Deadline at Dawn

She put on her best dance-hall armor, cut her hand at him frontally. “Now listen, I’m doing this, and I don’t want to hear any arguments. All of it has got to go back; if there’s even a dollar still out, it’s technically a theft and you’re open to arrest. Besides, what’s the difference? Call it a loan, if it’ll make you any happier. You can pay me back after we get home and you’ve started working again. I’ve still got enough left here to take care of both our bus tickets. You can square that up too, later on, if you want to.” She thrust it into his hand. “Here, you hang onto it for us. It’s our bankroll now, yours and mine.”

He gave her a look that was like a pause in the flurry of their preparations for departure. “Gee, I don’t know what to say—”

“Don’t say anything.” She flung herself back into the chair she’d originally sought out when she first entered the room. “The main thing is to make sure we both get out of this town tonight. Wait for me a minute, till I get my shoes on — throw a few things into my bag — there isn’t much to take—” Then as she saw him make a tentative move toward the door and look at her inquiringly, “No, stay right in here with me, don’t even wait outside — I’m afraid I’ll lose you, and you’re my one chance of getting home tonight—”

“You won’t lose me,” he promised almost inaudibly.

She jumped up again, settled her feet into their gear with a slight downward stamp of each one. “It’s funny, but I’m not tired any more—”

He watched her throw things headlong into a battered suitcase she had hauled out from under the cot. “Suppose he’s back by the time I get over there?”

“He won’t be. We’ve got to keep saying that, praying it. It’s the only way. You weren’t caught when you went there to take it, why should you be caught when you go there to put it back? He’s stepping out some place with that girl you saw leave with him — there’s an even chance he won’t get back till half-past three or four; till he sees her home to wherever she lives herself and—”

She went over to the window, raised it and leaned out. Not in the center of it, but slantwise, over in the far corner, looking off at an angle. “Look, we’ve still got time. You can still make it, you’ve still got a fighting chance.”

“What’s that out there you’re looking at?”

She drew her head in again. “That’s the only decent thing in this whole town. Every night it let me off when I thought I couldn’t hold out another minute. It never tricked me, never gypped me, and I know it won’t tonight. It’s the only friend I’ve got, the only one I’ve ever had since I first came here. It won’t let us down. It’s the clock on the Paramount Building, all the way over; you can see it from here, if you look the right way, where there’s a chunk cut out between two of the buildings— Come on, Quinn, it says we still can; and it never steered me wrong yet.”

She latched down the lid of the valise. He reached for it, and she passed it to him. He held the door wide for her a moment, after she’d already passed through to the hall. “Got everything? Sure there’s nothing else?”

“Close the door,” she said wearily. “I don’t want to look at it again. Leave the key in it, I won’t be needing it any more.”

They went down the rickety stairs one behind the other, he with her weather-beaten valise in his hand. It didn’t weigh much; it had hardly anything in it — just busted hopes. They trod softly, not so much in fear of inmates around them as with the instinctive hush that goes with night-departure.

At one place he saw her put out her hand to a star-shaped gash shattering the tinted plaster of the wall, hold it pressed there for a moment.

“What’d you do that for?”

“That used to be my lucky spot,” she whispered. “I’d touch it on my way out, every time I left here. A year or so ago, when I was still going around to casting-offices and such. You get that way, you know, when luck’s against you. It’s been a long time since I touched it last. It never paid off. But maybe it will tonight. I hope it does. We need it tonight.”

He’d gone down several steps beyond it, in her wake, while she spoke. He stopped for a moment, hesitated. Then he turned, went up again the step or two it took to reach it, put his hand to it as she had. Then he followed her down once more.

They stopped for a moment behind the street-door, side by side, before going on. Then she put out her hand to the knob. He put out his at almost the same instant. His hand came to rest atop hers. They stayed that way for a second. They looked at one another and smiled, artlessly, without coquetry, like children do. He said, “Gee, I’m sort of glad I met you tonight, Bricky.” She said, “I’m sort of glad I met you too, Quinn.”

Then he took his hand off and let hers open the door. It had been her house, until just now, after all.

Outside the street stretched still and empty—

Chapter 4