Fear is the Key (4 page)

I got one almost at once. We had been passing
through one of those new towns which mushroom
by the score along the seaboards of Florida when I
heard the flash, and less than two hundred yards
beyond the limits we came to a lay-by on the shore
side of the road. There were three cars there, and
obviously they had been travelling in company
for through a gap in the trees and low scrub that
curved round the lay-by I could see a group of
seven or eight people picking their way down to
the shore, about three hundred yards away: they
were carrying with them a barbecue grill, a cooking
stove and luncheon baskets: they looked as if they
intended making a stay.

I jumped out of the Chev, taking the girl with
me, and quickly checked all three cars. Two were
convertibles, a third a sports car and all were open.
There were no ignition keys in any of the locks, but
the sports car owner, as many do, had a spare set in
a cubby-hole by the steering column, hidden only
by a folded chamois cloth.

I could have just driven off leaving the police car
there, but that would have been stupid. As long as
the Chev's whereabouts remained unknown, the
search would be concentrated exclusively on it and
little attention would be paid to the common car
thief who had taken the other: but if the Chev were
found in the lay-by then the state-wide search
would immediately be switched to the sports car.

Thirty seconds later I had the Chev back at the
limits of the new town, slowing down as I came to
the first of the all-but-completed split-levels on the
shore side of the road. There was no one around,
and I didn't hesitate: I turned in on the concrete
drive of the first house, drove straight in under
the open tip-up door of the garage, shut off the
engine and quickly closed the garage door.

When we emerged from the garage two or three
minutes later anyone looking for us would have
looked a second or third time before getting suspicious.
By coincidence, the girl had been wearing
a short-sleeved green blouse of exactly the same
shade of colour as my suit, a fact that had been
repeated twice over the radio. A fast check point
and a dead giveaway. But now the blouse had
gone and the white sun-top she'd on beneath it
was worn by so many girls that blazing summer
afternoon that she'd subtly merged her identity
with those of a thousand other women: her blouse
was tucked inside my coat, my coat was inside out
over my arm with only the grey lining showing
and my necktie was in my pocket. I'd taken the
bandanna from her, wrapped it kerchief-wise over
my head, the loose ends of the knot hanging down
the right-hand side, in front, all but obscuring my
scar. The red hair showing at the temples was still
a giveaway and while, by the time I had finished
smearing it with her moistened mascara pencil, it
didn't look like any hair I had ever seen, at least
it didn't look red.

Under the blouse and coat I carried the gun.

Walking slowly so as to minimize my limp, we
reached the sports car in three minutes. This,
too, like the one we'd just tucked away in the
garage, was a Chevrolet, with the same engine
as the other, but there the resemblance ended. It
was a plastic-bodied two-seater, I'd driven one in
Europe, and I knew that the claims for 120 mph
were founded on fact.

I waited till a heavy gravel truck came grinding
past from the north, started the Corvette's engine
under the sound of its passing – the group of people
I'd seen earlier were on the shoreline now but they
might just have heard the distinctive note of this
car's engine and might just have been suspicious
– made a fast U-turn and took off after the truck.
I noticed the startled expression on the girl's face
as we drove off in the direction from which we'd
just come.

‘I know. Go on, say it, I'm crazy. Only I'm not
crazy. The next road-block won't be so very far to
the north now, and it'll be no hurried makeshift
affair like the last time, it'll stop a fifty-ton tank.
Maybe they'll guess that I'll guess that, maybe
they'll conclude that I'll leave this road and make
for the side-roads and dirt-tracks in the swamplands
to the east there. Anyway, that's what I'd
figure in their place. Good country for going to
ground. So we'll just go south. They won't figure
on that. And then we'll hide up for a few
hours.'

‘Hide up? Where? Where can you hide up?' I
didn't answer her question and she went on: ‘Let
me go, please! You – you're quite safe now. You
must be. You must be sure of yourself or you
wouldn't be heading this way. Please!'

