the Lowland police chief's office, playing a starring role in this real-life drama for print media and television cameras. I wasn't the only member of the media smart enough to realize a picture of that nasty weapon would sell newspapers, or draw viewers.
   Chief Eddie Marks (E.W. is only his official first name. All cops like initials for some strange reason, when they're quoted in the press, with the exception of the elected ones like sheriffs, who know the value of being plain old Eddie on the ballots) posed for my picture by holding the AK-47 out in front of him gingerly, with an expression on his face like he is smelling a rough fart from one of his officers with the bad grace to let one slip in the chief's sanctified office.
   I suppose the reason for the grimace is that Eddie was thinking about what that AK-47 could do to him or his men in a perp's hands.
   I've been around cops so long, 19 years in the news business now, that I've begun thinking like they do. At least when I'm around them, I talk that way, such as "perp" which is cop shorthand for "alleged perpetrator." Because criminals have rights, too, sometimes or even oftentimes more rights than cops or victims, they can't be called criminals anymore, at least not by cops in public. So somebody came up with a copeze expression for the criminals-alleged perpetrator.
   I asked Marks about his AK-47 grimace earlier Friday when I took his photo holding the weapon in his office, but he didn't really want to reveal the thought that created his expression.
   "That's sure a nasty looking sucker, ain't it chief?" I asked in my best good-ol'-boy manner as I shot photos of him and the gun.
   It really wasn't a question, but an observation, and as expected, I didn't get an answer, just a continuing grimace. The main reason I asked him the question was an attempt to get him to loosen up a bit for the pictures. Talk to somebody while you're shooting their picture, and the result is usually much more natural looking than just letting them stand stiffly, staring into the camera. But Eddie wasn't responding. His grimace was frozen.
   I had already asked him all the basic questions in an interview: the who, what, when, where and how of the crime, before I got my camera and flash out and started snapping photos.
   At least Eddie had told me all he could on the record, leaving out the most important fact, which cop had shoved his pistol up against the perp and went Bam! Bam! Bam! as Parker had described.
   Until the SBI gets through with their investigation of the shooting, no cop in the state of North Carolina will answer that kind of question. And when the SBI finally finishes, the story is usually already played out and nobody will care about it by then.
   That would probably be the case here, because as the SBI guy already told me, this cop shooting was pretty clear. Perp refuses to drop gun when surrounded by officers, points it at hostage and announces his intention to blow him away in language that left little doubt, cops shoot first, miss then hit perp, end of story.
   There probably wouldn't be any "Cops kill innocent man" stories coming out of this incident, and I never liked writing that kind of stuff anyway, even on the rare occasions when it was true.
   Contrary to some opinions, the cops really are the good guys, and the perps really are the bad guys, most if not all of the time.
   Besides, I already knew who killed the perp. And technically it wasn't even a cop at all. One of the deputies, proud of his associate's action, confided in me-off the record, of course-that Deputy Mad Max Mabe, first officer on the scene, had done it.
   That was why I slipped Mad Max's name in the story, the only sheriff's deputy mentioned by name. Let's just say I was sending Max a little praise by the mention of his name, a small attaboy.
   Elected sheriffs know the value of getting their name in print, and Richland's sheriff is like most of them, he wanted his name used but he'd just as soon you not use any deputies' names.
   But since this was in the city, it was officially a police case with deputies supposedly only providing backup to the police.
   Therefore, the high sheriff of Richland County wasn't going to get his name in print and Chief Marks could hog all the glory.
   But if Mad Max hadn't charged in when he did and nipped the situation in the bud, that perp might have got that AK into action. Then you would have had at least one dead hostage and probably some dead cops and deputies, not to mention anybody else within rifle range, which in the case of an AK-47 could be up to five miles. And since Mad Max had pulled everybody's bacon out of the fire, deputies and city cops alike who had missed with their opening volley of fire, I was sure the high sheriff of Richland County wouldn't mind too much seeing his deputy's name printed.
   And that brief mention is probably all the fame Max would ever get for his actions in official print, unless I miss my guess.
   I knew it would be useless to try to talk to Mad Max about it. He's not really mad, just unfortunate enough to have a name like Max Mabe that just naturally lends itself to a nickname like that.
   Cops like to kid each other like that, but only the fortunate few on the inside are allowed to play that kind of game with them.
   I'm sort of on the edge of the cops' world, sometime friend, sometime adversary in my role as a member of the fourth estate, reporting on the activities of those other three estates, the law and courts, the elected representatives and the executive branch.
   I suppose our founding fathers knew what they were doing when they guaranteed freedom of the press, because most times relations between the media with the other three estates are more adversarial than friendly.

