The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

To Spare a Life

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1970.

Marilyn speeded up, and so did the souped-up yellow and black striped hot rod behind her. Straining, she watched a lonely, twilight half mile sweep past. She took her sandaled foot from the gas pedal, slowing to a crawl. Her gaze inched to the rear-view mirror. Instead of swinging out to pass, the hot-rodder applied brakes, matching her own pace.

A shallow pulse of panic raced through Marilyn’s throat. The steering wheel began to feel slimy beneath her long, tapering, hard-curled fingers. No doubt of it now, the cats in the hot rod had cast her in the role of mouse.

She looked at her surroundings for some sign of life. The emptiness of interior Florida threatened her, endless acres of greasy-green palmetto broken by patches of saw grass. Here and there reared a lonely, twisted pine tree or desolate, heat-blasted cypress in funereal shrouds of gray Spanish moss. The narrow state road was a vacant needle point in the grimly darkening distance, not a light in sight.

Marilyn drew a breath, clinging to calm. Please, she thought, be a pair of harmless kooks getting bored with the game, ready to break it off...

A college junior, Marilyn had worked most of the summer in her father’s modest real estate and insurance company. Five days ago, his hearty, benign presence had loomed beside her desk.

“You’re fired,” he’d said, grinning. “Take that house guest invitation from your classmate in Sarasota. Go and get your water skis wet before you have to go back to school.”

It had been a dreamy time, with an assortment of healthy young males vying for the attention of a glowing, lovely raven-haired girl with large, dark eyes and a sense of fun and humor.

Marilyn had stretched out the final day with the gang on the beach, her packed bags stowed in her car. Shouted good-byes, an impromptu snake dance, promises of a reunion when the new semester opened in Gainesville had marked her departure.

She hadn’t noticed the disappearance of the two shaggy youths who had loitered some distance away and watched the beach party disdainfully. She’d seen them again briefly in the parking area, lean, tanned, tawny-maned as young lions, their bell-bottoms garish splashes of color below open-fronted shirts. They’d lounged beside the zebra-striped rod. The taller had tossed a blue pill in the air, like a peanut, and dropped his head back to catch it in his open mouth. The action had caused an uncomfortable squirm of distaste in Marilyn. She’d got in her car and quickly driven away. By taking the short-cut on the state road she could be in her small home town in north-central Florida and having dinner with Mom and Dad in less than two hours.

With a sudden whine of racing cams and squeal of rubber, the hot rod was a yellow-black blur swinging out and roaring past. It snarled its twin chrome exhausts at her, catapulting half a mile ahead in a matter of seconds.

Marilyn drew her first deep breath since the rod had revealed itself a few miles back. They’d been very clever and deceptive following her through city traffic and deciding which road she would take. Now they had lost interest, and her fears—

She broke the thought with a gasp. In a grayish cloud from smoking tires the rod had slammed to a stop, reversed. It was a returning projectile.

Drenched with icy feeling, Marilyn saw the driver looking back over his shoulder as he steered. His companion was on his knees in the seat, facing rearward, half crouched on the turtleback of the open-topped rod. He seemed to be yowling something in wild excitement.

“Crazy pillheads... goofballs...” Marilyn choked. She twisted the wheel, taking to the outside lane, giving the rod room. In the rearview mirror she saw it again screech to a stop, almost lifting the front wheels from the rough, graveled macadam.

She mashed the gas to the floor, gaining a bare quarter-mile lead while the rod was meshed into forward gear.

Spidery prickles swept over Marilyn as she heard it coming, a high keening in the turgid silence. Her thoughts tumbled desperately. Can’t outrun them... Narrow road... Tricky, sandy shoulders... Don’t give them room!

Her heart matched the laboring of the two-door’s engine as it hurtled along the very middle of the road. She watched the intermittent white lines come slashing at the center of the windshield.

The rod rocked from one side to the other, the driver not quite taking the chance of trying to pass with two wheels on the shoulder.