‘Don't be silly,' I said wearily. ‘Let you go – and
within ten minutes every cop in the state will
know what kind of car I'm driving and where I'm
heading! You must think I'm crazy.'

‘But you can't trust me,' she persisted. I hadn't
shot anybody in twenty minutes, she wasn't scared
any longer, at least not too scared to work things
out. ‘How do you know I won't make signs at
people, or shout out when you do nothing about
it, like at traffic lights, or – or hit you when you're
not looking? How do you know –?'

‘That cop, Donnelly,' I said apropos of nothing.
‘I wonder if the doctors got to him in time.'

She got the point. The colour that had come back
to her face drained out of it again. But she had the
best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the
kind that gets you into trouble.

‘My father is a sick man, Mr Talbot.' It was the
first time she'd used my name, and I appreciated
the ‘Mister'. ‘I'm terribly afraid of what will happen
to him when he hears this. He – well, he has a very
bad heart and –'

‘And I have a wife and four starving kiddies,' I
interrupted. ‘We can wipe each other's tears away.
Be quiet.'

She said nothing, not even when I pulled up
at a drugstore a few moments later, went inside
and made a short phone call. She was with me,
far enough away not to hear what I was saying
but near enough to see the shape of the gun
under my folded coat. On the way out I bought
cigarettes. The clerk looked at me, then at the
Corvette roadster parked outside.

‘Hot day for driving, mister. Come far?'

‘Only from Chilicoote Lake.' I'd seen the turnoff
sign three or four miles to the north. My
efforts at an American accent made me wince.
‘Fishing.'

‘Fishing, eh?' The tone was neutral enough,
which was more than could be said for the half-
leer in his eyes as he looked over the girl by
my side, but my Sir Galahad instincts were in
abeyance that afternoon so I let it pass. ‘Catch
anything?'

‘Some.' I had no idea what fish if any were in
the local lakes and, when I came to think of it,
it seemed unlikely that anyone should take off
for those shallow swampy lakes when the whole
of the Gulf of Mexico lay at his front door. ‘Lost
'em, though.' My voice sharpened in remembered
anger. ‘Just put the basket down on the road
for a moment when some crazy idiot comes past
doing eighty. Knocked basket and fish to hell and
breakfast. And so much dust on those side roads I
couldn't even catch his number.'

‘You get 'em everywhere.' His eyes suddenly
focused on a point a hundred miles away, then
he said quickly: ‘What kind of car, mister?'

‘Blue Chev. Broken windscreen. Why, what's
the matter?'

‘“What's the matter?” he asks. Do you mean
to tell me you haven't – Did you see the guy
drivin' it?'

‘No. Too fast. Just that he had a lot of red
hair, but –'

‘Red hair. Chilicoote Lake. Brother!' He turned
and ran for the phone.

We went out into the sunshine. The girl said:
‘You don't miss much, do you? How – how can
you be so cool? He might have recognized –'

‘Get into the car. Recognized me? He was too
busy looking at you. When they made that sun-top
I guess they ran out of material but just decided to
go ahead and finish it off anyway.'

We got in and drove off. Four miles farther on
we came to the place I had noticed on the way
up. It was a palm-shaded parking-lot between the
road and the shore, and a big sign hung under a
temporary wooden archway. ‘Codell Construction
Company' it read, then, underneath, in bigger
lettering, ‘Sidewalk Superintendents: Drive Right
In.'

I drove right in. There were fifteen, maybe
twenty cars already parked inside, some people
sitting on the benches provided, but most of them
still in the seats of their cars. They were all
watching the construction of foundations designed
to take a seaward extension of a new town. Four
big draglines, caterpillar-mounted power shovels,
were crawling slowly, ponderously around, tearing
up underwater coral rock from the bay bottom,
building up a solid wide foundation, then crawling
out on the pier just constructed and tearing up
more coral rock. One was building a wide strip
straight out to sea: this would be the new street
of the community. Two others were making small
piers at right angles to the main one – those
would be for house lots, each house with its own
private landing-stage. A fourth was making a big
loop to the north, curving back into land again.
A yacht harbour, probably. It was a fascinating
process to watch, this making of a town out of
the bottom of the sea, only I was in no mood to
be fascinated.

