Oh boy. Here I am laying the last edit to my story and quitting time is less than a half hour away. I look down at the black box in my hand wondering if I should lie. When the assignment editor wants to know if you are close to handing in your finished product, it means she is looking for a lens to send to breaking news. Time for some OT.

“We have an armed robbery happening at the R & R Bar-B-Que on Highway 49 behind the race track,” a pair of magnified eyes looked up at me from behind a stack of screaming scanners as I approached the assignment desk. “It sounds like they are still looking for one of the suspects in the woods behind the restaurant.”

“Near the race track?” I reply with a questioning tone. “Isn’t there a race going on?”

Robbing a restaurant near the Lowe’s Motor Speedway on a night when about 150,000 people are enjoying a NASCAR race seems a little odd to me. Why? Well, traffic on the roads around the enormous track tends to get a bit congested with fans traveling to see burning rubber and paint swapping. To ensure every fan makes it to the track before the green flag falls, the North Carolina Highway Patrol sends an army of troopers to Charlotte to handle crowd control. Every intersection along the roads bordering the track has at least two or three Ford sedans sitting in the medians with lights flashing watching for lawbreakers who might slow the traffic flow. Highway 49 is one of the roads heavily watched by the men in uniform. Why anyone in their right mind would try to pull off a heist under the noses of the state police is beyond my comprehension. Even if the robbers made it out of the target with the loot, any speeding get-a-way car would get pulverized by the troopers waiting for any hunk of metal traveling one mile per hour over the posted speed limit.

I found what I expected when I arrived on the scene. Flashing blue lights lit up the night sky. I piloted the live van onto the sidewalk near the entrance to the restaurant and prepared to go LIVE. The 11 o’clock newscast was already in progress by the time I got a signal tuned in. Folks at home had to settle for a live picture from my fancy cam. With all the cop cars flooding the parking lot, I’m sure our viewers got the idea that something was going down at the R & R. After 15 seconds of panning the camera across the scene for the airwaves, I was free to go on the hunt for anybody who had seen something worth telling on “Teevee”.

I didn’t have to hunt for long. The bright glow of a competitor’s camera top light told me he had a victim in his clutches. I just needed to sneak up behind him and join in the conversation. By the time I got to the little group circled around my across town brother, he was finished with his interview. The fella he was thanking for talking at his lens wore an R & R tee-shirt. My journalists instincts told me this guy had witnessed the hold up and I had to get him on tape. With a quick howdy-do and poke to the record button on the camera, I was rolling on all the details of the events leading up to this moment.

“So tell me what happened,” I asked with my best-of-friends tone. Words flowed out of the fella’s mouth like water from a tap.

“I was just walking outside. Went outside to get a mop bucket and when I did that, a guy came around the corner with his hand in his pocket. And he just walked right in the door like he knew someone who worked here. And he looked around for a little bit and came walking back outside. He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a little gun and told me to come inside. Then when we got inside he asked me where the money was. And Keith brought him up here to get the money while the other guy held us back there with the zip ties around our hands. Keith gave him the money then slammed the door in the guys face and went running out the side door of the restaurant. When that happened I guess the guy got out of the office and shot at him. When we heard the shots, we broke loose and the other guy took off running. And he forgot his bag and he came running back and tried to grab his bag. And when he did that, we grabbed a hold of him and I came up here and called the cops.”

After hearing all that, I had more questions than before. Who was Keith? When did the second guy come into the picture? How did they capture one of the armed robbers with their bare hands? It sounded like a great story if I could get all the details worked out. I decided to start over at the beginning with more specific questions. “Who is Keith?”

“The manager. The night time manager that was working tonight.”

That’s a good start. The first part of his story about being outside with the mop bucket when the robber approached him was understandable, but the story got blurry when they came inside the restaurant. I decided to start there. “You come inside and what happens?”

“Come inside and he tells me to go up front and I was going to take him to the office and tell him where the money was. And when that happened, I come around the corner and see his buddy standing there with a little assault rifle. And he takes us back to the back room and ties us up with little twist ties, zip tie things. Held us there.”

“How many employees were here?”

“Four of us.”

“They tied all four of you up?”

“Yes Sir”

“Did they tie the manger up?”

“He didn’t tie him up. He just took him up to the office to get the money.”

I’m still a little unclear as to how the second guy enters the picture. He makes it sound like the guy was already in the restaurant. Really, this detail isn’t all that important. After all, I work for television and not the newspaper. I just need a general picture of the situation. Two guys with guns enter a restaurant through the back door and hold four employees at gun point. One takes the manager to the office for the cash. Now I need a big dollar number to wow the viewers. “How much money are we talking about here?”

“I don’t know. Pretty much what we got in today.”

I know that since this is race weekend we were talking more than on a usual night. Maybe that’s why the robbers chose to try this with cops at every corner. But, I need a good sound bite for air and “pretty much what we got in today” isn’t going to work. I think a bite about when the guns started blazing would be best for the little screen so I start fishing. “After he took the manager up to get the money, what happened after that?”

“After that, the manager just slammed the door in his face and ran out the side door while his buddy was holding us in the back room.”

This answer leads me to think that the robber was inside the office when the manager decided to take action and escape out the side door. I decided to throw out a little theory to see if I’m right. “The manager slammed the door to trap the guy inside the office?”

“Yes Sir.”

“So while he’s running outside to escape what’s happening to you in the back?”

“We don’t know what’s going on and then the guy fires a shot (the guy that just got trapped in the office) at Keith. We hear that and the other guy (the one holding the other three in the back) turns around and goes to see what’s going on and forgets his bag and comes running back to try and grab it and that’s when we got a hold of him.”

This is more along the lines of what I’m looking for in a useable sound bite. Yeah, it still may be a bit confusing but with all the other information about the robbery we can get the picture that the manager was shot at and the employees captured one of the robbers. Good enough to fill a few seconds in a newscast. But I’m drawn into this guy’s story when he says they “got a hold of him” and I want to know more. I continue rolling out the questions. “The three of you have your hands tied up and you still got a hold of this guy?”

“Well, we broke loose of the ties.”

I couldn’t resist asking this next question. “But this guy had an assault rifle. What in the world possessed you guys to jump on this guy if he had a semi-automatic rifle in his hands?”

“My friend Andrew was the first one to go after him. He was in the National Guard. So I guess he knowed what he was doing.”

As I’m listening to the tape to make sure I’m quoting the fella word for word, I can hear myself start laughing at this. One of the ladies standing in the group around us listening to him tell the tale chimes into our conversation with “I guess it was better than dieing.”

The fella responds to her with, “we just went along with it.”

I lost my train of thought after this exchange. In my mind’s eye I can see this Andrew guy telling the others that he knows what to do because he was a war veteran. Just because he was in the Guard doesn’t mean he has been overseas but my imagination likes to think that way. I had to go back to the beginning and recount the whole story as I understood it to get back on track with my questioning. I got a few more details out of him but the attack lead by the guardsman was the climax to the story. I thanked him for his time and called the desk to let her know I was coming home with the goods. While I drove by all the intersections with police cruisers stationed on every corner, another question occurred to me. Why did the nut with the assault rifle come back for some old bag he could have replaced with all that money they attempted to steal? I wonder if the bag had his name and address written somewhere inside?