Fear is the Key

Throw your arms round his neck or his legs, I prayed. Or throw your coat over his head. But don't, don't, don't go for his gun-hand.

She went for his gun-hand. She reached round his right side and I plainly heard the smack as her right hand closed over his right wrist.

For a moment Larry stood stock-still. Had he jumped or twisted or moved, I would have been on to him like an express train, but he didn't, the very unexpectedness of the shock temporarily petrified him. It petrified his gun hand too — it was still pointing straight at me.

And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary's right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn't see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn't even a chance.

"Come here, cop," Larry said stonily. "Come here or I'll give the girl friend's wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye." He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much.

I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

"Scared, cop?" he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die.

I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of nausea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

"You can't do it, Larry," I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonising, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. "Kill me and they'll never get the treasure."

"I'm laughing." He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. "See me, cop, I'm laughing. I'd never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that's all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son."

"Vyland?" I'd known for hours.

"My father. God damn his soul." The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. "So long, cop."

My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

"I'll tell him goodbye from you," I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.

There came a dull muffled snapping noise and the Colt fell from his hands and struck the grille at my feet. For two or three seconds Larry seemed to stand there poised, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a toppling factory chimney, he fell out into space.

There was no terror-stricken screaming, no wild flailing of arms and legs as he fell to the steel deck a hundred feet below: Larry had been dead, his neck broken, even before he had started to fall.

CHAPTER XI