The Danger

by Dick Francis

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, and I knew that like all policemen he’d been concentrating almost exclusively on capturing the villains. He looked assessingly at me for a moment and I said, “I’m going in, don’t argue.”

  He shook his head in resignation and didn’t try any further to stop me, and it was he and I, as before, who made the first approach, quiet as cobwebs, to the house with no pumpkins.

  In the shadow of a laurel I touched his arm and pointed, and he stiffened when he saw what I was showing him: a man standing in an upstairs unlit window, smoking a cigarette.

  We stayed quiet, watching. So did the man, unalarmed.

  “Shit,” Kent said.

  “There’s always the back.”

  Behind bushes we slithered our way. The windows facing rearwards to the woodland looked merely blank.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Got to be done.” The gun was back in his hand, and there was both apprehension and resolution in his voice. “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  Ready, if that included a noisy heart and difficulty in breathing.

  We left the shelter of the bushes at the nearest point to the house and crept from shadow to shadow to what was evidently the kitchen door. The door was double; an outer screen against insects, an inner door made half of glass. Kent put his hand on the screen door latch and pulled it open, and tried the handle of the main door beneath.

  Unsurprisingly, locked.

  Kent pulled the radio from his belt, extended the aerial, and said one single word, “Go.”

  Before he’d finished returning the radio to his belt there was a sudden skin-crawling crescendo of sirens from in front of the house, and even at the rear one could see the reflections of the revolving lights racing forwards. Then there were searchlights flooding and voices shouting incomprehensibly through megaphones: and by that time Kent had smashed the glass panel of the door and put a hand inside to undo the lock.

  There was pandemonium in the house as well as out. Kent and I with the two rear patrolmen on our heels raced through the kitchen and made straight for the stairs, sensing as much as seeing two men pulling guns to oppose the invasion. Stavoski’s men seemed to have shot the lock off the front door: in a half glimpse after the staccato racket I saw the blue uniforms coming into the hall and then I was round the bend of the stairs, heading for the upper level.

  Still quiet up there, comparatively. All doors except one were open. I made for it, running, and Kent behind me cried agonizedly, “Andrew, don’t do that.”

  I looked back for him. He came, stood out of the line of fire of the door for a second, then leaped at it, giving it a heavy kick. The door crashed open, and Kent with gun ready jumped through and to one side, with me following.

  The light inside was dim, like a child’s nightlight, shadowy after the bright passage outside. There was a tent in the room, grayish-white, guy ropes tied to pieces of furniture: and standing by the tent, hurrying to unfasten the entrance, to go for his hostage, stood Giuseppe-Peter.

  He whirled round as we went in.

  He too held a gun.

  He aimed straight in our direction, and fired twice. I felt a fierce sharp sting as one bullet seared across the skin high on my left arm, and heard the second one fizz past my ear . . . and Kent without hesitation shot him.

  He fell flat on his back from the force of it, and I went over to him, dropping to my knees.

  It was Kent who opened the tent and went in for Morgan Freemantle. I heard the senior steward’s slow sleepy voice, and Kent coming and saying the victim was doped to the eyeballs and totally unclothed, but otherwise unharmed.

  I was trying with no success at all to wad a handful of folded tent against my enemy’s neck, to stop the scarlet fountain spurting there. The bullet had torn too much away; left nothing to be done.

  His eyes were open, but unfocused.

  He said in Italian, “Is it you?”

  “Yes,” I said, in his tongue.

  The pupils slowly sharpened, the gaze steadying on my face.

  “I couldn’t know,” he said, “how could I have known . . . what you were . . .”

  I knelt there trying to save his life.

  He said, “I should have killed you then . . . in Bologna . . . when you saw me . . . I should have put my knife . . . into . . . that Spanish . . . chauffeur.”

  “Yes,” I said again, “you should.”

  He gave me a last dark look, not admitting defeat, not giving an inch. I watched him with unexpected regret. Watched him until the consciousness went out of his eyes, and they were simply open but seeing nothing.