Free The Saint to the Rescue by Leslie Charteris Page A

nothing illegal about using a
phony name just for fun.” He drank again from the can, deeply and with
relish, and then made another raid on the icechest for a square plastic
box, from which he extracted a thick and nourishing sandwich. “Pardon
me if I have lunch,” he said. “There are plenty more of these, by
the way, and to you they are only two thousand dollars each.”
    Mr. Diehl could not have explained why this
was the precise
twitch that snapped the rein of his congenitally crude and choleric temper, but it was probably far more a general sense
of frustration than any specific affront that made him crowd forward again with his fists bunched and his face purpling.
    “I’m not taking any of this crap,”
he growled. “You give me a sandwich and a can of beer, or I’ll help
myself!”
    “You’re standing in the shade of my
helicopter,” Simon pointed out forbearingly. “For using this very expensive
piece of equipment as a parasol I shall have
to make a charge of one hundred
dollars a minute. If you think that’s too high and you want to get out of the sun, go and sit under a tree.”
    “What tree?” roared Mr.
Diehl.
    “Oh, there don’t seem to be any right
around here, now you mention it. But you don’t care much about trees any way, do
you? At least, when they’re in the way of a fast cheap cleanup job on a subdivision, you’re
the type of clot-headed dollar-clutching slob who—”
    That was the exact moment when Mr. Diehl threw
his Sunday punch, and perhaps it was just his bad luck that this was
only Saturday.
    The Saint did not let go either the can of
beer which he held in one hand or the sandwich in the other, but he
leaned a little to one side and brought up an elbow with the power and accuracy
of a short uppercut; and Mr. Diehl suddenly found himself lying on
his back with a numb sensation in his jowls, a taste of blood in his
mouth, and an astronomically unrecorded nova erupting in the red haze that
had tem porarily clouded his vision.
    With even more care not to spill a drop or
lose a crumb, Simon used one foot to roll the realtor out into a rather muddy
expanse of sunlight.
    “Just for that gratuitous display of bad
temper,” he said, “the fee for flying you out has now gone up to
fifty grand.”
    Mr. Diehl sat on a damp log in the sun, making it damper with his own sweat, after the Saint had finished
eating and drinking and had stretched
himself out for a siesta under the
shadow of the helicopter. Glowering at him from a safe distance, Mr. Diehl had inevitably toyed with the
idea of a murderous sneak attack; but when he was recovered enough to make the first tentative move in that
direction, he was instantly greeted by the opening of a cool catlike eye
which without any other explanation at all
convinced him that such a maneuver
would not have the automatic success that it might have conveniently enjoyed in a story.
    In any case, even if he could have overpowered
the Saint, he didn’t know how he could have forced him to fly the
helicopter. A man might be beaten or even tortured into promising
to fly; but once in the air, the passenger was at the mercy of the
pilot. And if the preliminary struggle actually incapacitated or even killed
the Saint, Mr. Diehl would still be stuck there until a rescue party
found him, and it could be a long time before any such search was organized.
He recalled now, with awful clarity, how the Saint had told the
airport crew that they expected to spend at least three days in
the Everglades and might even go on to explore some of the
inaccessible islands of the Bay of Florida before turning back—to all of which
misdirection Mr. Diehl had contributed his loud support.
    Far out beyond the last stems of maiden cane,
something dark and gnarled came slowly awash in the glazed surface of the
water. Mr. Diehl identified it after a while as the front end of an
alligator, which stared at him with inscrutable agate eyes. Mr. Diehl
stared back, somewhat less