Deadline at Dawn полностью

She drew herself up defiantly beside him. But her defiance wasn’t of him; she looked out, and around them, at it. “The city, the city,” she breathed vindictively. “We’ll show it. We’re not licked yet. The deadline is still good. We still have until daylight. No one knows yet, they haven’t found him, or the place’d be full of policemen by this time. No one knows; only us — and whoever did it. We’ve still got time. Somewhere in this town there’s a clock that’s a friend of mine. I know that it’s saying right now, even if we can’t see it from where we are, that we’ve still got a little time. Not as much as we had before, but some. Don’t quit, Quinn, don’t quit. It’s never too late, until the last second of the last minute of the last hour.”

She was shaking him again, by the arms, imploringly. But this time to put something into him, not to drag something out of him.

“Come on, we’re going back in there and see if we can figure this thing out. We’ve got to. It’s our only hope. We want to go home; you know we do. We’re fighting for our happiness, Quinn; we’re fighting for our lives. And we have until six o’clock to win our fight.”

She could hardly hear him. But he’d turned toward the flight of steps, leading up, leading in. “Come on, battler,” he said softly. “Come on, champ.”

Her arm unconsciously slipped through his going up the steps, both to lend courage and to borrow; it was a case of mutual support. Strangely formal promenade, slow and frightened and very brave, into the place where death was.

In the coffin-like confinement of the vestibule the misappropriated key shook a little as he fitted it unlawfully into the door for the third time that night. Her heart shook in time with it. But that was bravery, that slight shaking of his hand, and no one needed to tell her that. He was going in, not out; toward it, not away. And the man who says he’s never been afraid is a liar. So she admired the shaking of his hand; that was honest, that was brave.

He got it straight at last and a latch-mechanism recoiled and freed the door. They went in. His off-shoulder hitched a little, she could feel the gesture transferred to her, and the latch-mechanism bedded softly back into its groove again. The door was closed now at their backs. A blurred grayish oval remained, that was the street-light, dun and smoky as it was, struggling to come in after them all the way and giving up after it reached that far. It receded, grew smaller, to the size of an ox-eye, as step by step they felt their way forward.

The hall — they were in some kind of a hall, she surmised — had the stuffy air of a place closed up all day. She tried to visualize the house by her unaided sense of smell. She was no expert in scents, but over and above its stuffiness the place had an expensive leather-and-woodwork aura to it. Not distinct, that was just the sensory impression. No mouldiness of decay or disrepair, no cookery taints, no sachet of feminine occupancy. Impersonal, austere maybe, but not cheap.

“He’s in the back, on the floor above,” he whispered. “I don’t want to light any lights down here. They might be seen from outside.”

Again a transfer of motion told her his hand had gone into his pocket for something. “No, don’t use matches either,” she cautioned. “You lead the way, I’ll be able to follow. I’ll keep my hand on your sleeve. Wait, let me put this down here somewhere first.”

She groped her way to the wall, set her valise down close against the baseboard of it, where she could find it again readily. Then she moved back to him, took up her position of telepathic accompaniment, hand to his coat-sleeve. They toiled forward in a sort of swimming darkness that was almost liquid, it was so dense.

“Step,” he whispered presently.

She felt him go up. She raised her foot, pawed blindly with it, found the foremost step with her toe. The rest of them followed in automatic succession, were no trouble at all. The staircase creaked once or twice under their combined weights in the stealthy silence. She wondered if anyone else were in the house, anyone still alive. For all they knew, someone might be. Many a nocturnal murder isn’t discovered until the following day.

“Turn,” he whispered.

His arm swung away from her, to the left. She kept contact, wheeled her body obediently after it. The stairs had flattened out into a landing. They made a brief half-pirouette together, like a couple executing a ghostly cotillion in the dark.

She felt his arm go up again, after the brief level space. She found the new flight, reversed in direction to the old. Finally they too had leveled off, there weren’t any more. They were on the second floor now.

“Turn,” he breathed.

His arm crowded in against her, around toward the right this time. She corrected her own direction accordingly. They were moving along an upstairs hall now.