Fear is the Key (24 page)

I took half a step forward, fists clenched till they
hurt, murder in my heart. Larry bared his teeth
and grinned at me like a wolf.

‘Come and get it, copper. Come and get it,' he
whispered. I looked from him to the floor and back
again and my hands slowly unclenched. ‘Scared,
aren't you, copper? Yellow, aren't you, copper?
Sweet on her, aren't you, copper? Just like that
pansy Kennedy is sweet on her.' He laughed,
a high falsetto giggle carrying the overtones of
madness. ‘I'm afraid a little accident is going to
happen to Kennedy when I get back over to the
other side. Who's going to blame me for gunning
him down when I see him sapping Royale?'

‘All right,' I said wearily. ‘You're a hero and
a great detective. Let's go see Vyland and get it
over with.'

‘We're going to get it over with,' he nodded. His
voice was suddenly very quiet and I think I liked
it even less that way. ‘But you're not going to see
Vyland, copper, you're never going to see anyone
again. I'm going to kill you, Talbot. I'm letting you
have it now.'

My mouth felt as if someone had gone over it
with a roll of high-absorbency blotting-paper. I
could feel the slow heavy beat of my heart and
the sweat coming on the palms of my hands. He
meant every word he said. He was going to squeeze
the trigger of that heavy Colt and if he lived to be
a hundred nothing would ever give him half so
much pleasure again. Finish. But I managed to
keep my voice steady.

‘So you're going to kill me,' I said slowly. ‘Why?'

‘Because I hate your lousy rotten stinking guts,
Talbot, that's why,' he whispered, a whisper with
a shake in it, a horrible sound. ‘Because you've
ridden me and laughed at me from the moment
we met, hophead this, junky that, always asking
about my syringe. Because you're sweet on this
dame here and if I can't get her no one will. And
because I hate cops.'

He didn't like me, I could see that. Even when
he wasn't talking his mouth was working and
twitching like an epileptic's. He just told me things
that I knew he'd never tell another, and I knew
why. Dead men tell no tales. And that's what
I'd be any second now. Dead. Dead as Herman
Jablonsky. Jablonsky in two feet of earth, Talbot
in 130 feet of water, not that it made any difference
where you slept when it was all over. And it made
things no better to reflect that the end was going to
come at the hands of a quivering mass of doped-up
neuroses disguised as a human being.

‘You're going to let me have it now?' My eye
never lifted off that jumping trigger finger.

‘That's it.' He giggled. ‘In the guts, low down,
so I can watch you flop around for a while. You'll
scream and you'll scream and you'll scream and
no one will ever hear it. How do you like it,
copper?'

‘Hophead,' I said softly. I'd nothing to lose.

‘What?' His face was a mask of disbelief. He went
into a crouch over his gun that would have been
laughable in different circumstances. It wasn't any
strain at all not to laugh. ‘What did you say,
copper?'

‘Junky,' I said distinctly. ‘You're all doped up so
that you don't know what you're doing. What are
you going to do with the body?' It was the first
time I'd ever thought of myself as a corpse and I
didn't care for the feeling very much. ‘Two of you
couldn't lift me out of here and if they find me shot
in this cabin they'll know it was you who did it and
than you'll be in for the high jump, because they
still need my services very badly, more than ever.
You won't be popular, Larry boy.'

He nodded cunningly as if he had just thought
up all this himself.

‘That's right, copper,' he murmured. ‘I can't
shoot you in here, can I? We'll have to go outside,
won't we, copper? Near the edge, where I can
shoot you and shove you into the sea.'

‘That's it,' I agreed. This was macabre, this
arrangement for my own tidy disposal, but I wasn't
going as crazy as Larry, I was gambling on my last
hope. But the gamble was crazy enough.

‘And then they'll be running around and looking
for you,' Larry said dreamily. ‘And I'll be running
around and looking for you too and all the time I'll
be laughing to myself and thinking about you and
the barracuda down among the seaweed there and
knowing that I'm smarter than any one of them.'

‘You have a charming mind,' I said.

‘Haven't I now?' Again that high falsetto giggle
and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my
neck. He poked at Mary with his foot, but she
didn't stir. ‘The dame will keep till I come back.
I won't be long, will I, copper? Come on. You first.
And don't forget I have a torch and a gun.'

‘I'm not likely to forget.'

Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred.
I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn't stir
for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my
fist and foot. But I wasn't at all sure about Mary,
I wasn't even sure that she wasn't faking, her
breathing seemed much too quick and irregular
for an unconscious person.

‘Come on, now,' Larry said impatiently. He
thrust the gun painfully into the small of my
back. ‘Out.'

I went out, through the door, along the passage
and through the outer door on to the wind-
and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had
opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack
but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-
driving blast of that wind and I knew that when
that moment came it would be then or never.

It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my
back I moved round the corner of the shack,
crouched low and barrelling forward into that
great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn't
so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he
was standing upright, and the sudden wavering
and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by
my feet was intimation enough to me that the
wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent
him staggering several feet backward. I lowered
my head still farther until I was in the position
of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps
of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

Almost at once I realized that I had miscalculated.
I had miscalculated the strength of the
wind, running into that hurricane was like running
through a barrel of molasses. And I had
also forgotten that while a seventy-mile-an-hour
wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a
human being it offers relatively none to a heavy
slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600
mph.