  Anyway, I wasn't stupid enough to stroll up to the deputy in question and say, "Hey, Mad Max, how did it feel to blow that dude away?" and stick a microphone in his face and wait for an answer.
   That may be the way the TV jerks do it, but not this ol' boy.
   All the TV jerks are looking for is about 15 seconds' worth of video tape to plug into two or three minutes' worth of air time, the big majority of which will be consumed by their smiling face and blow-dried hair framed by the camera while they talk excitedly with the crime scene in the background, assuring the boss will OK their expense account bills by seeing they actually did leave the studio to get their report. That's the way news works for the TV.
   But I need a whole lot more than two or three minutes' worth of information to write a decent newspaper story, and I also wouldn't be leaving town to go back to the big city as soon as this story was done, like those TV types. I'd have to stay around and take the consequences if I asked Max a foolish question like that.
   My daddy didn't raise no fools. The best I could expect to get from Mad Max if I asked the standard TV-interview question, "How does it feel ...?" is a frosty look and a deputy who would henceforth avoid me like the plague and tell all his buddies, thereby drying up all future chances of learning like off-the-record information.
   And the worst might be a fist in the face or a foot in the groin, particularly since I wouldn't have a video cameraman peeping over my shoulder recording Max's reaction to the question. If I were fool enough to try that, I probably wouldn't even have a witness around, or at least no witnesses other than more cops, whose likely reaction to any aggression by Max would be vigorous applause.
   And if Max really is mad, the worst might be Bam! Bam! Bam!
   Seriously, that was not a reasonable expectation, but since spitting in the wind is a good way to get spit on, I didn't try it.
   Anyway, I'd already seen Mad Max since the shooting, and he wore that somewhat embarrassed look of a cop whose buddies were kidding him about being a hero. Anything I said to him would just embarrass him further, so I didn't even let on that I knew a thing.

   Fact is, the vast majority of law officers will go their whole careers and hardly ever draw their sidearms, much less fire them in the line of duty. And very, very few cops will ever actually shoot somebody. On those rare occasions when they do shoot, the most likely outcome is exactly what happened in this case, a lot of nervous cops let fly a hail of lead-and miss what they shot at.
   Deer hunters on their first hunt learn all about "buck fever," when that deer finally shows up and you get all excited and shoot too quick-and miss. I know, because I've done it, and had my shirt-trail trimmed by my fellow deer hunters, trimmed all the way up to my shoulder blades, which is the deer hunters' tradition for the hunter who is unskilled enough to miss a deer.
   It's one thing to tote a gun around, but it's something else entirely to use it accurately, whether on a deer or a human. And only a precious few cops ever do what Max did, shoot and kill somebody, saving a hostage's life in the bargain. Yep, Max was a genuine hero and his was a story that I'd love to write and sell.
   But that was a story I couldn't write until the SBI got through with their slow-paced investigation, at least days and probably weeks away.
   And even then, Max probably wouldn't want to talk about it. Cops have feelings, too, just like all the rest of us. And I'm sure Max will relive that moment over and over again for the rest of his life, the day he went Bam! Bam! Bam!

