Skull Duggery td-83, page 2
part #83 of The Destroyer Series
"Try me," Remo invited.
Shariff hesitated. There was something in the deep eyes of the skinny guy with the thick wrists, something that said he was not afraid.
"Fahrvergnugen work against guns too?" he wondered.
"Ask Volkswagen," Remo said, forcing his finger into the barrel with sudden violence.
With a crack!, the steel gun barrel split along its top seam clear back to the breech, changing the black man's hesitant expression to one of soul-disturbing doubt. His eyes got wide, then narrowed, then widened again as his thinking processes methodically considered and rejected various explanations for the impossible calamity that had befallen his weapon.
Finally he opened his mouth.
"You broke my Mac!" he wailed. "Why you do that?"
"You were about to shoot me," Remo said politely. "Come back to you?"
"Says who?"
"Every telltale muscle in your dishonest body."
"Prove it. It's your word against mine!"
"And it's my car," Remo said, withdrawing his steel-hard but unexceptional forefinger from the burst gun barrel and placing it to the teenager's forehead.
"What you gonna do with that?" Shariff wanted to know, his eyes trying to focus on the threatening digit. He was getting cross-eyed with the effort.
"That depends."
Shariff gulped. "On what?"
"On how fast you return my car to where I left it."
"Six seconds do you?"
"Make it five."
"Done. Hop in. Give you a lift."
"I'll meet you there. I've seen you drive."
"You got it!"
Remo withdrew his finger. The black man's head snapped around. He fixed his slowly uncrossing eyes on the empty parking space and hit the accelerator.
Four-point-nine seconds later, he screeched to a slippery halt before the store and jumped out of the car as if it were on fire.
He looked back up the street.
"I don't see the dude," he muttered to the blond. "Do you?"
A very, very hard finger tapped him on the shoulder once. He jumped, turning in place.
Standing on the sidewalk, not appearing winded at all, was the white dude whose name was Remo Farfarnugat, or something like that.
"Nice parking job," Remo complimented.
"Thanks."
"You only got one wheel up on the sidewalk."
"I'm going now," Shariff said, starting off.
"Not so fast," Remo said, arresting the youth with a hand on his shoulder.
"Hey, I did whatchu said."
"Let's take it a step further. I need help loading up."
"What do I look like-Jimmy Friggin' Hoffa!"
"Want to compare expressions face-to-face?"
"What you need loaded?"
"In there. Rice. Just put it in the trunk."
The black man went into the store. He came out with his arms full of rice in bags.
Remo opened the trunk for him. He went in for another trip.
"I saw what you did," the blond said.
"No, you didn't," Remo said. But he smiled when he said it.
"Okay, I didn't see what you did. But how did you do it?"
"You've heard of fahrvergnugen?"
"Sure. I drive a Jetta."
"Well, this is super fahrvergnugen."
"Amazing. Teach it to me?"
"No," Remo said flatly.
He felt her hand on his half-bare bicep. "Please?"
Remo looked at her uptilted face, her half-parted, appealing mouth, and considered changing his mind.
He exhaled a long sigh instead.
Gently Remo disengaged the blond's fingers as the youth came out with the last of the rice.
"You sure must eat a lot of rice," Shariff muttered.
"I do," Remo returned. "And if you're standing there with your hand out for a tip, you're gonna freeze in place and the pigeons are going to redecorate your 'do."
"That's the thanks I get for luggin' your stuff all the way to your damn car!" Shariff snarled.
"If you hadn't come along, pal, I'd have done it myself and been home by now."
"Point taken. I'm going."
"Don't stop till you come to a state line or an ocean," Remo called after him.
As they watched Shariff turn a corner, the blond turned to Remo and said bravely, "Where were we?" She bit her lip, waiting for a reply.
Remo said without a trace of feeling one way or the other, "I was about to drive home with my rice and you were about to inventory your cash register for missing twenties. "
One hand flew to her mouth. "My register! Oh, my God!" She bolted into the store.
