Fear is the Key Read Online Free PDF Page B

forests not of palmsor palmettos as I would have expected to findin those parts but pine, and disheartened-lookingscrub pine at that.
    I wasn’t enjoying the ride. I was pushing theChev along as fast as I dared, and the soft swingingsuspension gave me no feeling of security at all.I had no sun-glasses, and even though the sunwas not directly in my face the savage glare ofsub-tropical light off that road was harsh andhurtful to the eyes. It was an open car, but thewindscreen was so big and deeply curved that wegot almost no cooling benefit at all from the windwhistling by our ears at over eighty miles an hour.Back in the court-room, the shade temperaturehad been close on a hundred: what it was out herein the open I couldn’t even begin to guess. But itwas hot, furnace hot: I wasn’t enjoying the ride.
    Neither was the girl beside me. She hadn’t evenbothered to replace the stuff I’d emptied out ofher bag, just sat there with her hands claspedtightly together. Now and again, as we took a fastcorner, she reached out to grab the upper edge ofthe door but otherwise she’d made no movementsince we’d left Marble Springs except to tie a whitebandanna over her fair hair. She didn’t once lookat me, I didn’t even know what colour her eyeswere. And she certainly didn’t once speak to me.Once or twice I glanced at her and each time shewas staring straight ahead, lips compressed, facepale, a faint red patch burning high up in her leftcheek. She was still scared, maybe more scaredthan ever. Maybe she was wondering what wasgoing to happen to her. I was wondering aboutthat myself.
    Eight miles and eight minutes out of MarbleSprings the expected happened. Somebody certainlyseemed to have thought and moved evenfaster.
    The expected was a road-block. It came at a pointwhere some enterprising firm had built up the landto the right of the road with crushed stones andcoral, asphalted it and built a filling station anddrivers’ pull-up. Right across the road a car hadbeen drawn up, a big black police car – if the twopivoting searchlights and the big red ‘STOP’ lightwere not enough, the eight-inch white-lettered‘POLICE’ sign would have removed all doubt. Tothe left, just beyond the nose of the police car,the land dropped sharply four or five feet intoa ditch that lifted only slowly to the mangrovecoast beyond: there was no escape that way. Tothe right, where the road widened and angledinto the courtyard of the filling station, a verticallyupright line of black corrugated fifty-gallon oildrums completely blocked the space between thepolice car and the first of the line of petrol pumpsthat paralleled the road.
    All this I saw in the four or five seconds it tookme to bring the shuddering skidding Chevroletdown from 70 to 30 mph, the high-pitched screamin our ears token of the black smoke trail of meltedrubber that we were leaving on the white roadbehind us. I saw, too, the policemen, one crouchedbehind the bonnet of the police car, a second withhis head and right arm just visible above the boot:both of them carried revolvers. A third policemanwas standing upright and almost completely hiddenbehind the nearest petrol pump, but there wasnothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal ofall close-quarters weapons, a whipper, a sawn-offshotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.
    I was down to 20 mph now, not more than fortyyards distant from the block. The policemen, gunslevelled on my head, were rising up and movingout into the open when out of the corner of myeye I caught a glimpse of the girl reaching for thehandle of the door and half-turning away from meas she gathered herself for the leap out of the car. Isaid nothing, just leaned across, grabbed her arm,jerked her towards me with a savage force thatmade her gasp with pain and, in the same instantthat I transferred my grip to her shoulders and heldher half against half in front of me so that the policedared not shoot, jammed my foot