Simon picked up the revolver and slipped it back into his pocket.
“I’m afraid it isn’t mine,” he said truthfully, and a sardonic glimmer flickered in the young pawnbroker’s eyes for an instant.
“You don’t say.”
“As a matter of fact, it belongs to George Murphy, whose initials are ‘MG,’ spelled backwards,” Simon informed him solemnly, and sauntered from the shop with Hoppy in his wake.
It was perhaps the way the black sedan roared away from the curb at the end of the block that pressed an alarm button in the Saint’s reflexes. It forced itself into the stream of traffic with a suddenness that compelled the drivers behind to give way with screaming brakes. For one vivid instant, as if by the split-second illumination of a flash of lightning, Simon saw the driver, alone in the front seat, hunched over the wheel, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his face hidden in the shadow of the brim, a glimpse of stubbled jowl barely visible. He had an impression of two others crouched in the deeper shadow of the back seat, their faces obscured by handkerchiefs, the vague angle of their upraised arms pointing towards him... All this the Saint saw, absorbed, analysed, and acted upon in the microscopic fragment of time before he kicked Hoppy’s feet from under him so that they both dropped to the sidewalk together as the black sedan raced by, sending a fusillade of bullets cracking over them into the pawnshop window beyond.
Hoppy Uniatz, prone on his stomach, fumbled out his gun and fired a single shot just as the gunmen’s car cut in ahead of a truck and beat a red light.
“Hold it!” Simon ordered. “You’re more likely to hurt the wrong people.”
They scrambled up and dusted off their clothes. “You okay, boss?” Hoppy asked anxiously.
“Just a bit chilled from the draught of those bullets going by.”
Hoppy glared up the street at the corner where their assailants had vanished.