‘Get down,’ I ordered. ‘That’s it, right down on the floor. Your head, too. Whether it’s bullets or a crash, your best chance is down there.’
When she was crouched so low that all I could see was her shoulders and the back of her blonde head I eased the revolver out of my pocket, abruptly removed my foot from the accelerator, grabbed for the handbrake and hauled hard.
With no tell-tale warning from the foot-operated braking lights, the slowing down of the Chevrolet was as unexpected as it was abrupt, and the screech of tyres and violent slewing of the pursuing police car showed that the driver had been caught completely off balance. I loosed off one quick shot and as I did the windscreen in front of me shattered and starred as a bullet went clear through the centre of it: I fired a second time, and the police car skidded wildly and finished up almost broadside across the road, the nearside front wheel into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road. It was the sort of uncontrollable skid that might have come from a front tyre blowout.
Certainly no harm had come to the policemen inside, within a couple of seconds of hitting the ditch all three were out on the road, squeezing off shots after us as fast as they could pull the triggers: but we were already a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away and for all the value of revolvers and riot guns in distance work of this kind they might as well have been throwing stones at us. In a few seconds we rounded a curve and they were lost to sight.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘The war’s over. You can get up, Miss Ruthven.’
She straightened and pushed herself back on the seat. Some dark-blonde hair had fallen forward over her face, so she took off her bandanna, fixed her hair and pulled the bandanna on again. Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they’d comb their hair on the way down.
When she’d finished tying the knot under her chin she said in a subdued voice, without looking at me: ‘Thank you for making me get down. I – I might have been killed there.’
‘You might,’ I agreed indifferently. ‘But I was thinking about myself, lady, not you. Your continued good health is very closely bound up with mine. Without a real live insurance policy beside me they’d use anything from a hand grenade to a 14-inch naval gun to stop me.’
‘They were trying to hit us then, they were trying to kill us.’ The tremor was back in her voice again as she nodded at the bullet hole in the screen. ‘I was sitting in line with that.’
‘So you were. Chance in a thousand. They must have had orders not to fire indiscriminately, but maybe they were so mad at what happened back at the road-block that they forgot their orders. Likely that they were after one of our rear tyres. Hard to shoot well from a fast-moving car. Or maybe they just can’t shoot well anyway.’
Approaching traffic was still light, maybe two or three cars to the mile, but even that was too much for my peace of mind. Most of the cars were filled with family groups, out-of-state vacationers, and like all vacationers they were not only curious about everything they saw but obviously had the time and the inclination to indulge their curiosity. Every other car slowed down as it approached us and in my rear-view mirror I saw the stop lights of three or four of them come on as the driver tramped on the brakes and the occupants twisted round in their seats. Hollywood and a thousand TV films had made a bullet-scarred windscreen an object readily identifiable by millions.
This was disturbing enough. Worse still was the near certainty that any minute now every local radio station within a hundred miles would be broadcasting the news of what had happened back at the Marble Springs court-house, together with a complete description of the Chevrolet, myself and the blonde girl beside me. The chances were that at least half of those cars approaching me had their radios tuned in to one of those local stations with their interminable record programmes MC’d by disc jockeys with fixations about guitar and hill-billy country music. The inevitable news flash, then all it needed was for one of those cars to be driven by a halfwit out to show his wife and children what a hero he really was all the time although they had never suspected it.
I picked up the girl’s still-empty handbag, stuck my right hand inside it, made a fist and smashed away the centre of the laminated safety plate glass. The hole was now a hundred times bigger than before, but not nearly so conspicuous: in those days of stressed and curved glass, mysteriously shattered windscreens were not so unknown as to give rise to much comment: a flying pebble, a sudden change of temperature, even a loud enough sound at a critical frequency – any of those could blow out a screen.
But it wasn’t enough. I knew it wasn’t enough, and when an excited fast-talking voice broke into the soap opera on the Chev’s radio and gave a concise if highly-coloured account of my escape, warning all highway users to look out for and report the Chev, I knew that I would have to abandon the car, and at once. It was too hot, and on this, the only main north-south route, the chances of escaping detection just didn’t exist. I had to have a new car, and had to have it fast.
I got one almost at once. We had been passing through one of those new towns which mushroom by the score along the seaboards of Florida when I heard the flash, and less than two hundred yards beyond the limits we came to a lay-by on the shore side of the road. There were three cars there, and obviously they had been travelling in company for through a gap in the trees and low scrub that curved round the lay-by I could see a group of seven or eight people picking their way down to the shore, about three hundred yards away: they were carrying with them a barbecue grill, a cooking stove and luncheon baskets: they looked as if they intended making a stay.
I jumped out of the Chev, taking the girl with me, and quickly checked all three cars. Two were convertibles, a third a sports car and all were open. There were no ignition keys in any of the locks, but the sports car owner, as many do, had a spare set in a cubby-hole by the steering column, hidden only by a folded chamois cloth.
I could have just driven off leaving the police car there, but that would have been stupid. As long as the Chev’s whereabouts remained unknown, the search would be concentrated exclusively on it and little attention would be paid to the common car thief who had taken the other: but if the Chev were found in the lay-by then the state-wide search would immediately be switched to the sports car.
Thirty seconds later I had the Chev back at the limits of the new town, slowing down as I came to the first of the all-but-completed split-levels on the shore side of the road. There was no one around, and I didn’t hesitate: I turned in on the concrete drive of the first house, drove straight in under the open tip-up door of the garage, shut off the engine and quickly closed the garage door.
When we emerged from the garage two or three minutes later anyone looking for us would have looked a second or third time before getting suspicious. By coincidence, the girl had been wearing a short-sleeved green blouse of exactly the same shade of colour as my suit, a fact that had been repeated twice over the radio. A fast check point and a dead giveaway. But now the blouse had gone and the white sun-top she’d on beneath it was worn by so many girls that blazing summer afternoon that she’d subtly merged her identity with those of a thousand other women: her blouse was tucked inside my coat, my coat was inside out over my arm with only the grey lining showing and my necktie was in my pocket. I’d taken the bandanna from her, wrapped it kerchief-wise over my head, the loose ends of the knot hanging down the right-hand side, in front, all but obscuring my scar. The red hair showing at the temples was still a giveaway and while, by the time I had finished smearing it with her moistened mascara pencil, it didn’t look like any hair I had ever seen, at least it didn’t look red.
Under the blouse and coat I carried the gun.
Walking slowly so as to minimize my limp, we reached the sports car in three minutes. This, too, like the one we’d just tucked away in the garage, was a Chevrolet, with the same engine as the other, but there the resemblance ended. It was a plastic-bodied two-seater, I’d driven one in Europe, and I knew that the claims for 120 mph were founded on fact.
I waited till a heavy gravel truck came grinding past from the north, started the Corvette’s engine under the sound of its passing – the group of people I’d seen