Fear is the Key (3 page)

‘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 leapt 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.

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 happened 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.

When she'd finished tying the knot under her
chin she said in a subdued voice, without looking
at me: ‘Thank you for making me get down. I – I
might have been killed there.'

‘You might,' I agreed indifferently. ‘But I was
thinking about myself, lady, not you. Your continued
good health is very closely bound up with
mine. Without a real live insurance policy beside
me they'd use anything from a hand grenade to a
14-inch naval gun to stop me.'

‘They were trying to hit us then, they were
trying to kill us.' The tremor was back in her
voice again as she nodded at the bullet hole in
the screen. ‘I was sitting in line with that.'

‘So you were. Chance in a thousand. They must
have had orders not to fire indiscriminately, but
maybe they were so mad at what happened back at
the road-block that they forgot their orders. Likely
that they were after one of our rear tyres. Hard to
shoot well from a fast-moving car. Or maybe they
just can't shoot well anyway.'

Approaching traffic was still light, maybe two
or three cars to the mile, but even that was too
much for my peace of mind. Most of the cars were
filled with family groups, out-of-state vacationers,
and like all vacationers they were not only curious
about everything they saw but obviously had the
time and the inclination to indulge their curiosity.
Every other car slowed down as it approached us
and in my rear-view mirror I saw the stop lights
of three or four of them come on as the driver
tramped on the brakes and the occupants twisted
round in their seats. Hollywood and a thousand
TV films had made a bullet-scarred windscreen an
object readily identifiable by millions.

This was disturbing enough. Worse still was the
near certainty that any minute now every local
radio station within a hundred miles would be
broadcasting the news of what had happened back
at the Marble Springs court-house, together with
a complete description of the Chevrolet, myself
and the blonde girl beside me. The chances were
that at least half of those cars approaching me had
their radios tuned in to one of those local stations
with their interminable record programmes
MC'd by disc jockeys with fixations about guitar
and hill-billy country music. The inevitable
news flash, then all it needed was for one of
those cars to be driven by a halfwit out to show
his wife and children what a hero he really was
all the time although they had never suspected
it.

I picked up the girl's still-empty handbag, stuck
my right hand inside it, made a fist and smashed
away the centre of the laminated safety plate glass.
The hole was now a hundred times bigger than
before, but not nearly so conspicuous: in those
days of stressed and curved glass, mysteriously
shattered windscreens were not so unknown as
to give rise to much comment: a flying pebble,
a sudden change of temperature, even a loud
enough sound at a critical frequency – any of
those could blow out a screen.

But it wasn't enough. I knew it wasn't enough,
and when an excited fast-talking voice broke into
the soap opera on the Chev's radio and gave a
concise if highly-coloured account of my escape,
warning all highway users to look out for and
report the Chev, I knew that I would have to
abandon the car, and at once. It was too hot,
and on this, the only main north-south route,
the chances of escaping detection just didn't exist.
I had to have a new car, and had to have it fast.