Fear is the Key

He lay spread-eagled face downwards on the floor, silent and still. I was far from silent myself, my breath was coming in great heaving gasps as if I had just run a mile, and I hadn't even run a hundred yards in years. My arms, my hands, my face were wet with sweat, and it was this that made me think to get out a handkerchief and rub it all over my face. But there was no blood there, and I couldn't feel any bruise. It would have been very difficult indeed to explain away a black eye or bleeding nose to Vyland when I met him later. I tucked the handkerchief away and looked at the girl in the doorway. The hand that still held the chair-leg was trembling slightly, her eyes wide, her lips pale and what little expression there was on her face couldn't easily have been misconstrued as the beginnings of a worshipping admiration.

"Did you — did you have to use your boot?" she asked shakily.

"What did you expect me to use?" I asked savagely. "The palm of my hand to smooth his fevered brow? Be your age, lady. That guy never heard of Little Lord Fauntleroy, he'd have chopped me into bits and fed me to the barracuda if he'd had half the chance. Now, just you stand by with your shillelagh there and clout Mm if he bats an eyelid — but hard, this time. Not," I added 'hastily, lest she suspect me of being a thought ungracious, "that I'm not grateful for what you've already done."

I turned round, already a precious minute had been lost since I had come into the shack, and found what I was looking for right away. Several pegs on the walls were festooned with tightly-rolled coils of wire and flex, material for antenna leads and radio repairs. I picked a nice flexible roll of flex and within a minute I had the radio operator trussed like a chicken ready for the broiler, passed a slip knot round his neck and tied the end of it to a cupboard handle. There could be some bells or pushes or phones he might try to reach but he'd soon give it up when he found that all he was doing was strangling himself. I gave the matter of a gag only a passing thought: there may be those who know how to draw a happy median line between suffocating a man and making a gag loose enough to permit breathing without at the same time letting the victim be heard a hundred yards away, but I'm not one of them. Besides, with that great hurricane howling outside he could holler away till he got laryngitis and nobody below deck would ever hear him.

I reached for the only other chair in the shack and sat down before the radio. It was a standard aircraft-type transmitter, I knew it well and I knew how to operate it. I switched on, tuned it on the wave-length the sheriff had given me through Kennedy and clamped on a pair of headphones. I wouldn't have long to wait, I knew that: the police were keeping a twenty-four hour watch on their short wave receivers. Within three seconds of the end of my call-up sign the head-phones crackled in my ears.

"Police headquarters. Sheriff Prendergast here. Please go ahead"

I threw the transmitter switch from manual to microphone.

"Car nineteen reporting." The agreed subterfuge wasn't necessary for identification, every police car in the county had been warned to stay off the air and the sheriff knew it could only be me: but in these days of enthusiastic radio "hams," air-wave eavesdroppers abound and I wouldn't have put it past Vyland's organisation to maintain a permanent listening watch on the police wavelengths. I continued: "Suspect answering to description detained near Ventura crossroads. Shall we bring him in?"

"Negative," the voice crackled. A pause. "We've found our man. Please release suspect."

I felt as if someone had given me a million dollars. Almost without realising it I relaxed heavily against the back-rest of the chair, the strain of the keyed-up tension of the past forty-eight hours had been far greater than I had realised. The sheer mental relief, the depth of satisfaction I experienced then surpassed anything I had ever known.

"Car Nineteen," I said again. Even to myself my voice didn't sound quite steady. "Would you repeat that, please?"

"Release your suspect," Prendergast said slowly and distinctly. "We have found our man. Repeat, we have found-"

The transmitter leapt backwards about two inches, a great jagged hole appeared in the centre of the timing band and the radio shack seemed to explode about my ears so deafening, so shattering was 'the effect of a heavy gun being fired in that confined space.

I didn't jump more than a couple of feet and after I came down I got to my feet the normal way, but slowly, carefully. I didn't want anyone getting too nervous, and whoever had pulled that stupid trick, unnecessarily smashing the set and tipping off the cops that something had gone wrong, was very nervous indeed. Almost as nervous as I felt as I turned slowly round and saw who my guest was.