When, after a moment, she didn't scream, Remo slid behind the wheel and pulled away from the curb. The car bounced violently as the front tire dropped off the curbstone.
Remo pulled into traffic, his face a frown of unhappiness.
He wasn't sure what bothered him more-walking away from an attractive blond or losing a convenient source of rice.
Either way, Remo could never set foot in that store again. She had seen him perform impossible stunts. That made her a security risk. He couldn't jeopardize her life by becoming friendly. Not here in Rye, New York, where he lived and where his boss and the organization for which he worked was headquartered.
There was no telling what Dr. Harold W. Smith would do if Remo Williams started dating a Rye girl. Probably have her eliminated in the name of national security. Anything was possible.
As Remo left the shopping area, he drove past the car thief, who was grumpily trooping down the street. Remo gave him an angry blast of his horn as he drove past, causing the man to jump. Shariff turned, and upon recognizing Remo, dived for cover. His maimed Mac-10 skittered out from under his pea coat.
And that was another thing. Normally Remo would have killed the thief too. But that might raise a ruckus, and the last thing Remo wanted to do was cause problems in Rye. Smith would probably force him to sell his house and relocate. He had had two decades of relocating. He was settled now. Forever, he hoped.
Once, Remo's aspirations had been simple.
He had been a Newark, New Jersey, beat cop. His dreams were limited to a sergeant's desk, a wife, and a nice suburban house with a white picket fence.
Harold W. Smith had changed that forever. It was Smith, in his capacity as director of CURE, a supersecret government organization that Remo had never heard of then and which virtually no one knew of today, who had engineered a frame so perfect that no one dreamed that Remo Williams, honest foot-slogging Remo Williams, had not killed a certain pusher in a certain alley and dropped his badge beside the body so very long ago.
Remo landed on death row so fast he thought the world had been turned upside down. And that was only the beginning. His life-his true life-began after he'd walked the last mile at Trenton State Prison and sat in an electric chair that sent a jolt through every jumping fiber in his body.
It did not kill him. He woke up later in a place called Folcroft Sanitarium with a new face and a choice so stark he wondered if he had died and gone to some sinister catch-22 hell: Join CURE as its enforcement arm or fry for real.
And although Remo Williams had gotten a second chance in life, his dreams of a wife and family and white picket fence were irretrievably lost.
It had taken most of the twenty years he'd worked for CURE to realize-or accept-it.
Twenty years of training in Sinanju, the fahrvergnugen of martial arts. Twenty years that had taught him to conquer all physical limitations, including absolute mastery of the opposite sex.
Under the tutelege of the Master of Sinanju-the last of a long line of professional assassins going back five millennia-Remo had discovered the thirty-seven steps to bringing a woman to blissful ecstasy. The same knowledge that unlocked the power to hold a car in place despite the best efforts of six sparking cylinders sent out subtle sexual signals that most woman responded to on an instinctive level. And that while Remo simply stood there trying to read rice labels.
The earliest steps could bring a woman to exquisite climax-and leave Remo listening to his bed partner's snores.
This was only another reason why, as the years went on, Remo had stopped bothering. What was in it for him?
Pulling into the driveway of the suburban house he had finally acquired after two decades of anonymously liquidating America's enemies, Remo wore an unhappy expression.
He carried the expression into the kitchen, along with the first two bags of rice, thinking he would gladly trade in part of his abilities for a measure of sexual satisfaction and get back a tiny spark of that old dead dream.
From the other room came the sound of a TV. The Master of Sinanju, enjoying his leisure.
Remo went out to the car, his hurt eyes glancing over to the Tudor-style house next door. The home of Harold W. Smith. It reminded him that this was all Smith's fault.
The thought struck him as he lifted the trunk. He shut it with a metallic slam.
Grimly Remo walked up to Smith's front door and rapped the imitation-brass lion's-head knocker against the door.
The door opened, framing a stoop-shouldered man of advanced years and rimless spectacles. Harold W. Smith looked indecisively in both directions, knuckles tightening on the door. "Remo!"
