Nuclear .38 Special Rounds?

I was a rookie patrolman when my senior partner and I were called to back up a pair of robbery detectives. They planned to kick in a door at a felon-filled flophouse hotel, crunch some cockroaches and yank a sleepy stickup-shooting suspect outta his grimy sheets. His room was on the second floor of this converted century-old residence, and a rickety stairway led directly from his crib down to a garbage-littered lot. That’s where Davey and I were posted — just in case Plan A went South when the “dicks” kicked the front door. It did.

We weren’t quite “positioned” when multiple muffled gunshots preceded Hairball Harry’s rapid exit out onto the landing. There was a flash of light as the door banged hard against the rail, and both Davey and I thought it was a muzzle flash and gunshot. Davey was standing in front of me with his trusty 6" S&W Model 10 aimed at Harry. He squeezed (or jerked) the trigger — and the stairway landing seemed to explode, with a hurricane of splinters and dust billowing out toward us as simultaneously, the entire stairway screeched, groaned, and collapsed to the deck.

  I pushed past Davey when a second after that, a ground-floor back door flew open and two skivvie-clad bed-headed dudes with pistols in their mitts staggered outside, blinded by the clouds of dust, shouting stuff like “COPS! They’re usin’ grenades!” and searching for targets. Using some ungentlemanly language, I convinced ’em of the inferiority of their tactical situation. Good thing they didn’t fight — my partner was still standing there, frozen, with his revolver a hand’s-breadth from his nose, staring incredulously at the muzzle. He was lost in his own world, wondering how a lead 158 gr. SWC could blow up a stairway and two landings. Finally, I had to grab the gun and gently awaken him.

  The gunshots were Hairball Harry’s response to his door gettin’ kicked. The dicks had sidestepped, and were occupied with straightening out a pair of pucker-factor-induced “wedgies.” That flash was the bulb of an outside light’s last gasp as its fuse blew out. The once-heavy wooden beams and planks of that stairway were virtually hollow shells filled with a century’s worth of termites and wood-powder. It simply imploded under Harry’s weight. He was unconscious, suffering multiple injuries, snoozin’ in the wreckage.

  The Big Diff between me an’ Davey was that previous combat experience had taught me stuff blows up and weird things happen in gunfights, and you have to keep your head in the game.

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