I had the wee bairn stay home from school with me today. We have the plague (cold/flu/ebola). Right at noon I hear the my dogs in the backyard go off. Not just cat or squirrel to close to their territory barking, real 'come any closer and I'll cujo your a..' barking. So I go out the front door and there is every black and white in the world (almost) along with unmarked police cars and two canine units doing a search two houses down. Thinking that the dogs should be calmed down I walked to the back and in the yard next door are no less than three plain clothes detectives, guns drawn. The fences in my neighborhood are all 4 foot chain link so they see me right away. I announced my presence and they start asking about the tool shed in my back yard. They want to know if it locks and I tell them it does not (anybody need a lawnmower?) and they are welcome to search it. I take the three dogs inside and I notice the hair on their backs is standing straight up.
So here come the three detectives and they go through the back and do the as-seen-on tv take-the-door procedure, one low, one high and the other right in the middle. Nothing there except cobwebs and that lawnmower. They come back through the yard and tell me that they are looking for a felon that escaped and is still in handcuffs. The original officer had pulled the driver over on suspicion of stolen vehicle, cuffed him when his passenger jumped out of the car and fired at him/them. The officer(s) got off twelve rounds (don't know if he was alone or had a partner) and the driver escaped during the melee.
There were black and whites zipping up and down the street all afternoon. On the way back from picking up the spousal unit I see lots more cops further up the road, yellow crime scene tape on a space the size of a football field and every major news outlet doing the live at the scene thing for the five o'clock news. I watched at 10 tonight and they gave all of 15 seconds to the story because, hey, this is Oklahoma and we might have bad weather. The bad guy fired at the officer(s) and the 12 shots t(he)y returned were not deadly and the shooter is fine in the hospital. The other guy is still at large and may be still handcuffed.
The mrs had me retrieve the blunderbuss and the canon from the attic (come get my lawnmower now, will ya?) So if I go missing in the next couple of days you'll know why.