Fear is the Key Read online

  ‘Call off your watchdog, Sheriff,’ I said curtly. ‘He’s liable to get hurt real bad next time.’

  The sheriff glared at me venomously and spat out one single unprintable word. He was hunched in his chair, left hand tightly gripping his right wrist: he gave every impression of a man too preoccupied with his own hurt to worry about any damage to others.

  ‘Give me that gun!’ the policeman demanded hoarsely. His throat seemed to be constricted, he had difficulty in forcing out even those few words. He had taken one lurching step forward and was no more than six feet away. He was only a kid, hardly a day over twenty-one.

  ‘Judge!’ I said urgently.

  ‘Don’t do it, Donnelly!’ Judge Mollison had shaken off the first numbing shock. ‘Don’t do it! That man’s a killer. He’s got nothing to lose by killing again. Stay where you are.’

  ‘Give me that gun.’ Judge Mollison might have been talking to himself for all the effect his words had had. Donnelly’s voice was wooden, unemotional, the voice of a man whose decision lies so far behind that it is no longer a decision but the sole obsessive reason for his existence.

  ‘Stay where you are, sonny,’ I said quietly. ‘Like the judge said, I have nothing to lose. Take another step forward and I’m going to shoot you in the thigh. Have you any idea what a soft-nosed low-velocity lead bullet does, Donnelly? If it gets your thigh-bone it’ll smash it so badly that you’ll be like me and walk with a limp for the rest of your life: if it gets the femoral artery you’ll like as not bleed to death before – you fool!’

  For the second time the court-room shook to the sharp crack and the hollow reverberations of the Colt. Donnelly was on the floor, both hands gripped round his lower thigh, staring up at me with an expression compounded of incomprehension and dazed disbelief.

  ‘We’ve all got to learn some time,’ I said flatly. I glanced at the doorway, the shots were bound to have attracted attention, but there was no one there. Not that I was anxious on this point: apart from the two constables – both of them temporarily unfit for duty – who had jumped me at the La Contessa, the sheriff and Donnelly constituted the entire police force of Marble Springs. But even so, delay was as foolish as it was dangerous.

  ‘You won’t get far, Talbot!’ The sheriff’s thin-lipped mouth twisted itself into exaggerated movements as he spoke through tightly clenched teeth. ‘Within five minutes of you leaving, every law officer in the county will be looking for you: within fifteen minutes the call will be state-wide.’ He broke off, wincing, as a spasm of pain twisted his face, and when he looked at me again his expression wasn’t pretty. ‘The call’s going out for a murderer, Talbot, an armed murderer: they’ll have orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.’

  ‘Look, now, Sheriff––’ the judge began, but got no further.

  ‘Sorry, Judge. He’s mine.’ The sheriff looked down at the policeman lying groaning on the floor. ‘The moment he took that gun he stopped being your business … You better get going, Talbot: you won’t have far to run.’

  ‘Shoot to kill, eh?’ I said thoughtfully. I looked round the court. ‘No, no, not the gentlemen – they might start getting death or glory ideas about having medals pinned on them …’

  ‘What the hell you talking about?’ the sheriff demanded.

  ‘Nor the young ladies of the high school. Hysteria …’ I murmured. I shook my head then looked at the girl with the dark-blonde hair. ‘Sorry, miss, it’ll have to be you.’

  ‘What – what do you mean?’ Maybe she was scared, maybe she was just acting scared. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You. You heard what the Lone Ranger said – as soon as the cops see me they’re going to start shooting at everything in sight. But they wouldn’t shoot at a girl, especially not at one as good looking as you. I’m in a jam, miss, and I need an insurance policy. You’re it. Come on.’

  ‘Damn it, Talbot, you can’t do that!’ Judge Mollison sounded hoarse, frightened. ‘An innocent girl. You’d put her life in danger –’

  ‘Not me,’ I pointed out. ‘If anybody’s going to put her life in danger it’ll be the friends of the sheriff here.’

