Johnny Get Your Gun (7 page)

Billy hung his head. “Will you arrest him?”

“I don’t think so. Part of the decision there rests with your father.”

The telephone rang and Billy jumped to answer it. He listened for only a moment and then held out the instrument;
Tibbs took it, spoke his name, and then actually seemed to turn pale. “I’ll go there directly,” he said and hung up.

He turned toward his hostess. “I’m very sorry,” he apologized, “but I have to leave at once. Please excuse me.” Within seconds he was out of the door and literally running for his car. Because of the time element it was hard for him to connect what had happened so recently at the Hotchkiss home with the report he had just been given, but he felt a definite tightening of his nerves.

He headed westward, driving as rapidly as he could without going into code three condition, toward a familiar destination. As he did so he tried to decide if it was possible that Johnny McGuire had somehow made his way without delay to another part of the city, or whether he now had two similar cases on his hands.

He pulled up and parked near to the emergency entrance of the Huntington Memorial Hospital. As he went inside he noted at once a gangling Negro youth who was waiting in the corridor. He knew that he wanted to talk to this young man, but his first concern was for the patient who had just been brought in. The receptionist nurse, who knew him, quickly shook her head. “You’ll have to wait, Mr. Tibbs,” she told him. “The boy is in critical condition; they’ve taken him into surgery. Even if he pulls through, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to see him tonight. At least I don’t think so.” As she finished speaking she inclined her head, very slightly, toward the teen-ager standing in the hallway.

“Thank you,” he said. “If you get any further word, let me know immediately. Will you, please?”

“Of course—I’ve already asked them to keep me informed.”

In a manner which seemed almost casual Tibbs turned away from the desk, walked down the corridor a short way, and then turned to speak to the obviously tense youth who seemed to be not quite sure where he was. “Did you bring in the boy who was shot?” he asked.

The young man looked slightly down at him from his six foot height and took his time before he answered. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“A friend of yours?” Tibbs asked.

Despite his obvious tension, the young Negro took a studied time before he answered. Then he said simply, “Yeah.”

“It’s a good thing you brought him immediately,” Tibbs told him. “It’s possible that you may have saved his life.”

He was ignored.

This was not a new game, he had encountered it many times before. Pretending he had not noticed, he took his own time before he put his next question. Then he asked, “What happened?”

The Negro youth lifted his shoulders by way of reply and then let them settle back into position.

Once more Tibbs waited, then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a small leather case, opened it, and displayed his badge. He very seldom did that, if he had to offer
credentials he preferred a simple calling card. In this instance the badge itself was the proper answer.

“Why didn’t cha tell me?” the tall boy asked.

“I just did.” There was no edge to the words, they came out only as a flat statement. “Who are you?”

The teen-ager shifted his weight. “Charlie Dempsey. They call me Sport.”

“What happened, Sport?”

“Well, we was out drivin’ in my car, doin’ nothin’ much, when we seen this kid. He looked like he was real lost so I stopped. I figured maybe he needed some help.”

“Just like that.”

Again the shoulders rose and fell in a slow movement. “I figured if we took the kid home, we might get a dollar or two for the trouble.”

Tibbs nodded his head slowly as if that explanation had satisfied him. “Did you get out?”

“No, Beater, he got out. Nice and friendly-like he walked up to the kid. When they started talking then we all got out, I did and so did Jeff and Harry. Jus’ got out, that’s all. As soon as we got up near to the kid he called us a bunch o’ niggers.”

“I don’t like that word,” Tibbs said.

For the first time Dempsey looked at him with something like interest in his eyes.

“Well we didn’t like it neither and we tol’ him so. Just nice like. He was only a little kid.”

“Was he wearing a jacket?”

“Yeah?”

“What color?”

“Red.”

“New?”

“Naw, old. His arms was stickin’ out the elbows.”

“What about the gun?”

“Well, all we seen was this paper bag he had. Beater, he asked the kid what was in it and he said his lunch.”

“You didn’t believe that.”

