Then Zeigler began to babble.  He talked about his parents' Christmas presents.  He kept repeating, "Don's plant at the store." It made no sense to Thompson, and he asked no more questions.

*

After Thompson left with Zeigler, Don Ficke waited outside the store.  He had no gun, and he wasn't going to enter the dark building without one.  He asked Jimmy Yawn for a shotgun, but Yawn didn't have one in his patrol car.  Cindy Blalock drove up, and Ficke asked her for a shotgun.  She didn't have one, either.  So Ficke sent Yawn to get weapons from their headquarters.  Blalock went around to the back, outside the high fence--she must have passed May's van--to the southwest corner of the back lot, where she could watch the rear of the building.  Out front, Ficke called for backup from the Orange County sheriff's office, and he waited.

Ted Van Deventer drove up with the Presbyterian minister, Mickey Fisher; they had followed Thompson and Ficke.  Ficke asked them to go to Zeigler's house to notify Eunice that her husband had been shot; they left immediately.  A former Winter Garden patrolman named Phil Cross drove up with a friend, Richard Sims.  They had heard the call on a police scanner.  Ficke deputized them both.

After about six minutes, Yawn returned with shotguns, and Ficke passed them out to Sims and Cross.  At about that time, Thompson came back from the hospital with the news that Charlie Mays might be wounded in the store.

Violence was not uncommon in West Orange, especially during harvest season, when the migrant camps were full.  Yawn, Thompson, and Ficke all had known tense situations and had seen the effects of shootings, stabbings, and assaults.  During the past year Ficke had even been involved in a hostage standoff, when a man in an apartment threatened to kill his wife; the apartment belonged to Tommy Zeigler, and Zeigler, who knew the man, had come to the scene and talked him out.

But this was something else:  a large dark store, a wounded robber who was already supposed to have shot one person.  And this on what was supposed to be the quietest night of the year.

Ficke may have felt the tension.  Yawn reported later that the chief was unable to load his own shotgun.  He fumbled with the shells, dropped them to the ground.  Yawn loaded the weapon and gave it to Ficke.

"Let me go in first," Thompson said.  "I know Mays, and he knows me."

Thompson and Yawn went in together, with Phil Cross behind Thompson and to his left.  Ficke and Sims followed.