Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  In Rubidoux, deputy Rolf Parkes stopped writing a traffic ticket, shoved the driver’s license back into the hands of the stunned motorist, and ran to his unit. Fred Chisolm was already responding from Mira Loma on the original 211 dispatch, but now he jammed the accelerator to the floor as he went south on Pedley Avenue. A. J. Reynard pushed Kurt Franklin’s 511 car over one hundred miles per hour on the Pomona Freeway wondering, as were others, how the hell a 211 could go from dispatch to “Officer down” in less than one minute. Sergeant Ed Alvis and three other undercover narcotics detectives bailed out of a surveillance stakeout behind the nearby Lions Club and headed south on Hamner.

  At RSO headquarters, detective Mike Jordan leapt up from his desk, grabbed his holstered .38 from the hook on the door, and raced headlong down the hallway toward the department vehicle yard. Others poured out of their offices along with him. California Highway Patrol officer Doug Earnest heard the transmission on scanner, notified fellow patrolman Bill Crowe, and the two left the freeway, self-dispatching to Norco. Riverside City cop Mike Watts did the same, along with others from the neighboring Corona Police Department. In Moreno Valley, deputy Jim Evans aimed his unit in the direction of Norco. Even lit up like a Christmas tree with sirens screaming, it would take him at least twenty minutes to get there, maybe more. But it did not matter. It was an 1199. It was Mayday. It was the end of the world.

  IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF THE CAMARO, JENNIE LEWIS HEARD THE GUNFIRE. She turned and looked out the back window just in time to see Bolasky’s unit come flying out of the parking lot in reverse, shedding glass and debris in the roadway. She saw the deputy jump out of the vehicle and then disappear behind it. “Shit,” she said. “That guy is down.”

  As Evans and Lewis pulled across Hamner away from the gunfire, they passed a 1964 Ford Thunderbird headed straight into it. Fifteen-year-old Jody Ann Tygart was behind the wheel taking a driving lesson from her father. Darryel Tygart had instructed his daughter to cross Hamner and continue on Fourth Street past the bank and into the quiet neighborhood behind it. Once through the light, however, the Tygarts found the neighborhood anything but quiet. The moment Tygart caught sight of Bolasky’s unit in the bank parking lot, he saw the right rear tire of the sheriff’s vehicle explode, followed by the sound of heavy gunfire. Tygart immediately recognized what was going on. “Jody, step on the gas. That bank is being robbed,” he shouted to his daughter. The teenager hesitated, trying to comprehend her father’s instruction.

  The Thunderbird was about to pass the entrance to the parking lot when Darryel Tygart saw the sheriff’s vehicle reversing into their path. “Get down!” he yelled, lunging across the center console. He threw his body over his daughter, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it to the left to avoid Bolasky’s unit and the gunfire being directed at it. Tygart waited for the impact, but somehow, Bolasky’s unit barely clipped them. Tygart lifted his head above the dashboard and found he was now traveling in the oncoming lane with another automobile headed directly at them. He jerked the wheel back to the right, but the Thunderbird sideswiped the oncoming car, hard. The impact nearly tore the side off Marvin and Ernestine Holtz’s Buick Regal, sending it into the dirt shoulder where the elderly couple cowered, both injured, as bullets began to strike the pavement around them. Tygart’s Thunderbird continued to careen eastbound on Fourth Street until it struck a curb and came to a stop seventy-five feet beyond Bolasky.

  When Darryel Tygart raised his head to check if they were still in the line of fire, there was a sharp crack as a bullet came through the back window, grazed Tygart on the side of the head, and slammed into the center of the dashboard. He threw his body over his daughter again to protect her, putting a hand on her back to keep her as low as possible. But when Darryel Tygart looked down at his hand, it was covered in the girl’s blood.

  THERE HAD BEEN NO BREAK IN THE GUNFIRE RIPPING GLYN BOLASKY’S UNIT apart. Now crouching behind the Impala holding his shotgun, Bolasky waited for a pause in the firing before daring to put his head up for a look. When he did, he saw the green van rolling slowly in his direction, headed toward the bank exit onto Fourth Street. In addition to the driver, another man sat in the passenger seat with the barrel of a gun sticking out the side window. The van accelerated toward Bolasky. Afraid of taking gunfire at close range, Bolasky dove forward and curled up with his shotgun behind the front tire, where he would be protected by the wheel and the engine block. The possibility also existed that the van would ram the Impala in an attempt to flee in the direction of Sierra Avenue. If it did, Bolasky would be crushed.

