Fear is the Key

‘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.

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 whippet, 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.

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.