Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,102

I closed my hand and easily beat his grasp.

‘Tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you where I found it,’ I said.

‘You give me that back, right now,’ he said, winding himself into a rage.

‘You can have it back if you tell me what it is,’ I said, sounding like a teacher who has confiscated some type of electronic gadget from a miscreant schoolboy, but doesn’t know what it is.

Without warning the big guy swung the polo mallet and struck me on the forearm. He was partially behind me and I didn’t see the mallet coming until the very last millisecond. I had no time to avoid it, but thankfully I had time to relax as he hit me, otherwise I think he would have broken my arm completely in two. As it was, it wasn’t great. The mallet caught me just above my right wrist. There was a sharp crack and my arm went instantly numb. I dropped the shiny metal ball. It rolled away towards Kurt. As he stooped to pick it up, I dived into the car, slammed the door and pushed the central-locking button.

My right arm wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the key in the ignition which was on the right side of the steering column. I spent valuable seconds trying and failing before leaning completely over to my right and getting the key into the lock using my left hand. I turned the key, started the car and threw the automatic gear lever into reverse, also left-handed. The rear window of the Buick disintegrated behind me. I ignored it. I looked through the space where the glass had been and gunned the engine. The car leapt backwards towards the mallet-wielding maniac behind me. He surprisingly deftly sidestepped the car and swung the mallet again in my direction. The passenger-door window shattered, showering me with tiny squares of glass. Kurt was at the driver’s door banging on the window and hauling on the door handle but he had no mallet and his fist was no match for the toughened glass.

I braked hard to a stop, and shoved the gear lever back into drive with my elbow. But the mallet-maniac hadn’t finished. As the car accelerated forward towards the gate and the highway he took one last swing. The business end of the mallet came right through the laminated windscreen in front of the passenger seat, and stuck there. I didn’t stop. I caught a glimpse of the look of panic on the man’s face as I shot off with the mallet head stuck firmly through the glass. He had his hand equally firmly stuck in the twisted leather loop on the handle end.

In the rear-view mirror I saw the loop pluck him off his feet. I heard him strike the vehicle somewhere low down on the nearside rear door but I wasn’t going to stop, not even if I had to drag him all the way back to Chicago. As it was, he somehow disentangled his hand and dropped away before I turned out on to Silvernail Road and sped off towards the relative safety of the thundering eighteen-wheelers on I-94, the polo mallet still sticking out sideways from the windscreen.

After a mile or so I pulled over on to the hard shoulder and managed to extricate the mallet. The leather loop on the handle had broken. I hoped that the wrist that had so recently been in it would be broken as well. I threw it on the back seat and set off again, glad that I wouldn’t now have to explain to any highway patrol why I had a polo mallet stuck out of my windscreen. The Buick was missing two windows completely, and had a two-inch-diameter hole plus multiple cracks in the windscreen, but I could live with that. The fact that I was alive at all was what really mattered to me.

‘Damn,’ I shouted out loud. Not only had I got my arm injured, and I was pretty sure that a bone had been broken by that blow, but I had also lost the shiny metal ball.

I’ll have to go and get another, I thought, and turned the car around at the next junction. I just hoped that Dorothy Schumann hadn’t had second thoughts about lending me one of the balls since Caroline and I had been at her house the previous day.

My trip to the Lake Country Polo Club had provided me with two useful pieces of information. Firstly, the