“’Course not. Then all of a sudden the bag falls off, there the kid is standin’ with the gun. First I thought it was a water pistol or somethin’, then the kid he says it’s real.”

“Did you believe him?”

The Negro youth’s voice rose slightly. “Mister, I wasn’t takin’ no chances on that. I started to edge around him so’s I could grab him from the back. Jeff and Harry, they went for the sides. Beater, he stayed where he was in front. With the kid pointin’ the gun at him he didn’t dare go noplace.”

Tibbs glanced down the hall toward the nurse receptionist, but she seemed occupied in working with a form on her desk.

“And then?”

Again the maddening shoulder shrug before the answer came. “The kid, he tried to jerk away, same time he fired the gun and hit Beater right in the guts. The damn little monkey shot him in cold blood.”

“Go on.”

“Well, Beater, he grabbed hisself and went down. Mister, I was too scared to know what I did. I let the kid go; I think he fired again, but I ain’t sure, then he turned and run like hell. We didn’t give no damn for him; we laid Beater out in the car and I brought him here.”

“Where are the others?”

“They went home.”

Tibbs produced his notebook. “Where do you live, Sport?” he asked. Dempsey gave him his address and those of his other two associates.

“Tell me about Beater, what sort of a fellow is he?”

This time there was no preliminary shoulder shrug, instead the boy seemed glad to answer the question. “Beater, he’s got talent, he can do anythin’. Real sharp. He’s a great cat on the skins, as good as they come, s’why we call him Beater. Good in a fight, clean like, good talker. He’s got it all.”

“Good friend of yours?”

“Best I got.”

That sobered Tibbs, knowing what he did about the injured boy’s condition. He flared with inner anger at the senselessness of it all. The loaded gun kept where a child had access to it; the idiotic mistake of grabbing a badly frightened boy from the rear when he was holding a gun and someone was standing directly in front of him.

Guns, dammit, guns!
The right to keep and bear arms was given when a raw young country was part of a great,
wild, largely unknown continent. In crowded modern cities a loaded gun was as lethal as a pit viper, a machine for killing and nothing else. Killing. First there was Kennedy and the bitter, terrible reality of a presidential assassination. Then Martin Luther King, as a Negro Tibbs could never forget that one. Because King had been more than just a prominent public figure who had been cut down; he had been the whole pride and hope of a long-suffering people, a man whose voice was listened to everywhere—and respected. The manhunt for his killer had been one of the most intensive in all history, but that did not bring King back, or his words, or give back to the Negro people their Nobel Prize winning peacemaker.

Then Robert Kennedy—three bullets from a small .22 had stopped his energy, his intensive drive, erased his victory over Eugene McCarthy, terminated in mid-flight his bid for the Presidency. One man, any man, could do it at any time.

It bit deeply into Tibbs’s being because so many who had fallen had been Negroes, leaders who had offended the Southern white establishment. And among the dead lay the white mailman who had gone to the South to ask for fairness for his fellowmen and who had left his life there.

Because someone had a gun
, a gun he could buy as easily as a stick of gum. Now Johnny McGuire was still in the city somewhere, still loose, still frightened, and still armed with a gun with several live bullets nested in its chambers.

For a few seconds Virgil had a hard time controlling himself. He saw before him the face of Mike McGuire, who
ruthlessly forced other cars off the road when he was piqued, who in his ignorance considered himself to be a superior being, and who kept a gun to feed his vanity and cover his weaknesses.

In rage and frustration he clamped his teeth and cursed the day he had become a policeman. Then he would not have had to face things like this. But they would still be happening, whether he saw them with his own eyes or not. And until the last bullet was out of Johnny McGuire’s gun, or until he was captured and the weapon was safely taken from him, who knew
what
could happen.

The nurse down the hall picked up her phone in answer to a short, subdued ring. She listened and then motioned to Virgil Tibbs who walked quickly down to where he could speak with her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Tibbs, it’s all over,” she said. “They did everything possible, but it was no use. The boy died in surgery two or three minutes ago.”

A sense of weariness and galling defeat hit Virgil Tibbs; for the moment life to him was not worth the living.

