Warren Murphy - Wolf's Bane

"You like it?"

Cuvier considered that one for a moment, frowning as if Remo's question puzzled him, presenting issues he had never taken time to ponder.

"Like it?" Shoulders thick with muscle lifted in a shrug. "Is where I'm from. Like it or don't like it, what difference? Tell you one thing true-I like it more than Omaha."

He stretched the last word out as if its syllables were unfamiliar to him, something from a foreign language-which, Remo decided, was a fair enough description in the circumstances.

"You may not be safe here," Remo told him, "even if we find the man who's tracking you."

"I told you three, four times already, ain't no man," said Cuvier. "Armand done hire himself a loup-garou. You find him, he find you, don't matter which. That's all the trouble you going to need."

"Tell me something," Remo said. "In all the time you worked with Fortier, did he have lots of werewolves on the payroll?"

"Go on with jokin'," said the Cajun. "That's all right. You meet old loup-garou, then you'll be laughing out the wrong side of your face."

"I wasn't joking."

Cuvier gave him a quick sideways glance and they rode in silence for a few more minutes, Remo concentrating on the road, Chiun pretending to be asleep in back, before the Cajun spoke again.

"There's not just one old loup-garou around here, if you wanna know. Not many, but a few. A few is all it'll take. Pass on the secret and the power."

"But you never met one?"

"Not me, no," said Cuvier. "My grandpa seen them, back a time, before I was born. See one, it last you for a lifetime, if you live that long."

"I'm only interested in recent werewolves. You don't know this werewolf," Remo pressed him. "Where he lives or what his name is, anything to help us track him down."

"Done told you not to worry about that thing. He'll find us when he feel like it, I guarantee. He find us, and that's all she wrote."

Remo veered to a different tack. "What would you pay your average wolf man for a job like this?"

"A contract? All depend on what he ask for, what he needs. I reckon some take money, just like common folks. You can't be sure, though. Loup-garou might ask you something else."

"Such as?"

"No tellin'. He be lookin' for someone to carry on the line, might ask you for a soul."

"How's that?"

"Your firstborn baby girl, for example. Raise them up a litter that way, keep the pick and lose the rest."

Remo was trying to get real-world answers, and this guy was hanging out in the twilight zone. "The white man in his arrogance assumes that he knows everything," Chiun said from the back seat. "He visits distant lands, interrogates the people who have lived there for a thousand generations, then dismisses half of what they say as fantasy, the rest as lies."

"Is there a point?"

A bony index finger, moving with the speed of thought, tapped Remo sharply on the head. "Your point is sadly obvious," the Master of Sinanju said. "Do not take wisdom for granted. A man with wisdom accepts that there are things he does not know. Koreans understand this basic truth. Even Chinese and Japanese can grasp it, with some effort. White men, on the other hand, display their ignorance by claiming knowledge of all things."

"Okay, I get your drift," said Remo, switching to Korean for privacy. "But I wasn't raised on spooks and demons. We know what this werewolf is and what it's not. This wolf man is brought to you by Judith White, not Hammer Horror."

"I assume nothing. Perhaps this creature is not what we think it is, but what the Cajun criminal thinks it is."

"Huh? You trying to tell me that you believe in werewolves? The supernatural kind? Silver bullets and all that?"

Chiun answered with a haughty silence.

Remo sighed. "Okay, Little Father, look-this has the signature of Judith White's little projects. Judith White ran away just a few months ago. Seems to me Judith White's the most likely culprit."

"Perhaps," Chiun replied without conviction. Cuvier was looking concerned at the unintelligible conversation going on around him. Remo didn't want him freaking out on them. Not while he was still good bait. He switched back to English. "So," he said, glancing over at the Cajun, "how does someone go about becoming loup-garou?"

"Some born that way, what I been told," said Cuvier. "Them others go on out lookin' for it. Wanna grab the power for themselves."

"Is there some kind of formula?"

"Ain't made no study on it," said the Cajun. "Heard some stories, long time back. One say you gotta have a wolf skin, other say you don't. One talks about some kind of ointment made of herbs. Another one tells how you gotta say the right words at a certain time of night."

"That's helpful," Remo muttered.

"Ain't no help to get," the Cajun said. "Go on up against old loup-garou, best say you prayers before you start."

"I'll make a note."

"One thing I'm happy 'bout," Cuvier said. "Oh, yeah? What's that?"

"Time we be gettin' into New Orleans," said the Cajun, "we'll be right in time for Mardi Gras. We have a little party before the end."

HUMILIATION and frustration kept Leon from sleeping on the long drive home. The leader of the pack didn't need the others grumbling at him, but they did it anyway-except the bitch, who simply glared at him from time to time, then slowly turned away without a sound, a gesture of supreme contempt.

The pack was pissed because Leon had made a kill without them, and there was no time to share. The cop had stumbled into it as he was leaving, more than likely summoned by a neighbor who had wakened to the noise of Leon freaking out and tearing up the absent target's house. It had been close, that one. Not from the aspect of a risk, since he didn't think an ordinary bullet would have fazed him, but because there could have been another cop, one who escaped if he was lucky, sounding the alarm.

Leon's chief weapon, other than the pack, his teeth and talons, was the fact that 99.9 percent of all Americans would swear upon a stack of Bibles that there were no loups-garous. That kind of ignorance protected him and made him stronger than he was already. Granted, one scared cop wouldn't be able to convince the world at large-hell, they would more than likely slap him in a straitjacket-but if enough people reported a phenomenon, somebody from the government was bound to check it out eventually, and that spelled no end of trouble for a werewolf on the prowl.

So all of them were angry for different reasons as he drove around the clock to get back home. His brothers and the silent bitch had their noses out of joint because they hadn't had a chance to chow down on the cop-as if he had-and they were making due with cold ground beef from several all-night markets strung along the highway.

Leon, for his part, was mad and worried all at once, because it was the first time he had blown a paying job, and he had no idea what his next move should be.

The shopping was a problem, same with gassing up the van, but he had worked it out with help from the old man who raised him long ago. He had to hide his face and hands when he was out in public, meaning off the bayou, anywhere on the road. You couldn't travel far in the United States, even by night, and remain invisible. Even if he could satisfy the pack with roadkill, there would still be stops for fuel, other essential shopping expeditions, maybe even rare occasions when he had to ask directions from the locals.

The old man's solution was to purchase a hat and raincoat from the Goodwill people, with a pair of roomy leather gloves, and big rolls of gauze. Dressed up, with gauze wrapped all around his head beneath the snap-brim hat, sunglasses on, the leader of the pack resembled someone who had suffered facial burns, or maybe was recovering from some kind of extensive plastic surgery. The old man took one look at him back then and beamed. "Just like Claude Raines," he said.