Deadline at Dawn

It was nearly over now; Quinn was young, Quinn had purpose, he could have kept running straight through the night, straight through the city. The figure ahead stayed in sight full-time now, the corners couldn’t save him, the doorways couldn’t save him any more; they didn’t come quick enough.

The pounding of his footfalls grew diffuse as they slowed, they burned themselves out to a standstill, and he leaned there, crushed for air. Sort of at bay against a wall. In a minute Quinn was up to him, then circled out a little, still afraid of that eloquently restrained arm, and came in on him from the outside instead of straight forward. Thus, too, whichever way he jumped, Quinn could jump with him.

He didn’t jump, he couldn’t.

His voice was a husky whisper, sand shaken through a sieve, for lack of wind. “What is it? What do you—? Don’t come any nearer.”

Quinn’s was sibilant with breathlessness too but gritty with purpose that nothing could have deflected, not six cartridges fired in a row. “I’m coming nearer. I’m coming right up to you.”

He closed in and their faces were almost touching, breathing hot at one another. Both afraid, but one more afraid than the other. And the lesser fear was Quinn’s. It was just a fear of being shot unexpectedly. But the other man was almost undone with his. He was palpitating with it. Like some sort of stuff pouring sluggishly down the side of the building he was backed against. Tar or thick paint. His mouth was open and some kind of wet stuff came out of the corner of it, in a funny long thread. Then broke off short, as though a scissors had snipped it.

The left hand moved before Quinn could check it. The left, not the right. If it had been a gun, it would have been too late. But it wasn’t.

“Here. Is this what you want? Take it and let me alone.”

He kept pressing it on him.

“Take it. Take it. I won’t holler. I won’t—”

The wallet fell, and Quinn scuffed it offside with his foot.

“Why’d you run?”

“What’re you following me for? What are you trying to do to me? I can’t stand it. Ain’t I scared enough? I’m scared of the dark and scared of the lights, I’m scared of sounds and scared of stillness. I’m scared of the very air around me. Let me alone—” He screamed it out at him. Or past his shoulder, into the unheeding night.

“Pull yourself together, mister. What’re you so scared of? Is it because you’ve killed someone? Is that it? Answer me. You’ve killed someone, haven’t you?”

His head went down as though his neck were a matchstick that someone had broken in two.

“Plenty. Twenty. I don’t know how many — I’ve tried to count them but I never can—”

“And tonight, one was—?”

He was crying like a baby. Quinn had never seen anything like it. “Let me go now. Don’t make me stand here and face them— For the love of Christ, let me go—”

“What’ve you got there, a gun?”

He made a sudden brutal clutch at the inert right arm.

His fingers spiked into it too deep, to the very center bone, as though — as though there were nothing there to stop them. The whole arm leaped lifelessly up out of the pocket, but of his clutch, not of its own act. A roll of wadded newspaper dropped out of the empty sleeve. The sleeve hung there collapsed, flat as a board up to the shoulder.

“Yes, I did have a gun,” he said in an oddly child-like voice. “They took it away from me. After it had done its work. And when I gave it back, I must have forgot to take my hand out of it. I’ve missed it ever since; every time I look, it isn’t there any more. All the way up to here—”

The shock had needled Quinn straight through the heart. He was young and the puncture closed right up again. But for a minute it was enough to have dropped him in his tracks.

“I’m sorry, mister,” was all he could choke out, and turn his head compassionately away. “What can I say?”

“Let me go now,” he said, with a sort of docile mournfulness, like a small child helpless in the face of forces it can’t understand or combat.

“This killing,” Quinn said. “When was it? When did it happen?”

“In Spain, two years ago. Or was it just a few minutes ago, back there around that last corner? I can’t tell for sure any more. The shells keep going off so bright and stunning me so.”

Quinn picked up his battered hat from the street and brushed it for him, pityingly, tenderly, with lingering slowness. Over, and over, and slowly over again. There was no other way he could show him—

Chapter 9

The brief shot of novocain that the easing of Helen Kirsch’s predicament had vicariously given her wore off and the dull throb of her own dilemma came back again, twice as sore as before. The red back-light of the homeward-bound transgressor’s cab petered out, and she was alone again. Out and around on her own again. With forty, maybe fifty good minutes smashed up, and as far from successful fulfilment as ever.