‘We Were Just Trying to Figure Out How to Stay Alive’

She had come back to see for herself, to examine the bullet holes and broken glass, to sort through what had happened in 30 wild minutes the day before. She sat on a curb in the parking lot of the Bank of America branch. She wore a violet T-shirt, short pants and a cap that promoted “Rain for Rent.” On her right foot was a white jogging shoe. On her left was a fresh splint.

That Tracy Fisher had been shot in the little toe made her a victim of the great gun battle at this bank Friday morning. That she only was shot in the toe made her something of a walking miracle.

A 28-year-old freelance set designer, Fisher grew up in North Hollywood. This was her part of Los Angeles. This was her bank branch. She had swung into the parking lot Friday to withdraw some cash from the automated teller machine. It was her boyfriend’s birthday. She wanted to buy him flowers. Her dog, named D.O.G., was with her. She was taking him to the vet.

As she stopped, Fisher heard what sounded like muffled gunfire. It seemed to be coming from inside the bank. She drove across the street to a Del Taco and dialed 911 on her cellular phone. The dispatcher told her officers already were on the way. She spotted one, in fact, in the bank parking lot. She assumed the incident was settled. She hung up, got out and walked over to the officer.

“Hi, my name is Tracy,” she said. “I’m the one who just called 911.”

It was then, she would say later, that she heard the brrrp brrrp brrrp of automatic weapon fire. It was then that bullets began slapping into the pavement all around her. It was then she saw the hulking men in the stance of war movie soldiers, aiming at her, Tracy Fisher, a slight, soft-spoken woman who only wanted cash to buy flowers.

“They were,” she said of these men, “like machines.”

Quickly, the officer pushed her down behind a squad car. Two other passersby--”these two gentlemen,” she called them--crouched beside her. Shots pounded into the car, shattering glass, ripping through metal.

“The car,” she said, “was like disintegrating.”

The gunmen were maybe 20 paces away, and closing.

*

Fisher was not the only person drawn back to the bank Saturday morning. The surrounding streets swarmed with all sorts of people. Police officers could be overheard swapping battle stories in a language of their own: “I heard him go like, ‘Code 3, Code 3.’ It was definitely the pucker factor.” Reporters traded in rumors of militia connections, terrorist angles. And there was the obligatory “Day ofthe Locust” crowd, kids crawling through shrubbery in search of souvenir casings, sightseers poking with shoes at bloodstains that marked where the masked gunmen had fallen.

“See,” a mother told her two little daughters a block away, “this is where the bad guy got shot. See that, that is blood.”

“Where?” one of the little ones asked.

“Right there, that red there. That is blood.”

“What are those holes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they are bullet holes. OK, kids, let’s go.”

And everywhere--in front of stucco bungalows pocked with bullets, along the crowded sidewalks, in the bank parking lot--people young and old could be seen posing in the stance of soldiers, blazing away with imaginary AK-47s, reliving what they had witnessed firsthand, or at least had watched on television.

“I wish I had only watched it on television,” Tracy Fisher was saying now. “It was much worse being here.”

She spoke in a faraway voice. Her eyes were squinted, and sometimes filled with tears: She was focused on some interior screen, trying to describe for the benefit of a few strangers with note pads the bad movie that kept rerunning through her mind.

She told how at first they tried to flag down a helicopter hovering overhead. They thought maybe it could land and pluck them away, Vietnam-style. They called out to police officers across the street. The gunfire simply was too fierce for a rescue.

Just stay still, they told each other. Maybe they will think we are dead.

No, the gunmen were too close. A few more steps and they would be around the car, firing at point-blank range. Run. Run. They stood up to bolt. Fisher felt something like a knife run through her foot. They huddled back down behind what was left of the car and tried to make themselves smaller targets. She held one of the men from behind, and the other held her the same way--”like three little monkeys.” The hammering of gunfire did not stop.

“We were just trying to figure out how to stay alive,” she said. “I started making deals with God. I said ‘I don’t want to die,’ and then I added, ‘I don’t want to get shot again, either.’ Because it hurt. It knocked my foot out from under me.

One of the gentlemen I was with was getting shot. He was shot several times. I saw it happen. I was holding him when he got shot. We were calling him Mikey. We just kept telling Mikey to hold on. Hold on, Mikey, hold on. You can make it.”

How many times was this Mikey hit? she was asked.

Her voice broke.

“Seven times.”

At last an armored car drove toward them. It had been commandeered by detectives. They yanked her through the back door. “I remember asking them, ‘Is this bulletproof?’ ” The cops had to steer the Brinks truck straight through the cross-fire to escape the parking lot. As the gunfire clanged, she kept telling Mikey and the other man how someday they would all reunite in Hawaii and “just lay there on the beach, and there will be no guns.”

She smiled a little as she recalled this promise. On this, the morning after, amid the bullet holes and broken glass, Tracy Fisher could not understand why she was still around to tell her own story. She could not understand why she was not dead. She was a miracle, walking with a limp.