Warren Murphy - Bay City Blast

Gregory sighed. Mark Tolan might yet prove to be difficult.

Tolan spent much of his day walking around the streets of Bay City, bumping against people as he walked, hoping against hope that one would turn and badmouth him. He crossed the street three times to try to bump into men wearing pinstripe suits, but nobody seemed to want to shoot it out in the street.

He knew that Lizzard was supposed to rent apartments to be used as sniper posts against Rocco Nobile but sniping was no fun. Tolan liked his killings up close and personal, as they had been in Nam when he had wasted everybody left behind in that VC village. He liked to see the horror on the faces. He liked to see the pain when the bullet hit home. He liked to see the movements that turned slowly to still death.

When Rocco Nobile's time came, it wouldn't be from sniping. It would be from a bullet between the eyes, fired from no more than a few steps away. By Mark Tolan.

He felt good walking along, feeling the gun on his hip and in his pocket bumping against his body. He went into the lobby of the Bay City Arms and asked about renting an apartment. He was told that all the apartments had been rented.

He was not much good at small talk so he asked the doorman, "Mayor live here?"

"Yes."

"When's he go to work?"

"Who wants to know?"

Tolan really had to draw a tight rein on himself so he didn't shoot the doorman. When he came back from Rocco Nobile, he'd pay that debt too.

He walked into City Hall and found the mayor's office on the second floor. The City Commission was meeting when he arrived and he could hear their amplified voices out in the hallway. He wondered for a moment what it would be like to jump into the room, guns blazing, and level the whole commission. That would be fun, he thought. But the real fun would come from getting the boss.

The mayor's receptionist was a pretty young brunette named Denise. He asked her how to go about getting an appointment with the mayor. He was told to write a letter or he could leave a telephone number and she would get back to him. Of course, she'd have to know what the meeting concerned.

"Mayor here every day?" he asked.

"Every day."

"I'll spell everything out in my letter." Before leaving he glanced to his left. Through a leaded glass window, he could see another secretary at a desk. Sitting in a chair, leaning against the wall, was a man reading a paper. The man looked like a bodyguard.

Tolan thought how easy it would be. One shot in the head on this young twit, Denise. Push through the door. Two more bullets to take care of the other secretary and the bodyguard. He would not even have to break stride. He could be in the mayor's office before the mayor would have a chance to react. He could put a bullet in the ginzo's brain before anybody could do anything.

He reached under his jacket to feel the cold butt of the gun on his right hip. Then he withdrew his hand, slowly, reluctantly. He didn't want it to be a surprise shot. He wanted Nobile to know he was in danger, that there was a killer after him, and when the time came, he wanted to see Nobile squirm a little bit before he finished him off. It was the fright on their faces that he really liked.

As he left City Hall, he hoped to himself that Rocco Nobile had friends. Gregory had said that they were going to live huge, but all he wanted to do was to kill huge.

It was going to be fun and it was going to be easy. And anybody who got in his way was going to be hurt. Terminally.

Yeah, he thought. Yeah.

The ping pong ball whizzed off Chiun's fingertips. It headed straight across the room toward Remo's left hand. At the last split second, the ball veered upward and sharply to the right, toward Remo's head. Before it touched flesh, Remo drove his right hand forward. The hard fingertips slammed into the center of the ball. The little plastic sphere broke in two halves, which rapped off the panelled wall of the motel room with an almost simultaneous tap-tap sound. The rug near the wall was littered with half ping pong balls.

"I don't like this assignment, Little Father," Remo said.

"Why not?" Chiun asked. He was reaching toward a box of ping pong balls on the table behind him.

"Because we're bodyguards again. I don't like being a bodyguard. That's not what you trained me for."

"I like you as a bodyguard better than I like you as a detective," Chiun said. "For that, you are totally untrained." He flashed another ping pong ball at Remo from behind his back. The ball arced toward the younger man in a high lazy loop, then at the last moment, seemed to increase in speed. Remo got his left hand up to block the ball from hitting his face, but his stroke was not perfect, and instead of the fingertips splitting the ball in two, they merely dented it and drove it hard off the wood-panelled wall.

"Don't carp about my being a detective," Remo said.

"I never carp," Chiun said. "You should not mind being called a bodyguard. To be a bodyguard in time of trouble means that we will practice our assassin's art. And, if it is not a time of trouble, who cares what we are called because we are paid for resting?"

"Maybe you're right," Remo said.

Chiun put his hands at his sides, signaling that the exercise had entered a rest period. Remo relaxed.

"You must remember," Chiun said, "that Emperor Smith is crazy just as all emperors are crazy. They never know what we do. But he always pays on time. You buy what you wish. The gold gets to the village of Sinanju on time." He paused. "Did I ever tell you why that is important?"

"Yes, Chiun," Remo said wearily. "No more than five hundred times though. Poor village, throw babies into bay to drown when there's not enough to eat, masters work as assassins for emperors, get money, feed village, no more drowning kids. I got it. See, I know it well."

"It does not always work thusly," Chiun said. "Once, with the Master Shang-tu..."

"Never heard of him," Remo said. He had heard of the Eng and Chiun and Wo-Ti and a half dozen other Masters-down through history, including the greatest of them all, the great Master Wang, but Chiun's lecturing had, up till now, never mentioned Shang-tu.

"He was not memorable," Chiun said. "He produced no new art and he produced no new business. He was content merely to service accounts that Masters before him had created. One of these accounts was a Siamese king, for whom Shang-tu had performed a great service. Yet, Shang-tu did not do the most important thing an assassin must do."

"What's that?" asked Remo.

"He did not secure the payment. He accepted instead the king's promise that the payment would be sent to Sinanju, but when Shang-tu returned, the payment had not come, and after many months, it still had not come and the villagers were starving and it was time to send the children home again into the bay, because there was no food for them to eat."

Remo watched Chiun. Under the guise of talking to Remo and explaining this story, the old Korean's hand was slipping quietly behind him, toward the box of ping pong balls.

"What happened?" asked Remo, watching without appearing to watch.

Chiun's hand dropped back to his side, away from the box.

"Shang-tu had to go back to see the king once more and the king made profuse apologies and blamed the failure to pay on one of his ministers and in the presence of the Master, he had the Minister executed. And he told the Master to go home because now, surely, the payment would be there at Sinanju. And Shang-tu went back to Sinanju, but the payment did not come, and now many children had been sent home to the sea and the people of the village raised their voice against Shang-tu." Chiun's right hand was again moving toward the box of ping pong balls. Remo slightly tensed his body. Chiun's hand moved away again.