  I was on the trigger end of a killing machine off the coast of Vietnam, and I know I'll never forget one particular day in 1969 during the Vietnam War, which was part of my four years of service in Uncle Sam's Navy. I was watching through a director's telescopic sight when a 5-inch shell was sent whistling from one of the rapid-fire guns on our destroyer into the gaping, dark mouth of a cave on the side of a cliff just above the beach on the South China Sea.
   I'll never forget the eruption of that 60 pounds of high-explosive TNT from the shell, which triggered God only knows what in that cave, setting off a much bigger explosion of the contents of that cave a micro-second after the shell impacted inside it.
   And I also won't forget seeing stuff flying through the air and falling on the pretty white beach at the bottom of the cliff. Nor will I ever forget my shock when I trained that director's optical sight on the beach and punched up to the highest magnification and recognized several pieces of that stuff as human.
   I suppose it wouldn't have hit me quite as hard if the pistol-grip control of that director hadn't been in my hands, and the trigger on that pistol grip hadn't been pulled by me a few seconds before to send that 5-inch shell whistling on its way.
   Until that moment, pulling that trigger, which I did thousands of times during that tour on the Vietnam gunline, had been just sending an electrical impulse down to the 5-inch gunmount, which in turn set off a powder charge in the shell, launching a projectile.
   But that time, it wasn't what we called indirect fire, sending a shell 10 or 15 miles inland to hit somewhere far out of sight. That time, it was what we called direct fire, meaning wherever I pointed that optical gunsight, the barrel of that 5-inch gun went.
   And I aimed that director's optical gunsight, timed the roll of the ship in the waves, and fired shell after shell, until finally I got lucky and lobbed one into the mouth of that cave.
   And my whoop of joy for accomplishing my mission as part of a ship's crew of some 300 sailors was swallowed a minute later when I looked down on that pretty white beach and saw what I had done. I say "I did it," recognizing it was as part of the ship's crew.
   I wasn't the gunner's mate inside the gunmount who loaded the shell into the gun, nor the helmsman who held the course true, nor the gun computer operator below decks, nor any of the other sailors who did the many jobs needed to keep that ship on firing station.
   But I was the fire control technician who aimed that gun and I was the sailor who pulled the trigger that sent that shell off.
   No, I won't ever forget that trigger pull, and Max won't ever forget his Bam! Bam! Bam! either, because he pulled that trigger.
   And after that day, every other time during that Vietnam cruise when I was called on to pull that pistol-grip trigger, it wasn't just sending an electrical signal to a gunmount anymore.
   It was firing a gun at actual people, who were on the other end miles away, even if I couldn't see the final outcome. That was the closest I ever came in that war, or up to now, to shooting somebody. And that was still a long way from jamming a pistol up against a human being and pulling the trigger thrice.
   But I understood, at least a little bit, how Max was feeling.

  Yet as much as I would have liked to coax the full inside story of the shooting out of Max, now wasn't the time. But while I was sitting in Police Chief Eddie Marks' office, like it often does happen, he handed me my next story, a far bigger one than the hostage-shootout tale, quite by accident. Or are there any accidents? We'll discuss theology later.

  Knowing I already had about all I was going to get for print from the chief, I asked him a question just for my own curiosity.
   "What do you suppose that perp was doing when he backed off and started fumbling with the AK before the shooting?" I asked.
   "Off the record?" the chief asked. "Sure," I assured him.
   I've known the chief for several years now, and he knows I'm a straight shooter. If I agree to off-the-record comments, he knows he won't read it in print the next day. I'm not only a man of my word, but I'm also realistic. Breaking a confidence with a source is one of the biggest no-no's in the news business. You just don't do that, never, ever. Not if you expect to ever get any future comments out of him, either on or off the record.
   I've told many lawmen or politicians or other officials I am interviewing or reporting on my hard and fast number-one rule of journalism: "If you don't want to see it in print, don't say it."
   But I've also learned there is a time and place for off-the-record comments, and many times that's the only way to find out what you really need to know in order to get the whole story.
   So I had expected Marks' answer to be off the record anyway.
   But still Marks hesitated a beat or two before he answered.
   "Don't quote me on this," he reiterated, "but I've got a theory about that." Lawmen never go public with their theories.
   In the best tradition of Sgt. Joe Friday of "Dragnet," when they're dealing with the press, it's always "Just the facts" and nothing else. It reaffirmed the chief's faith in me that he was willing to share his theory with me, so I just smiled and waited patiently.
   After another pause, Marks said, "I think here's your answer right here," picking up the AK-47 and pointing to a small lever on the back of the receiver at the trigger guard.
   "What's that?" I asked, although I suspected I already knew.
   "That's the full-auto/single-shot switch," Marks answered.
   "Ah ha!" I responded in my best Sherlock Holmes imitation. Up until that point, I hadn't known the weapon was fully automatic.
   The chief had just handed me a new piece of information that made the hostage story much more interesting-and salesworthy.
   Now all I had to do was get him back on the record so I could report the fact in my story that the AK was an illegal full auto, in addition to already being banned for further imports, heading the line-up of assault weapons on the gun-control lobby hit list.
   "I don't suppose this perp had a license on him for a fully automatic AK did he?" I asked the chief with a very small smile.
   I was only slightly joking. You can get a license to own a fully automatic weapon under some special circumstances. But the likelihood that this guy had one was very definitely between slim and none. And as my daddy used to say, Slim went back to Texas.
   "Not that we're aware of," the chief answered very carefully.
   "Then I can put it in my story that this guy's weapon was an illegal full auto?" I asked. Even with friendly cops like Eddie, sometimes you have to be a bit devious to get something in print.
   He had told me off the record that the gun was full auto, so to get it on the record, I went a step further with the "illegal." Marks favored me with a smile even smaller than the one I gave him and paused a minute, then said, "Yeah. I guess you can say so."
   But then he quickly added, "But don't quote me on that."
   "Sure chief. No problemo." (I speak Italian copeze, too.)