I parked the car between a couple of empty
convertibles, opened the pack of cigarettes I'd just
bought and lit one. The girl half-turned in her seat
and was staring at me incredulously.

‘Is this the place you meant when you said we'd
go somewhere to hide up?'

‘This is it,' I assured her.

‘You're going to stay here?'

‘What's it look like to you?'

‘With all those people around? Where everyone
can see you? Twenty yards off the road where
every passing police patrol –'

‘See what I mean? Everyone would think the
same as you. This is the last place any hunted
man in his senses would think of coming. So it's
the ideal place. So here we stay.'

‘You can't stay here for ever,' she said steadily.

‘No,' I agreed. ‘Just till it gets dark. Move closer,
Miss Ruthven, real close. A man fleeing for his
life, Miss Ruthven. What picture does that conjure
up? An exhausted wild-eyed individual crashing
through the high timber or plunging up to his armpits
through some of the choicer Florida swamps.
Certainly not sitting in the sunshine getting all
close and confidential with a pretty girl. Nothing
in the world less calculated to arouse suspicion, is
there? Move over, lady.'

‘I wish I had a gun in my hand,' she said quietly.

‘I don't doubt it. Move over.'

She moved. I felt the uncontrollable shudder
of revulsion as her bare shoulder touched mine.
I tried to imagine how I would feel if I were a
pretty young girl in the company of a murderer,
but it was too difficult, I wasn't a girl, I wasn't even
particularly young or good-looking, so I gave it up,
showed her the gun under the coat lying over my
knees, and sat back to enjoy the light on-shore
breeze that tempered the sunlight filtering through
the fronds of the rustling palm trees. But it didn't
look as if the sunlight would be with us too long,
that sea breeze being pulled in by the sun-scorched
land was laden with moisture and already the tiny
white scraps of cloud that had been drifting across
the sky were building and thickening up into grey
cumulus. I didn't like that much. I wanted to
have the excuse to keep wearing the bandanna
on my head.

Maybe ten minutes after we arrived a black
police car came along the highway, from the south.
I watched in the rear-view mirror as it slowed
down and two policemen put their heads out
to give the parking-lot a quick once-over. But
their scrutiny was as cursory as it was swift, you
could see they didn't really expect to see anything
interesting, and the car pulled away before its
speed had dropped to walking pace.

The hope in the girl's eyes – they were grey and
cool and clear, I could see now – died out like a
snuffed candleflame, the rounding and drooping
of her sunburned shoulders unmistakable.

Half an hour later the hope was back. Two
motor-cycle cops, helmeted, gauntleted, very
tough and very competent, swept in under the
archway in perfect unison, stopped in perfect
unison and killed their motors on the same instant.
For a few seconds they sat there, high gleaming
boots astride on the ground, then they dismounted,
kicked down the rests and started moving round
the cars. One of them had his revolver in his
hand.

They started at the car nearest the entrance, with
only a quick glance for the car itself but a long
penetrating wordless stare for the occupants. They
weren't doing any explaining and they weren't
doing any apologizing: they looked like cops might
look if they had heard that another cop had been
shot. And was dying. Or dead.

Suddenly they skipped two or three cars and
came straight at us. At least, that seemed to be
their intention, but they skirted us and headed for
a Ford to the left and ahead of us. As they passed
by, I felt the girl stiffening, saw her taking a quick
deep breath.

‘Don't do it!' I flung an arm around her and
grabbed her tight. The breath she'd meant for the
warning shout was expelled in a gasp of pain. The
policeman nearest turned round and saw the girl's
face buried between my shoulder and neck and
looked away again. Having seen what he thought
he'd seen he made a remark to his companion
that wasn't as
sotto voce
as it might have been and
might have called for action in normal circumstances.
But the circumstances weren't normal. I
let it go.