Mr Diehl could not have explained why this was the precise twitch that snapped the rein of his congenially crude and choleric temper, but it was probably far more a general sense of frustration than any specific affront that made him crowd forward again with his fists bunched and his face purpling.
“I’m not taking any of this crap,” he growled. “You give me a sandwich and a can of beer, or I’ll help myself!”
“You’re standing in the shade of my helicopter,” Simon pointed out forbearingly. “For using this very expensive piece of equipment as a parasol I shall have to make a charge of one hundred dollars a minute. If you think that’s too high and you want to get out of the sun, go and sit under a tree.”
“What tree?” roared Mr Diehl.
“Oh, there don’t seem to be any right around here, now that you mention it. But you don’t care much about trees anyway, do you? At least, when they’re in the way of a fast cheap cleanup job on a subdivision, you’re the type of clot-headed dollar-clutching slob who—”
That was the exact moment when Mr Diehl threw his Sunday punch, and perhaps it was just his bad luck that this was only Saturday.
The Saint did not let go either the can of beer which he held in one hand or the sandwich in the other, but he leaned a little to one side and brought up an elbow with the power and accuracy of a short uppercut, and Mr Diehl suddenly found himself lying on his back with a numb sensation in his jowls, a taste of blood in his mouth, and an astronomically unrecorded nova erupting in the red haze that had temporarily clouded his vision.
With even more care not to spill a drop or lose a crumb. Simon used one foot to roll the realtor out into a rather muddy expanse of sunlight.
“Just for that gratuitous display of bad temper,” he said, “the fee for flying you out has now gone up to fifty grand.”
Mr Diehl sat on a damp log in the sun, making it damper with his own sweat, after the Saint had finished eating and drinking and had stretched himself out for a siesta under the shadow of the helicopter. Glowering at him from a safe distance, Mr Diehl had inevitably toyed with the idea of a murderous sneak attack, but when he was recovered enough to make the first tentative move in that direction, he was instantly greeted by the opening of a cool catlike eye which without any other explanation at all convinced him that such a maneuver would not have the automatic success that it might have conveniently enjoyed in a story.
In any case, even if he could have overpowered the Saint, he didn’t know how he could have forced him to fly the helicopter. A man might be beaten or even tortured into promising to fly, but once in the air, the passenger was at the mercy of the pilot. And if the preliminary struggle actually incapacitated or even killed the Saint, Mr Diehl would still be stuck there until a rescue party found him, and it would be a long time before any such search was organized. He recalled now, with awful clarity, how the Saint had told the airport crew that they expected to spend at least three days in the Everglades and might even go on to explore some of the inaccessible islands of the Bay of Florida before turning back — to all of which misdirection Mr Diehl had contributed his loud support.
Far out beyond the last stems of maiden cane, something dark and gnarled came slowly awash in the glazed surface of the water. Mr Diehl identified it after a while as the front end of an alligator, which stared at him with inscrutable agate eyes. Mr Diehl stared back, somewhat less enigmatically, and remembered to wish that he had brought a gun.
There had to be some weak point in the set-up, if he could only find it.
The Saint came languidly back to life, yawned and stretched, smoked a cigarette, bathed his face with a cloth ostentatiously dipped in ice-water from the cooler, hauled out a sheaf of magazines, and sat down again in the shade to read.
“You’re crazy,” Mr Diehl shouted.
“It just isn’t the time of day to catch bass,” argued the Saint reasonably. “As a native of these parts, you ought to know that. So I’m improving my mind instead of tiring out my arm. Would you care to join me? I’m renting magazines at only a hundred dollars a minute for the reading kind, or two hundred for the ones with girlie photos.”
Mr Diehl clenched his teeth to the point of almost cracking some expensive bridgework, but managed to suppress an answer that would have been impractical and unprofitable.
He was sharply susceptible to hunger, like any man accustomed to self-indulgence and a high-calorie diet, but he also had a cushion of accumulated blubber that could absorb temporary deprivations without acute distress. Mr Diehl felt miserably empty in the stomach, but in no danger of fainting from it. The thirst was much harder to bear. His propensity for profuse sweating was always a strain on his fluid resources, and the thought of cold cans of beer nestling in arctic beds of ice cubes or dripping clean refreshing wetness as they were lifted out was a refined anguish that became more acute with the passing of each unslaked minute. It got so bad that even while his pores were acting like faucets he could hardly find enough internal moisture for a good spit.
When the sun began to cooperate by dousing itself prematurely behind a high bank of clouds in the west, the Saint finished another can of beer and began fishing again. After a while he tied on to a fish that erupted from the water like a stung dervish as it felt the hook, and fought through several more minutes of explosive leaps and straining runs before the light tackle could subdue it. Mr Diehl watched morosely while the Saint beached it and unhooked it and held it up with a skillful thumb under its jaw.
“Would you like it for supper, Ed? Only two thousand dollars!”
“You go to hell,” Mr Diehl said hoarsely.
“Just as you like, Ed,” said the Saint agreeably.
He put the bass gently back in the water and released it. Then he slapped at himself a couple of times, and picked his way back to the shallow mound where the helicopter stood.
The word “picked” is not just an idle choice. At one point he froze abruptly on one foot, and remained thus grotesquely poised for several seconds, while a water moccasin slowly unwound its thick black coils from around the tuft of grass that he had been about to step on and slithered off into the muck. Mr Diehl saw it, and wondered if the Saint was also equipped with antivenin, and how much a shot would cost anyone else.
“The mosquitoes are starting to get hungry,” Simon observed imperturbably, slapping himself again.
Mr Diehl had already noticed that. He squirmed and fanned himself savagely while the Saint leaned into the cabin and brought out a bottle of insect repellent.
“I don’t want to rush you, Ed,” Simon remarked, rubbing himself liberally with the lotion, “but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and pretty soon I’m going to weaken for the idea of a nice cold shower, some clean clothes, a tall tinkling Pimm’s Cup in an air-conditioned bar, a prime steak dinner, and a comfortable bed. If you haven’t given in before I do, I guess I’ll just have to leave you here and hope I can find you tomorrow.” He replaced the cap on the bottle. “Would you like some of this gunk? You can have it for only five grand, and before morning you’ll think it was cheap at the price.”
Mr Diehl’s small eyes grew bigger with horror. The last straw that breaks the camel’s back is a time-worn cliché, but something like it happened to whatever stubbornness he had left. The unappetizing brown swamp water was certainly drinkable if a man got thirsty enough, and nobody died of simple starvation in a few days. But the prospect of a night of utter loneliness in the teeming dark, surrounded by snakes and alligators, with myriads of small swift invisible stinging and biting things to add real torment to imagination, was already a living nightmare before which the edges of his pampered brain curled in clammy panic.