Chapter 9

The following Tuesday, Bob enlisted the aid of Val to drive him to Sacramento, some sixty miles west of Circleton. He wanted to do something about the insurance payments before anyone could accuse him of hanky panky. He and Val talked about many things on that drive, but in the interests of brevity (hah!) we'll skip most of those. Suffice it to say that Val was excited, not only because it gave her time with what was now her favorite man, but because she'd get to go to a real boutique to shop for a new bikini. She dropped her great grandfather off at an imposing glass fronted building and drove off toward the shopping district with a promise to return in an hour.

A more sophisticated author would say "the storm broke" when Bob walked into the Amalgamated Indemnity of America's corporate offices and calmly announced that he was no longer "infirm", and that as such, they no longer were required to make the monthly payments to him that they had been making for fifty years.

A less sophisticated author would just say ... the shit hit the fan.

Priscilla Hardy happened to be the adjustor who was approached by a very timid young man named Paul, who was an intern with the company that summer and who had been asked to take over the front desk by Missy Walker, the receptionist, so she could go get a cup of coffee. Most people just sent Paul to get them things, but Missy had been there ... had that T shirt ... and was almost militant about not making the interns "step and fetch" things. So she smiled sweetly and asked Paul to watch her desk for a bit. When a few minutes later, a man walked in off the street and explained what he wanted, Paul had no idea what to do. So he took the man to Priscilla.

Priscilla was a hard driving young woman, who took control of things by telling the man to sit down while she reviewed his file. She asked for a doctor's release while she tapped keys on a computer keyboard.

"I don't have one." said Bob calmly. "I didn't see the need to go to a doctor. I'm not infirm any more and I just thought you folks should be told that."

"This is highly irregular." she muttered as his file came up.

She blinked when she saw the date of the original claim and the dates of the list of payouts. The file was for a seventy-five year old man. She looked at Bob, who was obviously in his mid twenties.

"Mr ... Winkle ... is it?" she asked.

He nodded.

"May I see some identification please?" she said, her voice level. There was all kinds of fraud in the insurance business. This man was trying to get them to stop making payments to a man he claimed to be, but obviously wasn't, which didn't quite fit the usual fraud pattern, but she intended to get to the bottom of this. She picked up the phone and dialed security - just in case - while Bob got his wallet out.

Bob's wallet, it turned out, had been put in the roll top desk that Rip's diary had been found in. It still contained all the usual documents - driver's license, social security card, pictures of his three baby girls, and, scraps of paper with long defunct phone numbers on them and, hidden in a hard to find slot, a single folded five dollar bill. That bill was unusual because the seal was in blue, not green, and along the bottom were printed the words "Silver Certificate". Val, Fran and Becca had found the wallet, of course, when they went through the desk looking for treasure. They hadn't discovered the money, but after Bob woke up they remembered the wallet and retrieved it from the desk, handing it to him like the treasure it really was.

In 1950, a driver's license was an un-laminated card, with typewriting on it and no photograph. Bob's had been issued to him only a few weeks before he went into his long nap, and was in pristine condition. When he handed it to Priscilla, and she examined it (both front and back) her suspicions gelled. Still, security wasn't there yet, so she put on a smile.

"I'm afraid I'll need a picture ID Mr. Winkle."

"And I'm afraid that's the only identification I have." said Bob calmly. He hadn't thought it would be this difficult to get an insurance company to stop giving him money.

Priscilla sighed with relief as she saw Chuck, the security guard she had ignored for more than a year, approach. Chuck was a beefy young man who had failed the Police Academy entrance exam because he was basically stupid. He seemed to inflate as he approached her desk. Chuck was a surfer when he wasn't being a security guard, and he was good at posturing.

"What seems to be the problem here?" he asked, importantly. His hand went to the can of pepper spray he kept at his belt. There wasn't actually any money in the building, so they wouldn't let him carry a gun. He had adopted the pepper spray instead and carried it in a pouch where he thought a pistol should be.

Bob looked up at the towering ... and glowering man.

"There's no problem." he said. "I was receiving payments for being infirm, and I'm not infirm any more."

Priscilla handed Chuck Bob's driver's license.

"This is the ID he provided." she said, as if that explained everything.

Chuck frowned at the card, peering closely at it and holding it up to the light, as if he could see through it.

"What's this?" he asked.

"It's my driver's license." said Bob patiently. "I know it's expired, but it's all I have."

Chuck searched until he found the expiration date. It was May 15, 1952. He frowned.

"What are you trying to pull here?" he asked, trying to make his voice sound low and grave.

Bob felt the first tingles of frustration as he realized he was dealing with something he obviously wasn't prepared for. He had thought it would be simple. He'd walk in, say "Thanks for all the help" and walk out. He looked at Priscilla.

"Are we done here? Is there anything else I need to do?"

Priscilla was at a complete loss as to what to do. She'd called security not because she wanted them to do anything in particular, but because it made her feel powerful. This couldn't be the man listed as the beneficiary in the file she was looking at, so something had to be wrong, but she couldn't figure out what that was. She made a decision. This man was obviously not Robert Winkle, and he was trying to get the company into some kind of trouble so there would be litigation and they'd have to pay out even more money. Yes, that just had to be the scheme here.

