it might have had a hotted-up engine – and when I’d straightened it up and had time for a fast look in the mirror we were a hundred yards away from the court-house: I had time only for a glimpse of the judge and the sheriff running out on to the road, staring after the Chevrolet, before a sharp right-angle bend came sweeping towards us: a quick twist of the wheel to the right, a four-wheel drift, the back end breaking away, another twist of the wheel to the left and then, still accelerating, we were clear of the town limits and heading into the open country.
We were heading almost due north along the highway, a white and dusty ribbon of road built up several feet above the level of the surrounding land. Away to our left the Gulf of Mexico glittered and twinkled like an opalescent emerald under the broiling sun. Between the road and the sea was a flat uninteresting belt of low mangrove coast, to our right swampy forests not of palms or palmettos as I would have expected to find in those parts but pine, and disheartened-looking scrub pine at that.
I wasn’t enjoying the ride. I was pushing the Chev along as fast as I dared, and the soft swinging suspension gave me no feeling of security at all. I had no sun-glasses, and even though the sun was not directly in my face the savage glare of sub-tropical light off that road was harsh and hurtful to the eyes. It was an open car, but the windscreen was so big and deeply curved that we got almost no cooling benefit at all from the wind whistling by our ears at over eighty miles an hour. Back in the court-room, the shade temperature had been close on a hundred: what it was out here in the open I couldn’t even begin to guess. But it was hot, furnace hot: I wasn’t enjoying the ride.
Neither was the girl beside me. She hadn’t even bothered to replace the stuff I’d emptied out of her bag, just sat there with her hands clasped tightly together. Now and again, as we took a fast corner, she reached out to grab the upper edge of the door but otherwise she’d made no movement since we’d left Marble Springs except to tie a white bandanna over her fair hair. She didn’t once look at me, I didn’t even know what colour her eyes were. And she certainly didn’t once speak to me. Once or twice I glanced at her and each time she was staring straight ahead, lips compressed, face pale, a faint red patch burning high up in her left cheek. She was still scared, maybe more scared than ever. Maybe she was wondering what was going to happen to her. I was wondering about that myself.
Eight miles and eight minutes out of Marble Springs the expected happened. Somebody certainly seemed to have thought and moved even faster.
The expected was a road-block. It came at a point where some enterprising firm had built up the land to the right of the road with crushed stones and coral, asphalted it and built a filling station and drivers’ pull-up. Right across the road a car had been drawn up, a big black police car – if the two pivoting searchlights and the big red ‘STOP’ light were not enough, the eight-inch white-lettered ‘POLICE’ sign would have removed all doubt. To the left, just beyond the nose of the police car, the land dropped sharply four or five feet into a ditch that lifted only slowly to the mangrove coast beyond: there was no escape that way. To the right, where the road widened and angled into the courtyard of the filling station, a vertically upright line of black corrugated fifty-gallon oil drums completely blocked the space between the police car and the first of the line of petrol pumps that paralleled the road.
All this I saw in the four or five seconds it took me to bring the shuddering skidding Chevrolet down from 70 to 30 mph, the high-pitched scream in our ears token of the black smoke trail of melted rubber that we were leaving on the white road behind us. I saw, too, the policemen, one crouched behind the bonnet of the police car, a second with his head and right arm just visible above the boot: both of them carried revolvers. A third policeman was standing upright and almost completely hidden behind the nearest petrol pump, but there was nothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal of all close-quarters weapons, a whippet, a sawn-off shotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.
I was down to 20 mph now, not more than forty yards distant from the block. The policemen, guns levelled on my head, were rising up and moving out into the open when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the girl reaching for the handle of the door and half-turning away from me as she gathered herself for the leap out of the car. I said nothing, just leaned across, grabbed her arm, jerked her towards me with a savage force that made her gasp with pain and, in the same instant that I transferred my grip to her shoulders and held her half against half in front of me so that the police dared not shoot, jammed my foot flat down on the accelerator.
‘You madman! You’ll kill us!’ For a split second of time she stared at the row of fifty-gallon drums rushing up to meet us, the terror in her face accurately reflecting the terror in her voice, then turned away with a cry and buried her face in my coat, the nails of her hands digging into my upper arms.
We hit the second drum from the left fair and square with the centre of our fender. Subconsciously, I tightened my grip on the girl and the steering wheel and braced myself for the numbing shattering shock, the stunning impact that would crush me against the steering-wheel or pitch me through the windscreen as the 500-lb dead weight of that drum sheared the chassis retaining bolts and smashed the engine back into the driving compartment. But there was no such convulsive shock, just a screeching of metal and a great hollow reverberating clang as the fender lifted the drum clear off the road, a moment of shock when I thought the drum would be carried over the bonnet of the car to smash the windscreen and pin us to the seat. With my free hand I jerked the wheel violently to the left and the cartwheeling drum bounced across the nearside wing and vanished from sight as I regained the road, jerked the wheel in the opposite direction and straightened out. The oil drum had been empty. And not a shot had been fired.
Slowly the girl lifted her head, stared over my shoulder at the road-block dwindling in the distance, than stared at me. Her hands were still gripping both my shoulders, but she was completely unaware of it.
‘You’re mad.’ I could hardly catch the husky whisper through the crescendo roar of the engine. ‘You’re mad, you must be. Crazy mad.’ Maybe she hadn’t been terrified earlier on, but she was now.
‘Move over, lady,’ I requested. ‘You’re blocking my view.’
She moved, perhaps six inches, but her eyes, sick with fear, were still on me. She was trembling violently.
‘You’re mad,’ she repeated. ‘Please, please let me out.’
‘I’m not mad.’ I was paying as much attention to my rear mirror as to the road ahead. ‘I think a little, Miss Ruthven, and I’m observant. They couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes to prepare that road-block – and it takes more than a couple of minutes to bring six full drums out of store and manhandle them into position. The drum I hit had its filling hole turned towards me – and there was no bung. It had to be empty. And as for letting you out – well, I’m afraid I can’t spare the time. Take a look behind you.’
She looked.
‘They’re – they’re coming after us!’
‘What did you expect them to do – go into the restaurant and have a cup of coffee?’
The road was closer to the sea, now, and winding to follow the indentations of the coast. Traffic was fairly light, but enough to hold me back from overtaking on some blind corners, and the police car behind was steadily gaining on me: the driver knew his car better than I did mine, and the road he obviously knew like the back of his hand. Ten minutes from the road-block he had crept up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us.
The girl had been watching the pursuing car for the past few minutes. Now she turned and stared at me. She made an effort to keep her voice steady, and almost succeeded.
‘What’s – what’s going to happen now?’
‘Anything,’ I said briefly. ‘They’ll likely play rough. I don’t think they can be any too pleased with what happened back there.’ Even as I finished speaking there came, in quick succession, two or three whip-like cracks clearly audible above the whine of the tyres