From behind him, a woman's voice asked, "Harold, who is it?"
That decided Smith. He closed the door behind him.
"Remo! What is this?" His croak was anxious.
"I just have one thing to say to you," Remo told him.
Smith adjusted his glasses. "Yes?"
"This is all your fault."
And with that, Remo turned on his heel and went back to finish carrying rice into his empty home. His supersensitive hearing picked up the frumpy voice of Mrs. Smith asking Harold who had been at her front door.
The answer infuriated Remo: "Just the paper boy, dear."
Remo finished putting the brown rice in the brown-rice cabinet, the white rice in the white-rice cabinet, and the exotic varieties in the others. There were five cabinets over the sink. Four of them were packed with rice in various containers.
With any luck, Remo thought glumy, the supply would last three weeks.
Remo left the kitchen to break the bad news to the Master of Sinanju.
"Little Father . . ." he began.
A spindly arm lifted, dropping a silken sleeve.
"Hush," a squeaky voice said. The figure of the Master of Sinanju occupied a floor space no greater than might a German shepherd.
Before a big-screen projection TV, he sat, his legs tucked under one another in the classic Asian lotus position. His kimono was like a monarch butterfly's wings replicated in silk-orange and black and iridescent.
Remo looked to the screen. He was surprised to see, not a British soap opera-Chiun's latest passion-but a documentary of some sort.
And because the Master of Sinanju was not watching a soap opera, Remo knew he could interrupt without risking a minor rebuke such as a compound leg fracture.
"Little Father, we need to talk," he said firmly.
"Remo!" the Master of Sinanju snapped. His wizened face glanced around, his clear hazel eyes annoyed. They were the only youthful aspect of the dusty lunar map of his features. "Not now!"
Remo folded his arms, his face a thundercloud of unhappiness. He thought about storming out, but he knew better than to escalate an argument he could never hope to win.
He wondered what Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, found so interesting. As Remo watched, scratchy archival footage from another time flickered on the screen. A crisp narrator's voice was saying, "Amelia Earhart left New Guinea on her fateful voyage on July 1, 1937, and was never seen again. Many theories have been put forth since her plane was lost over the South Pacific, but the mystery has never been solved."
From the Master of Sinanju came a derisive snort and a butterfly fluttering of his exquisitely long fingernails.
The announcer's overfed face appeared on the screen, looking serious. "We at Ten-Thousand-Dollar Reward believe there is no mystery that cannot be solved," he continued. "Somewhere out there is someone who knows what befell the brave aviatrix on her flight into the unknown. The producers of this program have placed ten thousand dollars in a trust fund to be paid to the first person to provide a credible documented account of Amelia Earhart's fate. If you are that person, call the eight-hundred number on this screen. Now!"
Twin puffs of hair floating over the Master of Sinanju's tiny ears like volcanic steam quivered in anticipation.
Remo detected that tiny warning subliminally. He stepped back in time to escape the explosion of butterfly silk that was the Master of Sinanju coming to full boil.
"Quickly, Remo!" Chiun cried, whirling about. "Fetch the telephone device. We must call this number!"
Remo eyed the Master of Sinanju, his arms flung out like wings, his wispy beard barely visible under his anguished mouth.
And he did not move.
"Did you not hear me, deaf one?" Chiun squeaked. Even with his arms upraised, he looked tiny.
"I hear you fine," Remo said calmly. "Just as you heard me when I wanted to talk to you."
"But the reward!" Chiun cried, his squeaky voice twisting with imminent loss.
"You know where the phone is," Remo said casually.
"But I do not know how to work it properly!"
"Just press the buttons, like any lesser mortal," Remo offered, his hands sweeping to the telephone on a tiny table, the only bit of furniture in the bare room other than the big TV.
"Very well, I will," said the Master of Sinanju, lowering his sail-like arms. He shrank to his normal height, which was barely five-feet-five. He padded toward the telephone on white sandals. His feet made an audible sound only because the Master of Sinanju wished to make his unhappiness known to his pupil.
