Johnny Get Your Gun

6

During the first few terrible seconds after the bark of the gun and the crash of the bullet through the front living room window, Ralph Hotchkiss’s reaction was one of shocked disbelief. Then a burning demand for action seized him and he lunged toward the front door of his home.

He heard the word “No!” and then felt the impact as his wife flung herself in front of him. She threw her arms around his waist. “No, no!” she repeated. “Don’t go, don’t, he’ll kill you!”

The impact of her words hit him. He quickly pulled Estelle down to the floor and pressed her shoulders there.

“Don’t get up,” he ordered. “Stay right there. I’ll call the police.” As he finished speaking the phone rang.

Holding himself bent over to make a smaller target he ran to the phone, lifted it off, and quickly said, “Yes?”

“This is Mr. Tibbs,” the voice said. “We took the guard off your home, Mr. Hotchkiss, when we picked up a young boy we thought was Johnny McGuire. It was a mistake, so the officers will be back shortly.”

Ralph tried to make his voice sound sane. “We’re being shot at. A bullet came through our front window just a few seconds ago!”

“Turn off the lights and keep down. “We’ll go after the boy at once. You’ll have protection within five minutes.”

“I hope we last that long,” Hotchkiss retorted. His nerves were quivering so badly he was unable to think what he was saying. Then something approaching sanity returned. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m not myself.”

“Understood, now get those lights off.” Tibbs hung up.

“Dad, what’s happening?” came from behind Hotchkiss. He turned quickly to find his son.

“Down on the floor, Billy, now!” he ordered, then he ran to the light switch and turned it off. Feeling the shielding comfort of the darkness, he returned to where he had left his family prone in the middle of the floor.

“That was Tibbs, the policeman,” he said. “He told us to keep down and to turn off the lights. They’ll be back any minute.”

“I hope so,” his wife answered him, a strange calmness in her voice.

Then it was quiet in the Hotchkiss household. Billy, knowing that he was the cause of it all, needed no cautioning to make him remain still. He tried to stay absolutely motionless and regulated his breathing as best he could.

Outside faint traffic noises could be heard; from almost a block away a city bus made familiar churning sounds as it pulled away from the curb. From inside the house the soft whirr of an electric clock could just be detected.

Then headlights came down the street and there was the sharper, clearer sound of vehicles pulling up and stopping.

“The police are back.” Hotchkiss raised himself enough to peer out the window. He saw two official cars with red lights on and a third just arriving. A few moments later there was a knock at the door. “Mr. Hotchkiss, can you hear me?” a voice asked.

“Yes, clearly.”

“Good. We’re back and looking for the boy now. We have men all around your home, but stay where you are, with the lights off, until we can make a thorough check. We don’t want to take any chances.”

“Agreed.” Nevertheless after a minute or two Hotchkiss sat up, satisfied that the danger was past, and looked out the window. Across the street, in the wooded area, he could see flashing lights and hear the voices of several men. Then compassion returned to him and he hoped that they would not hurt the boy when they found him. In the cool calmness of the darkened room he realized that they would not do that. He also began to understand how deeply his own son must have injured the youngster outside.

He also thought that the father had to be some kind of an idiot to keep a loaded revolver where a child could get at it.

Again there was a knock on the door, a quieter one this time. “This is Mr. Tibbs,” Ralph heard. “You can turn on the lights now, Mr. Hotchkiss. And I’d like to come in if you please.”

Stiffly and uncertain of himself, he got up, went to the light switch, and then opened the door. He found Tibbs there and also Barry Rothberg. As the policemen came in Estelle Hotchkiss got to her feet; her composure was badly shaken, but she made an effort nonetheless. “Will you have some coffee?”

“Thank you,” Tibbs said. “We’re a little shaken too.”

That broke the ice. “I’m very sorry for the experience you’ve just been through,” Virgil said to his host. “I told you what happened; we put two and two together and got the wrong four. If Chief Addis feels that it was our fault for pulling the protection away from your home too soon, and he very well may, then we’ll pay for the window and the damage to your woodwork.”

Hotchkiss shook his head. “Never mind that, we’re insured. I only hope now that you find the boy and get the gun away from him before anything more happens.”

“Amen,” Tibbs agreed.

There was a strained silence for a short while, then Estelle Hotchkiss reappeared with a tray of empty coffee cups, cream, and sugar. “The kettle’s on,” she announced. “It will just be a couple of minutes.” She set out the cups carefully in front of her husband and the two policemen.

Although he was at the moment a guest, Virgil’s thoughts were very much elsewhere. He kept listening for any indication from the men outside that the boy had been found. If and when he was, then it was his intention to take him home himself and make sure that the child was not ill-treated. Having formed his estimate of Mike McGuire, he considered it a definite possibility that he might have to remain present until Johnny was at least safely in bed.

Estelle came in with the coffee and poured it out with hands which shook just a little. “Will they find him?” she asked.

“I believe so,” Tibbs answered her easily. “He’s only a small boy and he can’t get too far on foot. It may take a little while because we don’t want to frighten him any further if we can avoid it, and of course we have to recover the gun he has, or had, without any more accidents.”

“What will you do to him?” Billy asked.

“I’m going to take him home myself,” Virgil answered, “and help him if I can. He’s not as old as you are, you know.”

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.”