Matt picked up the Colt Sporter and said quietly, “Okay, I’m going to lay down some suppressive fire, and you skee-daddle. Meet me on the back side of these stores.”
Matt and Chase jumped out of the van simultaneously. Chase ran directly for the end of the strip mall, carrying his black nylon range bag. Consciously avoiding shooting directly at the officer, Matt took cover behind the open door and began to pepper the back of the Asheboro cruiser. He shot out the rear windows and both of the rear tires. He fired twenty-eight cartridges, at roughly one-second intervals.
The Asheboro police officer ducked behind the cruiser as soon as he saw Matt emerge with the rifle. As the shooting started, he scampered back to the passenger compartment and grabbed the handset. “Shots fired at Randolph Electric! This is Alpha Six. Shots fired at me by an AR-15 rifle!” The officer was not hit by any of the bullets or flying glass. He didn’t get up from his crouched position until other units began to arrive.
Matt set the rifle down, picked up his duffel bag and briefcase, and ran in the same direction that his brother had gone. Chase was waiting, as ordered.
They could hear sirens wailing in the distance. They ran across the street into a residential neighborhood. They covered three blocks in a zigzag, checking parked cars for keys as they ran. They found none. Chase pointed to an apartment complex on their right. “This way!”
They walked briskly through the apartment complex, again looking for cars with keys. An Asheboro PD car roared down the street that they had left just moments before, with its red lights flashing. When they got to the back of the complex, Chase peered at a concrete drainage ditch through a chain-link fence. The brothers nodded to each other. Chase handed Matt his range bag, and scrambled over. Once he was over the fence, Matt lifted over all three of their bags. Then he climbed the fence. It was nearly fully dark now.
They spent forty minutes in the drainage ditch, making their way through ankle-deep cold water. Matt stumbled once and got wet up to his thighs. They emerged from the ditch fourteen blocks east. They started looking for a car with keys again, slowly working their way east. They saw just two more police cars flash by, traveling together at high speed, three blocks distant.
It took nearly an hour to find a car. By then, they were twenty-five blocks from the strip mall where they had left the van. It was a 1985 Olds Cutlass, parked in an open garage. The car had belonged to a man who had died of cancer just two weeks before. The man’s son-in-law had been at the car earlier that same day. In anticipation of placing a newspaper ad to sell the Cutlass, he had been there to check if the battery had enough current to start the engine.
Distracted by the registration, owner’s manual, and the stack of service receipts he had gathered from the glove box, he accidentally left the keys in the ignition when he departed.
Matt drove toward Greensboro on minor roads. Chase lay in the backseat of the Cutlass, clutching his Glock. Chase tried to stay out of sight, knowing that any police would be on the lookout for two men traveling together. They listened to the car radio as they drove. Matt scanned through the dial, trying to catch any news about the shooting incidents. They caught just one brief blurb: “State police are still on the lookout for a pair of heavily armed men that fled on foot, eluding arrest, following two gun battles in Asheboro late yesterday afternoon. They are described as armed and extremely dangerous.” There was nothing more, so Matt scanned on, hoping to catch another news report.
Matt laughed when he heard Warren Zevon’s “Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” He proclaimed, “Hey Chase, they’re playing our song!” He tapped the scan button again to hold the station. He sang along:
… I was gambling in Havana,
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Dad, get me out of this
I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the rock and the hard place
And I’m down on my luck
And I’m down on my luck
And I’m down on my luck
Now I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The s**t has hit the fan….
They parked on a side road at 2 a.m. to assess their situation. In the briefcase they had just over one thousand and one hundred in cash—the gross from the day’s sales, Matt’s address book, his customized ParaOrdnance .45 “race gun,” four loaded thirteen-round magazines, and a Galco shoulder holster. Between their two wallets, they had another hundred and eighty in cash. In the range bag, they had Chase’s Glock and his Auto-Ordnance .45, three pairs of earplugs, five spare loaded magazines for each, and two extra boxes of ammunition—one of .45 ball, and one of 9 millimeter ball.
