Chapter 16

LUTZ and ATLANTA

CHUCK - Day 11 part 1 Thursday

I left the house on my own before 0600 to go down to the patio for a quick breakfast this morning, because I needed to discuss the previous night's call with Sue. Well, she employed thousands of seamstresses, didn't she? Could she use twenty more?

She came over as soon as I arrived, and while drinking coffee and munching on a breakfast sandwich, I quickly told her all that I knew.

"Late last night, I had a call from an Atlanta Deputy named John Hanmer," I began. "He was obviously deeply distressed. He told me that both he and his wife are elders in a Lutheran Church in one of the poorer parts of the City.

"His wife is one of the managers of a project which employs twenty women who are all married to disabled vets. They use a church hall as a sewing room, but a developer has hired some gangsters to get them out. They got nowhere with the police, and the deadline is today. In addition, his wife was assaulted and received some serious threats last night. He'd heard that I was interested in helping disabled vets, and wanted to know if I could help."

Sue's reaction was immediate. "When do we leave?" She asked.

My cell rang while she was talking to Glenda. It was Steve out in Nevada. What's going on? It's the middle of the night there; this must be serious.

However, all he wanted was for me to send Mac and some of the men from our new Marine Guard Force out there ASAP.

I promised to do what I could, but I explained that 'as soon as possible' in this case was going to be lunchtime. I luckily managed to get hold of Buster, and he promised to try and get twelve of Hap's men who wanted to transfer to CS&S fully outfitted and ready to move out. He'd been impressed by a Sergeant Crossley who Colin had just hired, and would put him in charge. Mac was sitting beside Buster, so I was able to quickly tell him what I wanted. I told him to give me daily reports, and we arranged that he would call my cell at 1800 local time, every evening whenever possible.

Sue told Glenda that she was coming to Atlanta with me and would probably be away all day. While she went inside to get her purse, I called the airpark so that they could get my Citation out of its hangar, and start the preflight checks. I called John Hanmer next, and told him that we would meet him either out at the airfield at about 0730 or at the church hall a half an hour later. He said that he'd meet us at the airfield, because he needed to fully brief us before we got to the hall; anything could happen after that.

There was one further call I had to make. This was to the night man in the Atlanta Deputy Marshal's station so that they would know what we were doing.

We were airborne by 0700, and were being given landing clearance at the Atlanta general aviation field within 40 minutes. Deputy Hanmer was waiting by his car as we taxied to the parking spot we were being guided to.

"Everything seemed quiet when I dropped my wife off this morning," he reported. "But as she walked across to unlock the hall door, I thought I saw one of the BBBs across the street."

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, but who are these BBBs?" Sue asked.

"The local gang likes to call themselves the Big Bad Boys," he explained.

"Thank you, but shouldn't you tell us about why we're here?"

Deputy Hanmer started right at the beginning.

"Our Pastor and his wife lost a son in Iraq," he told us. "When the kid's best buddy was totally incapacitated in a later skirmish, the Pastor took the man and his wife in after his discharge from the VA hospital. Then, when they heard about another disabled vet, they took him and his family in too.

"They soon found themselves responsible for twenty-four families (twenty vets and four others) where only the wife was capable of earning a proper living. Only six of the husbands can even barely do part-time work. When it proved difficult to find jobs for all these women, the Church was lucky to be given some old sewing machines. Those were put into the Church hall, and the first wife, who was a skilled seamstress, trained all the others to use them. It's proved quite successful in a quiet way, because it gives each family enough money to live on, without them regarding it as charity.

"Everything was going great until a local developer bought up the land around the hall. When our Pastor flatly refused to sell it, the man hired the BBBs to force us out. The Pastor has appealed to the Police Captain at the local precinct, but he just flatly refused to do anything, and our poor Pastor had to listen to a lot of insults and bad language, as well. The city authorities have been no help either.

"Last night, two of the gang cornered my wife, and after slapping her around, they threatened to rape her and the other women if they were not out of the hall by noon today."

When our car pulled up outside the hall, one of the gang members was blocking the door, but he moved away after I produced my badge and stared him down. Deputy Hanmer took Sue inside to introduce her to his wife and the Pastor. Mrs. Hanmer had a vivid black eye as evidence of her meeting with the BBBs.

I stayed at the door, and quickly counted up to a dozen likely gang members in the neighborhood. One was talking on his cell, and a patrolman soon drove slowly up. While he was talking to the gang leader, I held my badge up, and waved to the policeman to come over, but he totally ignored me and just drove off.

Because it was obvious that things might start getting serious, I called Charles Wragg, the Atlanta Marshal's Station Chief, and requested some backup.

At that moment, there was a crash from within the hall and a series of shots. The Station Chief heard it too, and I heard him shouting to alert his men as the call was cut.

The gang members outside didn't seem to know what to do, so I went quickly inside to check. Deputy Hanmer was clutching his shoulder, while Sue had her gun out of her purse and was covering a BBB man who was begging her not to shoot him. His buddy who had also jumped through the window, was lying on the floor with the back of his head missing.