"I can't just stop the payments on your say-so." she said to Bob, explaining it as if he were simple minded. "Mr. Winkle is over seventy years old. I don't understand why you want us to stop paying him, but he probably needs this money and I think you're not a very nice person to pretend to be him."

Now Bob knew that this wasn't working. He didn't want to argue about it, but he also knew that the money should stop being paid and that someone would try to make trouble if he kept taking the money.

"Look," he said patiently. "I took a nap in 1950 and didn't wake up until just a month ago. Your company's insurance policy has been paying out all this time. But I'm awake now. You understand? I'm awake now. I don't want to cause any trouble. I'm just here to inform you that I'm awake."

He stood up to leave and Chuck went into action. The story he'd just heard made it clear to him that he had a wacko on his hands. He grabbed for the pepper spray and gave Bob what was supposed to be a two second burst in his face. Chuck, however, had been carrying his cartridge of pepper spray for a year and a half, and enough dust and grime had collected around the trigger mechanism that it stuck. As Bob howled and went down, his hands scrabbling at his eyes, Chuck dropped the canister and grabbed the handcuffs from the back of his belt. He yanked Bob's right arm, twisting it behind his back yelling "You have the right to remain silent!" He said that three more times, unable in his excitement to remember the rest of the phrase he'd practiced over and over in the mirror in his mother's basement, where he lived. By the time he got Bob's left arm cranked back and had closed the cuffs as tightly as they'd go, he was panting and jubilant. He'd just made his first "collar"!

In the meantime, his canister of pepper spray bounced and rolled, merrily spraying a stream of its contents up into the air and all over generally. It rolled to a stop spraying directly into the air return vent next to Priscilla's desk. The mist formed by this process drifted in the excellently conditioned air. Only the best had gone into the structure of the corporate HQ at Amalgamated. The air in the whole building was reputed to be recycled every three minutes.

Priscilla freaked out. She, too, assumed Bob was a wacko, but he didn't seem violent - merely deluded - and when Chuck "went into action" and some of the over spray of Chuck's pepper spray came her way, making her eyes water and making her sneeze, she panicked. She screamed and tried to run from her desk, and tripped over a wastebasket, sprawling on the floor.

People at desks nearby had been watching as the incident progressed. No one had ever had to call Chuck before, so when he showed up and began his "investigation" there were a lot of interested people watching. None of them had seen what the man did to cause Chuck to spring into action, but there was obviously a struggle going on, and Priscilla was running screaming from her desk, so that suggested the man might have a gun.

911 was called by three different people.

Rodney Jackson, who had a crush on Priscilla, jumped up from his desk to go and render aide. He was elated to find that, in the fall, Priscilla's skirt had whipped up, exposing the peach colored thong she had worn under it that day. Her bare buttocks were exposed to his delighted, if somewhat misty gaze. He was torn between trying to get away from what was making his eyes tear up and hurt, and getting a better look at something he thought he'd never get to see in his whole life. He intended to roll her over, primarily so he could see the front of those panties, when a cloud of pepper spray enveloped his head. His eyes squeezed shut and he gave a massive sneeze. Instead of gripping her waist to turn her, as he intended, one hand went squarely between her naked buttocks and he fell on top of her, incapacitated.

Priscilla, her vision still blurred by tears, felt a man's hands being forced between her soft buttocks and, now in a complete panic, screamed "Rape!" at the top of her healthy young lungs. She kicked with her legs and one foot impacted a decorative floor lamp that happened to have halogen bulbs in it. It tipped, and two of the bulbs shattered with an explosive pop.

By now, others in the big room had gotten a sniff of Chuck's pepper spray and were in the process of fleeing in panic. As they streamed out of the room, pushing and shoving, Henry Stevens was slammed into the edge of a doorway. His forehead hit the sharp molding and split open. He staggered back, bleeding like a stuck pig and, tried to run. Unable to see because of the blood in his eyes, he slammed into another wall and flopped senseless to the floor.

Mildred Hopkins, a matronly woman of about forty five years, if you took her word for it, came out of the ladies room to a scene of pure chaos. People were screaming various things, one of which was "He's got a gun!" Many more were coughing their lungs out and staggering around with streaming eyes. It was about then the halogen lamps burst and Mildred swung her gaze to see Henry reeling, his face bleeding, fall to the floor limply. Being a woman of iron disposition, and having watched every police show that ever aired on television, she calmly reached over and pulled the fire alarm, and then sank down behind a desk and pulled the phone to her heaving chest. She was the fourth person to call 911.

"Shots fired!" she screamed into the phone. "One man down! The place is on fire! We need help and we need it now!" she wailed into the phone.

It didn't help that Alice Trumble, unable to see where she was going, tripped over the phone cord and jerked it out of the wall, cutting Mildred's running commentary to the 911 operator off mid stream.