  THE MINUTE HE SAW THE FLASHING RED AND BLUE LIGHTS APPEAR IN HIS SIDE mirror, Billy Delgado knew he had made a terrible mistake. Why had his brother gotten him into this? It’s going to be okay, Belisario. Nothing’s gonna happen. That’s what Manny had told him all along. But what about now? What about those blue and red lights in the mirror?

  Billy had watched the cop turn onto Fourth Street, the light bar whirling blue and red, praying that it might just keep going past on its way to somewhere else, maybe the gas main fire a mile south. Fumbling with the walkie talkie, he radioed George that the cops were there. Seconds later, they all came crashing out the bank door.

  “There’s one!”

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  Billy saw red and blue plastic flying off the roof of the sheriff’s unit and half the light bar go dark. Seconds later, the black-and-white was right in front of the van, almost nose-to-nose, half a light bar still whirling away. There was a moment when Billy could see the face of the man behind the wheel. A young guy in a tan uniform. And then the whole car seemed to explode. First the windshield, and then glass, metal, and plastic flying off in all directions. Billy glanced out the open cargo doors and saw all four of them shooting at once. His own brother stepped in front of the van and fired the shotgun straight at the deputy from no more the six feet away. That cop was dead. He just had to be. No one could live through all those bullets. Don’t worry about it, Billy. We’re never gonna have to use no fucking guns.

  Then Billy saw something he could hardly believe. Somehow that dead cop in the shot-up car in front of him was not so dead after all. The car suddenly came to life, accelerating in reverse, tires screeching, sliding to a stop sideways in the middle of the road and blocking their escape route to Sierra Avenue. They would have to go up Hamner instead. George had said it would be crazy to go that way. Too much traffic, too many witnesses, too many cops. But now Hamner Avenue was the only hope Billy Delgado had left.

  As soon as the police car backed away, the guys all dove into the van through the open cargo doors at once, their guns still smoking with a metallic smell. Manny climbed into the passenger seat beside him and pointed the shotgun out the window. Fuck, let’s go! Billy gunned the van toward the exit and the cop car parked sideways in the road. When he got close, he saw the cop again, out of the car now and hiding behind the wheel. Just as the van reached the exit, the cop poked his head up and Billy could see he was holding a shotgun. The sight of the gun startled Billy and he whipped the hard left onto Fourth Street toward Hamner but took the corner too damn fast. He could hear the guys in the back being thrown around along with the duffel bags of bombs, guns, ammunition, and Molotov cocktails. One of the cargo doors swung wide open. Someone managed to dive for the door and jerk it back shut before anyone tumbled out onto the road.

  Tires screeched on pavement as he completed the turn. Everyone was pissed off and screaming at him as they scrambled to their knees.

  Crack! Crack!

  A gun went off right behind Billy’s head. Glass shattered. Russell Harven was so close behind Billy’s seat when he opened fire straight through the back window that the shell casings from the “Shorty” AR ejected onto the dashboard of the van. The others began firing too, so many rounds going off all at once, like a wall of sound, deafening in the confined space of the cargo compartment.

  In front of him, Billy saw nothing but road all the way to Hamner Avenue only
a hundred feet ahead. The intersection was clear, with all the traffic stopped at the light. Some people were out of their cars gawking in disbelief at the scene unfolding before them. All that empty road suddenly looked a lot like hope to Billy. If he could make the turn onto Hamner, it would come down to a sprint to the cold getaway cars parked at the Little League field. If he could just make that one last stretch of road, they really might get out of this after all. Then never again. Never ever again would he let himself get talked into any shit like this, not even by Manny.

  But then something happened that made no sense to Billy. His body seemed to disappear on him. He could not feel it at all. His hands slid off the steering wheel and fell uselessly to his sides like dead meat. He could not even hold his head up; it just sagged, chin resting on his chest, eyes staring down. He could see his body below him but had no ability to control it at all. The only thing he could feel was a sharp stinging at the back of his neck. But even that did not last long because right then Billy Delgado began the process of slowly drowning in his own blood.