"But I will not share the reward with you," he warned as he lifted the receiver to his face. Remo noticed with a smile-suppressing tightening of his lips that Chiun placed the earpiece to his prim mouth.
"Don't tell me you actually think you can convince the TV people you know what happened to Amelia Earhart," Remo said.
"I do and I will," said Chiun, stabbing push buttons with a long-nailed forefinger. The nails kept getting in the way-the true reason Chiun did not like using telephones.
"They won't believe you," Remo warned.
"I know where the body is."
"You do?" Remo said, a perplexed frown eradicating his smug expression.
"She was not lost, as many believe," Chiun retorted, one eye on the treacherous, nail-snagging keypad. "No storm claimed her craft-unless the sweet wind that has blown through the centuries is a typhoon."
"Sweet wind? I don't think I like where this is going . . . .
Chiun stabbed the O-for-operator button. He pressed too hard, making three zeros and not two. When he finished dialing, a feminine but mechanical voice said, "The number you have called is not a working number."
"But it was just on the television!" Chiun screamed into the earpiece. "I demand that you connect me!"
The voice repeated the message and the Master of Sinanju hung up huffily.
"These devices are impossible!" he shrieked. He turned to Remo, pointing an accusing finger. "You! I must claim that reward! Name your price!"
"Half," Remo said.
"Too much!"
"Three-quarters!"
"You are going high when you should be going low!" Chiun cried in exasperation. He grabbed his decorative hair puffs as if to yank them out by the roots.
"The more you stall, the higher my price goes," Remo told him, enjoying the rare experience of having leverage over the other man to bring him to this sorry sexless state in life.
"Bandit!" Chiun accused.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will cost you ten percent more," Remo sang out.
Chiun turned his back. "I will not be dragged into this insane negotiation," he said huffily.
"Suits me. You'll never see the reward anyway."
Chiun spun about like a fury. "I will so!"
"Prove it to me," Remo invited, folding his arms. "I'll be the judge."
The Master of Sinanju hesitated. His lifted chin dropped, making the wispy tendril of a beard jump out against his orange-and-black kimono. "How do I know you will not call these people when my back is turned, and claim the reward for yourself?"
"Good point," Remo said. "Why don't we just forget the whole thing?"
Chiun stamped one foot like a petulant child. "I will not! The reward is rightfully mine."
"Why?"
"Because we eliminated the dirty spy of a woman."
Despite the earlier hint, Remo was taken aback by the Master of Sinanju's venomous pronouncement.
"One of your ancestors killed Amelia Earhart?" he blurted out.
"No," said Chiun.
"That's a relief," said Remo. "For a minute I-"
"I did," added Chiun.
"You!"
"It was during a prelude to the Second Idiocy of the Barbarians," Chiun explained. Remo recognized the oft-used euphemism for World War II. "This woman was a spy, working for the Americans."
"Who did you work for?" Remo wondered.
"Why, those she intended to spy upon, of course."
"Not the Japanese?" Remo demanded.
"Possibly," Chiun said in an evasive voice.
"You worked for the Japanese?" Remo said, aghast.
"I said possibly," Chiun admitted in a quieter voice. "It was many years ago."
"The same sneaky, treacherous, unworthy Japanese you revile at every opportunity?"
"Not all Japanese are to be described so harshly," Chiun allowed. "There are a few who are worthy-for Japanese."
"I thought you hated the Japanese."
"I do not hate their money," Chiun retorted, gathering up his autumnal kimono sleeves.
"You don't hate anyone's money," Remo snapped. "You worked for the Japanese. The people who conquered Korea, so-called land of eternal perfection?"
"It was a special case," Chiun said, tight voiced.
"So tell me the story," Remo invited, toeing a tatami mat in front of him. He sat down, folding his legs, and assumed a patient expression.
The Master of Sinanju looked to the telephone. His many wrinkles bunched together in frustration. Then he stalked back to the television and assumed his own mat. He sat down with his back to his pupil.