  And now I more fully understood his grimace when he looked at that AK. He and I both knew how lethal that rifle was even when it is only semi-automatic. Each squeeze of the trigger would send out a .30 caliber high-powered rifle bullet. With it in full auto, it would keep spitting out rounds as long as you held down the trigger, until the 30-round magazine emptied or until you ran out of people to shoot and let go the trigger, whichever came first. But then he told me something I didn't know about that AK-47.
   He paused again, then said, "This is one of the most dangerous types of weapons our men are seeing on the streets, an assault weapon. That's why they outlawed this gun and others like it. We're really outgunned badly when we have to face something like this in a perp's hands.
   "And this is very definitely off the record," the chief continued. "Even if my men had been wearing armored vests, which I can't get them to do hardly any of the time, and not at all when it's hot like it's been lately, it wouldn't have stopped this gun.
   "Armored vests are designed to stop pistol rounds, not high-powered rifle rounds. No vest will stop a round like this AK shoots, even the best ones with steel plates won't stop a rifle.
   "And if you print that in the paper, I'll ..." he trailed off.
   I knew the chief was serious, so I just smiled at his unspoken threat and continued, "So even if your men had been wearing armored vests, those AK-47 rounds would have killed them graveyard dead just like they weren't wearing anything but a shirt?" I asked.
   "Yeah," he answered, "that about says it all pretty well."
   Now I really understood the danger of that perp holding a fully automatic weapon that could spew out 30 high-powered rounds in seconds.
   The thought of that made the hair on the top of my head tingle, thinking of the bloodbath that could have been, if that perp with the AK-47 had not been hit by a case of fatal indecision.
   Because that's what the chief was trying to tell me, without spelling it out in words that he might see in print.
   What that perp was fumbling with that gave the officers a chance to shoot first was the full-auto switch, trying to decide whether he wanted to shoot one at a time or a bunch of them at a time. That moment of fatal indecision not only saved the hostage's life, it probably also saved several cops' lives, too.
   Unfortunately, that was one angle I wouldn't be able to fully explore in my story, for a couple of reasons. First, Eddie had already said about all he was going to say, at least for print.
   Talking about cops getting gunned down with fully automatic weapons is not one of any cop's favorite topics of conversation.
   And even if he should be so inclined to say that on the record, I'm not so sure I'd even want to use it for a story. The alleged perpetrators out there come up with enough ideas of their own about how to kill cops, without me giving them help.
   I'm not so sure it's a real good idea to write it down for this book. Perps probably read crime books just to get new ideas.
   Anyway, I already had more good stuff than I could write for one edition of a newspaper. Newspapers will make room for a good story, but there's a limit for all stories and it's not very long.
   I knew I had more than enough good stuff to compose a piece of the optimum length, which as a blunt but accurate editor once told me, is the amount a fella can read while sitting on the porcelain throne. Write more than that, and some wise editor will cut it down to the time frame to fit a morning bathroom reading session.
   I suppose that's why I'm writing this book, because after 19 years in the newspaper business, you sort of develop a hankering to just once sit down and write the whole story, and the story behind the story, too. All the stuff you couldn't write for the newspaper.
   But back to the story that began this story for The Star. I knew I had all the ingredients to make the front page, unless King Kong had climbed the First Union Bank tower in Charlotte earlier Friday. It would take something earth-shattering like that in Charlotte or immediate environs to push this off The Star front page.
   I had a good story. Those quotes from the hostage/hero were dynamite. That Bam! Bam! Bam! stuff was great, dramatic, gripping.
   I had some good shots, in color, and The Star like most major papers today always use color on the front page and section fronts, the good, gray New York Times being one of the few exceptions left.
   Besides, I gave up on writing for The Times many years ago. I've grown to like being a country boy working in my home Old North State, which is where I've spent every one of my newspaper years.
   But I was already thinking beyond Saturday morning's front page in The Star. I guess that's one thing I love about the newspaper business. There's always another story waiting to be written.
   And the chief had given me the idea for the next one. What on earth was a fully automatic AK-47 doing in Richland County? How did it get there? Who sold it to the perp? Or where did he steal it?