The duffel bag held Matt’s prized Steyr AUG rifle, stowed with its barrel removed, a M65 field jacket, a set of web gear, five bandoleers of .223, and nine magazines—one forty-two round and the rest thirty-rounders. Only one thirty-round magazine was loaded, so Matt took the time to load three more.
His father had bought the AUG for him just before the 1994 ban. When the ban passed, its value suddenly doubled. He had originally considered the gun “inventory” but once its value shot up, he realized that it would be a very expensive gun to replace, so he added it to his personal collection.
Once they had finished their inventory, Matt turned off the car’s interior lights. They each said prayers aloud. After sitting for a few moments in silence, Matt asked, “Well, the big question is, do we risk going back to the motor home? You know we could just take off straight from here. I don’t think that we left anything in the van that would point the lawmen to the campground, did we?”
“No. Not that I remember. But you know, if they act fast, the cops could check on other ‘motor vehicles’ registered in our family name. The motor home is registered in dad’s name.”
Matt pondered for a moment and then said matter-of-factly, “Okay then. Let’s set a limit of twenty-four hours to get out of North Carolina, and another twenty-four hours to ditch the motor home. Anything beyond that, and we’ve got to expect that they’ll be circulating the license plate number, and a description of it.”
“Fair enough.”
“So then we’re agreed that we’ve got to go back to the campground. We can’t just abandon everything there. If we’re going to be on the run, we’ll need the rest of our money, our coins, our guns, and our survival gear. We’ve already lost the van and most of our inventory. We absolutely can’t afford to lose any more!”
Chase nodded gravely, and said, “Agreed.”
They got back to the campground at 3:30 a.m. They stopped two hundred yards short of the entrance and walked the rest of the way to the motor home.
After carrying in their bags and the briefcase, Matt emerged from the trailer, carrying a can of WD-40 and a roll of paper towels. Alone now, he drove the Cutlass a mile away and parked it behind a tavern. He sprayed every surface that they might have touched with the lubricant, and rubbed them thoroughly with paper towels, leaving behind a light coating of the WD-40. “Forensics will have fun trying to lift any prints off of this one,” he whispered to himself. He left the keys in the ignition and the driver’s side window rolled halfway down, hoping the car would be stolen again.
Matt tucked the used paper towels under a trash bag in a dumpster that was halfway back to the campground. He was back in Chase’s motor home just before 5 a.m. He found Chase sound asleep. Matt lay in his bed fitfully for an hour, working out their getaway strategy. Finally exhaustion let him sleep.
Chase awoke at 7 a.m. and made breakfast. Matt awoke to the smell of coffee. They spent the next hour sorting their things into piles, talking escape and evasion possibilities as they worked. Everything that was nonessential but that might be somehow incriminating or otherwise point to any of their friends went into black plastic trash bags that they intended to either dump or burn. Nearly everything else except a few clo
thes, linens, books, cookware, dishes, and perishable food items went into the rapidly growing pile that lined the motor home’s center aisle. This included their remaining gun show inventory—mostly duplicate items that they hadn’t brought with them to the show.
These were: three laminate-stocked Russian SKS rifles, eighteen ammo cans, three sets of web gear, two sleeping bags, duffel bags full of clothes and BDU uniforms, five cases of MREs, an Army shelter half-tent set, and their Army CFP-90 backpacks.
Using a Phillips screwdriver, Matt extracted the rest of their “non-inventory” guns from their hiding places behind the motor home’s fiberboard paneling. These included an M1 Garand, an HK-93, a pre-ban Olympic Arms AR-15 clone, a glass-bedded .30-06 bolt action with a 4-12x scope, and two Smith and Wesson .357 Magnums. After sorting through ammo cans for appropriate ammunition, clips, and magazines, Matt loaded all the guns. He also loaded forty extra Garand clips with AP ammo, and thirty-two assorted spare magazines, mainly for the AR-15.