As Sue seemed to have the hall under control, I went back outside and found a number of cars skidding to a halt in front of the hall. Some Deputies leapt out and started rounding up the gang members, disarming them and making them lie down in the road to be cuffed and chained.

Chief Wragg, who had been in the lead car, looked round.

"Well, Chuck, what on earth is happening here?" He asked.

I took him inside so he could see what was going on inside.

After he'd called for an ambulance to take a cursing Deputy Hanmer to the hospital, Charles shouted for another of his men to cuff Sue's prisoner.

"I called the Chief of Police on the way here, and told him to get over here fast." Charles told us. "I contacted the Bureau as well; they probably have jurisdiction from what I've heard."

"When the two men busted in to the hall," Sue told us, "One man used his gun to shoot Deputy Hanmer here, and that gave me the time to get my own weapon out and put a couple of rounds into the man's head. That was the only target I could aim at. Seeing what had happened to his buddy, the other man just went to pieces."

Her story was confirmed, as the man was talking away, spilling the whole story as fast as he could to the Deputy who cuffed him.

Sue and the Pastor started to comfort and calm the women, some of whom were almost hysterical after Sue had shot right over their heads, killing the other gangster.

The Chief of Police, accompanied by the local Precinct Captain then arrived, with the Chief demanding to know what was happening in a loud voice.

Just as Sue and I accompanied Charles out the door, the Precinct Captain made the mistake of loudly remarking that he didn't understand what all the fuss was about; it was only a bunch of niggers, anyway.

This really set Sue off, and like a bristling terrier, she really laid into the two men, one of whom was a good 18 inches taller than she was.

She told them in a really carrying voice what she thought of them, their city, and the police force for which they were such sorry representatives. She castigated their appearance, their morals, and every failing that they might ever be capable of.

The two men just stood there frozen to the spot, and couldn't have gotten a word out even if they had wanted to.

Those who heard her, which now included both the city's Mayor and the Atlanta FBI Special Agent-in-Charge, who had just arrived, couldn't agree afterwards on how long Sue held the stage. Some said three minutes, while others said five, but they all agreed that she never once repeated herself, and she never used a single cuss word either. Afterwards, the Precinct Captain quietly disappeared, and all that anyone heard from him later, was his resignation.

I found out afterwards that Sue had made two calls on her cell before the gang members broke into the hall; one was to a large mansion on top of a hill just outside the city, and the other to our Lutz airpark to order an aircraft. The results of her first call now started to appear.

A column of ambulances first began arriving, followed in a little while by a series of moving vans. A rather tubby blonde woman seemed to be in the charge of all of them.

Just then, the police who had cordoned off the building, parted to allow an ancient white Rolls-Royce to drive up. A smart, gray-uniformed bodyguard jumped out from the front passenger door, and opened the rear door for a very tall, thin, lady in a black suit that had been created by the eminent Parisian couturier Balenciaga (but nobody here knew that). She also wore four inch heels, and had bright white pancake makeup and startling orange hair that stuck out from her head like a frizzy mop.

Her very presence was most impressive.

Sue paused in her diatribe, gulped, burst into tears, then rushed across into woman's arms.

Her Godmother had arrived.

Christina Ethelburga Calhoun Melville (Queen Ethel to all those in government or positions of authority across five states) had never, as far as was known, left her self imposed isolation in her mansion on the hill for over 25 years. Now aged 94, only her immediate family and numerous servants were allowed inside, but her influence was still powerful. Jim Melville, her husband, had 'gone west' only four years after their marriage, but this had never bothered her. She was supposed to have agents all over the region whose responsibility, rumor has it, was to gather information on everyone and everything.

She herself had been the state's Governor twice (filling in the shoes of a dead incumbent the second time), Lieutenant Governor three times, and she was said to have repeatedly turned down offers of a guaranteed Senate seat in Washington. Her family had ruled the area from the earliest colonial times, and her great grandfather, James M. Calhoun, was the Mayor of Atlanta who unsuccessfully tried to stop Sherman in 1864. Despite this, the carpetbaggers had been warned off the family estates and now they were richer than most everyone in the country.

The short woman in charge of the ambulances was her great-niece, Josie Calhoun Lyons, the city's Commissioner for Community Development. While the distinguished looking man quietly standing in back, who was accompanied by three uniformed men, was Wendell C. Calhoun III, the current Lieutenant Governor of the State of Georgia, and also her great-nephew.

Queen Ethel had been Sue's grandmother's best friend and roommate through both private school and Bryn Mawr. By her very arrival, all the onlookers were convinced that she had anointed "Queen Sue" as her successor. But Sue never took advantage of this; in fact, she never realized what had happened. In future years, if she ever called anyone in government, they immediately knew who she was, and what she wanted usually got done without delay.

But in Atlanta, and around the country, Sue's name lived on for many years. Nobody realized that she owned a business in the city, but what became known as 'Sue's Game' remained popular at the dinner parties of the rich and well to do, as well as in bars across the city. Someone would often be challenged to describe another person for as long as they possibly could, without once repeating themselves...