Chapter 9

As usual, the newspaper was loaded with reports of problems at the charity homes for the elderly and the homeless who were not necessarily elderly. Especially, abused women and their children were among the primary targets of teens who were bored and high. Nancy and I talked about it and wondered what we might do to help.

Our lawyer told us how to contract with the management of these shelters so that they were our legal clients. We charged $1 per evening for our work, and we did this whenever we did not have a regular client. We did save at least one night a week for our charitable work. The $1 fee was to establish the legal formality of the shelter being our client for the night so that we had the protection against lawsuits that were sure to follow if we weren’t covered.

We found out that we could prevent most trouble by showing up in our formal outfits. The formal clothes were in such contrast to what the inhabitants were wearing that my tux, for example, fairly shouted that something was going on. The only place where the formal clothes didn’t help was at the shelters for abused women and children.

The abusing spouse, not always a man, would show up all pumped up on adrenalin or an artificial drug ready to take on the world. The abuser had never before experienced any firm resistance and saw no need to expect any this time. We usually could defuse the situation by a little application of empty-handed martial arts, but sometimes the baton proved necessary. Most of the time, the visiting abuser left under the care of EMS, but sometimes he or she was able to walk away. I am happy to say that there never was a need for a body bag.

The elderly were more often attacked by teens looking for some excitement. On some occasions, the teen, especially if there was more than one involved, would brandish a knife, and that would force us to use our batons. Such a teen never left with less than one broken bone, but we never killed one, either.

Once, a gang of late teens, 40 or so, showed up with guns. Their shouted intent was to cleanse Worcester of the homeless. All of them were high on one or more drugs, and they fully intended to kill everybody that they could find in the shelter. Fortunately, Nancy and I were there that night, and we were both armed with our Griffin .44s.

The greeter at the door saw the gang approach and heard their shouted threats, so Nancy and I were called immediately from the break room where we were talking to several of the regulars who lived there. We sent every supervisor we could find to round up the residents and herd them into the break room where we could mount a last ditch defense, if it came to that.

We ran to the front door and saw the crowd coming. We could see them waving guns, mostly pistols, but there were a few rifles and shotguns. We could also hear the shouting, but it was really not possible to make out individual words. The actions of the crowd made it obvious that this gang meant to do as much harm as it could, and that included killing every one who opposed them.

The front doors were the usual tempered glass that the fire code required, so that it was easy to see through them. There was some sort of entertainment that had been held in the shelter two days before, and there was a silhouette of a man still leaning against the wall. It dawned on me that we could make good use of that as a decoy. We stood it up so that it was readily visible through the transparent doors and even set up a light behind it to make the effect more noticeable.

As soon as we had done that, we ran to a service door about 15 feet to the left of the main door and opened it. It opened into the building and swung all of the way back against the wall, so it was well out of the way. This part we kept dark in hope that we would not be seen at first. I did the talking because Nancy didn’t think that they would take a woman seriously enough.

“STOP WHERE YOU ARE! WE ARE NO THREAT TO YOU, BUT WE WILL REPLY WITH DEADLY FORCE IF YOU CONTINUE TO MARCH TOWARD US!”

The response was exactly what we expected. There was a deafening fusillade fired at the main door to the shelter, all of it seemingly aimed at that back-lit silhouette. As they were supposed to, the doors simply disappeared into tiny clumps of harmless glass, and the silhouette was shredded by flying bullets.

That was the signal for Nancy and me to respond in kind. Both of us had our guns set for full automatic fire, and we swept the mob approaching us. Nancy started her sweep from the left, and I started from the right. There were way too many people in the mob for us to hit all of them in this first volley, even if we had been using the 100-round drums. We each had 15 rounds in that first clip, and we both emptied our guns in that first volley. We reloaded with the 30-round clips, but stayed on full automatic fire.

Some of the people in the mob had the sense to drop to the street even though they had not been hit, but the majority stubbornly remained standing. In any case, we had plenty of targets, and we were not the least bit reluctant to shoot at any good candidates for one of our bullets.

We could now see, because the mob had thinned out somewhat, that several members of the mob were carrying Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) which were lit, and they were getting ready to throw. We singled out those people as our next targets and managed to shoot all of them before we emptied this 30-round magazine. Many of the bottles broke when the carriers fell, so there was a lot of burning gasoline to light up the party. That may have done more than our bullets to break the back of the attack, because people started to run away from the burning gasoline, and none had run away from our bullets.

Ah, there was the sound of police sirens, so the call to 911 must have made an impression. Very soon, we heard a helicopter fly over and saw a spotlight directed at what was left of the mob. Some of the fools in the mob actually began to shoot at the helicopter, and that was the release that the gunner in the helicopter needed to return fire from his machine gun. That stupid law about unarmed police helicopters had long since been repealed, so the cops now had some decent firepower. This particular chopper was a version of the military Cobra, so it was well set up to handle this kind of action. It only took a few seconds for the street to be swept clean of the mob attacking us, and we were overjoyed at that.

A couple of minutes later, a police car carefully poked its nose into our street. It moved toward us when there was no fire from the clump of burning bodies lying in the street. There were a few people lying in the street who were screaming or calling for help, but the police wisely ignored them. There was no way to know if some idiot might try to shoot a rescuer, so the sensible thing to do was to let the fools burn.

It was not long thereafter that the news media showed up, and that was when the shit hit the fan as far as Nancy and I were concerned. We stood still for interviews for about 30 minutes, and we were greatly relieved when a spokesman from the police department showed up to announce that a press conference would be held in about 45 minutes. The cops wanted to talk to us while the situation was fresh in our minds—as if we were going to forget this escapade any time soon.

Anyway, we talked to the cops and answered the same questions from three or four different people. I guess that was to be sure that our story was consistent, but it did get tiresome. Eventually, we were ushered into a room packed with journalists, and would-be journalists, and asked the same old questions that we had already answered a dozen times over. Hell, it must have been close to 5:00 AM before we were able to go home. We left a couple of cops hanging around the shelter to guard the place until the morgue meat wagons showed up after daylight.

It wasn’t until we caught the evening news that we learned that we had withstood approximately 50 rioters, and had killed 32 of them. That was taken from a count of the bodies with wounds from our guns. The cops had been shooting 7.62mm bullets from the chopper, so that was how they had a body count of 32 for us and 14 for the chopper. Our semi-pro bono work got us a lot of good publicity and we were naturally glad for it. This was our largest number of kills, but it did not bother us at all. We looked at it from the point of view that we were saving a lot of nice people from unjustifiable injury. The bastards that tried to make the trouble only got what they deserved.