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
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—
That was the last thing she saw. She closed her eyes on it and waited, like a prisoner facing a firing squad.
The roar of the gun jarred them open again. She thought it was the loudest thing she’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest backfire, louder than a tire blowing out right in front of your face. She wondered why it didn’t hurt her more. She wondered if that was what death was always like, just that stunned, deafened feeling—
Griff was lumbering erratically around just in front of her, two or three feet in front of her. Was it he doing that, or was it she? He had too many arms, he had too many legs, there was too much of him—
The gun, still streaking its sputum of smoke after it, was vibrating jaggedly, tilted upward in his hand. Another hand had his collared by the wrist, made a bulge there. The crook of an arm was wrapped around his neck, elbow pointed toward her. Above it, his face was contorted, suffused with dammed-up blood. And behind it, another face peered, equally contorted, equally blood-heavy. But not too much so to be unrecognizable.
