“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.”
7
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.