The Saint to the Rescue (11 page)

“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 enigmati
cally, and remembered to wish that he
had brought a gun.

There had to be some weak point in the
set-up, if he could
only find it.

The Saint came languidly back to life, yawned
and
stretched, smoked a cigarette, bathed his face with a cloth
ostentatiously
dipped in ice-water from the cooler, hauled
out a sheaf of
magazines, and sat down again in the shade
to read.

“You’re crazy,” Mr. Diehl shouted.

“It just isn’t the time of day to catch
bass,” argued the
Saint reasonably. “As a native of. these
parts, you ought to
know that. So I’m improving my mind instead of tiring out
my arm. Would you care to join me? I’m renting magazines at only a hundred dollars
a minute for the reading kind, or
two hundred for the ones with girlie
photos.”

Mr. Diehl clenched his teeth to the point of
almost crack
ing some expensive bridgework, but managed to suppress
an answer
that would have been impractical and unprofit
able.

He was sharply susceptible to hunger, like
any man accus
tomed to self-indulgence and a high-calorie diet, but he
also
had a cushion of accumulated blubber that could absorb
temporary
deprivations without acute distress. Mr. Diehl
felt miserably empty
in the stomach, but in no danger of
fainting from it. The thirst was much
harder to bear. His
propensity for profuse sweating was always a strain on his
fluid resources, and the thought of cold cans of beer nestling in arctic
beds of ice cubes or dripping clean refreshing wet
ness as they were
lifted out was a refined anguish that became more acute with the passing of
each unslaked minute.
It got so bad that even while his pores were
acting like
faucets he could hardly find enough internal moisture for
a good spit.

When the sun began to cooperate by dousing
itself pre
maturely behind a high bank of clouds in the west, the
Saint
finished another can of beer and began fishing again. After a while he
tied on to a fish that erupted from the water like
a stung dervish as it
felt the hook, and fought through several
more minutes of
explosive leaps and straining runs before
the light tackle
could subdue it. Mr. Diehl watched morosely
while the Saint
beached it and unhooked it and held it up
with a skillful thumb
under its jaw.

“Would you like it for supper, Ed? Only
two thousand
dollars!”

“You go to hell,” Mr. Diehl said
hoarsely.

“Just as you like, Ed,” said the
Saint agreeably.

He put the bass gently back in the water and
released it.
Then he slapped at himself a couple of times, and picked
his way
back to the shallow mound where the helicopter
stood.

The word “picked” is not just an
idle choice. At one point
he froze abruptly on one foot, and remained
thus grotesquely
poised for several seconds, while a water moccasin slowly
unwound its thick black coils from around the tuft of grass
that he
had been about to step on and slithered off into the
muck. Mr. Diehl saw
it, and wondered if the Saint was also
equipped with
antivenin, and how much a shot would cost
anyone else.

“The mosquitoes are starting to get
hungry,” Simon observed imperturbably, slapping himself again..

Mr. Diehl had already noticed that. He
squirmed and fanned himself savagely while the Saint leaned into the
cabin and
brought out a bottle of insect repellent.

“I don’t want to rush you, Ed,”
Simon remarked, rubbing
himself liberally with the lotion, “but
we don’t seem to be
getting anywhere, and pretty soon I’m going to weaken for
the idea of a nice cold shower, some clean clothes, a tall
tinkling
Pimm’s Cup in an air-conditioned bar, a prime steak
dinner, and a
comfortable bed. If you haven’t given in be
fore I do, I guess
I’ll just have to leave you here and hope I
can find you again
tomorrow.” He replaced the cap on the bot
tle. “Would you
like some of this gunk? You can have it for only five grand, and before morning
you’ll think it was cheap
at the price.”

Mr. Diehl’s small eyes grew bigger with
horror. The last
straw that breaks the camel’s back is a time-worn cliche,
but something like it happened to whatever stubbornness he had
left. The
unappetizing brown swamp water was certainly
drinkable if a man got
thirsty enough, and nobody died of
simple starvation in a few days. But
the prospect of a night
of utter loneliness in the teeming dark, surrounded
by snakes
and alligators, with myriads of small swift invisible
stinging
and biting things to add real torment to imagination, was
already a living nightmare before which the edges of his
pampered
brain curled in a clammy panic.

“You wouldn’t do that,” he croaked.
“A man could be killed
or go nuts in one night, left here like
that.”

“A Seminole wouldn’t mind it a bit,”
contradicted the Saint. “But if it doesn’t appeal to you, you don’t have
to
stay.”

Mr. Diehl knew it. And in that moment of
truth, he also
saw the elementary answer that had ‘eluded him for so many
wretched hours, and could scarcely believe that he had been
so stupid
as to miss it in the first five minutes.

“You’re right, I don’t,” he said.
“Give me that repellent. And the check-book. And while I’m writing the
check, get
me a can of beer.”

“You could probably use a sandwich, too,
to hold you till
you get home,” said the Saint. “Let’s call it
fiftyfive thousand for the whole works, since you’re paying it all at
once.”

Mr. Diehl scribbled the check, and would not
have cared
much what the exact figures were. But the Saint examined
it
carefully before he folded it and put it away in his wallet.

“You may wonder why I should take all
this trouble, when
it might have been easier just to forge your
signature,” he
said. “But for some years now I’ve been trying to go
straight,
as the phrase has it, and I don’t want to be accused of
doing
anything criminal to get your money.”

Mr. Diehl drained the can of beer in three
long gulps, and
scratched himself almost joyously. He was beginning to
think
that this highly publicized Saint character might literally have a weak
place in his head, which it had taken a smart
and nerveless man like
Ed Diehl to discover.

“I just hope you get a sympathetic jury
when you have
to justify your prices,” he felt bold enough to say.

“Everyone is entitled to his day in
court,” said the Saint
equably. “And to save a lot of
time-wasting argument there,
I think we ought to mark this historic
spot.”

He turned the check-book over and wrote
quickly on the
back of the last check:

This is the place that I paid $55,000
to be
flown out of.

“Sign it,” he said, “and I’ll
witness it.”

This was done; and the note was sealed inside
the plastic
sandwich box, which was buried under the cypress log on
which Mr.
Diehl had spent a good part of his unhappiest
day. But he was far
from unhappy as the whirling blades
overhead brought the reassuring
geometric patterns of high
way and building in sight again, and in an
absurdly few minutes the runways of the Lantana airfield were rising towards
them out of the dusk.

He opened the door on his side and jumped out
the
moment the helicopter touched down, and was slightly
ecstatically
amazed that the Saint made no attempt to grab
him. He did not fall
on his knees and kiss the firm concrete
under him, not being
that kind of emotional jerk; but noth
ing could have stopped him taking a
stand directly he had
backed off beyond probable recapture or
reprisal, and shout
ing his ultimate triumph and defiance.

“You sonofabitch!” he bawled.
“Don’t waste time trying to cash that check after the cops get through
working you over,
because I’ll be at the bank when it opens on Monday to
stop
payment!”

Simon cut the engine and leaned out so as not
to have
to compete in vulgar volume.

“Okay, Ed,” he said gently.
“You play it the way you see
it. But long before that, I’ll have
flown a load of witnesses
to pick up our X-marks-the-spot, and they’ll
all be qualified
surveyors who can testify that we buried it right where
your plat calls for the City Hall of a dream town called Heaven
leigh
Hills. It should make fabulous publicity for every
thing else you’re
contributing to the Future of Florida. Any
how, you’ve got all
tomorrow to think it over.”