  CROUCHED BEHIND THE FRONT WHEEL OF HIS SHERIFF’S VEHICLE, DEPUTY Glyn Bolasky heard the screeching of tires, the sound of the van turning away from him toward Hamner. Bolasky moved to the rear of his vehicle and leveled the shotgun from the hip, but before he could get a shot off, the back windows of the van exploded out and he began taking fire from the men inside. With bullets striking the body of the Impala in front of him, Bolasky gripped the fore-end of the shotgun and pumped all four rounds in the direction of the van from a distance of twenty-five feet. He saw even more glass fall from the back window and knew at least one of his shots had hit the mark, maybe more.

  It is unclear precisely how many shots of buck from Glyn Bolasky’s shotgun had gone through that van. There are twenty-seven pellets of #4 buck, more or less, in every cartridge, each pellet about the size of a standard BB traveling 1,300 feet per second. Bolasky had pumped off four blasts from the Wingmaster. So . . . twenty-seven? Fifty-four? Eighty-one? There had been at least one full cartridge for sure, the one that entered squarely through the rear window, flew straight through the cargo area, and then out the front windshield in a tight twelve-inch spread pattern. Well, most of it had anyhow.

  There had been that one pellet in that one load of buck that did something other than waste everybody’s time. A single quarter-ounce ball of lead flew through the rear window, past all the Molotov cocktails, beer-can bombs, bags of cash, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It went past Russell and Christopher Harven, past George Wayne Smith and Manny Delgado. It even went past Gary Hakala. It went right the fuck past everyone. Everyone except Billy Delgado.

  When it got to Billy, that solitary lead orb weighing no more than a fat raisin went through the captain’s chair and into the back of his neck, midline at the base of his skull, punching a hole through bone like it was rice paper and entering the cranial cavity just north of the medulla oblongata. At that instant, Billy’s somatic nervous system ceased to relay voluntary commands below that point, and Billy’s body was no longer his own. But the medulla itself dutifully carried on its job of running the autonomic nervous system that kept Billy’s vital organs functioning. When it had finished its business in Billy’s brain stem, that shot of buck continued its journey, puncturing the cartilage wall of his trachea, allowing his heart to pump blood into his lungs, gradually filling them from the bottom up.

  Without Billy, the van decelerated and drifted harmlessly into a chain-link fence on the north side of Fourth Street, coming to a stop just a few feet short of what had been the teenager’s last great hope: Hamner Avenue.

  THE SECOND GEORGE SMITH WHIPPED HIS HEAD AROUND TO SEE WHY THE van was not moving, he knew what had happened to his driver. Billy was pitched forward, slumping limply to the right side. In the passenger seat, Manny was already shaking him, calling his name, trying to push him back up straight, but Billy’s body was dead weight. Manny tore off his own ski mask, lifted his little brother’s head, and saw the eyes filled with terror, darting crazily around in their sockets. Get him the fuck out of there, somebody yelled. Manny, drive!

  It was hopeless. Manny could not move his brother’s body out of the way. I’m getting out of here, Chris yelled. I’m not getting toasted in this van.

  Go out the back, George said, grabbing duffel bags and tossing them in the direction of the side cargo door. We need another vehicle.

  Chris put a foot up on the upholstered back seat and went straight out the shattered back window still holding his Heckler. He fell onto the street and then popped up, aiming the assault rifle toward the police car still sideways in the road. A moment later, Russ followed his brother out the same way with the “Shorty” AR.

  While Chris and Russ were diving out the back window, George grabbed Manny and pulled him away from Billy, whose body had begun involuntarily convulsing. Help me get these bags out of here, he yelled. Instead, Manny grabbed the riot gun, climbed over his dying brother, and went out the driver’s door onto the street.

  Alone in the van, George tossed one more duffel bag toward the cargo doors, grabbed his Heckler .308, and prepared to offload the bags. Before squeezing out the tight space between the van and the chain-link fence, Smith took a final look around the van for anything else they might need. His eyes settled on the cabinet holding their hostage and saw it punctured and gouged with buckshot. That dude was fucking dead, for sure.

