Deadline at Dawn

They turned aside and the shadows of the inset blacked the two of them out. All you could hear were their voices, whispering guardedly. That and the faint clash of an ashcan-lid being removed.

“Got it?”

There was an accusing pause. Then Bricky slurred, “Are you telling me the level on this?”

“Somebody’s found it! Somebody’s taken it out!”

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

“It was in this alley, and no other. I remember how it looked, when you turned and faced the street from in here. Those windows across there with all the little white splits in their panes. And it was this first can here. It’s full of coke-husks.”

Silence from Bricky.

“I swear I’m telling you the truth. Why would I want to back out now, after bringing you all the way over here?”

“You sound like it was the truth, at that. Never mind, don’t dig your arm all the way down through that stuff. It would be on the top if it was anywhere at all. Some night-scavenger must have come along right after you and found it. Maybe someone noticed you slip in and out of here.”

They reappeared suddenly in the lesser sombreness of the sidewalk.

“All right, now let’s go there,” Bricky said quietly.

The girl stopped short and looked at her pleadingly. “Do I have to?”

“You’ve got to go where it is. That’s what I hauled you out of your place with me for. That’s the main thing, not digging up the gun. The heck with the gun.”

They started on the way back. They recrossed Third. Suddenly the girl had stopped again. She was shaking all over; Bricky could tell even in the darkness.

“Snap out of it,” she started to say. “What’re you balking for n—?”

Without a word the girl turned aside and went into the rancid entrance they had halted opposite. For a moment Bricky thought she was trying to elude her, make a getaway. Her arm started to reach out after her to pull her back. Then she let it fall, checked the exclamation that had risen to her lips. A curious, coldly-frightening sensation coursed through her for a minute.

She went in after her. “What’re you doing, kidding me?” Her voice was unsteady.

In the dim light there was inside this hallway, this tunnel toward — who knew what? — she saw the girl look at her as if she didn’t understand her, didn’t know what she meant by asking that.

She waived the question. The girl went up stairs there at the back. She went at her heels. She couldn’t have told which was the more frightened one of the two of them now. Her fright was a sort of sick dismay.

Halfway up the girl stopped again. “I can’t— Why do I have to?”

Bricky motioned ahead of the two of them with a stab of her finger. “Keep going, wherever you’re going,” she said tersely.

Their shadows climbed the dingy walls beside them.

They stood before a door now.

Harry Kirsch’s wife looked at it, all around its edges four-square, as though it were insuperable.

“Open it,” Bricky said, reading their destination in her antipathy.

She reached out and touched the knob as though afraid it would sting her. She gave it a quick turn and then snatched her hand back. It slanted open now.

“You first,” Bricky said.

The other girl’s face was that of a doomed thing as she went in before her. Bricky remembered something she’d said down at her own flat earlier. Yes, this was like dying twice, all right. But she wasn’t dying alone, something in Bricky was dying along with her — had been ever since outside on the street before.

A light was on. First there was a narrow, prison-like hall. They went down that. They passed an open doorway, with the room beyond it dark. White-painted wood gleaming faintly in it. A kitchen, most likely. They passed a second one, also open, also dark. Then the hall opened frontally into a lighted room before it, and they went in there, and stopped.

It was a nondescript sort of place; it must have been rented just for the party, just for tonight, just for a place of assignation. Rented furnished as it was. It didn’t look as though it had been lived in consistently, or was meant to be. Something about it.

There was no one in this room. There had been somebody in it before, plentifully in it, rowdy in it, raising hell in it, before. Glasses stood around haphazardly; only four of them to begin with, but multiplied four-fold, six-fold, in the many still-moist scars all around them, where they had been taken up and set down again repeatedly. A fractured phonograph record lay on the seat of one of the chairs. Bricky picked up a central fragment, bearing the label, and looked at it. “Pistol-Packin’ Mamma.” She winced at the malevolent appropriateness, chucked it aside.

The Kirsch girl stopped and pointed. Toward a doorless room-opening beyond. She was rigid there, rooted; she couldn’t have been made to go on any further. Bricky went on alone.

She stopped at the threshold and stood looking in. There was no further place to go. There was no further need.