An image of coiled tension, Marilyn flicked a glance in the rearview as the rod beeped a horn that played a raucous how-dry-I-am.

The highway was surging at her with terrifying speed, but she kept those center-line marks streaking under the hood.

Then a hard thump and shattering of broken glass on the roof jarred the sedan. In the small mirror, Marilyn glimpsed the other car close on her rear bumper. The driver’s companion was standing crouched, holding the top edge of the windshield, drawing his arm back to throw another empty beer bottle.

A wave of fear left Marilyn feeling faint at the thought of mangled wreckage, bloody human forms.

She shivered, fighting the faintness. Ahead, the road made a long bend through a lovely area of banyan trees and vine-trellised cabbage palms, and fifty yards to the left of the highway in the shady clearing stood one of those out-of-the-way country stores. It was an ugly, unpainted, rambling wooden building with a long ramshackle porch and rusty tin roof, but a dim light glowed from one of the dusty windows, warmly beautiful to Marilyn.

She did nothing to telegraph her intention to the other driver. When she was almost abreast of the store, she slammed down the brake and pulled the steering wheel over hard.

The sedan pitched and slewed in a sickening half-spin. She fed gas, and the tires took hold. The building and lacy banyan trees swam at Marilyn. She mashed the brake pedal and the sedan slithered to a stop in a shower of sand, dust, and dead pine needles.

She was out of the car before it stopped rocking. From the highway came the sounds of screaming rubber, the rise and fall of an angry engine, the crash of changing gears.

Marilyn raced across the gritty planking of the gallery and threw herself against the front door. The latch was an old-fashioned metal lever which rattled as she depressed it. The door yielded perhaps half an inch. She shook it and banged on it with her fist.

“Please... whoever’s in there... open up!”

Her efforts created sepulchral echoes. She drew back a little. The iron hasp and heavy padlock securing the door loomed in her vision.

A soft whimper fell from Marilyn’s lips. She slipped a glance over her shoulder. The zebra-stripe had skidded to rest near her sedan. Both youths had got out, a little hesitantly at first.

Marilyn was chilled to inaction for a moment. Then she forced herself to move. A glance through the iron-barred window beside the stout door revealed a gloomy interior of shelves cluttered with a few canned goods, a plank counter bearing a small glass showcase, a table near the rear stacked with work clothing. There was no movement, no sign of life. A single small naked bulb dangled over the rear counter, a night light, Marilyn realized dimly, required by the county sheriffs department.

Her cheek pressed against the rough planking, her nails dug in as voices rose behind her.

“The babe has found an empty pad, Rajah.”

“How about that, Zeno?”

Footsteps softly crushed across the blanket of dry pine needles on the yard, voices in the dusk...

“She sure turns me on, Rajah.”

“From the sec I glom her on the beach, Zeno.”

Marilyn broke free of her paralysis, peeling away from the wall and dashing toward the end of the porch.

“We got a hunt, Rajah.”

“My bag, Zeno!”

Marilyn jumped from the open end of the porch, half stumbled, darted toward the rear corner of the building.

She heard them yelling instructions to each other. They were splitting up.

Beyond the store, the landscape was indistinct in the twilight pall but she had an impression of swampiness, tall grasses, and a tangle of trees in the distance. Her running feet were renewed with faint hope.

She angled away from the one who seemed nearer. She could hear his running feet directly behind her. Then she saw the shadow of the other one, flowing across the clearing to cut her off.

She tried to change directions. Her toe caught in a tough root She pitched to her knees, flinging out her left hand to break her fall.

She was scrambling up when she felt his presence flowing over her. She heard his breathing, glimpsed the white savage mask of a face in its growth of heavy beard.

“No!” The word was a crazed mingle of snarl and scream. “You won’t... I won’t let you... Let me go!”

Her left arm felt as if it were being torn from the shoulder socket. She thrashed wildly in his grip. Her mind seemed to burst. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered right then, except the sanctity of her person.

She felt the hands of the second youth grabbing at her free arm, her shoulder, her throat. They grunted soft, vicious curses, almost no match for her transformation in this insane moment. She fought bitterly, clawing, kicking, biting.