Somewhere in the interior of the hospital a promising boy he had never met lay dead, his life taken from him before he had hardly begun to live. Somewhere in the city there would be parents, anxious parents by now, to whom someone would have to carry a terrible message. Somewhere else there was an irresponsible boy, armed and dangerous, who in his desperation, might shoot again.

He would have to go back to the McGuires now and break the news of what had happened. Then, somehow, he would have to find and disarm their son. He understood perfectly how the boy had been frightened, he knew that the fatal shooting had been accidental, but that did not resolve
the problem. Because of his own dark skin, it might even compound it: if he came face-to-face with Johnny McGuire the boy would hardly now turn to him for help. It was more likely that he would think him a vengeful parent or older brother of the boy he had shot.

Tibbs went back up the corridor to where the lanky adolescent was still waiting. “I’ve just had a report,” he said.

“Is he gone?” the boy asked.

Tibbs nodded. “They lost him in surgery, trying their utmost to save his life. So he didn’t know, he was asleep.”

There was a dead, thick silence.

“I’m gonna find that kid and kill him,” Sport said. Not to Tibbs, but to the world around him, as far as it would reach.

“No. We’ll find the boy. We’ll get the gun and take him into custody.”

“I’m gonna kill him,” Dempsey repeated.

“You won’t, you must not. For one thing, he isn’t the only guilty person.”

“Then who is?” the boy asked, burning Tibbs with his eyes.

“There’s more than one person. His father, for keeping a gun where he could find it. Some Washington lobbyist who fought firearms control. Some legislators who went along with him because he was a good fellow.”

“You gonna tell his family?” Sport asked. “I don’ wanna have to do that.”

Tibbs looked down at his hands to see if they would hold steady. He had had an exhausting day well before the first call on this job had come in, now he was physically and emotionally near to the end of his reserves. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor made him look up; a young man in a clerical collar was approaching. “Mr. Tibbs, I’m Pastor Phillips,” he said and shook hands briefly. “I understand a little of what has happened. Can I be of any help?”

Tibbs introduced Dempsey and supplied a condensed account of the evening’s events.

“Has the family been notified?” the minister asked.

Tibbs shook his head. “I suspect that will be my job.”

“Let me.” He turned toward Dempsey. “Let’s go together, since you know them. I may be able to offer spiritual comfort—poor people.”

“Pastor, if you would care to do that, it would be a great help to me,” Tibbs acknowledged. “I have another family to see.”

The minister laid his arm across the shoulders of the awkward boy. “Shall we go?” he invited. With calm assurance he led him down the corridor and outside.

“Thank God for him—literally,” Virgil said to himself and returned to the admittance desk where he could phone. He reported and was told in return that the watch over the Hotchkiss house would remain in effect on a twenty-four
hour basis until Johnny McGuire had been captured. A stakeout was also set up at the McGuire home in the hope that the missing boy would come back on his own. Now, however, things were different and he would have to be taken into custody.

There was nothing new about the boy. One of Tibbs’s fellow investigators came on the line briefly; he had made a quick check of the area where the shooting had taken place. Two families where lights had been on had admitted that they had heard “a noise” which might have been a shot or shots. Neither had reported it, one householder claimed he had thought it was a backfire from a hopped-up car, the other flatly admitted that whatever it had been, he hadn’t wanted to get involved. The investigator had not bothered to explain that a properly equipped ambulance, if one had been called promptly, might have made the difference between survival or death; it would have been a waste of breath.

Notebook in hand, Virgil asked the admissions nurse for the proper name of the deceased, he had only heard him described as “Beater.” The efficient, middle-aged woman consulted the work sheet before her. “Willie Orthcutt,” she reported, and supplied the address. “That’s all that I have now, Mr. Tibbs, there should be some more details later.”

He drew in his breath and held it, then he let it out slowly while he thought. His mind at that moment was very active; unconsciously he passed a hand across his forehead as though to wipe away invisible perspiration.

“Mr. Tibbs, would you like a sedative?” the nurse offered. “Just something to quiet your nerves?”