Gunpoint - Part 2

This is a true story based on an incident that happened to my friend and me. I couldn't publish this story until after legal things were settled.

Running for your life takes on a whole new meaning when three guys with guns are somewhere behind you. Were they running after us? I couldn't look back. Would I hear a gunshot, feel a bullet rip through me? I continued to run.

"Which way?" I asked my friend who I somehow knew was right behind me. He told me to run straight and I did.

A cab appeared on the cross street up ahead and I flagged it down wildly, hoping the driver wouldn't think that I was insane and drive away. He didn't and I got into the back seat, watching as my friend ran past the cab. Where was he going? The three guys and their guns were nowhere in sight.

My friend ran to a payphone, picked up the receiver, put it to his ear, hung up and jumped into the cab. "Go to the nearest payphone." he ordered the driver and a block down the street he jumped out of the cab and to the next phone.

Within moments, we were surrounded by police cars and we were each put into a car and spent the next few hours driving around the neighborhood. I wanted to see them, I wanted to catch them, but after hours driving in circles I finally asked to go to the police station. I knew that my friend would keep looking and we would be out there until sunrise if I didn't ask the police to call the other car in.

We filled out a report, then finally went home. As the sun rose, I called the airlines and booked a flight to Florida to see my parents and my friend called the credit card companies to report his stolen cards. Efficiency in the face of terror. When I finally got to sleep, the phone rang. The detective assigned to the case was calling us in to do a lineup - they had apprehended a suspect who might be connected to our robbery.

At the police station, we were shown a gun that was in the suspect's posession but it wasn't the right gun. Disappointed, the detective took us next to look at mugshots. Piles and piles of polaroids, everyone looking like identical twins and none of them looking like our robbers. I called my employer at the time to say I might not make it in to work, explaining that I had been held up, and she said that maybe they should hire someone who really cared about the organization. The entire day was surreal and I touched the walls as I walked back to the room in the police station with the piles and piles of polaroids. Was I really alive?

I went to Florida and waited until the last possible moment to tell my parents about the robbery. I could feel the rush of blood from their faces, the liquid fear through their bodies, because I felt the same thing as I re-lived the robbery. I was glad I told them in person but I was terrified to be away from my friend, afraid that the robbers would go back to his house and kill him. When I got home, there was a message on my machine that he had caught one of the guys.

The day after my return to New York City, we were back at the police station and taken into separate rooms as we took turns viewing the lineups. I had to view three but my friend only had to view two since he had identified one already.

I was taken into a small room with a table, chairs and a mirror on one wall. I knew as I approached the mirror that they couldn't see me, but I closed my eyes and held my breath, thinking that somehow that would insure that they wouldn't see me through the mirror. When I opened my eyes the first time, I looked at each of the guys and exclaimed "Oh yeah." I saw him alright. The one who stood next to me inside the teller machine, the one who had first approached us with his gun pointed at us, at me.

I was able to pick them each out of their respective lineups. I knew them well. Their faces were in my mind, whether I wanted them there or not. After the lineups, my friend and I waited in a room with another man. He was a busboy, Mexican, and he had a bullet in his chest. He had been held up about 40 minutes before we had been, only a few blocks away from us. We were sure he was attacked by the same guys, but he couldn't identify them.

Yes, we were alive. We had caught them. And they were in jail. The next step...the grand jury.

Go to Part 3

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