Deadline at Dawn

He was huddled there on a bench against the wall, disconsolate and in distress. He was still holding himself there where he’d been shot. Or at least holding his coat convulsively clenched over it. It must be hurting him a lot. His head was way over, tilted back against the wall, as if he were staring straight up at the ceiling. But he had his free hand pasted over his face, hiding his eyes. Or holding them or something.

His mouth was a little open, and he was doing his breathing through that.

There was room on the bench for two, and Quinn sat down next to him. There was silence for a moment, just the heavy sound of Quinn’s own breathing after his fast hike along the corridor.

The man beside him didn’t look at him right away. Too much pain or too much misery or something. He didn’t care who it was next to him, didn’t even want to know.

Quinn reached for a cigarette and took one out and lit it. Then he blew the smoke straight at the side of his face, to attract his attention. Straight into his ear almost. It was calloused in a way, that occurred to him even at the moment of doing it. But he wanted him to know he was there. He said to himself: That’ll get him. That’ll make him turn. Watch.

The hand came down off his face, and then the face itself came down to a level, and he turned around and looked at Quinn.

Quinn thought he’d never seen such hopeless misery in his life. A sort of shock went through him. But not on that account. Some strange feeling of kinship got to him, and he couldn’t understand why, at such a moment. He didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like — just anyone at all you sat down next to. Quinn thought: Why, he looks like me, almost. At least, he looks like I feel I look like. Sort of harmless, and helpless, and he’s no older than me. Why, it might be me sitting there, looking back here at where I am, with a bullet in my chest.

He looked down and he saw a paper tissue there on the floor, bloodied up. Like the one in the booth.

He spoke first. He said to Quinn: “Can I have one of those?”

Quinn let him have one. He said drily, “Yes, I guess a guy like you, he needs a smoke pretty bad.”

The man beside him gave him a wan sort of smile back, and he said: “Does he? He sure does.”

Quinn waited for him to light the cigarette, but instead he aimed it toward Quinn’s own and ignited it from the tip of that. Quinn let him. He thought: This is the closest I’ve ever come to a murderer yet. Some of the other’s smoke-laden breath got in his face.

He spoke again. He said to Quinn: “Are you here for the same thing I am?”

“No,” Quinn said grimly. “Just the opposite, about. Just the reverse.”

He waited a moment. Then he said: “You ran out of cigars, I guess.”

The man said: “Yes, I did. I only had one left, and I used that up hours—” Then he got it. “How’d you know?” he said.

“I found it up at Graves’ place, chewed to ribbons,” Quinn said quietly.

The man just looked at him. It was beginning to sink in now.

Nothing more came, so Quinn spoke again. “Did the spirits of ammonia make you feel any better? The dose you had at the drugstore over on Madison near Seventieth?”

The man’s face was starting to go a funny color. The profile of his throat joggled a little. “How did you know?” he breathed.

“I found that too; on the directory, outside the phone-booths at the back.”

The cigarette Quinn had given him fell to the floor. He hadn’t wanted to discard it, his mouth got too loose to hold it, and it fell out before he could catch it.

Quinn kept looking at him, looking at him, and he kept looking back.

Quinn said: “Does it hurt you very much? There where you’re holding it?” And he ran his bent knuckle past the up-ended reveres without actually touching them.

“Did you lose a lot of blood?” he said. Then he took the man’s hand and disengaged it forcibly, but still trying not to jar it too much, trying to be gentle about it.

The coat peeled open and there was nothing, just blank whiteness, unbroken whiteness all the way down to his belt.

Quinn sat back with a jolt on the bench.

The man said: “I haven’t any undershirt on. I came out this way, with my coat on my bare back.”

He tightened it up again, with a gesture that must have become almost second-nature by now.

Quinn leaned forward again. “So he didn’t get you,” he said. “I thought he did. Then where was the blood from?”

“From my nose. Any time I get excited it does that. All night off and on, it’s been—”

“That’s a bad combination,” Quinn said. “A killer with a chronic nosebleed. That puts a strike on you.”

The man’s jaw hung slack. “What?” he said idiotically, as though he hadn’t heard him right.

“You know you killed him, don’t you? You know you left him up there dead behind you? You know that, don’t you?”

The man tried to get up off the bench. Quinn put his hand lightly on his shoulder, and then bore down a little. “No, stay here,” he said with deceptive unconcern, “don’t try to get up right away. Stay where you are a while.”

The whole lower part of the man’s face was dancing now.