Leslie Charteris - The Saint Closes the Case

He heard a shout behind him, and again a gun barked savagely in the night. The Saint felt the wind of the bullet ac­tually stroke his cheek. Clearly, then, there was at least one more police survivor of Marius's raid; but Simon judged that further disputes with the law could be momentarily post­poned. He swerved like a hare and raced on, knowing that only the luckiest—or unluckiest—of blind shots could have come so near him in such a light, and having no fear that a second would have the same fortune.

As it happened, the detective who had come out of the garden behind Teal must have realised the same feeling, for he held his fire. But as the Saint stopped by the yellow sedan, now locked inextricably with the wreckage of the battered Furillac, he heard the man pounding on through the darkness towards him.

Conway was opening the near-side door; and it was a miracle that his career was not cut short then and there by the shot from the interior of the car that went snarling past his ear. But there was no report—just the throaty plop! of an efficient silencer—and he understood that the only shooting they had heard had been done by the police guards. The raid­ers had not been so rowdy as the Saint had accused them of being.

The next moment Simon Templar had opened a door on the other side of the sedan.

"Naughty boy!" said Simon Templar reproachfully.

His long arm shot over the gun artist's shoulder, and his sinewy hand closed and twisted on the automatic in time to send the next shot through the roof of the car instead of through Conway's brain.

Then the Saint had the gun screwed round till it rammed into the man's own ribs.

"Now shoot, honeybunch," encouraged the Saint; but the man sat quite still.

He was in the back of the car, beside Vargan. There was no one in the driver's seat, and the door on that side was open. The Saint wondered who the chauffeur had been, and where he had got to, and whether it had been Angel Face himself; but he had little time to give to that speculation, and any pos­sibility of danger from the missing driver's quarter would have to be faced if and when it materialised.

Conway yanked Vargan out into the road on one side; and the Saint, taking a grip on the gun artist's neck with his free hand, yanked him out into the road on the other side. One wrench disarmed the man, and then the Saint spun him smartly round by the neck.

"Sleep, my pretty one," said the Saint, and uppercut him with a masterly blend of science and brute strength.

He turned, to look down the muzzle of an automatic, and put up his hands at once. He had slipped his own gun into his pocket in order to deal more comfortably with the man from the car, and he knew it would be dangerous to try to reach it.

"Lovely weather we've been having, haven't we?" drawled the Saint genially.

This, he decided, must be the guard who had fired at him down the lane; the build, though hefty, was nothing like Angel Face's gigantic proportions. Besides, Angel Face, or any of his men, would have touched off the trigger ten seconds ago.

The automatic nosed into the Saint's chest, and he felt his pocket deftly lightened of its gun. The man exhaled his satis­faction in a long breath.

"That's one of you, anyway," he remarked grimly.

"Pleased to meet you," said the Saint.

And there it was.

The Saint's voice was as unperturbed as if he had been conducting some trivial conversation in a smokeroom, instead of talking with his hands in the air and an unfriendly detec­tive focussing a Smith-Wesson on his diaphragm. And the corner was undoubtedly tight. If the circumstances had been slightly different, the Saint might have dealt with this obstacle in the same way as he had dealt with Marius on their first en­counter. Marius had had the drop on him just as effectively as this. But Marius had been expecting a walk-over, and had therefore been just the necessary fraction below concert pitch; whereas this man was obviously expecting trouble. In view of what he must have been through already that night, he would have been a born fool if he hadn't. And something told Simon that the man wasn't quite a born fool. Something in the busi­nesslike steadiness of that automatic . . .

But the obstacle had to be surmounted, all the same.

"Get Vargan away, Roger," sang the Saint cheerfully, coolly. "See you again some time. . . ."

He took two paces sideways, keeping his hands well up.

"Stop that!" cracked the detective, and the Saint promptly stopped it; but now he was in a position to see round the back of the sedan.

The red tail-light of the Hirondel was moving—Norman Kent was backing the car up closer to save time.

Conway bent and heaved the Professor up on to his shoulder like a bag of potatoes; then he looked back hesitantly at Simon.

"Get him away while you've got the chance, you fool!" called the Saint impatiently.

And even then he really believed that he was destined to sacrifice himself to cover the retreat. Not that he was going quietly. But . . .

He saw Conway turn and break into a trot, and sighed his relief.

Then, in a flash, he saw how a chance might be given, and tensed his muscles warily. And the chance was given him.

It wasn't the detective's fault. He merely attempted the im­possible. He was torn between the desire to retain his prisoner and the impulse to find out what was happening to the man it was his duty to guard. He knew that that man was being taken away, and he knew that he ought to be trying to do something to prevent it; and yet his respect for the despera­tion of his captive stuck him up as effectively as if it had been the captive who held the gun. And, of course, the detective ought to have shot the captive and gone on with the rest of the job; but he tried, in a kind of panic, to find a less blood­thirsty solution, and the solution he found wasn't a solution at all. He tried to divide his mind and apply it to two things at once; and that, he ought to have known, was a fatal thing to do with a man like the Saint. But at that moment he didn't know the Saint very well.

Simon Templar, in those two sideways steps that the de­tective had allowed him to take, had shifted into such a posi­tion that the detective's lines of vision, if he had been able to look two ways at once, at Conway with one eye and at the Saint with the other, would have formed an obtuse angle. Therefore, since the detective's optic orbits were not capable of this feat, he could not see what Conway was doing without taking his eyes off Simon Templar.

And the detective was foolish.

For an instant his gaze left the Saint. How he imagined he would get away with it will remain a mystery. Certainly Simon did not inquire the answer then, nor discover it afterwards. For in that instant's grace, ignoring the menace of the auto­matic, the Saint shot out a long, raking left that gathered strength from every muscle in his body from the toes to the wrist

And the Saint was on his way to the Hirondel before the man reached the ground.

Conway had only just dumped his struggling burden into the back seat when the Saint sprang to the running-board and clapped Norman Kent on the shoulder.

"Right away, sonny boy!" cried the Saint; and the Hiron­del was sliding away as he and Conway climbed into the back.

He collected Vargan's flailing legs in an octopus embrace, and held the writhing scientist while Conway pinioned his ankles with the rope they had brought for the purpose. The expert hands of the first set of kidnappers had already dealt with the rest of him—his wrists were lashed together with a length of stout cord, and a professional gag stifled the screams which otherwise he would undoubtedly have been loosing.

"What happened?" asked Norman Kent, over his shoul­der; and the Saint leaned over the front seat and explained.