Shots fired! Or, "I don't think the Marines are going to help you out this time, lady."

Previously, on Gas Station Adventures:

Why am I bleeding? Or, how simple statements can lead to assault charges
Yelling a the wrong guy, or, how a bitchy lady learned what handcuffs felt like

Before I begin, I should preface this by saying that the stories I'm telling here are in no way actually in chronological order. It's more of a "oh, hey, remember that one time that..." kind of story telling.

This even occurred late in the shift. It was dark out, and traffic had died off to almost nothing. Our station is (present tense, it's still there, even if I don't work there) located at the beginning of a cul de sac, along with an oil-and-lube shop, a family diner, a dentist's office, a McDonalds, and a flower/coffee shop. There was just myself and another employee out playing gas attendant, but since there weren't any customers, we were instead standing in the middle of the pumps, conversing as co-workers do. I also had my phone out, texting my then-girlfriend. Aside from the roar of the nearby freeway, the world was, for the moment, quiet.

But slowly, we heard a noise. It was obviously coming closer, but truck traffic made it hard to determine what it was, let alone where it was coming from. After a few minutes, we determined that it was a human voice, yelling something. It soon became apparent that the voice was coming from a woman up the street a bit from the cul de sac. She was, in fact SCREAMING her lungs out. As she wandered her way up the street vaguely in our direction, we began to "understand" what she was saying. Mostly it was gibberish, word salad without form or grammar, with the occasional guttural moan or shrill yelp. A few coherent phrases came through as well, the most memorable of which was "Come back me up, Marines!"

My associate and I watched in stunned/disturbed fascination as this mad woman walked up our cul de sac and entered the McDonalds. No, "entered" isn't the right term. She CONQUERED herself in there, like a cowboy hero busting open the swinging half-doors to the saloon in an old western, right before he challenges the bad guy in a black hat to a high-noon show down.

Once inside, we could see her moving around. Not up at the counter, but amongst the tables and chairs. She spent several minutes in there, and it was obvious that the McDonalds staff wasn't happy about it, because the guy we knew to be manager was pointing to the door and saying something to her. She did not appreciate being informed where the egress was, as she started to throw around items like trays, handfuls of napkins, straws, cup lids, whatever detritus she could find, and running full tilt from the counter to the bathrooms and back again.

My associate and I chuckled. Poor Mickey-Ds schmucks.

At some point, her eccentric (ha!) orbit of the dining area destabilized, and she was ejected from the premises by her own inertia. The two of us on the pumps then turned our heads, as we didn't really want to deal with something like that right before quitting time. However, we were either too slow or not camouflaged well enough, because her next course change sent her directly our way.

I still had my phone out, sending updates on the weird event to my gf. The crazy lady approached, but didn't really seem like she was interested in communing with whatever it was she thought we were. That is, until, she saw my phone out and my thumb on the keypad. THAT piqued her interest, and in none-too-kind a manner. She stalked over to me, came within about 18", and hiss-whispered, "If you call the cops, I'm going to fucking kill you." Oh dear. That's not exactly what you would call a smart threat, given that she then wandered towards the parking lot on the back side of the store, still shouting randomly and occasionally flailing her large purse around. Out of reach and out of eyesight, I called it in. My co-worker wandered a bit over to the side, to see if she was going to mess with anything in the back.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had called 911 about this lady, because the police response time, already quite quick, was extraordinarily fast. Well under 2 minutes, as I was still giving information to the dispatcher when the two units arrived. Just as the officers got out of their cars, we heard a loud crash of breaking glass, along with my co-worker yelling "HEY!!" and pointing at the woman. The two officers broke into a run, as did I, and came around the corner to find her with a piece of pipe that had been left near the recycling bin, smashing the window to the small outbuilding which contained some sort of monitoring equipment for the underground gas tanks.

The moment she saw the two officers, however, it was like a switch got flipped. She instantly calmed down, and became intelligible. She put down the pipe, and complied with the officers as they asked her to come out to the front of the store (which was on camera and better lit). The officers asked her for ID, which she calmly produced from a back pocket. Another officer arrived at this point, but went down to the McDonalds to talk with the manager. The two officers with the lady were interviewing her, asking her what might be the reason that people were calling about her, her responding that she was just having a bad night, etc etc. After a few minutes of this, the officer who had been down at the McDonalds came up to talk to us two pump jockeys. We relayed our perspective of what happened to him, and he went over to the other two officers. Now, I'm uncertain as to what that officer said to the other two, but he soon went back to his car and began to drive it up to our parking lot. As that was happening, the two officers with the lady asked her to stand, and if they could search her purse.

This is, as they say, the climax of the story.

For she stood, as she was asked, and grabbed her purse, as if to drop it. However, instead of doing so, her hand returned with a small-caliber compact pistol, which she raised up and fired. Now, thankfully, she didn't actually point the thing AT anybody. Her aim was directly between the two officers, and both of us wage slaves were off to her left. So the three rounds she fired weren't REALLY a danger to anyone, with the exception of a possible ricochet or that poor barkdust hillside which took three rounds amidships.

The two officers with her reacted instantly, not with guns drawn, but with a very well choreographed double tackle. Her gun was taken from her hands as she squirmed and screamed all manner of vile epithets. The third officer heard the shots, and his big V-8-Interceptor-Packaged-Police-Charger roared up between the pumps. The three officers had a hell of a time getting her into cuffs, because even though she was slight, she was feisty.

Eventually she was controlled with handcuffs and leg restraints, along with the arrival of another couple officers and eventually an ambulance. One officer had sustained a rather nasty cut to his forehead during the struggle, the cause of which I do not know. The woman, now lying in the back of a police cruiser, still screaming and trying to kick the window, was being taken to jail for booking and then almost immediately to a hospital for a psych eval. The two officers were visibly quite shaken, and I overheard them asking if they could take the rest of their shift off. In a quiet community like that, it's not often that officers end up being shot at.

In the end, I believe that the lady was committed for sanity issues, which does make me feel bad for her. A crime scene tech recovered the bullets from the hillside (which, I'm happy to say, recovered from it's injuries) and we were thanked by the police officers for our quick call to 911. I went home, drank a couple beers, and went to sleep, dreaming of crazy ladies.

TL;DR - One of the better night's sleep I've ever had, actually.

EDIT: I can't link well.