“Oh, yes. But that isn’t everything. Not the way I mean. I mean...”
“What do you mean?”
She fiddled with a seam in her negligée for a long time.
“I mean... I know you aren’t an angel, but you’re not just like Freddie. I think you’d always be sincere with people. You’re sort of different, somehow. I know I haven’t got anything much, except being beautiful, but — that’s something, isn’t it? And I do really like you so much. I’d... I’d do anything... If I could only stay with you and have you like me a little.”
She was very beautiful, too beautiful, and her eyes were big and aching and afraid.
Simon stared at the opposite wall. He would have given his day’s thousand dollars to be anywhere the hell out of there.
He didn’t have to.
Freddie Pellman’s hysterical yell sheared suddenly through the silent house with an electrifying urgency that brought the Saint out of bed and up on to his feet as if he had been snatched up on wires. His instinctive movement seemed to coincide exactly with the dull slam of a muffled shot that gave more horror to the moment. He leapt towards the communicating door, and remembered as he reached it that while he had meant to get it unlocked that morning the episode of the obliterated fingerprints had put it out of his mind. Simultaneously, as he turned to the outer door, he realised that the sound of a door slamming could have been exactly the same, and he cursed his own unguardedness as he catapulted out on to the screened verandah.
One glance up and down was enough to show that there was no other person in sight, and he made that survey without even a check in his winged dash to Freddie’s room.
His automatic was out in his hand when he flung the door open, to look across the room at Freddie Pellman, in black trousers and unbuttoned soft dress shirt, stretched out on the davenport, staring with a hideous grimace of terror at the rattlesnake that was coiled on his legs, its flat triangular head drawn back and poised to strike.