Then her face exploded. One of them had struck hard with his fist. The back of her head struck the stone-like bole of a wild palm as she hurtled backward and down.

The pain lasted for a fiery fraction of a second. Then she seemed to float in a weird nothingness. She had the strangest sense of detachment, as if a stranger lay here with two sweaty, hard-breathing strangers standing over the limp body.

A soft breeze flapped the bell-bottoms and touched bearded faces marked by her raking nails. The two standing figures were quite still for a moment, immunized to real fright by pills but touched with caution.

“Glom the back of her head, Zeno.”

“Yeah, all bloody.”

“Is she dead?”

“Who cares?”

“Nobody saw it.”

“That’s right.”

“But they’ll see her car, some cruising county fuzz.”

“So we’ll park it out of sight behind the store.”

“How about her? She comes to, busts a window in the store, finds a telephone before we’ve made miles.”

“Not if she’s in her car trunk.”

“Hey, man! That’s cool! If she ain’t kaput already, she’ll suffocate before anybody finds her.”

“Go get her car. I’ll drag her out of here.”

Marilyn was vaguely aware of hands shoving under her armpits, of muscles straining against her weight. She sensed she was being half lifted and dragged, her heels bumping roots and grinding through sandy soil.

She floated away. Then the pain of twisted arms and legs came through as they lifted her and stuffed her callously in the car trunk. Somewhere in her mind despairing words formed, begging for mercy. The trunk lid slammed shut over her, locking automatically, the thud of a sealed coffin.

She was swaddled in blackness and silence for a long time. At last she choked a soft moan. Despite bleeding where the scalp had been scraped, her head wound was superficial. Her brain resumed its function with sparkles of pain.

She tried to move. She was wedged between the trunk lid and spare tire, and she thrashed wildly for a moment, in the grip of a nauseating claustrophobia.

She fainted in the midst of the useless, helpless effort. When she came to, she was weak, trembling, bathed in sweat.

She could move her left arm a little, and groped in the blackness. By straining, she reached the latch, but her fingers were powerless against the hard metal.

She fought down a fresh wave of panic. Her moving hand touched a tire tool. It was wedged under the spare. There was no way she could get it out.

Her muscles were cramping, but the growing fire in her lungs was the more real pain. She realized she was having to breathe very fast. Her heart was racing in its hunger for oxygen.

She tried to scream; then restrained herself. Very little oxygen was left in the sealed trunk. The faster she used it, the quicker she would die.

Everything in her collapsed. She closed her eyes and wept silently. The pain was mounting steadily. She felt as if her chest were being crushed with a two-ton weight.

She tried not to think of Mom, Dad, the nice young associate professor at school, the faces she would never see again.

The scene tomorrow morning built frightfully in her mind. The storekeeper would return, see her simple black sedan, look it over, call the sheriff finally. They would talk, search the car. At last the trunk would be opened, and they would fall back and ask, “What kind of beast could do this?”

They would lift out the cold, dead body and wish the stiff, unfeeling lips could answer the question. Perhaps in the light of day they would wish it almost as much as she wished it right now in her dying moment.

A strange warmth suffused her. Then the fire seemed to die as her lungs gave up the impossible fight for oxygen. Bright motes began showering through her brain.

Her face rolled limply against the spare tire. The tread roughness meant nothing at first. Then a final thought struggled — spare tire. Pounds and pounds of compressed air, loaded with life-giving oxygen; enough air, taken a sip at a time, to be alive when the storekeeper came a few hours from now.

The thought of the zebra-striped car gave her a final ounce of strength. Her fingers fumbled along the spare tire, found the valve stem. She unscrewed the cap, set her fingernail on the tip of the core, and pressed her lips about it. She depressed the core and the first squirt of air volleyed deep into her lungs.

Only a little at a time, Marilyn cautioned herself. It was going to be a long night but a brand new morning would come — for her and, incidentally, for a pair of pillheads.