Meanwhile, Chase retrieved a slim metal box that was attached with magnets in the back of the motor home’s LP tank compartment. This box contained cash, four Canadian Maple Leaf one-ounce gold coins, and twenty-eight one-ounce silver ingots and trade dollars. He counted out $3,850 in cash.
He divided all of the assets equally into two canvas moneybags, and put one into Matt’s backpack, and one into his range bag.
The sorting went on until 10 a.m., when Chase glanced up at the clock and declared, “Hey, we’re going to be late for church!”
After showering, shaving, and changing clothes, they walked the six hundred yards to the Baptist church that they had been attending for the last three Sundays. They sat down at a pew just as the pastor was about to begin the sermon. Some of the regular congregation members were later quoted by reporters as stating that the pair seemed deep in prayer for most of the service.
One commented, “They were very pious looking.”
They got back to Chase’s motor home just before 1 p.m., and again started sorting. It seemed like a monumental project. Just reprioritizing and repacking their backpacks took two hours. When they were done, each of the packs weighed nearly eighty pounds. In deciding how to set the ratio between food and ammo, they both opted to go “heavy on ammo, light on food.”
They finished their organizing at just after 8 p.m. Matt and Chase shared a pan of soup and studied their road maps. They picked out intended primary route, a secondary route, and decided on two different rendezvous points in case they got separated.
Chase was melancholy. He declared, “I don’t think it is either fair or wise to go stay at any of our friends’ places. The cops will probably start checking them and maybe even phone tapping and keeping them under surveillance. It’s just a matter of time. And we sure can’t go back to Spokane. They’ll trace the van to there very quickly.”
They tried to get some more sleep, but couldn’t. Finally, at 1 a.m., Matt stepped outside, disconnected the power ponytail and septic hose, and wiped the power receptacle box vigorously with an oily rag. Then he yanked the wheel blocks and stowed them in their bin near the rear wheels. They left the campground an hour and a half after midnight.
CHAPTER 7
Low Profile
“I tell ye true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter.”
—William Wallace, Address to the Scots, circa 1300
After leaving the campground, Chase did most of the driving. Matt rode in the back of the motor home, out of sight. They stopped first for fuel, filling the motor home’s sixty-five-gallon tank in Roanoke,Virginia. An hour later they dumped the black plastic trash bags in a large commercial dumpster behind an office building that looked like it had just been constructed, but was not yet leased. They drove as far as Baltimore that day, and parked behind a Flying J truck stop an hour after dark. Matt went into the truck stop and bought a Sunday newspaper and a few groceries.
There was nothing in the Baltimore newspaper about the shooting incidents, but they surmised that the events were top news stories in North Carolina. They went through the want ads and discussed the various possibilities that they saw. They picked out five likely candidates. Chase complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the noise of the idling big rigs. They started making phone calls at 8 o’clock Monday morning. It being a weekday, there weren’t many people home to answer their calls.
When Matt called the number in the fourth ad that they’d circled, he got an answer. He was promptly given street directions. Chase waited in the motor home three blocks from the proffered address for what seemed like an eternity.
Matt looked the truck over carefully—smelling the transmission dipstick, looking for oil leaks, watching for telltale smoke from the tailpipe when the owner started it up cold, and listening carefully under the hood as it was idled.
It had some defects. The passenger-side rearview mirror was broken, the rear quarter panels were starting to rust out, and the upholstery was torn up on the driver’s side of the bench seat. Otherwise it was a good, serviceable truck. He dickered with the old man for a few minutes, quizzing him about the leaf springs, the air shocks, and how “dry and tight” the camper shell was, and finally settled on a price of fourteen hundred dollars. The man had advertised it at sixteen hundred. Matt counted out the fourteen hundred in cash, and was handed the signed title and two sets of keys. Just before he drove the truck away, the old man told Matt, “She don’t burn much oil.” It wasn’t until ten minutes after Matt had left that the man realized that he should have got the young man’s name and address. He said to himself, “Makes no never mind. I’ll get word back from the DMV, soon as he’s re-titled it.”
