Deadline at Dawn

His ten cents was running out, evidently. There was a time-lag before he got the answer. He got it finally, but it came slow, like the last of anything. Or like when something’s drying up, there isn’t going to be any more.

“Two or three hours, I guess.”

That took it back to about the right time.

The fourth hieroglyph.

“Has he been on this stuff the whole time?”

This time it backfired. He would have had to be a rye-buyer to get any more answers.

“What are you doing, young fellow, taking a census in here?” the barman snarled, and he moved up the line, to where there was more profit and less interrogation.

He didn’t have to ask any more; he couldn’t have, anyway. A door broke casing somewhere unseen behind him, and the glass’s owner was returning.

Quinn didn’t turn his head. There was a strip of mirror-panel matching the bar straight before him. “I’ll get him in that,” he said to himself, and kept his eyes riveted front.

The mirror stayed blank for a minute, next to his own image. Then the mirror filled in next to that, took imprint. A face climbed up on it from the rear, that on the mirror-surface leant from below his own; steadied when it had gained the level of his own, stood still.

A tortured, beaten hat was down low over it, but not low enough to hide it. It was the face of a man about forty-five, but it had leaped ahead twenty years — perhaps in this one night? — to meet its own old age. Only the hair-coloring, the line of the neck, a few things like that, told that its owner was still young in years, that it, too, should have been still young. It was haggard and white with strain, silver in its whiteness where the electric light seeped in under the hat brim and caught it.

There was something wrong with him. Quinn could tell that at a glance; anyone could have.

He didn’t stand there upright against the bar. He crouched protectively against the wall, almost seeming to hug his whole right side to it, as if sheltering it, screening it from observation, there where the wall came across, ending the bar. It wasn’t the inert lean of intoxication, it was the furtive, concealing lean of one seeking protection; very subtly expressed, but yet implicit in every line of his body. Even when he raised his hand, as now, and drank, he turned a little away, toward the wall. Very little, the slightness was one of attitude rather than of actual physical measurement, but he turned a little away, in mental hiding.

I’ve got him, Quinn said to himself. And this time it’s something bad, no kid being born to a frightened father.

He drank again, and again he crouched a little like that, cowered. Only the left hand always came up; never the right was seen. The right was a secret between his guardian body and the wall.

The gun, Quinn wondered?

What did he see in his beer, dreaming into it like that? The ghost of a dead man, maybe? Was that why he couldn’t take his eyes off it, his staring haunted eyes?

I’ll try out his reaction, Quinn decided. I know already, but I’ll give it the fifth hieroglyph.

He took his mug with him and ambled over and pretended to fool around with a cigarette-vending machine they had standing there. That way he had them all well out in front of him, in a straight line. He set the mug precariously down atop the machine, and then unnoticed gave it a little nudge off into space.

It gave a shattering whack on the floor. Not terrifying, just, say, mildly startling. Eight heads turned and glanced casually around, then turned back again and went ahead with their own concerns.

But the ninth. His shoulder-blades had contracted into a vise, pinching his back together. His head had gone sharply down, as if to avoid a blow at the back of his neck. He didn’t turn to look, he couldn’t; shock held him in a strait jacket for a moment. And then as it slowly eased, Quinn could see his sides swelling in and out with his enforced breathing. And when he raised his hand a moment later its outline was all blurry even to Quinn’s steady eye, it vibrated so.

Reaction: positive. Positive as to guilt. What else but guilt could make anyone cringe so, cower and quail into a lumpy bunched-up mass the way he just had? And, Quinn reminded himself, there might even have been more glaring symptoms he had missed seeing. If that bedded right hand, for instance, had half started out of the pocket that encased it, gun-laden, and then checked itself again, that was a give-away known only to the wall that faced it. Quinn had muffed it. And by the time he looked to see, he was too late, it was motionless again.

He drifted back once more to where he’d been, idly kicking aside a scallop or two of glass on the way.