Fear is the Key. Alistair MacLean
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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.
‘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