Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 13

She leaned there bound and helpless in the dark. They’d never make that bus now. Poor Quinn would wait there for her at the Graves house with the dead man to keep him company, until broad daylight; until someone happened on him there, and gave the alarm, and they arrested him for it. And that would be the end of it; he’d never be able to clear himself. After all, this Bristol woman and her partner hadn’t left anything half as incriminating behind them over there as that broken-into wall safe that he was responsible for. She could accuse them all she wanted to afterwards — that is, if she survived this walling-up alive — but it wouldn’t do any good. She hadn’t been an eye-witness to his first entry; she hadn’t even set eyes on him until afterwards. Her word would be worthless.

Precious minutes ticking by. Minutes that were drops of her heart’s blood. It must be all of five-thirty by now. In another ten minutes at the latest she and Quinn should have been starting for the bus terminal. What a fat chance now. She might have known the city would outsmart them. It always did. Just a small-town boy and a small-town girl — what chance did they have against such an antagonist? He’d go up the river to the electric chair. And she’d turn into a tough-gutted chain-dancer in a treadmill, without a heart, without a hope, without even a dream any more.

Precious minutes trickling by, that couldn’t be stopped, that couldn’t be called back again.

Suddenly that other door outside had reopened and someone was in the room again. For a minute wild hope flashed through her mind. Ah, the happy ending, the camera-finish, like in the storybooks, like in the pictures! Someone to rescue her in the nick of time. The besotted hotel-clerk come up to investigate, his suspicions aroused by her non-reappearance when they left? Or maybe even Quinn himself, drawn here by some miraculous sixth sense—

Then a voice spoke, cottony with subdued rage, and the bottom dropped out of her hopes again. It was Griff, Bristol’s accomplice. The two of them had come back again. Maybe to finish her off, here and now, on the spot.

“Why’dn’t you think of that sooner, you half-witted dope? What’s the matter, your brain missing a cylinder?”

“I’m going to ask her now,” Bristol’s voice answered him grimly. “I would’ve the first time, only you came out of there too fast for me. There must have been something there that tipped her off to me. It’s a cinch she didn’t pull my name and address out of a trick hat—”

The closet-door swung out and blinding light spilled over her, shutting off her eyes for a moment. She was aware of herself being loosened from the hook that had held her fast. She was hauled out into the open once more, between the two of them. The towel-gag was lowered sufficiently to enable her to speak.

Joan Bristol held the back of her hand poised threateningly toward her lips, ready to swing it and flatten them. “Now you try to scream and I’ll dent you in!”

She couldn’t have, even if she’d wanted to. All she could do was pant and sag exhaustedly against the man who was holding her up.

Bristol raised a hand to her hair, took a half-turn in it, and drew her head back at a taut inclination. “Now, no stalling. What I want to know is this: just what was it over at the Graves place that hooked you onto me? How’d you know I knew him, and how’d you know where to find me? I’m going to let you have it, and I’m going to keep on letting you have it, until you give me the straight goods on it!”

Bricky answered in a muffled but unhesitant voice. “You dropped your hotel-bill over there. I found it lying in the room with him.”

The blow, when it came, was rabid and with a sound like a paper bag full of water dropping from a third-floor window, but it wasn’t from Bristol to Bricky, it was from her own team-mate to Bristol. She staggered five or six steps back away from the commingled little group they made.

“Why, you—!” he grated. “I mighta known you’d do something like that! It’s as good as leaving your calling-card sticking out of his vest-pocket! I oughta slap you down to the soles of your feet!”

“She’s lying!” Joan Bristol shrilled, one side of her face slowly reddening as with an eczema. “I could swear I still saw it in my handbag after I got back here—!”

“Did you take it out to show it to him? Answer me! Did you? Yes or no?”

“Yes, I did... I... you know, as part of the build-up, to show him how bad I needed money. That was at the start, before he got tough about it. But I know I put it back again, Griff! I know I brought it back here with me!”

Bricky shook her head, within his boa-constrictor-like grasp. “It fell out. It was for seventeen dollars and eighty-nine cents. It had ‘Past Due’ stamped on it, in sort of purple ink. It even had your room-number on it.”

He gave her a merciless shake. “Did you bring it here with you? What’d you do with it? Where is it?”

“I left it there where it was. I was afraid to touch anything. I left everything just the way I found it.”

Bristol closed in again, the sting of the punitive blow evidently lessened by now. “Don’t take her word for it, she may have brought it with her. Frisk her and see if it’s on her.”

“You do it, you’re a dame. You ought to know where — I’ll hold her.”

Her hands went quickly and thoroughly about their business. She missed it by inches. Bricky’s legs were tightly bound together at the feet, anyway. She held them that way, compact. It was within the top of one of her stockings, to the inside. The Bristol woman poked a finger down into each, at the outside of the leg.