  ‘But – but Miss Ruthven is my guest. I – I invited her here this afternoon to –’

  ‘Contravention of the rules of the old southern hospitality. I know. Emily Post would have something to say about this.’ I caught her by the arm, pulled her none too gently to her feet and outside into the aisle. ‘Hurry up, miss, we haven’t –’

  I dropped her arm and took one long step up the aisle, clubbed pistol already reversed and swinging. For some time now I’d had my eye on the broken-nosed character three seats behind the girl and the play and shift of expression across the broken landscape of his Neanderthalic features as he struggled to arrive at and finally make a decision couldn’t have been more clearly indicated by ringing bells and coloured lights.

  He was almost vertical and halfway out into the aisle, with his right hand reaching deep under the lapel of his coat when the butt end of my Colt caught his right elbow. The impact jarred even my arm so I could only guess what it did to his: quite a lot, if his anguished howl and sudden collapse back into the bench were any criterion. Maybe I’d misjudged the man, maybe he’d only been reaching for another cigar; that would teach him not to carry a cigar-case under his left armpit.

  He was still making a great deal of noise when I hobbled my way swiftly up the aisle, pulled the girl out into the porch, slammed the door and locked it. That would only give me ten seconds, fifteen at the most, but it was all I needed. I grabbed the girl’s hand and ran down the path to the street.

  There were two cars parked by the kerb. One, an open Chevrolet without any official markings, was the police car in which the sheriff, Donnelly and I had arrived at the court, the other, presumably Judge Mollison’s, a low-built Studebaker Hawk. The judge’s looked to be the faster car of the two, but most of these American cars had automatic drive controls with which I was quite unfamiliar: I didn’t know how to drive a Studebaker and the time it would take me to find out could be fatal. On the other hand, I did know how to operate the automatic drive on a Chevrolet. On the way up to the court-house I’d sat up front beside the sheriff, who drove, and I hadn’t missed a move he made.

  ‘Get in!’ I nodded my head in the direction of the police car. ‘Fast!’

  I saw her open the door out of a corner of an eye while I spared a few moments for the Studebaker. The quickest and most effective way of immobilizing any car is by smashing its distributor. I spent three or four seconds hunting for the bonnet catch before I gave it up and turned my attention to the front tyre nearest me. Had it been a tubeless tyre and had I been carrying my usual automatic, the small calibre steel-jacketed bullet might have failed to make more than a tiny hole, no sooner made than sealed: as it was, the mushrooming Colt bullet split the sidewall wide open and the Studebaker settled with a heavy bump.

  The girl was already seated in the Chevrolet. Without bothering to open the door I vaulted over the side into the driving-seat, took one swift glance at the dashboard, grabbed the white plastic handbag the girl held in her lap, broke the catch and ripped the material in my hurry to open it, and emptied the contents on the seat beside me. The car keys were on the top of the pile, which meant she’d shoved them right to the bottom of her bag. I’d have taken long odds that she was good and scared, but longer odds still that she wasn’t terrified.

  ‘I suppose you thought that was clever?’ I switched on the motor, pressed the automatic drive button, released the handbrake and gunned the motor so savagely that the rear tyres spun and whined furiously on the loose gravel before getting traction. ‘Try anything like that again and you’ll be sorry. Regard that as a promise.’

  I am a fairly experienced driver and where road-holding and handling are concerned I am no admirer of American cars: but when it came to straightforward acceleration those big V-8 engines could make the average British and European sports models look silly. The Chevrolet le
apt forward as if it had been fitted with a rocket-assisted take-off – I suspected that being a police car it might have had a hotted-up engine – and when I’d straightened it up and had time for a fast look in the mirror we were a hundred yards away from the court-house: I had time only for a glimpse of the judge and the sheriff running out on to the road, staring after the Chevrolet, before a sharp right-angle bend came sweeping towards us: a quick twist of the wheel to the right, a four-wheel drift, the back end breaking away, another twist of the wheel to the left and then, still accelerating, we were clear of the town limits and heading into the open country.

