“The cops’re awake too. We will be stuck if we just stand here— Come on, Bricky, try, try!” He caught her by the hand, pulled her out of the room after him, down the stairs.
“Pick up your valise. Open the door and stand there by it. I’ll use the phone down here, it’ll only take a minute.”
He picked up the phone. “Ready?” She was standing there out in the vestibule, valise in hand, poised for instant flight. “Get on your mark, get set, here goes.”
He said into the phone: “Give me the police.” Then he said to her, “Hold that door out of the way for me.” She pushed it back with her arm and held it wide.
“Hello, is this the police? I want to report a murder. At—” He gave the house-number. “—East Seventieth Street. You’ll find Stephen Graves lying dead on the second floor of his house there. In the same room with him you’ll find the two people who did it. You’ll find them tied up and waiting for you, if you don’t take too long getting there. In the desk, also in that same room, you’ll find a special delivery letter. That’ll give you the reason. Oh, and one other thing — you’ll find the gun that they did it with, downstairs in the vestibule, under the doormat, waiting for you. Hunh? No, this isn’t a rib. I only wish it was. Me? Oh, just a — just a fellow who happened to be passing by.”
He flung the instrument down without even bothering to rehook it.
“Go!” he shouted to her, and came scurrying after her.
He dipped down for a minute, shoved the gun under the doormat, and then went floundering outside and down the stoop-steps after her.
“Their car!” she called back, pointing as she led the way. “He left his keys in it.”
He slammed into it after her, swerved it out away from the curb. They’d hardly rounded the corner than they could already hear the keen of some approaching radio patrol-car, still invisible, racing up from the opposite direction.
“Gee, they’re fast,” he said. “If we’d had to stay on foot, they would have already grabbed us by now.”
They went tearing down Madison, almost empty of traffic at that hour. Twice Quinn took a chance, drove through a red light slackening speed but not stopping.
“We’ll never make it, Quinn,” she shouted above the hiss of wind.
“We can try, at least.”
The sky kept getting lighter over in the east. Another day, another New York day was on the way. Look at it. Even dawn in this town was no good.
You’ve won, she kept thinking bitterly. Are you happy? Does it do you good to know you’ve got us, you’ve wrecked us, a little fellow and a little girl like us? The odds were fair and square, weren’t they? Like they always are when you’re involved, you topheavy, bone-crushing bully. Some odds. Some fight. You rotten place, trying to look pretty in the early morning; you — you New York.
A tear whipped straight across her temple, from the corner of her eye toward her ear, carried that way by the backthrow of the wind they were making.
His hand stole a moment from the wheel, squeezed hers tight, so tight the skin wrinkled, then beat it back again fast to the throbbing rim to keep the life from being crushed out of them. “Don’t cry, Bricky,” he said looking down the avenue ahead, and swallowed hard.
“I’m not,” she said smoulderingly. “I wouldn’t give it that much satisfaction. Let it dish it out all it wants to, I can take it.”
The buildings kept shooting up taller ahead of them all the time. With every block they seemed to put on additional inches, though it was just the over-all aspect of the skyline and not individual rooftops that altered. From eight and ten stories to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty, from twenty to thirty and more. Higher, higher all the time, encroaching on the sky, leaving less and less of it, until sometimes it was just like a jagged irregular manhole-opening over them, with the cover left off. Bright blue up there. And below dimness, perpetual dimness and labyrinths of concrete from which there was no egress.
They’d shifted over now, they were going down Seventh on their way toward the Thirties. Broadway, on their right, kept edging closer through each successive side-street opening. Then suddenly, just as the Forties were ending, it sheared straight across their path, forming the X, the double triangle, that everyone calls Times Square but that’s really two other squares, Duffy above the waist, Longacre below.
The most famous patch of asphalt on the face of the earth, this is, and yet so commonplace, so like nothing at all, when you’re on it. The Palace and the State Building on the left, the wedge-shaped Times skyscraper straight ahead, and on the right, as the building-line suddenly veered way out and left a gap, that odd-shaped tower-cube abruptly struck up into the paling-blue morning light—
She grabbed at his arm so unexpectedly, so fiercely, the whole wheel came around with it, and they were nearly flung up against the statue of Father Duffy. Their front wheel on that side took a bite out of the sidewalk, then came down off it again as he swerved crazily the opposite way. It took him another half-block to straighten them out, get the machine under control again.
She was up on her knees, facing backward on the seat, her hand still riveted to his shoulder, pummelling it with joy and babbling into the wind racing backward.
“Quinn, look! Oh, Quinn, look! The clock on the Paramount says five-to! It’s only five-to six now! That one back there in the room must have been fast—”
“Maybe this one’s slow— Don’t, you’ll fall out.”
She was blowing kisses to it, she was almost beside herself with ecstatic gratitude. “No, it’s right, it’s right! It’s the only friend I ever had in this whole town. I knew it wouldn’t let me down. That means we can still make it, we still have a chance—”
The Times monolith clipped it, and it was gone now. She’d never see it again. If her heart had its way, she’d never be here where it was. But with her chin resting low on the top of the seat, she peered backward to where it had been, in grateful, misty-eyed goodbye.
“Get down on the seat, I’m going to make a turn.”
The razor-edged sharpness of it lifted two wheels clear, and they were in Thirty-fourth. And there, on the second block over, between Eighth and Ninth — there it was ahead of them, under way already, the big cross-country bus... It had just finished clearing the terminal ramp as they got there, turned and straightened itself out, and now it was beginning to pick up speed, point westward, headed for the river tunnel, the Jersey side — and home.
So close, and yet so out of reach. A minute sooner and they would have been on it. She made a little whimpering noise in her throat, then choked it down. She didn’t ask him what they were to do, nor he her; instead he went ahead and did it.
He wouldn’t give up. He sent the lighter, more maneuverable thing that they were in winging after it. They gained, they closed, they caught up. It slowed ponderously as it neared Tenth to make its turn for the tunnel approaches, and they coasted deftly up alongside of it. A friendly red light did the rest, stopping the big and the little alike with overawing impartiality.
It came to a shuddering elephantine stop, and they to a skittish grasshopper-like one.
They were already out and on the ground before it had quite finished, and pounding pleadingly on the glass inset of its pneumatically-controlled door. And she, at any rate, bobbing up and down in frenzied supplication.
“Open up, let us in! Take us with you! We’re going your way! Ah, let us in! Don’t leave us here, don’t make us stay behind— Show him the money, Quinn; quick, take it out—”
The driver shook his head and scowled and swore at them in pantomime through the glass. And the red light lasted and lasted, and he couldn’t shove off, had to sit there looking at their agonized faces. Anyone with a heart would have had to give in. And he evidently had some such thing inside him that he used to pump his blood with. He gave them a final black look, and he glanced around to see if anyone was noticing, and then he grudgingly pulled the control lever and the door swung hissingly open.