Matt pulled the Chevy pickup behind the motor home and tapped his horn. Without pausing to get out and examine their new purchase, Chase started up the motor home’s engine and headed out. They were well out of the Baltimore metro area into the farm country of Frederick County before they stopped. There, they pulled into a deserted county park. Playground equipment near the front of the park sat idle, since the weather was cold and drizzly.
There were several corrugated metal buildings there that looked like they were used to house exhibits during the summer county fair. Chase pulled in behind the biggest of the buildings. Matt backed up the pickup to the motor home’s side door. They rapidly transferred their load, putting the heaviest items at the front of the truck’s bed.
Their gear completely filled the pickup bed, all the way to the roof of the camper shell. Matt stowed his backpack, briefcase, and AUG duffel bag in the cab. Chase kept only his range bag and his rucksack in the motor home. He realized that he was going to need something to read during his upcoming journey, so he tucked a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged into his rucksack.
Before Matt stepped out of the motor home, Chase hugged his brother and vowed, “Okay. I’ll see you in four days, maybe five. God Bless.”
As they drove the motor home and the pickup out of the fairgrounds gate, Matt turned left and Chase turned right.
Chase drove west to Fargo, North Dakota, driving twelve hours a day. He left the motor home at an informal campground a mile north of town. Following Matt’s advice, he left it unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. He made no attempt to remove any fingerprints. Their prints were so numerous, and on so many items in the motor home that he would have certainly missed many, even if he had worked a full day. He further reasoned that the authorities probably already had several samples of their fingerprints from the van and merchandise that they left behind in Asheboro.
Shouldering his rucksack and heavy range bag, Chase walked back to town.
He bought a bus ticket for Grand Forks, but instead boarded a bus bound for Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Both buses left the station about the same time. He apologized to the driver for boarding so late, and paid cash for the ride to Fergus Falls. Chase immediately stuck his nose into his book, to avoid eye contact that might encourage conversation. After ha
ving dinner and waiting four hours in Fergus Falls, he took a bus to Minneapolis. He slept most of the way there. In Minneapolis he shaved in the restroom at the McDonald’s across the street from the bus depot. Then he walked five blocks and had breakfast at a diner. From there he walked another five blocks in the same direction, toward the financial district, and hailed a cab, and asked to be taken to the Amtrak station.
Two hours later, he was on an Amtrak train headed for Chicago. The next day, he left Chicago on a bus to St. Louis. In St. Louis, he took another Amtrak train. This one was bound for Dallas. Eighteen hours and thirty-three chapters of Atlas Shrugged later, he got off in Hot Springs,Arkansas, even though he had bought a ticket that was paid all the way to Dallas. In Hot Springs, he thumbed a ride to Texarkana. In Texarkana, he bought a bus ticket to Baton Rouge.
From a Baton Rogue bus station he hitchhiked to De La Croix State Park, five miles west of town. He arrived at the campground totally exhausted. It had been one hundred and seventeen hours since the brothers had said their goodbyes in Maryland. He found Matt sitting in a lawn chair, sipping a root beer. Matt exclaimed, “Hey little brother, I’ve been waiting here a day and a half. What took you so long?”
• • •
The day before, Matt had stored most of their gear in a commercial storage space. He chose a small “mom and pop” storage company, because they were less likely to have a lot of paperwork to fill out. Matt made up a story about inadvertently leaving his wallet on the counter at a truck stop two days before.
“Hey, give me a break,” Matt pleaded. “I just moved down here from Maryland, my wallet was ripped off, I haven’t found a house to rent yet, and I’m scared to death that all my clothes and TV and stereo are going to get stolen out of my truck!” The owner was reluctant to rent him a space without ID, but was finally persuaded when Matt offered to pay a full year’s storage fee in advance, in cash. Matt rented the storage space in the name of Marcellus Thompson.
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