Warren Murphy - Bay City Blast

"Actually, I received a dispensation from Father Cochran to be out alone on this terrible street."

"Father Cochran? I'm afraid I don't know him. And just where is St. Joseph's?"

Trapped, The Lizzard thought. He improvised.

"It's a new church, dear. We're just starting it. But, actually, I didn't come here to talk about myself. Rather, we would like to help in any small way we can."

The brunette secretary didn't know what to make of it. She reached into her desk for an application form. "You wouldn't mind filling this out, would you?"

"Of course not. The longer the better. Nobody here but you two lovelies?"

Louie came back into the Association office on the dead whoop, shouting and pointing at the paper. "I hit! I hit! I had 456 and I hit it in the box! Twenty-five dollars! I hit! I hit!"

"All right, Louie," said the brunette.

The Lizzard stood up quickly. He had heard all he needed to. This man was in here with the numbers play. And besides, it was tune for a drink.

"I'll just take this application with me," he said as he snatched the paper from the desk. "And I'll be back tomorrow night."

Without waiting for a reply, he walked out the front door. Behind him, the two girls looked at each other and suppressed laughter. Louie was drawing his finger across the winning number again to make sure that he had won.

Outside on the street The Lizzard rubbed his forehead three times in the pre-arranged signal.

"That's it," Tolan said joyously. "Let's go kill somebody."

He had a gun in each hand as he walked to the door. Gregory followed him, carrying a Gregory Sur-Shot.

The Baker lingered behind.

"Come on," Gregory said. "Timing is everything."

"Do I have to go?"

"Yes." Gregory looked at the sad expression on Baker's face. "A good job tonight and tomorrow is bonus day for everybody."

Baker brightened appreciably. "Okay, Let's do it."

"Take a gun," Gregory said, pointing toward a small arsenal of weapons on the dresser.

Baker sighed and took the smallest one he could find and stuck it into his jacket pocket. No way he was going to fire it. No way.

They had to run to catch up with Mark Tolan who was marching at doubletime across the street. The plan had been for all of them to talk to The Lizzard and get the lay of the land, but Tolan had had enough of talking. While Gregory and Baker walked toward Lizzard, Tolan marched toward the front door of the Bay City Improvement Association.

"You know where Barrack Street is?" Nobile asked Remo.

"Yeah," said Remo. He spun the car around the corner, making a right-hand turn toward Bay City. The car strained upward on its two inside wheels. Just as it reached the point where it was sure to tip, Remo tromped on the gas pedal, and the sudden forward surge overcame the centrifugal force and brought all four wheels back to the pavement.

"You always drive like this?" Nobile said.

"Yes," said Chiun. "With callous disregard for the lives of people who are worth something, namely me."

"You ain't seen nothing yet," Remo said.

Mark Tolan knew the face of evil when he saw it, no matter how it was painted or disguised. His had looked into evil before, and it could not hide itself from him or from his judgment. The little brunette looked up when he came through the door. She smiled, the same kind of smile she smiled every Sunday at 11 a.m. when she sang in the choir of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church where she was the second alto and was hoping that she would be the first alto next year. She was still smiling when the first Gregory Sur-Shot string of fragmentation slugs ripped into her head.

The blonde secretary was not a choir singer. She was nineteen years old and by the brunette's standards already a fallen woman because she had once let her fiance touch her there and they weren't planning to be married until next year, when he got out of college where he was studying archaeology. She went next, a string of slugs almost severing her neck. She fell onto the table gushing red. Tolan thought, yeah, my favorite color, blondes wearing red.

Louie was sitting at a table in the back of the room and he looked up slowly when he heard the shots and saw the two girls hit and the big goon standing in the doorway. He was enraged because the two girls had been nicer to him than anyone else had ever been and he jumped to his feet and raced at Tolan.

"Bad man, I'm gonna get you," he cried out.

Tolan let him get close, fifteen feet, ten feet. Louie was waving his fists over his head, his puffy face distorted with rage and anger. At eight feet, Tolan squeezed the trigger.

The gun jammed. He squeezed again. It did not fire. Then Louie was on him, his hard little fists flailing at Tolan's face and Tolan didn't like it. For a moment, he thought of running way but then he remembered the other gun in his left hand, the .357 Magnum, and he put it to Louie's right temple and squeezed the trigger. This one fired and Louie dropped to the freshly linoleumed floor.

Tolan ran to the back of the office hoping there were more people there. But there weren't. He turned and ran back toward the street. He grabbed a handful of pencils from his pocket, and with one wrench broke off their eraser ends and dropped them onto the floor. On the street, he met The Eraser, The Baker and the Lizzard.

"All done," said Tolan. "Let's go."

The four men ran back up the steps of the tenement building where they kept an apartment, just as Remo's car turned the corner. He pulled up in front of the Bay City Improvement Association, as Gregory and his three accomplices began to look out the window. Remo was scanning the windows on the other side of the street.

"Hey, I know him," Tolan said. "That's the dip with the ping pong balls."

Remo looked up at their apartment and for one chill moment, it seemed to Gregory that his eyes had locked with those of the hard-faced man in the street.

Behind Remo, Chiun and Nobile had gone to the association offices.

"Oh, my God," Remo heard Nobile say.

He turned to see the mayor bent over the body of Louie near the doorway. Chiun was gesturing to Remo to go after the shooters.

"Nobile," Tolan said upstairs. "I can get him from here."

"No. We want him to sweat a little," Gregory said. "First his drug trade, then his numbers business. Next is him, but let him wait."

Baker saw Remo look in the Association headquarters. He saw the thin man's fist clench. Remo turned and ran across the street toward them. His face was twisted with anger.

"We better get out of here," Baker said.

"I think you're right," Gregory said.

"Let's shoot it out with him," Tolan said.

"Later," said Gregory. "We'll get him on our terms."

The four men went through a back window and down the fire escape. Their rented car had been parked in a vacant lot behind the old tenement building.

When Remo kicked in the apartment door, they were gone. He looked out the back window and saw only the taillights of the car pulling around a building and into the street.

"Damn," he said. "Damn."

Back at the Association headquarters, Chiun handed Remo three broken pencils.

"I thought you would want these," he said.

It was on the TV — eleven o'clock news.

The three major New York channels carried brief pieces on the killings. They described how Mayor Rocco Nobile, making his usual nightly visit to the club, had come on the scene only seconds after the shootings.

"It was two young juveniles," the stations quoted Nobile as saying. "I ran after them, but they were too fast for me and they got away." He described them as Hispanic youths, perhaps five-foot-six or -seven, wearing yellow nylon windbreakers. He pledged an all-out police effort to apprehend the perpetrators.