“She hasn’t got it on her.”

“Then we’ll have to go back there and get it! We can’t leave it lying there, it’s a dead give-away. You chump, I ought to bust your neck lopsided for you!”

The threat glanced off his partner’s pelt unheeded. She was thinking. “Wait a minute, I’ve got the play, Griff,” she said in a rapid, bated voice. “We’ll take her back there with us, and we’ll leave her there with him. Fix it to look like she did it to him. You know—” She hitched her head toward Bricky with unmistakable meaning; “do what you wanted to do in the first place, only do it over there. Give them a double-header to figure out. That way we’re in the clear. It don’t have anything to do with us.”

He thought about it for a minute, brittle-eyed.

“It’s the only out for us, Griff. Rub out this detour by finishing her off where she started out from.”

He was starting to nod, faster and faster. He got through nodding — fast too — and sprang into action. “All right, fix her up to get her past that desk downstairs. She’s pie-eyed, see, and you’ve got to hold her up. I’ll still get him out of the way like I told you. We’re helping her home, that’s all. Leave her hands the way they are, just loosen her feet so she can move on them.”

They were numb from constriction, she couldn’t use them at first, even after they’d been freed.

Bristol took her own coat, slung it around Bricky’s shoulders, concealing the defection of her arms. That wasn’t particularly grotesque, there was a new style that had come over from London lately for women to wear their coats just that way, leaving their arms out of the sleeves.

“Take the towel off her chin,” the man said. “You’ll have to. Here, use this on her.”

He brought something out from behind, handed it over to Bristol. Something that glinted and was black. Probably the one that had been used on Graves.

It disappeared under the enshrouding coat, and Bristol’s hand ground it hard into Bricky’s spine, deep as a spinal anesthetic being administered with a snub-nosed, triggered needle.

“Now wait here with her. I’m going down ahead and get the car out of bed, and get rid of that stew down at the desk. Gimme about ten minutes, the garage is a couple blocks over. Better take the stairs.”

The door closed after him and the two women were left alone.

They didn’t speak; not a word passed between them. They stood there curiously rigid, one directly behind the other, the coat hooded between them, raised in the middle like a small tent with the passage of Bristol’s hand.

Bricky thought: I wonder if she’d shoot, if I made a sudden step to the side, tried to break contact with the bore of the gun? Somehow she didn’t make the attempt, and not altogether through fear either. They were taking her back to the very place she had wanted to take them all along: to the scene of the murder. A feat that she probably would never have been able to accomplish single-handed, particularly in the case of the man. Why not wait? That was the better place for it. True, this opportunity might not recur up there — but why not wait and see? There was always Quinn.

Bristol shifted a little, spoke at last. “That’s long enough. Start walking over to the door now. Now let me warn you for the last time. If you let a peep out of you, on the stairs or on the way through the lobby, or outside while we’re walking over to the car, this goes off into you head-first. And don’t think I’m kidding. I’ve never kidded about anything in my life. I was born without a sense of humor.”

Bricky didn’t answer. She probably had been, at that, she reflected. It must be hell to be like that all the time; dead sore at the world and dangerous.

They went out of the room, and along the musty corridor of before. Behind one of those doors the loose, tinny jangling of an alarm-clock went off just after they’d gone a few steps past, and a curious transmitted shock passed from one to the other, that was almost like electric current passing through the gun for a conductor.

She heard Bristol let out a deep breath behind her. She knew without having to be told how close that accidental, extraneous thing had come to exploding the weapon.

They turned aside where there was a dark-red exit-bulb burning, passed through a fireproofed hinged door, and started down an emergency staircase. Its lower reaches brightened imperceptibly with light from the lobby. They could already hear Griff’s voice, somewhat hollow and resonant in the open down there, before they were quite clear of it.

“Take another one. Go on, don’t be afraid, that’s what it’s for.”

“Wait a minute,” Bristol whispered tensely behind her, and held her motionless at the foot of the stairs. The desk was out of sight from there, around an el-shaped turn. They had to go straight past the front of it, however, to reach the street.

Somebody gave a strangled cough, and Griff’s voice sounded again. “Easy, easy. Don’t swallow the whole bottle.”

“Now,” Bristol hissed, and urged her forward via the gun, as though it were some sort of a handle which controlled her movements.

He was there by himself, leaning engagingly forward over the desk on both arms. In front of him there were just the tiers of pigeonholes, cutting off the view from the rear.

The two-headed, four-legged, curiously-humpbacked creature that was the two women, the two women and a gun, slithered rapidly by. He didn’t turn his head or seem to be aware of them at all, but he fanned one hand loosely behind his back, sweeping it repeatedly in the direction of the entrance. As though he had a funny sort of waggy tail there, cropped short.

