Deadline at Dawn

She peered infinitesimally out, and he wasn’t in sight, he’d gone on past along the avenue. She let her breath out slowly, stepped up onto sidewalk-level again. Now she knew what it meant, what he’d felt, Quinn, when he kept looking behind him on the way over to her place from the mill earlier tonight; insecurity was awfully contagious.

She drifted back the other way, eying the inscrutable house-front apprehensively as she neared it. What had happened to him in there? What had gone wrong, to hold him so long? He should have been out ages ago.

Just as she came abreast of the near end of the house, the vestibule-doors up above parted noiselessly and he appeared between them. They fell to again behind him but he didn’t move at once. He stood there looking down at her as though he didn’t see her. Or as though he did see her but didn’t know her.

Then he moved to the rim of the steps and started down.

But there was something the matter with the way he was coming out of there. It wasn’t fast enough. It was both too slow and something else besides; stupid, that was it. He was coming out too slow and stupid. As though he didn’t know where he was. No, that wasn’t it. As though — this was it — as though it didn’t matter whether he came out or stayed inside.

Twice he broke his uncertain descent to stop and look behind him up at the doorway he’d just come through. He was almost staggering with a sort of lassitude.

She’d reached him with a quick questioning step or two. She got to him just as he got to the bottom.

She stood a smattering of inches from him now. Even in the gloom, she thought, his face looked white and taut.

“What’s the matter? What’re you looking so frightened about?” she whispered hoarsely.

He kept staring blankly at her in a sort of dazed incomprehension. She couldn’t get it right out of him. Whatever it was had log-jammed in him. She put down the valise and shook him slightly by both shoulders.

“You’ve got to tell me. Don’t stand there looking like that. What happened in there?”

It had a hard time coming, but it came. Her slight shake had dislodged it.

“He’s been killed in there. He’s dead. He’s lying in there — dead.”

She gave a shuddering intake of breath. “Who, the... the man that lives there?”

“I guess so. The man I saw going out early this evening, the one I told you about.” He passed his hand across his brow, under his hat brim.

For a moment, of the two, she was the more stricken one, the more frustrated at any rate, for she knew who their adversary was, he didn’t.

She leaned against the stone side-arm of the stoop, wilted. “It did it,” she said dully, her eyes sightless over the top of his head. “I knew it would. I knew it wouldn’t let us square it. It never does. It’s got us now good, better than before. It’s got us just where it wants us.”

Apathy only lasted a moment. It teaches you how to fight, too. It teaches you a lot of bad things, but it teaches you one good thing. It teaches you how to fight. It’s always trying to kill you, so you learn to fight just to live at all.

She made a move, a sudden turn, as if to go on up the steps.

He reached out and caught her, held her tightly gripped, tried to turn her around again the way she’d been. “No, don’t you go in there! Stay out of there!” He tried to pull her down to the sidewalk, from the step or two she’d gained above it. “Hurry up, get out of here! Get away from in front of this house! I shouldn’t have let you come over here with me in the first place. Go down there, get your own ticket, climb on the bus, and forget you ever ran into me at all tonight.” She struggled passively against his hold. “Bricky, will you listen to me? Get out of here, beat it, before they—”

He tried to push her before him a step or two along the sidewalk to start her on her way. She only swerved around in a loop and came back to him again, in closer than before. “I only want to know one thing. I only want you to tell me one thing. It wasn’t you, was it — the first time you were in there? You didn’t, did you?”

“No! I only took the money, that was all. He wasn’t there. I didn’t see him at all. He must have come back since. Bricky, you’ve got to believe me.”

She smiled sadly at him in the semi-darkness. “It’s all right, Quinn. I know you didn’t. I know. I should have known even without asking. The boy next door, he’d never kill anyone.”

“I can’t go back now,” he murmured. “I’m finished. Cooked. They’ll think I did it. It knits in too close with what I did do. They’d only be waiting to get me at the other end, when I got there. And if it has to happen, I’d rather have it happen here, than there where everyone knows me. I’m staying, now. No use bucking it. Let it happen. I’ll wait. But you—” And again he tried to jostle her on her way. “Please go. Will you, Bricky? Please.”

This time she was immovable, he couldn’t even budge her. “You didn’t do it, right? Then let me alone, don’t push me any more, Quinn. I’m going in with you.”