If You're Skeered, Say You're Skeered!

Back in the day, we rode “two man” units and Roland C. was assigned to me for a period of time. Roland was a transplant from somewhere up north and was not used to working (communicating) with a partner. We were assigned to the deep southwest part of the city and jurisdiction which at that time was farms, woods, and a spattering of houses and a sprinkling of mobile homes. All of the dwellings were what you think of typical rural Alabama, broken down cars in the edge of the woods, old couches on the porches, and a shotgun over every door. All of these houses were in clearings surrounded by thick woods and at night …it was DARK! I am talking can’t see your hand in front of your face dark!
We get this call of “shots fired” on a road that dead ends at the top of the mountain… ok…in other parts of the world it would be called a hill or rise. Roland was driving. We flipped on blue lights and siren and off we go away from the city, out into the dark abyss. In route, the dispatcher told us that a woman and two children had run to a neighbor’s house to escape a drunken abusive husband. He reportedly was on the front porch of the “neighbor’s” house shooting through the door. “Neighbor” because it was the closest house but close is a relative term in those parts.
We went barreling down the two lane country road at about 90 mph. Blue lights lighting up the country side, sirens screaming. I suggested that we go in silent and dark but Roland thought that all the lights and noise would scare the guy into giving up. HAH! It just gave him time to reload all of his weapons.
We turned onto the one lane path at the bottom of the hill with the back end skidding on the gravel. We made it less than 50 feet up the hill when this jackass starts shooting at the patrol car. OH SHIT! Roland throws the car in park and we un-ass it scurrying into ditches on opposite sides of the gravel path. Now, strategically speaking, we were in a world of shit! We are separated and I am the only one with a radio which didn’t have the range of a thrown stone. He was familiar with the area and uphill from us. He knew where we were and we did not even know where he was.
The car was about 150 yards from the ass-wipe that had the gun. We low crawled in the ditch up the hill and this guy starts shooting at us. We could not see him; we just knew his general direction. It didn’t take us long to realize that our headlights were lighting us up like Christmas trees. Roland ran back to the car and killed the lights. BLACKNESS, TOTAL BLACKNESS!
Shit, now in the darkness, I lost sight of Roland. Great! I t entered my mind that now I can’t shoot at the guy for two reasons: I might shoot Roland or I might miss the asshole and shoot a kid on the other side of the door. Not to mention that I couldn’t see shit!
This POS would fire a shotgun a few blasts and then switch to what sounded like a 44 mag. I could hear the pellets rip through the trees above my head. The only pause in his firing was when he stopped to reload. The only light that we had was the muzzle flash from this asshole’s gun. I might need to mention at this point that I HATE shotguns! Actually, I don’t hate them. I hate the sound they make when I am not the one firing it. They are pretty handy when you have one. Racking a shotgun gives you a feeling of REAL POWER, but they make very messy exit wounds. OK … I admit that at this point… I was SKEERED! Here I am a mere 23 years old and thinking that I am going to die in these woods without a face. I had just worked a murder involving a shotgun and it was not pretty.

I was in great shape back in the day but the hill was steep and I was carrying every bit of 35 pounds of gear on me not to mention the adrenaline rush. By the time I got to the edge of the clearing around the house, my heart was pounding out of my chest! I was so scared that my upper lip had drawn up on the left side where it felt like it was touching my nose. I must have looked like Elvis or Popeye with that face tic going on. My brain was in a loop telling me that when guns are fired AT YOU, you run AWAY from not toward them! But Popeye the wonder cop kept going up the hill against her better judgment.
As I reached the clearing, the MF fired again. In the light of his muzzle flash, I caught a movement behind a tractor about 25 yards to my left. Roland! The POS was in the yard. He put down the shotgun and pulled a 44 mag out of his waistband. He turned and started to go back up the porch stairs. We both took off sprinting the 30 or so yards across the clearing and tackled the drunken MF. The NFL would have hired us on the spot. We all went to the ground in a thud. He started fighting with us so all three of us are rolling around on the ground. Roland and I were trying to grab his hands which he had under him because we weren’t sure if he had another gun. We weren’t worried about people in the house because we were “saving” them.
All of a sudden, the front door crashed open and this bitch jumps over the banister off the porch (a good 4 foot drop) onto my back, screaming like a banshee. I was thinking WTF? It was his wife and she was yelling, “Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt him! I love him.” The front door looked like Swiss cheese and he still had a gun and she didn’t want us to hurt him! I had to roll onto my right side to protect my firearm from her while trying to elbow her off me and still hanging on to his arm. All the while she was hitting me, crying, and trying to pull his arm away from me.
When the dust settled, he went to jail for shooting into an occupied dwelling and she went to jail for 3rd degree assault on me! On the way to jail, they were in the backseat practically necking in handcuffs. I was so mad that I wanted to give them both a good screen test. Good thing that Roland was driving!
Upon arrival at the jail, all my Sgt could say was, “What’s wrong with your face?” I looked in the window and saw my Elvis impression and laughed. Even though I didn’t smoke, I bummed a Marlboro off Roland and had me a long smoke. It took a couple of hours for the face tic to stop and my blood pressure to settle down.