Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary’s right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn’t see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn’t even a chance.

‘Come here, cop,’ Larry said stonily. ‘Come here or I’ll give the girl friend’s wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye.’ He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much. I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

‘Scared, cop?’ he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die. I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of nausea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

‘You can’t do it, Larry,’ I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonizing, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. ‘Kill me and they’ll never get the treasure.’

‘I’m laughing.’ He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. ‘See me, cop, I’m laughing. I’d never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that’s all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son.’

‘Vyland?’ I’d known for hours.

‘My father. God damn his soul.’ The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. ‘So long, cop.’

My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

‘I’ll tell him goodbye from you,’ I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.

There came a dull muffled snapping noise and the Colt fell from his hands and struck the grille at my feet. For two or three seconds Larry seemed to stand there poised, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a toppling factory chimney, he fell out into space.

There was no terror-stricken screaming, no wild flailing of arms and legs as he fell to the steel deck a hundred feet below: Larry had been dead, his neck broken, even before he had started to fall.

Eight minutes after Larry had died and exactly twenty minutes after I had left Kennedy and Royale in the cabin I was back there, giving the hurriedly prearranged knock. The door was unlocked, and I passed quickly inside. Kennedy immediately turned the key again while I looked down at Royale, spread-eagled and unconscious on the deck.

‘How’s the patient been?’ I inquired. My breath was coming in heaving gasps, the exertions of the past twenty minutes and the fact that I’d run all the way back there hadn’t helped my respiration any.

‘Restive.’ Kennedy grinned. ‘I had to give him another sedative.’ Then his eyes took me in and the smile slowly faded as he looked first at the blood trickling from my mouth then at the hole in the shoulder of the oilskin.

‘You look bad. You’re hurt. Trouble?’

I nodded. ‘But it’s all over now, all taken care of.’ I was wriggling out of my oilskins as fast as I could and I wasn’t liking it at all. ‘I got through on the radio. Everything is going fine. So far, that is.’

‘Fine, that’s wonderful.’ The words were automatic, Kennedy was pleased enough to hear my news but he was far from pleased with the looks of me. Carefully, gently, he was helping me out of the oilskins and I heard the quick indrawing of breath as he saw where I’d torn my shirt-sleeve off at the shoulder, the red-stained wads of gauze with which Mary had plugged both sides of the wound – the bullet had passed straight through, missing the bone but tearing half the deltoid muscle away – in the brief minute we’d stopped in the radio shack after we’d come down that ladder again. ‘My God, that must hurt.’

‘Not much.’ Not much it didn’t there were a couple of little men, working on piece-time rates, perched on either side of my shoulder and sawing away with a crosscut as if their lives depended on it, and my mouth didn’t feel very much better: the broken tooth had left an exposed nerve that sent violent jolts of pain stabbing up through my face and head every other second. Normally the combination would have had me climbing the walls: but today wasn’t a normal day.

‘You can’t carry on like this,’ Kennedy persisted. ‘You’re losing blood and–’

‘Can anyone see that I’ve been hit in the teeth?’ I asked abruptly.

He crossed to a wash-basin, wet a handkerchief and wiped my face clear of blood.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said consideringly. ‘Tomorrow your upper lip will be double size but it hasn’t started coming up yet.’ He smiled with humour. ‘And as long as the wound in your shoulder doesn’t make you laugh out loud no one can see that one of your teeth is broken.’

‘Fine. That’s all I need. You know I’ve got to do this.’ I was slipping off the oilskin leggings and had to reposition the gun in my waistband. Kennedy, beginning to dress up in the oilskins himself, saw it.

‘Larry’s?’

I nodded.

‘He did the damage?’

Another nod.

‘And Larry?’

‘He won’t need any more heroin where he’s gone.’ I struggled painfully into my coat, more than ever grateful that I’d left it off before going. ‘I broke his neck.’

Kennedy regarded me long and thoughtfully. ‘You play kind of rough, don’t you, Talbot?’

‘Not half as rough as you’d have been,’ I said grimly. ‘He’d Mary on her hands and knees on the monkey-board of the derrick, a hundred feet above the deck, and he was proposing that she go down again without benefit of the ladder.’