The Year of Fear by Joe Urschel Read Free Book Online

for cover and aimed directly at the lawmen while his partner inched closer, setting up the crossing fire line.
    “Put ’em up! Up! Up!” he screamed.
    Lackey pulled up the riot gun that had been nestled between his seat and the car door and furiously began trying to cock the unfamiliar weapon without releasing its triggering mechanism. When he finally stumbled on the release, the gun discharged unexpectedly, blowing off half of Nash’s head, killing him instantly. The blast shattered the car’s windshield and hit Caffrey in the back of the head as he stood near the front of the car.
    The panicked Lackey jerked the gun to the left as it discharged again, hitting Hermanson in the head before tearing into the Plymouth parked in the adjacent space.
    Reactively, the machine gunners unleashed a fusillade of return fire. Two bullets hit Grooms in the chest as he attempted to return fire, killing him. Vetterli, who had ducked to the ground for cover after taking a bullet in the arm, sprang to his feet and ran toward the station with a spray of machine-gun fire following him and slamming into the station’s granite walls.
    Miller trained his sights on Lackey, hitting him three times.
    Chief Reed, hit by multiple rounds, crumbled to the floor.
    The furious firefight was over in less than ninety seconds.
    With his gun trained on the car, Miller approached cautiously. Hermanson and Grooms lay in an expanding pool of blood on the passenger side of the car. Caffrey was sprawled next to the driver’s door with half his head blown away.
    Miller peered in at the blood-soaked front seat and the body of his longtime friend.
    “He’s dead,” he said to his partners. “They’re all dead.”
    With that he reached into the backseat, pulled Lackey’s gun from his hands and threw it to the ground. The unharmed Smith lay on the floor next to Lackey, playing possum.
    Miller and company ran back to the getaway car and sped off as the early morning crowds at Union Station looked on in horror.
    Patrolmen in the station raced to the parking lot, guns drawn. Flashbulbs popped as news photographers, who were at the station in force, having been tipped off by the wire story, went to work. In no time, they were rearranging the scene, moving people and evidence to get more graphic shots, as their polished leather shoes soaked up blood from the pavement and splashed it onto the cuffs of their trousers.
    Bedlam had broken out among the bystanders, some of whom fled screaming, while others ghoulishly picked up spent shells and casings from the ground for souvenirs.
    The Kansas City police began rounding up witnesses to the shooting. There were nearly sixty in all. All, it seemed, had wildly different stories about what they had just seen.
    *   *   *
    News of the shootout reached J. Edgar Hoover, within minutes. Hoover was an obsessive workaholic who was never really off the clock. “Married to his job,” is how his colleagues would describe the young bachelor. He preferred agents who had a similar relationship with their work and drove them to work harder, faster and better.
    The Bureau had just received a telegram from Kansas City.
Director, United States Bureau of Investigation, Wash DC—Ott Reed Chief Police McAlester Oklahoma special agents Frank Smith and Lackey with Frank Nash were met at Union Station this morning, seven fifteen by agents Vetterli and Caffrey and two local detectives. Nash was taken to Caffrey’s automobile in front Union Station when unknown parties believed four altho definite number unknown opened up with submachine guns killing two local police officers Chief Reed Frank Nash and shooting agents Caffrey in head fatally. Lackey shot right side not believed fatal. Frank Smith escaped uninjured Vetterli nipped in left arm license number of shooting car obtained doing everything possible. Vetterli.
    Hoover had set the whole debacle in motion when he’d offered a reward for information leading to the arrest and capture