"Wasn't it two minutes that we had to say our prayers, Maxie?" he whispered.
The gunman glared at him with dilated eyes. All at once, in a physical quiver of comprehension, he seemed to take in the situation—that the Saint was alive and free and the tables were turned. With a foul oath, heedless of the menace of the Saint's automatic, he broke loose from the girl with a savage fling of his arm and brought up his gun.
Simon's forefinger tightened on the trigger—once. Maxie's gun was never fired. His arms flew wide, and his head snapped back. For one swaying moment he stared at the Saint with all the furies of hell concentrated in his flaming eyes; and then a dull glaze crept over his eyeballs and the fires died out. His head sagged forward as if he were tired; his knees buckled, and he pitched headlong to the ground.
Simon gazed down at the two sprawled figures for a second or two in silence, while the jagged ice melted out of his eyes without softening their expression. A faint gesture of repugnance crinkled a thin line into one corner of his mouth; but whether the repugnance was for the two departed killers, or for the manner in which they had been exterminated, he did not know himself. He dismissed the proposition with a shrug, and the careless movement sent a sharp twinge of pain through his injured shoulder to bring him finally back to reality. With an inaudible sigh, he put the gun away in his pocket and turned his eyes back to the girl.
She had not moved from where he had last seen her. The dead body of Maxie lay at her feet; but she was not looking at it, and she had made no attempt to possess herself of the automatic that was still clutched in his hand. The light was too dim for the Saint to be able to see the expression on her face; but the poise of her body reminded him irresistibly of the night when she had watched him kill Morrie Ualino, and more recently of the tune, only an hour or two ago, when he himself had been sent out from the back room of Charley's Place on the ride which had only just ended. There was the same impregnable aloofness, the same inscrutable carelessness of death, as though in some impossible way she had detached herself from every human emotion and dominated even the last mystery of dissolution. He walked up closer to her, slowly, because it hurt him a little when he breathed, until he could see the brightness of her tawny eyes; but they told him nothing.
She did not speak, and he hardly knew what to do. The situation was rather beyond him. He saluted her vaguely, with the ghost of a bow, and let his arm fall to his side.
"Thank you," he said.
Her eyes were pools of amber, still and unreadable.
"Is that all?" she asked in a low voice.
Again he felt that queer leap of expectation at the husky music which she made of words. He moved his hands in a slight helpless gesture.
"I suppose so. It's the second time you've helped me—-I don't know why. I haven't asked. What else is there?"
"What about this?"
Suddenly, before he knew what she was doing, her arms were around his neck, her soft slenderness pressed close to him, the satin of her cheek against his. For a moment he was too amazed to move. Hazily, he wondered if the terrible strain he had been through had unhinged some weak link in his imagination. The tenuous perfume of her skin and hair stole in upon his senses, sending a creeping trickle of fire along his veins; her lips found his mouth, and for one mad second he was shaken by the awareness of her passion. He winced imperceptibly, and she drew back.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You see, you didn't get here quite soon enough. I stopped one."
Instantly she forgot everything else. She drew him over to the car, switched on the headlights, and made him take off his coat. With quick, gentle hands she slipped his shirt down over his shoulder; he could feel the warm stickiness of blood on his back. On the ground close by, the chauffeur still lay as if asleep.
"Better make sure he doesn't wake up while you're doing the first aid," said the Saint, with a rather weary gesture towards the unconscious man.
"He won't wake up," she answered calmly. "I killed him."
Then Simon saw that the shadow between the driver's shoulder blades was the hilt of a small knife, and a phantom chill went through him. He understood now why Maxie's call had gone unanswered. The girl's hands were perfectly steady on his back; he couldn't see her face because she was behind him, but he knew what he would have found there. It would have been masked with the same cold beauty, the same unearthly contempt of life and death and all their associations, which he had only once seen broken—so strangely, only a few moments before.
She fastened his handkerchief and her own over the wound, replaced his shirt, and drew his coat loosely over the shoulder. Her hand rested there lightly.
"You'll have to see a doctor," she said. "I know a man in Passaic that we can go to."
He nodded and moved round to the side of the car. Competently, she lowered the hood over the engine and forestalled him at the wheel. He didn't protest.
It was impossible to turn the car about in the confined space, and she had to back up the lane until they reached the highway. She did it as confidently as he would have expected her to, although he had never met a woman before who had really achieved a complete mastery of the art of backing. Inanimate stones seemed to have become alive, judging by the way they thrust malicious obstacles into the path of the tires and threatened to pitch the car into the shrubbery, but her small right hand on the wheel performed impossible feats. In a remarkably short time they had broken through the trees and swung around in the main road; and the powerful sedan, responding instantly to the pressure of her foot on the accelerator, whirled away like the wind towards Passaic. The Saint saw no other car near the side road and was compelled to repeat Maxie's question.
"How did you get here?"
"I was in the trunk behind," she explained. "Hunk was hanging around so long that I thought I'd never be able to get out. That's why I was late."
The strident horn blared a continuous warning to slower cars as the speedometer needle flickered along the dial. She drove fast, flat out, defiantly, yet with a cold machine-tooled precision of hand and eye that took the recklessness out of her contempt for every other driver's rights to the road. Perhaps, as they scrambled blasphemously out of her path, they caught a glimpse of her fair hair and pale careless face as she flashed by, like a valkyrie riding past on the gales of death.
Simon lay back in his corner and lighted a cigarette. His shoulder was throbbing more painfully, and he was glad to rest. But the puzzle in his mind went on. It was the second time she had intervened, this time to save his life; and he was still without a reason. Except—the obvious one. There seemed to be no doubt about that; although until that moment she had never spoken a word to him. The Saint had lived his life. He had philandered and roistered with the best, and done it as he did most other things, better than any of them; but in that mad moment when she had kissed him he had felt something which was unlike anything else in his experience, something of which he could almost be afraid. . . .
He was too tired to go deeper into it then. Consciously, he tried to postpone the accounting which would be forced on him soon enough; and he was relieved when the lights of Passaic sprang up around them, even though he realized that that only lessened the time in which he must make up his mind."
The girl stopped the car before a small house on the outskirts of the town and climbed out. Simon hesitated.
"Hadn't you better wait here?" he suggested. "If this bird is connected with your mob——"
"He isn't. Come on."
She was ringing the bell when he reached the door. After a lengthy interval the doctor opened it, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled, in his shirt and trousers. He was a swarthy, stocky man with a loose lower lip and rather prominent eyes which shifted salaciously behind thick pebble glasses—Simon would not have cared to take his wife there, but nevertheless the doctor's handling of the present circumstances was commendable in every way. After one glance at the Saint's stained shirt and empty sleeve he led the way to his surgery and lighted the gas under a sterilizing tray.