Alistair MacLean: Fear is the Key

"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 courthouse 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 immobilising 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 straight-forward 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 courthouse: 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.

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 crashed stone 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 any 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.