Police radio bands everywhere are constantly monitored by the news media, not to mention a crowd of ambulance chasing lawyers. The arrival of Sacramento's finest was, therefore, recorded by no less than four camera crews and three lawyers, all of whom had a fist full of business cards they were handing out to fleeing people as fast as they could. The police had to fight for parking spaces with a ladder truck and two pumpers as the SFD blazed onto the scene. Within minutes the scene was crisscrossed with three inch hoses. By now, the entire four story building was being evacuated by panicked and screaming "survivors." And, even though no flames or smoke were seen, water flowed through those hoses as each fireman attempted to be the first one to put water on the fire, wherever it was.

Try to imagine three hundred people, eyes streaming from drifting pepper spray, trying to negotiate their way to safety amidst a maze of hoses and those streams of water. Within minutes there were bodies all over the sidewalk and street, moaning victims of falls, with various cuts, bruises and contusions. It looked like a war zone. It took the fire scene commander five minutes of screaming into his radio and a bull horn to get the water stopped.

And the media got it all in full, living color.

The crowning moment though, was while the cops were barricaded behind their cars, pistols and rifles aimed intently at nothing in particular in the building. They were waiting for the hostage negotiator and the S.W.A.T team to arrive and darting out from cover occasionally just long enough to pull another moaning survivor through a puddle of dirty water to safety, making sure that a cameraman noticed while they did this.

Suddenly Chuck appeared in the now empty double glass doors of the building, the chain connecting the handcuffs to Bob's wrists firmly clamped in his right hand. Bob, being semi-conscious and completely out of it, wasn't helping any, which meant Chuck had to drag him along, Bob's arms lifted high up behind his back and stretched to the breaking point. Had Bob been conscious, the pain in his stretched shoulders would have had him screaming.

The number of hammers cocked and slides jacked back sounded like a truckload of crickets had been spilled in the street. Chuck, wiping his own eyes with one hand, staggered out onto the sidewalk, stopping only because there were two moaning bodies lying there blocking his way, too far from safety to be "saved" by anybody.

"I got him!" he yelled to half a million viewers of the breaking news as they watched the live video feeds. He grinned and looked blearily around, waiting for adulation and interviews.

What he got instead was rushed by the S.W.A.T team, which had just arrived and knew that sometimes, the hostage taker comes out pretending to be someone else.

Amid screams of "I got him motherfucker!" and "He's my collar you fuck!" Chuck went down in the melee as the butt of an M-16 connected solidly with his head.

And it was all on live feed, in living color.

We've all seen the local news "break a story", usually involving someone saying something like "I heard him [bleep]slapping the [bleep] out of her and she was screaming and then the cops busted down the door. Man, they beat the living [bleep] out of that guy. But I feel safer now, that's a fact."

Well that sentence didn't turn out to read very well, but you get the idea. Anyway, the media, as everyone knows, is addicted to drama and violence and being the first to announce anything. Having video of the violence is even better. So, while Detective Sergeant Zack Simpson, the unlucky investigator assigned to "sort things out down there" figured out what actually happened, the media reported, variously:

"Brenda Rogers, Channel Five Eyewitness News, Live at the scene. Today a man tried to rob the Amalgamated Insurance Building, resulting in chaos! Details at Eleven. Brenda Rogers, live in downtown Sacramento!"

"Fred Compton, WZTF First With The News. A terrorist plot was foiled when the terrorist's bomb apparently fizzled. The lives of hundreds were saved by the quick action of an unidentified Amalgamated Security Guard! (flash to tape of Chuck dragging Bob out of the building) We'll try to get you more for an update later. Fred Compton, WZTF First With The News, Scaramento!"

"Thank you, George. I'm Julie Denman. Today, in Sacramento, a man was shot while he tried to defend an unidentified co-worker from a rapist! In the ensuing struggle, unidentified chemicals were released in to the air ducts of the Amalgamated Insurance headquarters and hundreds suffered. We're working on the story. Back to you, George!"

and

"Kip Jackson here with KZWT Action News! I'm at the offices of the Amalgamated Insurance Company in Fresno, where police just captured a man who took at least twenty people hostage because Amalgamated refused to give him money. Gunshots were fired and at least fifty people are being treated at the scene, some of them for life threatening injuries! ... What? I didn't say Fresno. No way I said Fresno. Are we on the AIR?! You stupid [bleep] We're still on the air..."

Meanwhile, inside, Detective Simpson walked around, a handkerchief over his nose, looking at the destruction caused by the stampede. While the state-of-the-art air handling system recycled the air in the building every three minutes, it didn't have filters that would remove pepper spray, so the air was faintly tinged with the stuff, making Zack's eyes water. The perp was in custody, in bad enough shape they were taking him to the hospital. He could be interviewed later. Zack was trying to figure out something ... anything that would give him a clue as to exactly why he was here, and exactly what kind of evidence he should be looking for. The employees he had spoken quickly with, for the most part, didn't know a thing about any hostages, or any robbery, or any gunshots. The vast majority of them left the building because they started sneezing and their eyes burned. A patrolman stuck his head in the door.