I'd got maybe eight yards when the frantically
searching torch beam picked me up and steadied
on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two
before Larry fired.

Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the
world's worst marksmen, their usual method being
to come within a couple of yards before firing or
spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of
bullets to make the law of averages work for them
and I had heard a hundred times that those boys
couldn't hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe
Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule
applied only to barn doors.

A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming
stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me
high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in
a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks.
But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt
the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug
passed through it. Those weren't warning shots
that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

And kill he would if I had remained another
couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the
muffled boom of the Colt – even at ten yards I
could hardly hear it over the howling power of
that wind – and saw sparks strike off the deck
inches from my face and heard the screaming
whirr of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the
darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me
hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-
jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through
car bodies and locked doors, and that made an
awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming
soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the
shoulder.

I was on my feet and running again. I couldn't
see where I was running to and I didn't care,
all that mattered was running from. A blinding,
bulleting gust of rain whistled across the deck and
made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I
had my eyes shut so had Larry.

Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal
ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before
I properly realized what I was doing I was ten
feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe
it was just man's age-old instinct to climb high to
get out of danger that started me off but it was the
realization that this ladder must lead to some sort
of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept
me going.

It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally,
even in that giant wind, it wouldn't have given
me so much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing
completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn't
hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the
real pain would come later, but for the moment
the entire arm seemed paralysed, and every time
I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed
for the one above, the wind pushed me out from
the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the
next rung usually at the full extent of my arm.
Then I had to pull myself close with my one good
arm and start the process all over again. After
I'd climbed about forty rungs my right arm and
shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were
on fire.

I took a breather, hooked my forearm over a
rung and looked down. One look was enough. I
forgot about the pain and weariness and started
climbing faster than ever, hunching my way upwards
like a giant koala bear. Larry was down there at
the foot of the ladder, flickering his torch in all
directions and even with that bird-brain of his
it was only going to be a matter of time until it
occurred to him to shine that torch upwards.

It was the longest ladder I had ever climbed.
It seemed endless, and I knew now that it must
be some part of the drilling derrick, the ladder, I
was now almost sure, that led up to the ‘monkey
board,' that narrow shelf where a man guided the
half-ton sections of the drill pipe, as it came from
the ground, into the storage-racks behind. The
only thing I could remember about the monkey
was the cheerless fact that it was devoid of handrails
– those would only get in the way of the man
guiding the heavy drill sections into place.

A jarring vibrating clang as if the iron ladder had
been struck by a sledge-hammer was Larry's way
of announcing that he had caught sight of me.
The bullet had struck the rung on which my foot
rested and for one bad moment I thought it had
gone through my foot. When I realized it hadn't
I took another quick look down.

Larry was coming up after me. I couldn't see
him, but I could see the torch clutched in one
hand making regularly erratic movements as he
swarmed his way up the ladder making about three
times the speed I was. It wasn't in character this,
Larry could never have been accused of having an
excess of courage: either he was loaded to the eyes
or he was driven by fear – fear that I should escape
and Vyland find out that he had been trying to
murder me. And there was the further possibility,
and a very strong one, that Larry had only one or
two shells left in his gun: he couldn't afford not to
make those count.

I became gradually aware of lightness above and
around me. I thought at first that this must be a
glow cast from the aircraft warning lights in the
top of the derrick, but in the same instant as the
thought occurred I knew it to be wrong: the top
of the derrick was still over a hundred feet above
where I was. I took another breather, screwed my
eyes almost shut against the stinging lash of the
rain and peered upwards into the murky gloom.

There was a platform not ten feet above my
head, with a light shining off feebly to the right.
It wasn't much of a light, but enough to let me
see something of the dark maze of girders that was
the derrick, enough to let me see a dark shadow
above and also to the right which looked like some
tiny cabin. And then Larry's torch steadied and
shone vertically upwards and I saw something
that made me feel slightly sick: the platform above
was not solid sheet-metal but open grille-work
through which a person's every move could be
seen: gone were my hopes of waiting till Larry's
head appeared above the level of the platform and
then kicking it off his shoulders.

I glanced downwards. Larry was no more than
ten feet below, and both his gun and torch were
levelled on me, I could see the dull glint of light in
the barrel and the dark hole in the middle where
death hid. One little pull on the trigger finger and
that dark hole would be a streaking tongue of fire
in the darkness of the night. Curtains for Talbot.
I wondered vaguely, stupidly, if my eyes would
have time to register the bright flame before the
bullet and the oblivion it carried with it closed
my eyes for ever … And then, slowly, I realized
that Larry wasn't going to fire, not even Larry was
crazy enough to fire, not then. The 185-pound
deadweight of my falling body would have brushed
him off that ladder like a fly and from that ten-
storey height neither of us would have bounced
off that steel deck enough so that anyone would
notice.

I kept on climbing and reached the top. Had
it been a solid platform there and I don't think
I would have managed to pull myself on to it
against that wind, my one good hand would just
have scrabbled about on the smooth metal surface
until exhaustion took me and I fell back off the
ladder: but as it was I managed to hook my fingers
in the openwork steel grille and drag myself on to
the platform.