Deadline at Dawn

But now awareness was ablaze between them, and a delicate duel of seeming non-awareness that fastened on every slightest move got under way. The hat brim was down. Far down. But the sheathed sick-bright eyes under it, Quinn knew, were not looking at the counter-top they seemed to be directed at. Any more than his own, sighted forward toward the mirror, were merely concerned with the impersonal surface of the glass. It was as though each had unseen antennae, sensitively attuned to the other.

He senses something now, Quinn told himself. Not because of anything I’ve done; it’s my very motionlessness, my non-awareness of him, that has tipped him off. I’m standing too still, for too long; I’m looking too straight ahead. He’s on. I’ve got him afraid of me.

An invisible charged current was boiling from one to the other of them, and back again, recharged, and back once more, again recharged. Give and take of tension.

Lower and lower went the hat brim, defensively. Not a move otherwise. And blanker and blanker became Quinn’s stare into the mirror, never diverging, never sidling over into forbidden surface offside. Until each of them could scarcely breathe.

And all around them the others drank and chatted, grinned and sometimes spat, all unaware. The two of them were like a still-life picture of two men at a bar, set down in the middle of a restless, murmuring real-life barroom scene, they were so different from the others. With their distance between them, of three or four paces. They were like inanimate markers, leaning against the bar.

There was no warning. Suddenly the glass showed blank beside Quinn. It was almost like a Faustian disappearance, only minus the puff of smoke. So much so that Quinn turned his head entirely the wrong way, to where the other had been standing first, and then continued it on around behind himself in a complete baffled half-circle, his body following, until at last he was facing toward the door, having reached it the long way around.

The other was just scuttling through it. Was a blur wiped off the glass as with a wet sponge, he floundered out so fast.

Quinn hadn’t expected flight to be so overt, so unabashed. He’d expected, if anything, sidling dissimulation, gingerly-treading departure. This was open flight, before any hue and cry had even been raised. This was the whole scroll of guilt-hieroglyphs flung back in his face. I’m guilty; I know it, so what need to wait for you to discover it? I fly from my own knowledge.

He gave a choked cry of excitement and buckled after him, his mid-section lunging out ahead of the rest of him for a moment, before his arms and legs could take up their part.

He heard a muffled shout from the barman and he pulled something out of his pocket. Some sort of a coin, he didn’t care what it was, and flung it up over his shoulder in a spiral. He was outside before it had even had time to hit the floor.

He was already in crazed flight down the street, the other one. Maddened was the only fit description for it. No one runs that fast unless he’s touched with an insanity of fear. And yet he ran keeping that gun-bearing arm hugged close to him, still berthed in his pocket. It threw his balance off a little, gave the straight line of his running a slight sideward tilt.

He floundered around a corner and was gone. Quinn skittered around it after him and he was there again, distance between unchanged. He crossed over to the darker side of the street, the shadows had him, and he was gone again. Quinn crossed over after him, fusing into his very footprints before they’d had time to cool, and he was there again.

So they played hide and seek through the darkness, and the game had no laughter or mercy in it. He’ll shoot, thought Quinn. I’d better look out, he’ll shoot. But he kept on. Not through bravery; just through heat of the chase melting down all other fears.

He rounded another corner, the form ahead. Quinn rounded it after him, jerked him back into sight again. This time the distance between was less, was beginning to pull tighter. To run you need not only legs, you need the freedom of both arms, to buffet you through the air.

He was beginning to lose his head, the pursued. Around another corner, and gone. But then when Quinn rounded it, still gone this time. Yet when Quinn had already lost him, he gave himself back to Quinn again, out of his own fear. He flurried out of a doorway, that would have kept his secret for him if he’d only let it, as though mistrusting it at the penultimate moment, and the chase was on again. In reverse direction now, after Quinn had already overshot it. Fear rots the faculties.

And meantime, no one to stop them, no one to interfere. Why doesn’t he cry for help then, if he’s innocent, Quinn gloated? Why doesn’t he?

He fled on before him in desperate, staggering silence, mute to the last.