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—
Chapter 14
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.
The boy next door, fighting for her. Fighting for her — the way the boy next door should.
Suddenly there was a floor-shaking collapse. No more Griff, no more double arms and legs and heads in front of her, no more anything else. Two bodies threshing around on the floor.
Joan Bristol flashed past her, coming from the recesses of the room, an andiron snatched up from before the fireplace raised high above her head.
Bricky’s hands were tied; she couldn’t reach for her and grab her. But if the boy next door could launch himself against a gun with his bare hands, then she could launch herself against an andiron with no hands at all.
She slithered one leg out until it was almost calf-low to the floor, deftly spoked it between Bristol’s two scampering feet.
Joan Bristol went down face-first in a rocking-horse fall, and the andiron went looping futilely through the air, clanged against a wall somewhere.
Bricky flung herself down on her before she could get up again, knelt on her bodily with both knees at once, pinning her flat. Every time Bristol tried to squirm free and unsaddle her, she raised one knee slightly, slammed it down into her again with redoubled force.
She didn’t have time to glance at the men. An arm was swinging over there, pounding into the side of a head like a mallet. Twice, three times. Suddenly they broke into two, one of them staggered upright, one of them stayed flat. The one coming up was bringing the gun up with him.
“I’ll be right with you, Bricky,” a winded voice gasped from over there.
She looked then. Griff was face-down to the floor. He twitched a little, raised a dazed hand to the side of his head, but he stayed flat the way he was. Quinn was standing watchfully over him for a second. He was the one had the gun.
“I can’t hold her down—” she panted.
He went over to Graves’ desk, picked something up, came around in back of her, and sawed her hands apart. Both of them were still breathing too fast to be able to talk much.
He took the same bonds he had just removed from her, reknitted them, and fastened them around Joan Bristol’s hands, behind her back.
“Do that, uh, to him too,” she heaved.
“You bet.” He went into the bedroom, came out with linen stripped from Graves’ bed, ripped it and went to work.
“I saw them coming in with you, outside on the street. I was watching from one of the front windows on this floor. Something about the way you were walking between them, sort of stiff, told me they had a gun on you. I backed up into the bathroom and laid low—”
“They did it, Quinn. We got the right ones at last.”
“I know it wasn’t Holmes. Gee, I had a narrow escape, though—” He stood up, surveyed his own handiwork. “That’ll hold them for a few minutes anyway, if not for long. No need to gag them; let them attract all the attention they can. In fact, we want them to, we’ll do it for them.”
“Quinn, what good is it to us now? There they are, but what’s the difference? Look.” She pointed. “Two past six.”
“Let’s try for it anyway. Let’s go down there. If it isn’t that one, there may be another later in the day—”
“It’s no use, Quinn. We talked that over. We won’t be strong enough to take the later one. You’ll see. The city’s awake now.”