Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘So you’re going to kill me,’ I said slowly. ‘Why?’

‘Because I hate your lousy rotten stinking guts, Talbot, that’s why,’ he whispered, a whisper with a shake in it, a horrible sound. ‘Because you’ve ridden me and laughed at me from the moment we met, hophead this, junky that, always asking about my syringe. Because you’re sweet on this dame here and if I can’t get her no one will. And because I hate cops.’

He didn’t like me, I could see that. Even when he wasn’t talking his mouth was working and twitching like an epileptic’s. He just told me things that I knew he’d never tell another, and I knew why. Dead men tell no tales. And that’s what I’d be any second now. Dead. Dead as Herman Jablonsky. Jablonsky in two feet of earth, Talbot in 130 feet of water, not that it made any difference where you slept when it was all over. And it made things no better to reflect that the end was going to come at the hands of a quivering mass of doped-up neuroses disguised as a human being.

‘You’re going to let me have it now?’ My eye never lifted off that jumping trigger finger.

‘That’s it.’ He giggled. ‘In the guts, low down, so I can watch you flop around for a while. You’ll scream and you’ll scream and you’ll scream and no one will ever hear it. How do you like it, copper?’

‘Hophead,’ I said softly. I’d nothing to lose.

‘What?’ His face was a mask of disbelief. He went into a crouch over his gun that would have been laughable in different circumstances. It wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh. ‘What did you say, copper?’

‘Junky,’ I said distinctly. ‘You’re all doped up so that you don’t know what you’re doing. What are you going to do with the body?’ It was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as a corpse and I didn’t care for the feeling very much. ‘Two of you couldn’t lift me out of here and if they find me shot in this cabin they’ll know it was you who did it and than you’ll be in for the high jump, because they still need my services very badly, more than ever. You won’t be popular, Larry boy.’

He nodded cunningly as if he had just thought up all this himself.

‘That’s right, copper,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t shoot you in here, can I? We’ll have to go outside, won’t we, copper? Near the edge, where I can shoot you and shove you into the sea.’

‘That’s it,’ I agreed. This was macabre, this arrangement for my own tidy disposal, but I wasn’t going as crazy as Larry, I was gambling on my last hope. But the gamble was crazy enough.

‘And then they’ll be running around and looking for you,’ Larry said dreamily. ‘And I’ll be running around and looking for you too and all the time I’ll be laughing to myself and thinking about you and the barracuda down among the seaweed there and knowing that I’m smarter than any one of them.’

‘You have a charming mind,’ I said.

‘Haven’t I now?’ Again that high falsetto giggle and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. He poked at Mary with his foot, but she didn’t stir. ‘The dame will keep till I come back. I won’t be long, will I, copper? Come on. You first. And don’t forget I have a torch and a gun.’

‘I’m not likely to forget.’

Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred. I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn’t stir for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my fist and foot. But I wasn’t at all sure about Mary, I wasn’t even sure that she wasn’t faking, her breathing seemed much too quick and irregular for an unconscious person.

‘Come on, now,’ Larry said impatiently. He thrust the gun painfully into the small of my back. ‘Out.’

I went out, through the door, along the passage and through the outer door on to the wind- and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-driving blast of that wind and I knew that when that moment came it would be then or never.

It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my back I moved round the corner of the shack, crouched low and barrelling forward into that great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn’t so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he was standing upright, and the sudden wavering and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by my feet was intimation enough to me that the wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent him staggering several feet backward. I lowered my head still farther until I was in the position of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

Almost at once I realized that I had miscalculated. I had miscalculated the strength of the wind, running into that hurricane was like running through a barrel of molasses. And I had also forgotten that while a seventy-mile-an-hour wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a human being it offers relatively none to a heavy slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600 mph.

I’d got maybe eight yards when the frantically searching torch beam picked me up and steadied on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two before Larry fired.

Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world’s worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors.

A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks. But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug passed through it. Those weren’t warning shots that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

And kill he would if I had remained another couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the muffled boom of the Colt – even at ten yards I could hardly hear it over the howling power of that wind – and saw sparks strike off the deck inches from my face and heard the screaming whirr of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through car bodies and locked doors, and that made an awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the shoulder.

I was on my feet and running again. I couldn’t see where I was running to and I didn’t care, all that mattered was running from. A blinding, bulleting gust of rain whistled across the deck and made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I had my eyes shut so had Larry.

Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before I properly realized what I was doing I was ten feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe it was just man’s age-old instinct to climb high to get out of danger that started me off but it was the realization that this ladder must lead to some sort of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept me going.

It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally, even in that giant wind, it wouldn’t have given me so much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn’t hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the real pain would come later, but for the moment the entire arm seemed paralysed, and every time I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed for the one above, the wind pushed me out from the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the next rung usually at the full extent of my arm. Then I had to pull myself close with my one good arm and start the process all over again. After I’d climbed about forty rungs my right arm and shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were on fire.