Warren Murphy: Bloody Tourists

The deaths were witnessed by a group at the top of the stairs and started them all yowling, which got on Remo's nerves. He loped up the stairs in long strides and grabbed the first crack head he came to, hurling him over the railing to the landing below, where his vocalizations stopped with a bony crunch.

A crack head bashed his vodka bottle on the floor. Half the contents spilled out, and the air filled with the smell. Remo lifted the glass weapon out of the crack head's hands and inserted it in his chest, twisting and slicing a perfect circle of empty space where much of his rib cage and heart should have been.

The final crack head ran into an empty apartment and tried to slam the door behind him, only to find his attacker standing right there at his side. His howl died to a curious "Urk?" and he died with it, as his trachea shattered and his breathing apparatus stopped functioning.

There was a rustle from above and Remo drifted up to the third story, following the sounds to the doorless entry to another apartment. A zinc trash barrel stood in the middle of the room, smoking slightly from a fire that had been allowed to die out. A hairy, greasy man was struggling to claw his way through the narrow window, snuffling and grunting like a dog digging its way under the fence.

"Let's talk," Remo suggested. The hairy man's mouth fell open. "Please?" Remo added.

All he got was a high-pitched hyena wail.

"Oh, can it!" Remo swept the metal garbage container across the room, where it slammed into the screamer and crushed him into the window frame, shattering most of his skeletal system and silencing him instantly.

Remo listened. There were no more animal-like howls. More importantly, he could hear no other heartbeats or furtive movement inside the building.

Grabbing the boneless dead man, he tromped to the second floor and collected an armful of corpses. On the first floor he sat all the dead druggies together, rifling their clothing for paraphernalia and coming up with a few large plastic bags of white powder, a few plastic-wrapped rocks of crack cocaine and a couple of syringes. He broke the needles and pocketed everything else.

Down the street was a tiny neighborhood grocery that looked like a miniature prison. The windows were barred. A heavy steel gate covered the door.

Miraculously, the pay phone on the sidewalk functioned. Remo depressed the one button and held it. Somewhere, magic computerized connections were made. A wind blew and his body adjusted automatically to the chill.

"Luigi's Pizza," said a computer-simulated voice on the other end of the line.

"I want an extralarge pepperoni, delivered," Remo said. A scrawny man stalked to the phone booth, wearing so many gang colors and insignias he looked like an Eagle Scout who had gone over to the dark side.

Remo nodded. "Evening. The weather outside is frightful. Dum, dum, delightful."

"Man, what're you doing on my telephone?"

"Remo? What did you say?" said a new voice on the line.

"I'm talkin' to you, boy. What're you doin' on my phone? You know this is my place of business."

"Hold on, Luigi," Remo said, then turned to the gangbanger. "I thought you guys used cell phones these days."

"Usually I do, but there's times I need a public phone, and it's that phone right there. Now you get off my phone."

"You work with those clowns in the big green building down the street?" Remo asked.

"What's it to you, boy?"

"I just took this off them," he said, pulling one of the largest of the plastic bags of white substance out of his coat pocket. The dealer became very still, steam hissing out of his nostrils.

"Remo, what's going on?" Harold Smith demanded.

"Just hold on, Luigi."

"You a cop?" the dealer demanded.

"Just an interested bystander."

"If you ain't a cop, then you're moving in on my territory!" Reaching into the back of his pants, he yanked out a snubby handgun. "Hand it over."

Remo extended the dope and let go of it. In the moment the drug dealer's attention was distracted by the plummeting bag of controlled substance the handgun somehow became turned around in his hands, with his thumb depressing the trigger. He started to shout, and Remo nudged the muzzle of the weapon into his mouth. A great red mess suddenly covered the sidewalk. Remo snatched his bag of drugs before it hit the ground.

"I'm here, Smitty."

"Are you calling me from the middle of a job?"

"No, job's done. I just got tangled in some superfluous details and now they're untangled."

A man in a sleeveless undershirt and a dirty apron stepped out of the front of the grocery, looked down at the corpse and the mess on the sidewalk, then peered quizzically at Remo. Remo shrugged. The grocer retreated inside.

"You get any samples?" Smith asked.

"Got 'em. You were right about the perpetrators. They howled like dogs."

"Get those samples shipped here ASAP and maybe we'll figure out what's making it happen."

The wail of a siren filled the dingy block, and a Nashville Police Department squad car rolled around the corner. As the crowds gathered, Remo slipped through the cops trying to take control of the scene. A scene that appeared, as unlikely as it seemed, to be a suicide. The victim was on the ground with the front end of his handgun wedged squarely in his mouth, hand on the trigger.

If only a few more drug dealers took care of themselves like that, one of the cops observed, the world would be a better place.

The police never even saw Remo slip past them.

Chapter 7

The colors of the late-afternoon sun played over the peaceful community of cookie-cutter duplexes in Stamford, Connecticut, painting bright colors on the windows and lengthening the shadows of hopscotching children. Inside one of the duplexes a phone started to ring.

The ringing lasted twenty minutes. It stopped, then rang again, for twenty more minutes.

The childlike figure in the kimono sat cross-legged on the mat in the empty-looking living room, performing a nearly impossible feat: ignoring the ringing. Truly ignoring it. The endless electronic jangling did not annoy or even distract him. This was not a child at all, but an old Asian man. So old, in fact, he could have used his age to make himself a celebrity, had he chosen to.

There was a sheaf of empty parchment pages on the mat. There was another such stack on a mat across from him. A quill pen was placed next to each stack of paper. He ignored these as well. He was staring into space, not smiling, but somehow with contentment on a face that was as dry and pale as the parchment but far more wrinkled. When the phone paused and started to ring yet again, the Asian rose and lifted the receiver from its wall mount. He put it to his ear, saying nothing.

"Master Chiun, is that you?"

"Yes, Emperor Smith."

"Were you out?"

"Out of what?"

"Is something wrong, Master Chiun? Were you sleeping?"

"I have been reciting Ung."

"I see. I've been letting the phone ring for the better part of an hour."

"I was reciting Ung. It is an absorbing and beautiful literature."

"I see. Well-"

"The people of the Western world cannot allow their attention to rest on any one thought for long. They are children who become bored with playthings and look for another plaything and then another."

"I suppose that's true-"

"I blame Homer."

HAROLD SMITH HAD been struggling to change the direction of the conversation. He knew little of Ungian poetry, other than it was extremely lengthy and endlessly repetitive, and he knew the old Korean named Chiun could lecture about it for hours, interweaving his diatribe with discourses on the inadequacies of those who didn't enjoy it-a population that likely included everyone on Earth save Chiun himself.

But now the old Master of Sinanju had piqued his interest. Smith studied the classics during his university years, which was decades earlier, and was proud that he retained much of his classical education.