  By the time Frank Daniels called about 7:30 that night, I had already been pondering those and other questions for some time and I hardly cracked a smile when he told me, "Page one, man." "All right," I replied. "Thanks Frank, I owe you another one."
   "Hey man, I owe you. It's a good story. And the pictures are great, too. I love that shot of the guy with his white-bandaged thumb sticking up. And that one of the cop with the gun is great, too. We're going to try to get both of them in. They're both great."
   I must explain that Frank talks like that all the time. Even when I send him an average story, maybe a local front or an inside pages story, instead of one of the front-page kind, he'll still say it's "great" and spread the praise around. He's a cheerleader.
   But when he gets really excited, like he was about this one, it shows in his voice, so I had to smile a bit as I pictured him.

  Mostly we just talk on the phone, but occasionally I drop by his desk in the big newsroom in Charlotte, and he's always the same, a little gnome-looking guy with a red, bushy beard and a smile on his face, a quick handshake and a "Great to see you, man."
   He sort of reminds me of an air traffic controller. The image is created by his accessories, a headset with an earphone and a mike frees both his hands to peck on the keyboard of his computer as he talks on the phone, often doing two or even three things at a time. I've seen him talk on the phone while editing a story and answering or sending computer messages to any of the several outlying Star news bureaus surrounding Charlotte, and all of this going on amid the hustle and bustle of a newsroom filled with a more than a hundred desks for reporters and editors. And Frank not only does all that, but does it well.
   I guess when you're playing shortstop with a news staff of some 200-odd reporters (and some of them are really odd, too) it helps to be the cheerleader type, like Frank. He's been doing his job a long time and he's very good at it, so his way works.
   And I knew that Frank's enthusiasm would be genuine when it came time to send me a check, which for this one would be at least two or three hundred bucks for a page-one story and $100 each for the photos. It ain't Onassis money, but $500 for a few hours work ain't bad, not by newspaper pay standards in North Carolina anyway.
   Of course, I could have made at least a grand more on this one if I had done what I usually do with breaking news and fed the story to every major paper in the region, of which we have quite a few here in central North Carolina. I could have gotten almost the same from the Raleigh and Greensboro papers and maybe Wilmington, as well as lesser amounts from some of the smaller papers in between like High Point, Winston-Salem, Durham, Chapel Hill and others. But this one had been an assignment from Frank, who woke me up early this morning a few hours after the shooting, when one of his ears to the ground in Lowland called the tip in to The Star.
   And one of the rules of freelance journalism is: You find it, sell it to whoever will buy it; but if it's assigned, then whoever assigns it gets it, and nobody else better get that story. Sell one of those assigned stories to their competition and goodbye future paycheck.
   But I was glad to get the assignment. Otherwise, I would have had no money at all. And since Frank assigned it, Frank gets the exclusive story.
   As I said earlier, I owe Frank for helping me get started full-time freelance, which is usually just another way of saying unemployed.
   And since I'm freelance, my thoughts are always pointed toward the next story, since I don't get a paycheck for sitting around a newsroom staring at a computer screen and looking pretty.
   Even if I had a pretty face, which I don't, I always got bored quickly with desk work. I'd rather be out in the boondocks, beating the bushes, looking for that next hot news story.

  Of course, Frank didn't call me back that Friday night just because he wanted to hear my sexy voice. He's a bit strange, but not that kind of strange. He had made a few changes in my story.
   I suppose if John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway got their start as newspaper writers, they both had some editor who just had to rewrite and edit their stuff. And even after they became authors, I'm sure they still had some editor who was always whittling down their prose, like the infamous book editor who edited Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" down to just "War."
   After all, what are editors for, if they can't edit? I've done both jobs, writing and editing, and learned the hard way that it's a lot more fun to do the writing than the editing.
   But I can't complain about Frank's editing, because like a good editor, his changes are always with the sole purpose in mind of making the story more readable and interesting.
   Purple prose is fine, but if the reader can't understand it, or hasn't had his interest caught by the first paragraph or two, he won't read the rest of the story. And maybe he'll just drop the paper in the trash and go read somebody else's newspaper instead.
   Anyway, Frank's few changes to my story made sense, as always.
   And I told him I planned a follow-up story on the auto AK, as soon as I could track down further information. He loved that idea.
   After we agreed on the wording of the few cosmetic changes, Frank was happy with the story, I was, too, and he sent it on to the copy desk. I told Frank I'd be at home if any further questions arose that night before The Star was ready to go to press.

Chapter 2
The Auto AK Search Leads Down the Vietnam War Trail,
or, Nam War Stories of Nick Rowe and Ronnie Bruton