Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (i am reading a book TXT) 📕

“Give it to me,” the man repeated, coming up all the way and touching him on the shoulder.

July, having decided what to do at the split second he began doing it, ran past the man and made it to the door, where, trying to get it open, he felt hands grab him from behind.

“Stop. Give me that gun.”

July turned and with all of his force pushed. To his astonishment, the man went backward almost to the bed, giving him time to get the door open, get the empty pistol into his pocket and begin running down the hall.

“Stop him!” yelled the voice, and three boys at the end of the hall, two older than himself, stepped out of their rooms, barring his way to the staircase. July fixed his eyes straight on the biggest one, the one on the right, and ran at him; then just before making contact he changed course and ran through the middle, taking the smaller boy halfway down the stairs with him.

“Stop him!” came the shouting again, but the man with the hole in his windpipe couldn’t get around the counter before July was through the lobby, through the door and into the city night. Down the staircase tumbled counselor Tracy and thirteen or fourteen boys, one of them yelling, “Get the fucker, he broke my arm! My arm’s broke!”

“Terry, stop that kind of language! The rest of you get back up to your rooms or you’ll all be put on probation.”

They reluctantly left. Bill Jensen and counselor Tracy looked at Terry’s arm, found it to be not broken and sent him upstairs, reprimanding him again for his bad language.

“What’d he do?” asked Terry.

“Never mind. Get on upstairs.”

He went. Together, the older men went outside onto the sidewalk and looked down the street as far as they could see. Bob Tracy lit a cigarette. His hands were still shaking. He threw the match beyond the curb. “I’m going to quit,” he said sadly.

“What happened?”

“The kid had a gun. I panicked. I guess I wasn’t expecting anything like that on the second floor with the younger kids. I’ve handled things like that before. But this time I panicked. I didn’t know we had a new kid—just saw the light under the door and stopped in to get him to douse it. Then the gun on the bed . . . I panicked, and scared him. Now God knows the damage. The last thing in his mind was to point that gun at me, but I went at him like a hardened criminal—‘Give me that gun, give me that gun,’ like some kind of cop.”

“It happens to everybody.”

“Well, everybody it happens to shouldn’t have a job working with kids. Who knows what the damage—”

“Come on, let’s get some coffee. We’ve got to put together that requisition for film equipment.”

“They’ll never give it to us. If it costs one red cent . . . That poor kid.” They went inside.

July was running. Every shadow, every moving car, every doorway he thought concealed a policeman whose only goal that evening was to kill the kid with the gun from the YMCA. One old woman sitting on the step of her house yelled at him, calling him a thief. Four blocks later he stopped running. Run when you have to, he thought, otherwise it attracts too much attention. Far away he heard a siren and the adrenaline froze his blood. Then he heard another siren in another direction. Surrounded. He saw a stone wall across the street from him, and with the help of an iron fence, he got over it to the other side. He found himself in a small courtyard of an apartment complex. He stood back againstthe wall in the shadows and waited. He stayed there until after all the lights in the apartments had been turned out and he’d heard enough sirens to know that if they were all after him, they didn’t have a very good idea where to look. Then he decided to move. The door from the courtyard into a back alley could be opened from the inside, and he used it. He was hungry.

After an hour of walking, he managed to find his way back to the diner, which was still open. One of the movie palaces was spilling its patrons back onto the street, and in the commotion July felt safer. He bought another sausage sandwich, this time of a different color. There were no places to sit down and he ate it standing, being thankful for the well-lit room and the people impervious to him. He bought a bag of potato chips. A police car pulled up in front. There was a moment while it sat there like a white-and-blue toad. Then both doors flew open and two policemen came rushing into the diner crouched low like two halfbacks. July dropped his potato chips. One of the policemen threw him back away from the counter with a quick brush of his arm. A girl at the end of the counter next to the rainbow punch machine made an effort to run, but was quickly caught. She screamed, kicked and swore, and one of the policemen cuffed her on the side of the head. Then they bodily lifted her away from the edge of the counter she was holding on to and carried her out, arms and legs flailing, cursing, and stuffed her into the back seat of the car and drove away.

“You better pick them up,” the man behind the counter said to July, motioning down to the potato chips. “Someone’s likely to step on them.”

Having someone’s attention, July mustered all the courage he had and asked, “Why . . . why did they do that?”

“I don’t know, probably just some hooker on junk. Maybe she’s in the rackets.” He went away to wait on someone.

July picked up his potato chips and went outside. He was beginning to be very tired. Just as he had