They were in the car already when he joined them. It was down further, away from the hotel entrance, and Bristol had her in the back with her, waiting.

He got in in front, and they still didn’t say anything between the three of them. Bristol had shifted the gun around to her side now, because of the impediment of the back of the car-seat. Bricky sat there docilely, made no move to resist. She wanted them to reach there unhindered fully as much as they wanted to themselves.

The night was falling to pieces all around them, cracks and slivers of light showing through all over more and more.

They made the run up swiftly and remorselessly. Just before they took the final turn around into Seventieth, Bristol warned him in a slurred undertone, as though just the two of them were alone in the car: “Watch it, now. Don’t pull up unless you’re sure.”

They turned in and he ran straight past the house first of all, as though it had nothing to do with them, as though they had some destination miles from here.

It held its secret well. Well and long. There was no sign of life, inside or out. It was just as it had been yesterday morning at this same early hour; the morning before.

Their three faces had turned to it as one, as they went by. Was he back yet? Was he in there? Oh, God — now and only now was she beginning at last to get frightened.

Griff swerved in abruptly only after they were well past it; reversed and backed up a house-length or two; braked finally, but still a good three or four doors down from it. Then they watched again briefly, from their stationary position now.

Nothing.

“Still good for another quick trip in and out again,” he murmured tight-lipped. “Come on, let’s go.”

Her heart was racketing wildly as they hauled her out to the sidewalk, sandwiched her in between them, and advanced rapidly toward it in the gun-metal pall that overhung the street. They hustled her up the stoop and into the concealment of the vestibule with quick looks this way and that to make sure that no one was observing. No one was.

“Made it,” Joan Bristol exhaled relievedly.

“Where’s that key she had on her? Hurry up.”

They thrust her inside between them, closed it again after them. She’d played the game through to the end. And this was the end now. Now that they’d closed this door on her, every second was going to count. If he came back even five minutes from now, he’d be five minutes too late; he’d find her here — like Graves was. And even if he came back right now, that mightn’t help much; it might only mean the two of them, instead of just one. These people were armed and he wasn’t.

Maybe — maybe he wouldn’t come back at all. Maybe he’d had something like this happen to him too, only somewhere else.

The darkness inside the house was as impenetrable as ever. Bristol cautioned Griff the same way Bricky had Quinn the first time they came in here — it seemed like years ago. “Don’t touch the lights, now, until we get up there.” But they hadn’t been two murderers stealing in in the dark, they had only been a couple of kids trying to straighten themselves out, get a new start.

Griff lit a match; dwarfed it in the bowl of his two hands to an orange-red pinpoint. He led the way with it. Bricky trudged at his heels, still armless under the coat, the gun still fused to her living back. The Bristol woman came last. The silence around them was overpowering and, to Bricky at any rate, charged with such high-voltage tension that it was as though the air were filled with static electricity, creating little tingling shocks at every step.

Suppose he was waiting up there in the room ahead, with the lights out? Suppose he heard them, came forward now, saying “Bricky, is that you?” She would be bringing death upon him. And if he wasn’t up there, then she had brought death upon herself. But of the two choices, she preferred the latter. Then again, what was the difference either way? It was too late now; they’d missed the bus. The city was the real victor. Just as it always was.

The opening to the death room loomed black and empty before them in the stunted rays of his match. He whipped it out and for a moment there was nothing. Then he lit the room lights, and they shoved her in there with the dead man. Into the emptiness where there was no Quinn waiting to help her.

Griff said: “All right, now, hurry up and get it. Let’s do what we have to, and get out of here fast!”

Bristol scanned the floor, turned on Bricky menacingly. “Well, where is it? I don’t— Where’d you say you saw it?” She was still holding the gun in her hand, although she’d shifted out from behind Bricky’s back.

“Over there by him, is where I said,” Bricky answered in a listless voice. Then she added: “And you believed me.”

“Then you didn’t—!” the other woman yelped. She swung toward her confederate. “See, I told you!”

His open hand burst into Bricky’s face. “Where’ve you got it?”

She staggered lopsidedly, then came up again, smiling bleakly. “That’s your problem.”

His voice calmed suddenly. The calm voice of murder. He always seemed calmest when contemplating that. “Let me have that,” he said to Bristol. “I’ll do it.”

The gun passed back to him again.

“Get away from her. Move over.”

She was suddenly alone there, by herself.

He was coming toward her; he must have wanted to make it a contact wound. So the possibility of self-destruction could enter into it, afterwards.

It only took him a second or two to move forward, but her thoughts took hours. She was going to die now. Maybe that was better. It was too late now to take that bus — the bus for home. The clock said—