Lisa complained in the comments of the previous post that she never gets to see any good neighborhood drama where she lives. Well, sit back and let me tell you a story about THE most excitement I’ve ever had.
My foster dad once owned a 9-unit apartment building in the center of the town we lived in. My girlfriend, JM, used to rent one of the apartments from him and I spent a lot of time there. One afternoon in the dead of winter, she called and invited me over after work to help her mourn the loss of her latest boyfriend. When I got into town and went through the one traffic light, I almost hit some fool running down the center yellow line. He ran in front of my car and straight up the steps to the police station. I slammed on the brakes and swore a blue streak as I turned up the road to the building. Next to the apartment building where JM lived was another apartment building with a small white cottage down in back. From JM’s windows, we had a good view of that cottage and the back parking lot. Anyways, I walked in and was greeted by JM, who poured me a glass of wine while I sat down at the kitchen table. Her little pomeranian came over and, when I bent down to scoop him up, the window behind me shattered into a million pieces.
We screamed in unison, neither of us sure what the hell had just happened. After a minute or two of discussion -and picking glass out of the back of my jeans-we came to the conclusion that the incredible cold and wind had made it shatter. It had to have been around -20 below and it seemed like a logical explanation. While we ran around looking for plastic bags to tape up over the window and swept up the glass, we heard a POP sound from outside. We looked around and still didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, her apartment door busts open and her brother, who lived two floors below, came in yelling at us to get out of the building because there was some guy outside with a gun shooting at people. JM and I kind of looked at each other and started to laugh -thinking it was all a prank- until one of our town cops came running through the door and said the same thing. But HE had a gun, drawn and at the ready, so we were definitely more inclined to believe HIM. D, the cop, started to ask what had happened to the window but stopped and followed an invisible trajectory upwards from the cottage out back, through the window and finally, pointed out a hole in the ceiling. He declared it a bullet hole.
JM’s mouth was moving but she couldn’t say a word…just pointed at me. Her brother took her momentary speechlessness as a sign to press her dog, our jackets and car keys into our hands and pushed us out the door, down the stairs and outside to her truck.
By the time we got outside, the neighborhood was crawling with police and displaced tenants from all of the surrounding buildings. Since the truck was parked out in front of the building, we were still in danger of being shot, so an officer told us to move to one of the side streets on the other side of the road. An officer was posted on that street corner and we finally got the whole story of what was going on. Apparently, some distraught man was holding his wife and baby hostage. He had shot his teenage son when he escaped, grazing the boy in the arm as he ran down the street. That’s the kid I almost ran over before I got to the building.
Minutes ticked by. Then hours. At around 11pm, they called in a SWAT team from another part of the state, who had to arrive by helicopter. The copter landed in the center of town so the SWAT team had to hoof it from there. Ladies and gentleman, you have not lived until you’ve seen a large team of men armed to the teeth running up the streets of your sleepy little town in the middle of the night. It occured to me that some serious shit was about to happen and NOW might be a good time to get the hell outta Dodge, but JM and I couldn’t tear ourselves away.
With all that man and gun power out there, it didn’t take long for the man inside the house to realize that this could all end very badly for him, so he gave up. JM’s apartment was a crime scene until the next afternoon and I was quite relieved to hear that the bullet had entered near the top of the (very tall) window…it missed me by feet, not inches. Our guess is that the guy was aiming for the streetlight mounted on that side of the building.
That night was the first time in the history of our town that anyone had ever attempted anything so serious, but within the next 6 months of that incident, the SWAT team was called in twice more for standoffs of the same nature. The year after all that happened, we had our first honest-to-goodness murder.
Small towns don’t get a lot of drama…but when they do…LOOK OUT.
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