Fear is the Key Read Online Free PDF

for another cigar; that would teach himnot to carry a cigar-case under his left armpit.
    He was still making a great deal of noise when Ihobbled my way swiftly up the aisle, pulled the girlout into the porch, slammed the door and lockedit. That would only give me ten seconds, fifteenat the most, but it was all I needed. I grabbed thegirl’s hand and ran down the path to the street.
    There were two cars parked by the kerb. One, anopen Chevrolet without any official markings, wasthe police car in which the sheriff, Donnelly andI had arrived at the court, the other, presumablyJudge 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 automaticdrive controls with which I was quite unfamiliar:I didn’t know how to drive a Studebaker and thetime it would take me to find out could be fatal.On the other hand, I did know how to operate theautomatic drive on a Chevrolet. On the way up tothe court-house I’d sat up front beside the sheriff,who drove, and I hadn’t missed a move he made.
    â€˜Get in!’ I nodded my head in the direction ofthe police car. ‘Fast!’
    I saw her open the door out of a corner ofan eye while I spared a few moments for theStudebaker. The quickest and most effective wayof immobilizing any car is by smashing its distributor.I spent three or four seconds hunting forthe bonnet catch before I gave it up and turnedmy attention to the front tyre nearest me. Hadit been a tubeless tyre and had I been carryingmy usual automatic, the small calibre steel-jacketed bullet might have failed to make morethan a tiny hole, no sooner made than sealed:as it was, the mushrooming Colt bullet split thesidewall wide open and the Studebaker settledwith a heavy bump.
    The girl was already seated in the Chevrolet.Without bothering to open the door I vaultedover the side into the driving-seat, took one swiftglance at the dashboard, grabbed the white plastichandbag the girl held in her lap, broke the catchand 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, whichmeant she’d shoved them right to the bottom ofher bag. I’d have taken long odds that she wasgood and scared, but longer odds still that shewasn’t terrified.
    â€˜I suppose you thought that was clever?’ I switchedon the motor, pressed the automatic drive button,released the handbrake and gunned the motor sosavagely that the rear tyres spun and whined furiouslyon 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 whereroad-holding and handling are concerned I amno admirer of American cars: but when it came tostraightforward acceleration those big V-8 enginescould make the average British and Europeansports models look silly. The Chevrolet leapt forwardas if it had been fitted with a rocket-assistedtake-off – I suspected that being a police car itmight have had a hotted-up engine – and whenI’d straightened it up and had time for a fast lookin the mirror we were a hundred yards away fromthe court-house: I had time only for a glimpse ofthe judge and the sheriff running out on to theroad, staring after the Chevrolet, before a sharpright-angle bend came sweeping towards us: aquick twist of the wheel to the right, a four-wheeldrift, the back end breaking away, another twist ofthe wheel to the left and then, still accelerating, wewere clear of the town limits and heading into theopen country.

TWO
    We were heading almost due north along thehighway, a white and dusty ribbon of road builtup several feet above the level of the surroundingland. Away to our left the Gulf of Mexico glitteredand twinkled like an opalescent emerald underthe broiling sun. Between the road and the seawas a flat uninteresting belt of low mangrovecoast, to our right swampy