Warren Murphy - Bay City Blast

Remo raced after him.

Chiun led the mayor down the back steps of the city hall building to the parking lot.

Before he stepped outside, he looked carefully both ways. No one was in the lot except the parking attendant with the rum nose and plaid shirt, who was sitting in a city car, reading Playboy magazine.

Chiun nodded to Nobile and they walked quickly toward the mayor's car.

Just as Chiun opened the door, he heard a voice behind them,

"Hey, Chinkie, that's as far as you go."

He turned to see the brooding dark-haired man staring at them. He had a pistol in each hand. Chiun moved in front of the mayor and hissed to him softly: "Into the car and down."

Nobile moved back from Chiun and into the car, trying to fit himself onto the floor on the passenger's side. His hand reached up to unlock the door, and he pulled the handle so that the door was open, in case he had to roll through it.

"That won't do any good," Mark Tolan said to Chiun. He had a smile on his face, a twisted smile that involved only his mouth. His eyes remained cold. "I'll shoot right through you to get to him."

"Have to shoot through me first," said a voice from behind Tolan.

Tolan wheeled just as Remo lightly vaulted the low cyclone fencing which surrounded the parking lot. He was ten feet from Tolan.

"Yeah," Tolan said. He savored the moment. Three people to kill and more maybe might come. Yeah, it was going to be a good day. A good day for dying.

"Well, well, well," he said. "If it ain't the other ping pong player."

"Are you The Eraser?" Remo asked.

"No. I'm The Exterminator."

"Cute," said Remo. "Any other fancy names?"

"The two guys you killed. That was The Lizzard and The Baker."

"Then who the hell's The Eraser?" Remo demanded.

"In the tank," Tolan said. "What's your name? Ping Pong?"

Remo looked across the ten feet of distance and smiled and his smile was colder and more heartless than Tolan's.

"Me?" Remo intoned the words softly. "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. You don't know what that means, do you?"

"No," said Tolan.

"It means you're done, axe-face."

They should have been in the parking lot by now, Sam Gregory realized, so he put his tank into "drive" and began to chug forward, around the corner back toward the lot, where he was supposed to pick up The Exterminator. He heard a few cartridges pinging off the heavy armor of the tank and smiled. Almost all done.

Remo moved across the blacktop toward Mark Tolan. Tolan let him come. The closer the target, the bigger the hole. At five feet, he fired with the Gregory Sur-Shot in his right hand.

And missed.

Remo went down below the fragmenting slugs as if he had slipped down an open elevator shaft. Then he was on his feet again and before Tolan could squeeze off another round, he felt the gun slapped from his hand and heard its metallic clink on the pavement.

As Remo raised his hands toward Tolan, the burly man lifted his left hand and fired his .357 Magnum at Remo but even as he pressed the trigger, he knew it would miss, because Remo was no longer in front of him. The bullet fired with a loud crack. Tolan could see instantly crazed glass where the slug splintered its way through the windows of three parked automobiles.

Tolan felt a tap on his shoulder and, as he turned, the Magnum was knocked from his hand. And the crazy ping pong player was behind him and Tolan thought, yeah, well, he's good at dodging bullets but I'm fifty pounds heavier than he is and I'm going to tear his throat out with my hands and, yeah, if I like it, maybe I'll switch to using my hands from now on and he reached up and put his two big ham fists around the thin man's throat.

"Destroyer, huh? Try this destroyer," Tolan said. He began to squeeze with all the power in his bulky muscles. Remo did not stop smiling.

If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Sam Gregory would never have believed it.

He stopped the tank in the middle of the street near the parking lot. He saw Tolan inside the lot with his hands around the neck of a thin dark-haired man. It was the man he'd seen the night before at the Bay City Improvement Association.

The thin man slowly raised his hands and pressed his thumbs into Tolan's wrists and Tolan's hands separated and dropped from the man's throat.

The thin man was talking to Tolan but Gregory couldn't hear what he said...

"...You kill those little girls at headquarters last night?" Remo asked.

Tolan did not answer. He was trying desperately to make his hands move but they felt as if they had been dipped into plaster of Paris and left to dry for six days.

"I asked you a question," Remo said. He punched an index finger softly into Tolan's ear lobe.

"Yes, yes," Tolan shrieked. He had never known an ear lobe could hurt like that.

"And that poor Chinese family?"

"Drug dealers," Tolan gasped. "Yes. I did it."

"You're The Exterminator," Remo said. "When I'm done with you, there won't be enough left for roach paste."

Gregory put his eyes closer to the narrow slit through which a tank commander could see the battlefield in front of him. As he watched, he saw the bulky muscular Tolan being lifted in the air, above the head of the thin man. The thin man whirled gently, not with any obvious muscular effort as with a shot putter or discus thrower, but as if he were doing a gentle dance step, and then Tolan was slamming through the air. His body traveled twenty feet and then, like a spear, it went headfirst through the front windshield of the car owned by the city's deputy director of community improvement.

Tolan hit with a shudder, like a javelin sticking into the ground, and then the lower part of his body buckled and his knees banged down on the hood of the new Mercedes.

Gregory shuddered inside the safe confines of his tank. He hadn't thought making war on the Mafia was going to be easy, but this was ridiculous. It was time to retire to reconsider his situation.

Then he saw something else. There was an old Oriental standing in front of a car on the far side of the parking lot and as the Oriental moved away, behind him Gregory could see Mayor Rocco Nobile crawling out of the car.

He could not pass up the opportunity. Gregory wheeled the tank turret around. Here was his chance. He could put a shell into the Mafia mayor's midsection.

But as he lowered the barrel of the cannon into position, his eyes met those of the Oriental. And while their eyes locked, the ancient yellow man began walking across the parking lot toward the tank and Gregory realized what he was looking at. He was looking into the eyes of death and at that moment, he decided that from here on, it would be live and let live between himself and the Mafia and all these strange people they had working for him.

He put the tank in drive gear again and began rumbling down the street toward the city's piers. Behind him, straggled out, was a crowd of city policemen, ineffectively firing pistol bullets at the huge olive drab machine.

Nobile ran up behind Remo and Chiun.

"Is that The Eraser?" he asked.

"I guess so," Remo said. "I can't keep track of all these ninnies and their names." He turned to Chiun. "We'd better go after him." He nodded to the mayor. "You stay here."

"Not on your life."

"No. On yours. And tell those cops to stop shooting. They're liable to hit something. Like us," Remo said. He and Chiun hurdled the low fence and ran off after the speeding tank.

"Stop that goddamn shooting," Nobile yelled at a police captain.

The captain nodded as if that was the sensible command he had been waiting for since the start of this incident and shouted for his men to holster their guns. The firing stopped and the captain looked back toward Nobile for approval, but the mayor had already darted back into his car, started it up, and was driving down the street after the tank and Remo and Chiun.