  TWO

  We were heading almost due north along the highway, a white and dusty ribbon of road built up several feet above the level of the surrounding land. Away to our left the Gulf of Mexico glittered and twinkled like an opalescent emerald under the broiling sun. Between the road and the sea was a flat uninteresting belt of low mangrove coast, to our right swampy forests not of palms or palmettos as I would have expected to find in those parts but pine, and disheartened-looking scrub pine at that.

  I wasn’t enjoying the ride. I was pushing the Chev along as fast as I dared, and the soft swinging suspension gave me no feeling of security at all. I had no sun-glasses, and even though the sun was not directly in my face the savage glare of sub-tropical light off that road was harsh and hurtful to the eyes. It was an open car, but the windscreen was so big and deeply curved that we got almost no cooling benefit at all from the wind whistling by our ears at over eighty miles an hour. Back in the court-room, the shade temperature had been close on a hundred: what it was out here in the open I couldn’t even begin to guess. But it was hot, furnace hot: I wasn’t enjoying the ride.

  Neither was the girl beside me. She hadn’t even bothered to replace the stuff I’d emptied out of her bag, just sat there with her hands clasped tightly together. Now and again, as we took a fast corner, she reached out to grab the upper edge of the door but otherwise she’d made no movement since we’d left Marble Springs except to tie a white bandanna over her fair hair. She didn’t once look at me, I didn’t even know what colour her eyes were. And she certainly didn’t once speak to me. Once or twice I glanced at her and each time she was staring straight ahead, lips compressed, face pale, a faint red patch burning high up in her left cheek. She was still scared, maybe more scared than ever. Maybe she was wondering what was going to happen to her. I was wondering about that myself.

  Eight miles and eight minutes out of Marble Springs the expected happened. Somebody certainly seemed to have thought and moved even faster.

  The expected was a road-block. It came at a point where some enterprising firm had built up the land to the right of the road with crushed stones and coral, asphalted it and built a filling station and drivers’ pull-up. Right across the road a car had been drawn up, a big black police car – if the two pivoting searchlights and the big red ‘STOP’ light were not enough, the eight-inch white-lettered ‘POLICE’ sign would have removed all doubt. To the left, just beyond the nose of the police car, the land dropped sharply four or five feet into a ditch that lifted only slowly to the mangrove coast beyond: there was no escape that way. To the right, where the road widened and angled into the courtyard of the filling station, a vertically upright line of black corrugated fifty-gallon oil drums completely blocked the space between the police car and the first of the line of petrol pumps that paralleled the road.

  All this I saw in the four or five seconds it took me to bring the shuddering skidding Chevrolet down from 70 to 30 mph, the high-pitched scream in our ears token of the black smoke trail of melted rubber that we were leaving on the white road behind us. I saw, too, the policemen, one crouched behind the bonnet of the police car, a second with his head and right arm just visible above the boot: both of them carried revolvers. A third policeman was standing upright and almost completely hidden behind the nearest petrol pump, but there was nothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal of all close-quarters weapons, a whipper, a sawn-off shotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.

  I was down to 20 mph now, not more than forty yards distant from the block. The policemen, guns levelled on my head, were rising up and moving out into the open when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the girl reaching for the handle of the door and half-turning away from me as she gathered herself for the leap out of the car. I said nothing, just leaned across, grabbed her arm, jerked her towards me with a savage force that made her gasp with pain and, in the same instant that I transferred my grip to her shoulders and held her half against half in front of me so that the police dared not shoot, jammed my foot flat down on the accelerator.

  ‘You madman! You’ll kill us!’ For a split second of time she stared at the row of fifty-gallon drums rushing up to meet us, the terror in her face accurately reflecting the terror in her voice, then turned away with a cry and buried her face in my coat, the nails of her hands digging into my upper arms.

