Alistair MacLean: Fear is the Key

"Water?" The judge sounded half-impatient, half-sympathetic. "I'm afraid there's no—"

"Over there," I gasped. I waved weakly to a spot on the other side of the officer who was guarding me. "Please!"

The policeman turned away — I'd have been astonished if he hadn't — and as he turned I pivoted on both toes and brought my left arm whipping across just below waist level — three inches higher and that studded and heavily brass-buckled belt he wore around his middle would have left me needing a new pair of knuckles. His explosive grunt of agony was still echoing through the shocked stillness of the court-room when I spun him round as he started to fall, snatched the heavy Colt from his holster and was waving it gently around the room even before the policeman had struck the side of the box and slid, coughing and gasping painfully for air, to the wooden floor.

I took in the whole scene with one swift sweeping glance. The man with the broken nose was staring at me with an expression as near amazement as his primitive features could register, his mouth fallen open, the mangled stub of his cigar clinging impossibly to the corner of his lower lip. The girl with the dark-blonde hair was bent forward, wide-eyed, her hand to her face, her thumb under her chin and her fore-finger crooked across her mouth. The judge was no longer a judge, he was a waxen effigy of himself, as motionless in his chair as if he had just come from the sculptor's hands. The clerk, the reporter, the door attendant were as rigid as the judge, while the group of school-girls and the elderly spinster in charge were as goggle-eyed as ever, but the curiosity had gone from their faces and fear stepped in to take its place: the teenager nearest me had her eyebrows arched high up into her forehead and her lips were trembling, she looked as if she were going to start weeping or screaming any moment. I hoped, vaguely, that it wasn't going to be screaming, then an instant later I realised that it didn't matter for there was likely going to be a great deal of noise in the very near future indeed. The sheriff hadn't been so unarmed as I had supposed: he was reaching for his gun.

His draw was not quite the clean swift blurring action to which the cinema of my youth had accustomed me. The long flapping tails of Ms alpaca coat impeded his hand and he was further hindered by the arm of his cane chair. Fully four seconds elapsed before he reached the butt of his gun.

"Don't do it, Sheriff!" I said quickly. "This cannon in my hand is pointing right at you."

But the little man's courage, or foolhardiness, seemed to be an inverse proportion to his size. You could tell by his eyes, by the lips ever so slightly drawn back over the tightly clamped tobacco-stained teeth, that there was going to be no stopping him. Except in the only possible way. At the full stretch of my arm I raised the revolver until the barrel was level with my eyes — this business of dead-eye Dan snapshooting from the hip is strictly for the birds — and as the sheriff's hand came clear of the folds of his jacket I squeezed the trigger. The reverberating boom of that heavy Colt, magnified many times by the confining walls of that small court-house, quite obliterated any other sound. Whether the sheriff cried out or the bullet struck his hand or the gun in his hand no one could say: all we could be sure of was what we saw, and that was the sheriff's right arm and whole right side jerking convulsively and the gun spinning backwards to land on a table inches from the notebook of the startled reporter.

Already my Colt was lined up on the man at the door.

"Come and join us, friend," I invited. "You look as if you might be having ideas about fetching help." I waited till he was halfway down the aisle then whirled round quickly as I heard a scuffling noise behind me.

There had been no need for haste. The policeman was on his feet, but that was all that could be said for him. He was bent almost double, one hand clutching his midriff, the knuckles of the other all but brushing the floor: he was whooping violently, gasping for the breath to ease the pain in his body. Then he slowly straightened to a crouched stooping position, and there was no fear in his face, only hurt and anger and shame and a do-or-die determination.

"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 him 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 sometime," 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? "