“Please,” Simon groaned. “Another record, if you don’t mind.”
“Boss, we ain’t got a chance,” Jimmy said.
Appopoulis turned his eyes on the little man.
“He,” the boss said, “has the opal.”
This news stiffened their gelatinous spines long enough to set them at the Saint in a two-directional charge.
The Saint swerved to meet it. He held Jimmy between himself and the unwavering gun of Appopoulis with one hand. With the other he wrought havoc on the features of Mac.
It was like dancing, like feathers on the breeze, the way the Saint moved. Even to himself it had the kind of exhilaration that a fight may only experience once in a lifetime. He had a sense of power, of supernatural co-ordination, of invincibility beyond anything he had ever known. He cared nothing for the knowledge that Appopoulis was skipping around on the outskirts of the fray, trying to find an angle from which he could terminate it with a well-placed shot. Simon knew that it was no fear of killing Jimmy that stayed the fat man’s finger on the trigger — it was simply the knowledge that it would have wasted a shot, that the Saint could have gone on using Jimmy as a shield, alive or dead. The Saint knew this coolly and detachedly, as if with a mind separate from his own, while he battered Mac’s face into a vari-colored pulp.
Then Mac’s eyes glazed and he went down, and the Saint’s right hand snaked hipwards for his own gun while his left flung Jimmy bodily at the paunch of Appopoulis.
And that was when the amazing, the incredible, and impossible thing went wrong. For Jimmy didn’t fly away from the Saint’s thrust, as he should have, like a marble from a slingshot. Somehow he remained entangled with the Saint’s arm, clinging to it as if bogged in some indissoluble bird-lime, with a writhing tenacity that was as inescapable as a nightmare. And Simon looked down the barrel of Appopoulis’s gun and saw the fat man’s piggy eyes brighten with something that might have been lust...
The Saint tried to throw a shot at him, but he was off balance, and the frenzied squirming of his erstwhile shield made it like trying to shoot from the back of a bucking horse. The bullet missed by a fraction of an inch, and buried itself in the wall beside the mirror. Then Appopoulis fired back.