Fear is the Key. Alistair MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ they were not only curious about everything they saw but obviously had the time and the inclination to indulge their curiosity. Every other car slowed down as it approached us and in my rear-view mirror I saw the stop lights of three or four of them come on as the driver tramped on the brakes and the occupants twisted round in their seats. Hollywood and a thousand TV films had made a bullet-scarred windscreen an object readily identifiable by millions.

      This was disturbing enough. Worse still was the near certainty that any minute now every local radio station within a hundred miles would be broadcasting the news of what had happened back at the Marble Springs court-house, together with a complete description of the Chevrolet, myself and the blonde girl beside me. The chances were that at least half of those cars approaching me had their radios tuned in to one of those local stations with their interminable record programmes MC’d by disc jockeys with fixations about guitar and hill-billy country music. The inevitable news flash, then all it needed was for one of those cars to be driven by a halfwit out to show his wife and children what a hero he really was all the time although they had never suspected it.

      I picked up the girl’s still-empty handbag, stuck my right hand inside it, made a fist and smashed away the centre of the laminated safety plate glass. The hole was now a hundred times bigger than before, but not nearly so conspicuous: in those days of stressed and curved glass, mysteriously shattered windscreens were not so unknown as to give rise to much comment: a flying pebble, a sudden change of temperature, even a loud enough sound at a critical frequency – any of those could blow out a screen.

      But it wasn’t enough. I knew it wasn’t enough, and when an excited fast-talking voice broke into the soap opera on the Chev’s radio and gave a concise if highly-coloured account of my escape, warning all highway users to look out for and report the Chev, I knew that I would have to abandon the car, and at once. It was too hot, and on this, the only main north-south route, the chances of escaping detection just didn’t exist. I had to have a new car, and had to have it fast.

      I got one almost at once. We had been passing through one of those new towns which mushroom by the score along the seaboards of Florida when I heard the flash, and less than two hundred yards beyond the limits we came to a lay-by on the shore side of the road. There were three cars there, and obviously they had been travelling in company for through a gap in the trees and low scrub that curved round the lay-by I could see a group of seven or eight people picking their way down to the shore, about three hundred yards away: they were carrying with them a barbecue grill, a cooking stove and luncheon baskets: they looked as if they intended making a stay.

      I jumped out of the Chev, taking the girl with me, and quickly checked all three cars. Two were convertibles, a third a sports car and all were open. There were no ignition keys in any of the locks, but the sports car owner, as many do, had a spare set in a cubby-hole by the steering column, hidden only by a folded chamois cloth.

      I could have just driven off leaving the police car there, but that would have been stupid. As long as the Chev’s whereabouts remained unknown, the search would be concentrated exclusively on it and little attention would be paid to the common car thief who had taken the other: but if the Chev were found in the lay-by then the state-wide search would immediately be switched to the sports car.

      Thirty seconds later I had the Chev back at the limits of the new town, slowing down as I came to the first of the all-but-completed split-levels on the shore side of the road. There was no one around, and I didn’t hesitate: I turned in on the concrete drive of the first house, drove straight in under the open tip-up door of the garage, shut off the engine and quickly closed the garage door.

      When we emerged from the garage two or three minutes later anyone looking for us would have looked a second or third time before getting suspicious. By coincidence, the girl had been wearing a short-sleeved green blouse of exactly the same shade of colour as my suit, a fact that had been repeated twice over the radio. A fast check point and a dead giveaway. But now the blouse had gone and the white sun-top she’d on beneath it was worn by so many girls that blazing summer afternoon that she’d subtly merged her identity with those of a thousand other women: her blouse was tucked inside my coat, my coat was inside out over my arm with only the grey lining showing and my necktie was in my pocket. I’d taken the bandanna from her, wrapped it kerchief-wise over my head, the loose ends of the knot hanging down the right-hand side, in front, all but obscuring my scar. The red hair showing at the temples was still a giveaway and while, by the time I had finished smearing it with her moistened mascara pencil, it didn’t look like any hair I had ever seen, at least it didn’t look red.

      Under the blouse and coat I carried the gun.

      Walking slowly so as to minimize my limp, we reached the sports car in three minutes. This, too, like the one we’d just tucked away in the garage, was a Chevrolet, with the same engine as the other, but there the resemblance ended. It was a plastic-bodied two-seater, I’d driven one in Europe, and I knew that the claims for 120 mph were founded on fact.

      I waited till a heavy gravel truck came grinding past from the north, started the Corvette’s engine under the sound of its passing – the group of people I’d seen earlier were on the shoreline now but they might just have heard the distinctive note of this car’s engine and might just have been suspicious – made a fast U-turn and took off after the truck. I noticed the startled expression on the girl’s face as we drove off in the direction from which we’d just come.

      ‘I know. Go on, say it, I’m crazy. Only I’m not crazy. The next road-block won’t be so very far to the north now, and it’ll be no hurried makeshift affair like the last time, it’ll stop a fifty-ton tank. Maybe they’ll guess that I’ll guess that, maybe they’ll conclude that I’ll leave this road and make for the side-roads and dirt-tracks in the swamplands to the east there. Anyway, that’s what I’d figure in their place. Good country for going to ground. So we’ll just go south. They won’t figure on that. And then we’ll hide up for a few hours.’

      ‘Hide up? Where? Where can you hide up?’ I didn’t answer her question and she went on: ‘Let me go, please! You – you’re quite safe now. You must be. You must be sure of yourself or you wouldn’t be heading this way. Please!’

      ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said wearily. ‘Let you go – and within ten minutes every cop in the state will know what kind of car I’m driving and where I’m heading! You must think I’m crazy.’

      ‘But you can’t trust me,’ she persisted. I hadn’t shot anybody in twenty minutes, she wasn’t scared any longer, at least not too scared to work things out. ‘How do you know I won’t make signs at people, or shout out when you do nothing about it, like at traffic lights, or – or hit you when you’re not looking? How do you know –?’

      ‘That cop, Donnelly,’ I said apropos of nothing. ‘I wonder if the doctors got to him in time.’

      She got the point. The colour that had come back to her face drained out of it again. But she had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

      ‘My father is a sick man, Mr Talbot.’ It was the first time she’d used my name, and I appreciated the ‘Mister’. ‘I’m terribly afraid of what will happen to him when he hears this. He – well, he has a very bad heart and –’

      ‘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.

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