  We hit the second drum from the left fair and square with the centre of our fender. Subconsciously, I tightened my grip on the girl and the steering wheel and braced myself for the numbing shattering shock, the stunning impact that would crush me against the steering-wheel or pitch me through the windscreen as the 500-lb dead weight of that drum sheared the chassis retaining bolts and smashed the engine back into the driving compartment. But there was no such convulsive shock, just a screeching of metal and a great hollow reverberating clang as the fender lifted the drum clear off the road, a moment of shock when I thought the drum would be carried over the bonnet of the car to smash the windscreen and pin us to the seat. With my free hand I jerked the wheel violently to the left and the cartwheeling drum bounced across the nearside wing and vanished from sight as I regained the road, jerked the wheel in the opposite direction and straightened out. The oil drum had been empty. And not a shot had been fired.

  Slowly the girl lifted her head, stared over my shoulder at the road-block dwindling in the distance, than stared at me. Her hands were still gripping both my shoulders, but she was completely unaware of it.

  ‘You’re mad.’ I could hardly catch the husky whisper through the crescendo roar of the engine. ‘You’re mad, you must be. Crazy mad.’ Maybe she hadn’t been terrified earlier on, but she was now.

  ‘Move over, lady,’ I requested. ‘You’re blocking my view.’

  She moved, perhaps six inches, but her eyes, sick with fear, were still on me. She was trembling violently.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she repeated. ‘Please, please let me out.’

  ‘I’m not mad.’ I was paying as much attention to my rear mirror as to the road ahead. ‘I think a little, Miss Ruthven, and I’m observant. They couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes to prepare that road-block – and it takes more than a couple of minutes to bring six full drums out of store and manhandle them into position. The drum I hit had its filling hole turned towards me – and there was no bung. It had to be empty. And as for letting you out – well, I’m afraid I can’t spare the time. Take a look behind you.’

  She looked.

  ‘They’re – they’re coming after us!’

  ‘What did you expect them to do – go into the restaurant and have a cup of coffee?’

  The road was closer to the sea, now, and winding to follow the indentations of the coast. Traffic was fairly light, but enough to hold me back from overtaking on some blind corners, and the police car behind was steadily gaining on me: the driver knew his car better than I did mine, and the road he obviously knew like the back of his hand. Ten minutes from the road-block he had crept up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us.

  The girl had been watching the pursuing car for the past few minutes. Now she turned and stared at me. She made an effort to keep her voice steady, and almost succeeded.

  ‘What’s – what’s going to happen now?’

  ‘Anything,’ I said briefly. ‘They’ll likely play rough. I don’t think they can be any too pleased with what h
appened back there.’ Even as I finished speaking there came, in quick succession, two or three whip-like cracks clearly audible above the whine of the tyres and the roar of the engine. A glance at the girl’s face told me I didn’t need to spell out what was happening. She knew all right.

  ‘Get down,’ I ordered. ‘That’s it, right down on the floor. Your head, too. Whether it’s bullets or a crash, your best chance is down there.’

  When she was crouched so low that all I could see was her shoulders and the back of her blonde head I eased the revolver out of my pocket, abruptly removed my foot from the accelerator, grabbed for the handbrake and hauled hard.

  With no tell-tale warning from the foot-operated braking lights, the slowing down of the Chevrolet was as unexpected as it was abrupt, and the screech of tyres and violent slewing of the pursuing police car showed that the driver had been caught completely off balance. I loosed off one quick shot and as I did the windscreen in front of me shattered and starred as a bullet went clear through the centre of it: I fired a second time, and the police car skidded wildly and finished up almost broadside across the road, the nearside front wheel into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road. It was the sort of uncontrollable skid that might have come from a front tyre blowout.

  Certainly no harm had come to the policemen inside, within a couple of seconds of hitting the ditch all three were out on the road, squeezing off shots after us as fast as they could pull the triggers: but we were already a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away and for all the value of revolvers and riot guns in distance work of this kind they might as well have been throwing stones at us. In a few seconds we rounded a curve and they were lost to sight.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘The war’s over. You can get up, Miss Ruthven.’

  She straightened and pushed herself back on the seat. Some dark-blonde hair had fallen forward over her face, so she took off her bandanna, fixed her hair and pulled the bandanna on again. Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they’d comb their hair on the way down.