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A Feeling. While Hughes and Johnson talked on and on—for 55 minutes minutes—the FBI agents traced the call to a phone booth in the mezzanine of Baltimore's Town Theater, where Mickey Spillane's blood and thunder I, the Jury was playing. The FBI rounded up a small task force of its agents, including Agent John Brady Murphy, 35, who had already started home to his wife and three children when he got orders to come back to his office. At the theater, four agents, led by Murphy, cautiously made their way up the stairs.
Johnson paused in his phone conversation, then said ominously: "I got a funny feeling." "What do you mean?" asked Hughes. "When you live like I do," said Johnson, "you get these kind of feelings and you play them." Suddenly, after talking some more, Hughes heard "the damnedest clatter on the phone, as if someone took a stack of quarters and poured them into the coin box in spurts. The phone went dead."
Johnson, playing his feeling, had pulled out his gun and was waiting for the agents as they came up the stairs. He fired through the glass door, fatally wounding Agent Murphy, seriously wounded another FBIman before he died in the booth under a rain of bullets. Next day Hughes gave Johnson an appropriate epitaph: "You can't mess with a mad dog and Johnny was a bad guy and that was that."