Warren Murphy: Bloody Tourists

In just seconds the tide turned against Fumar's boys, who quickly came to a conclusion-these weren't just crack heads and waste cases. They were mad animals. They were maniacs. Fumar's boys tried to flee and didn't get far.

Grom was intrigued by a few desperate crack heads dancing around the fringes of the bloodbath and trying to maneuver themselves into the thick of the fighting. His suggestion was still holding. They were in hysterics, but they couldn't break the no-violence suggestion until and unless they were physically assaulted by one of Fumar's men. Grom observed this behavior with the fascination of a true scientist.

But inevitably they managed to insert themselves into the fray and get shot or pushed or hit by one of Fumar's men, and then they were released into a frenzy of violence. Grom thought of a mad dog at the moment the leash snapped-and the cat that had been taunting him was just sitting there; ready to be snapped up. Grom's eyes grew bright. There was none of the scientist in his appreciation for the ensuing slaughter.

Then the mayhem became stillness. Fumar and his boys were obliterated.

One pathetic crack head, the human trash pile who had accepted Grom's first sample, danced around the massacre shouting at the bloody remains. "Spread the word! We hate Fumar!" Somehow, he or she had never managed to get into the fray.

The other crack heads were disoriented and muddled, several of them wounded and some of their number sprawled in the street with Fumar's men.

Of Fumar himself there was nothing recognizable left. The teenage girl who drew first blood had torn the flesh from his body until her fingers broke, then hacked at his corpse with a pry bar until her adrenaline was used up.

Sirens. Greg Grom was startled back to the reality of his situation. He pleaded with the rental car to start, and it did. He begged it to actually roll on its wheels and it did that, too, although some part of the crushed rear end was rubbing against a tire.

The rental car got him across town, which was good enough. He pulled to the curb in a Nashville industrial park. When no one was looking, he yanked off the stolen license plates that covered the rental car tags. He tucked the plates into a sewer, along with his hairpiece.

Then he pulled out his notebook and flipped to his chart, scanning the left-hand column of alphanumeric identifiers. The column next to the list was headed Results.

He found the entry GUTX-SPF-OR1. The Oregon lab had held out high hopes for its patented system called slow-process fermentation. Slow-process fermentation, however, looked like a big fat failure. Greg Grom meticulously penned in his one-word summation of today's trials.

"Imperfect."

Chapter 4

Dr. Harold W. Smith didn't pick up the phone. Mark Howard, his assistant, did.

"Hi, sonny," Remo said, "could you put your old man on the line?"

"Dr. Smith is tied up at the moment, Remo. Give me your report."

Remo stood at a small end table using a house phone in a parlorlike sitting area, which was dwarfed by the vast hotel atrium. It was a classy place, but Remo had stopped noticing hotel lobbies after the first few thousand. "This is grown-up talk, youngster," he said. "I think I better speak to your dad."

"Dr. Smith is tracking an event, Remo," Mark Howard explained.

"Right now?" Remo asked. "Where is it?" Suddenly Remo found himself on a speakerphone, and he heard Dr. Harold Smith's lemony voice over the bad acoustics.

"Nashville, unfortunately, Remo."

"Crap. I'm still in Boston."

"The event has concluded anyway," Smith said without emotion. "What did you discover?"

"I discovered exactly how much spaghetti and meatballs are lethal to an adult male scumbucket."

"That's all?"

"Eight plates, and then the stomach bursts. It's quite a sight."

"That's all you learned?" Smith pressed.

"That's it."

"The bad narcotics didn't originate with Figaroa or Moroza?"

"They didn't deal them and they don't know who did. Figaroa said somebody claimed the drugs were giveaways, but there wasn't enough of it to look like new competition."

"What do you mean, not enough?" Smith asked.

"Huh?" Remo asked. "Not enough means you need more before it's enough."

Without thinking about it, Remo's stance was an instinctive balance of muscle and bone, but it was more that just your average good posture. His stance took into account a hundred factors that any other human being would have failed to sense.

Maybe someone standing beside him would have felt the slight movement of the circulating air, if they concentrated. But they never would have been able to sense, let alone make sense of, all the other shifting pressure waves flickering through the atmosphere.

Remo did feel them, and balanced his body to them just as he adjusted himself to the force of gravity. He didn't feel these dynamics in a conscious way, but absorbed them as part of the ebb and flow of his environment.

The part of his environment he was trying to ignore at the moment was the concierge, an outgoing woman in her forties with mannequin-perfect grooming. She caught his eye and gave him a sultry smile.

Well, Remo thought, you ask somebody to point you to the phone and you're just looking for trouble.

"I am asking about the quantity of the drugs that were distributed," Smith clarified.

"I told you, Smitty, a handful of samples."

"You don't know that," Mark Howard observed. "There could have been thousands of samples distributed on the streets and only a small percentage were contaminated."

The concierge was coming out from behind her desk, moving languidly, eyes locked on Remo Williams as she sauntered in his direction. Remo gave her his back.

"That's true," Smith said. "Figaroa's customers wouldn't be forthcoming with that kind of information so he might not have known. Remo, you could survey the populace."

Remo's exasperation crested. "Okay, Smitty, First, no. Second, the Boston Freak Party happened on one street corner, so even if there's a thousand other untainted doses floating around out there, so what? Third, here's the important part-I'm not Peter Falk and the word investigator is not on my business card."

"I know this-"

"Fourth, you've got so much computer brainpower in the loony bin basement that even Bill Gates would be hard-pressed to monopolize it. Why haven't they figured this out?"

"The data coming in to the mainframes is only as good as the data our gatherers can uncover," Smith explained with forced patience.

"So put the Folcroft Four on the streets," Remo insisted, referring to the mainframes that collected and served data for Upstairs. "Have your Boy Howdy slide 'em in the ass end of that rustbucket battleship you call a car. When you get here you can put them on toy robot treads to move around town."

"I don't think that is a reasonable plan."

"You know what these people drink?" Remo continued. "Ripple. I didn't even know they still made Ripple. I don't even know what Ripple is. But that whole end of town smells like Ripple."

"Remo-"

"I bet the Folcroft Four know what Ripple is. They're way smarter than I am-we both know that. You get them out here, they'll put two and two together in a big way."

"This is foolish. The mainframes cannot serve as gatherers."

"Then get other gatherers," Remo retorted.

"We have the best gatherer on the planet. You."

"Just when I think I've heard it all you go and lay some flattery on me," Remo grumbled. "Well, there was the one time you thought I was just the right one to be framed for murder and electrocuted, but since then, no compliments. So today you don't have any credibility."

There was a sigh. "Remo, it was not a compliment, it was a statement of fact. When no one else can get people to tell what they know, and tell the truth, you can do it."