Fear is the Key. Alistair MacLean

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      ‘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.

      Maybe ten minutes after we arrived a black police car came along the highway, from the south. I watched in the rear-view mirror as it slowed down and two policemen put their heads out to give the parking-lot a quick once-over. But their scrutiny was as cursory as it was swift, you could see they didn’t really expect to see anything interesting, and the car pulled away before its speed had dropped to walking pace.

      The hope in the girl’s eyes – they were grey and cool and clear, I could see now – died out like a snuffed candleflame, the rounding and drooping of her sunburned shoulders unmistakable.

      Half an hour later the hope was back. Two motor-cycle cops, helmeted, gauntleted, very tough and very competent, swept in under the archway in perfect unison, stopped in perfect unison and killed their motors on the same instant. For a few seconds they sat there, high gleaming boots astride on the ground, then they dismounted, kicked down the rests and started moving round the cars. One of them had his revolver in his hand.

      They started at the car nearest the entrance, with only a quick glance for the car itself but a long penetrating wordless stare for the occupants. They weren’t doing any explaining and they weren’t doing any apologizing: they looked like cops might look if they had heard that another cop had been shot. And was dying. Or dead.

      Suddenly they skipped two or three cars and came straight at us. At least, that seemed to be their intention, but they skirted us and headed for a Ford to the left and ahead of us. As they passed by, I felt the girl stiffening, saw her taking a quick deep breath.

      ‘Don’t СКАЧАТЬ