Deadline at Dawn by Cornell Woolrich

Author:Cornell Woolrich
Format: epub
Publisher: Lippencott
Published: 1944-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

8

And then he suddenly got this break. He was working his way back from the hospital, tail between legs, hands choking pockets, hat low over his eyes. He was coursing the bars now. They were easy to spot, even from a distance of two or three blocks away; they stood out like colored pins on a map, for they were the only places still open and lighted at this hour. He was working his way back at an extreme zig-zag, confining himself to a zone about six blocks wide from north to south, stretching between the hospital and the house. At each intersecting avenue he’d turn up about three blocks one way, combing it for bars, then reverse and go back about three blocks the other way, past his original starting point. Then come back to that again, and go on a block more westward, to the next intersecting avenue, do it over again there. They were all on the avenues, the bars, not on the side-streets linking them.

Some he entered, and stayed in for a moment or two, using his eyes. Some he just thrust his head into from the doorway, and then turned around and went out again. He wasn’t drinking himself. That would have been foolhardy; that would have been too destructive both of time and of keenness of perception.

He could do it this way, because there were certain things to look for, certain tell-tale signs, hieroglyphs, call them what you will, that made it quicker, made for a short-cut.

He told himself: If he’s stayed in one of these places this long after, at all, then he’ll be by himself, aloof, withdrawn. A person doesn’t enter a bar, after killing someone, looking for sociability. A person enters a bar, after such a thing, to steady his nerves. Look for someone by himself, then, withdrawn, noncommunicative, separate from the rest of the customers both in stance and attitude.

That was one short-cut. The first and foremost of them all.

He came upon this place, and he cased it quickly, first from the outside, without entering at all. It was small enough to stand for that without danger of omission of any pertinent detail. It was a store, an enclave, the width of half the usual shopfront. Its bar, instead of being something that belonged over with one side of it, bisected it mathematically down the middle. The aisle of clearance left on the outside, for the customers, was no wider than that left on the inside for the barman. Moreover, it had none of the usual adjunct of tables sheltered within booths or partitions, difficult to survey from out front where he was. He could look straight down the bartop, in central diminishing perspective, from the frontal window. And this is what he saw:

There were eight people paid out along it. They broke into about three groups, each self-contained, oblivious of the others, but he had to look close to tell where the divisions came in. Physical distance had nothing to do with it; they all stretched away from him in an unbroken line.

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