The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

3

Simon Templar carefully closed the door.

There was rather a lot to assimilate all at once, and he wanted time. The entire tableau gave him the impression of some sort of mad tea-party from Alice in Wonderland. Of course, he had already seen the March Hare, he reflected hysterically. And now there was Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Doubtless Sheriff Haskins would turn out to be the Mad Hatter. Jesse Rogers, from his position, looked like a promising candidate for the Dormouse. Presently they would all start singing and dancing, with Toots and Vivian doing a hot rumba in the middle.

That was the way it felt at first. The Saint could have taken a whole army of hoodlums in his stride, and turned up his nose at a forest of machine-guns, by comparison with the cataclysmic shock of what he actually saw. It left him wondering, for perhaps the first time in his life, whether he had any right to be patronising about the pedestrian intellectual reflexes of Hoppy Uniatz…

“Hullo, Sheriff,” he drawled. “You do get around, don’t you?”

The sheer electronic energy that it cost him to maintain that air-conditioned nonchalance would have twisted the needle of any recording instrument known to science off its bearings, but he achieved it And with a simultaneous equal effort he was forcing himself to try and wring a coherent interpretation out of the scene.

The only entirely unplumbed factors were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Aside from their generic facial resemblance, they shared the hollow-stomached muscular emphasis of professional bullies—and something more. It was something strange and out of place even in that plethora of improbabilities, something that was bound up by devious psychological links with the strangeness that had struck him about some of the revellers outside.

In another split second he realised what it was. Even in surrender, their carriage had the ingrained rigidity of soldiers on a parade-ground. They only needed the addition of field boots and Sam Browne belts to complete the picture.

Two guns lay on the dressing-table beside Haskins’s left shoulder. The sheriff caught Simon’s glance at them, and moved his chair a little to offer a better view. He puckered his lips, weasening his face with furrows, and underlined the weapons with a backward jerk of his left thumb.

“Now that you’re heah, son, mebbe you can help us. A feller like you should have a right smart knowledge of firearms. What do you make of these shootin’ irons?”

The Saint made no attempt to get closer—he knew better than to make an incautious move against a man who seemed to have the situation so comfortably lined up. Newt Haskins might look like a piece of antique furniture if he were set down in the streamlined atmosphere of New York’s Centre Street, but Simon was not deceived. Haskins wasn’t even nervous. He was utterly relaxed—a natural deadly machine buttressed with the simple knowledge that if he shot six times, six men would die.

“One of them is a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” said the Saint.

“An’ the other?”

Simon screwed up his eyes.

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