  GLYN BOLASKY NEVER SAW THE VAN DRIFT OFF THE ROAD. THE YOUNG DEPUTY was busy tossing his empty shotgun onto the pavement, drawing his .357 Python service revolver, and scrambling to the shelter of the front wheel. When the gunfire abruptly stopped, Bolasky peeked up over the hood of his car, expecting the van to have disappeared around the corner onto Hamner. What he saw instead surprised him. The van had come to a stop just before the traffic light. It was mostly off the road with its front end up against a chain-link fence bordering a strip of dirt used as a horse trail.

  Standing at the rear of the van was a man holding a rifle at his hip with the barrel leveled directly at Bolasky. With the mask pulled over his head, staring through a single hole for his eyes, he did not look so much like a man as he did some sort of gothic nightmare, a hooded executioner about to drop the guillotine.

  The two men fired at each other almost simultaneously, Bolasky getting off a single round, which he saw hit low, throwing up a puff of dirt and asphalt. He dove back down behind the front tire as rounds struck his patrol unit. The deputy made himself as small as he could behind the wheel and engine block. The bullets kept coming, hammering into one side of the Impala and out the other, zinging off the pavement to his left and right. They flew so close he could feel the concussion from the air they displaced and hear the sharp crack as they broke the sound barrier while whizzing homicidally overhead.

  There was another short break in the gunfire and Bolasky popped up again. There was a second man alongside the first now, each firing from the hip. Bolasky raised his .357 and got off two more rounds before the gunmen commenced firing on him, so many rounds striking the Impala that he thought the entire car would be torn to pieces. Bolasky went down again and immediately saw his rear tire blow out. Then something jerked his left arm backward. When he looked down, there was a hole on the inside of his left elbow. Blood began squirting onto his face.

  A MILE DIRECTLY NORTH ON HAMNER AVENUE AT THE DONUT CORRAL ON Sixth Street, deputies Chuck Hille and Andy Delgado threw down their coffee cups and jumped into their vehicles at the first 211 dispatch. The two men split up, Delgado heading down Hamner and Hille paralleling him on Sierra. Hille and Delgado were coming into the situation blind with no information on the location of the van, the number of suspects, or the firepower they would be up against. For all they knew it could be a strung-out junkie popping off a Saturday night special; it usually was. Splitting up and approaching from two sides was a basic tactic intended to locate a suspect fleeing in an unknown direction. But the two deputies did not know at the time that they
were about to execute a classic pincer movement on four heavily armed men.

  Turning westbound onto Fourth Street from Sierra, Chuck Hille immediately began scanning the scene. One hundred fifty yards in front of him and dead center in the road, Hille saw Glyn Bolasky crouched behind the front wheel of his unit and taking heavy fire. Even from that distance, Hille could see that something was very wrong. A moment later Hille heard the first rounds striking the radiator and hood of his own patrol unit with a guttural thump. The bullets hit so hard that Hille felt the impacts resonating through the frame of the Plymouth Fury. 2-Edward-59, we’re taking fire now, Hille radioed. Unit’s been hit. Why the hell are these guys still here? Hille thought. Every bank robber he had ever encountered just wanted to get away from the bank and the cops as fast as possible. So why were these guys still hanging around?

  Hille could not pick out the source of the gunfire from the landscape in front of him, but he knew he was headed straight into it. He began zigzagging his car left and right, employing the serpentine evasive driving tactic he had learned in a training course just a week before. Two more rounds hit his vehicle. Just before he reached Bolasky’s location, he jerked the wheel right, sending the Plymouth into a dirt lot, fishtailing to an outbuilding 150 feet off Fourth Street. As he skidded his cruiser to a stop, Hille heard a chilling transmission coming from Bolasky.

  3-Edward-50, I’m bleeding badly. I have an artery hit. I need help!

  Leaving his sheriff’s unit behind the outbuilding, Hille threw open the driver’s door, turned on the portable radio on his hip, and headed toward Bolasky’s position. He still had no visual on the suspects, but he could hear the crackling of gunfire, the bullets zinging off pavement and striking Bolasky’s vehicle. Holy shit, thought Hille, they’re firing automatics. There was the deep booming of a shotgun. How many of these sons of bitches were there? Hille eyed Bolasky’s position and scanned the scene again for the source of the shooting. There was a large bush on Fourth Street near the corner of Hamner. Other than that, Hille was looking at a wide-open field of fire between himself and Bolasky. Another transmission from Bolasky came over the radio.