The Saint in Miami Read Free

watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.
    2
Lawrence Gilbeck’s twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. Curtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it
From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.
    “It’ll be a great comfort to all the invalids who’ve come south for the winter,” he said, “to know that you’re here.”
    He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prizefighter’s shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.
    Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stem in the passing rush of wind.
    “After all,” he said, “the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn’t object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boat-house just rusting away.”
    “Their Scotch wasn’t rusting away,” Peter remarked, operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his feet “I always understood that it improved with age.”
    “Only up to a point,” said the Saint gravely. “After that it’s inclined to become anaemic and waste away. A tragedy which it is the duty of any right-minded citizen to forestall. Hand it over. Pat and I are chilly after our shower bath.”
    He examined the label and sipped an approving sample before he handed the bottle to Patricia.
    “Mr Peter Dawson’s best,” he told her, raising his voice against the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle wider. “Pass it back to me before Hoppy gets it and we have to consign a dead one to the sea.”
    Somewhere within the small globule of protopathic tissue surrounded by Mr Uniatz’s skull a glimmer of remote comprehension came to life as the Saint’s words drifted back to him. He leaned over from his seat behind.
    “Any time you say to t’row him out, boss,” he stated reassuringly, “I got him ready.”
    Through years of association with the paleolithic machinery which Mr Uniatz’s parents had bequeathed to him as a substitute for the racial ability of homo sapiens to think and reason, Simon Templar had acquired an impregnable patience with those strange divagations of continuity with which Hoppy was wont to enliven an ordinary conversation. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and said: “Who have you got ready?”
    “De dead one,” said Hoppy, exercising a no less noble degree of patience and restraint in elucidating such a simple and straightforward announcement as he had made. “De stiff. Any time ya ready, I can t’row him in.”
    Simon painfully worked out the association of ideas as the Meteor ate up the silver-speckled water.
    “I was referring,” he explained kindly, “to our bottle of Peter Dawson, which will certainly be a dead one two minutes after you get your hands on it”
    “Oh,” said Mr Uniatz, settling back again. “I t’ought ya was talkin’ about de stiff here. I got me feet on him, but he don’t bodder me none. Any time ya ready.”
    Patricia gave Simon back the bottle.
    “I noticed that Hoppy brought a sack down to the boat,” she said, with the slightest of tremors in her