Warren Murphy: American Obsession

Remo could see the little darts racing for his chest. At just the right instant, he blew a quick puff of breath. As the burst of air escaped his lips, it cracked like a small-caliber gunshot. The chi-powered gust veered the tiny missiles wide of their intended target.

Goatee shrieked as the twin darts caught him in the top of the right thigh, sending fifty-thousand volts coursing through his body. For a heartbeat, he went bug-eyed rigid, then his head drooped. As his chin dropped to his chest, his knees went rubbery soft. In slo-mo, he slumped down to his hands and knees, then to his face on the sidewalk. He lay there motionless, except for the kicking, solo dance of his right leg.

Pump-gun discarded his truncheon and made a grab for his shoulder-slung side arm.

A bad choice.

Without apparently moving from the spot on which he stood, the hairtail still safely tucked under his arm, Remo threw the bounty hunter fifteen feet through the air. Pump-gun landed with a hollow thunk, belly first on the car's hood, caving it in. Unconscious, he slid off the right front fender like a 250-pound over-easy fried egg.

Remo reached out for the guy with the stun gun. With a downward slash of a single razor-sharp fingernail, the assassin neatly slit through the front of the Kevlar body armor. Before the bounty hunter could get his hand on the butt of his pistol, Remo groped inside the foot-long gash for his pound of flesh. And catching hold of it, he wrung it out like a fistful of wet socks.

"Yeeee, Mama!" yelped Taser, dropping to both knees on the sidewalk with a shuddering thud.

"Who am I?" Remo asked him.

"You're a fucking maniac!"

"Who am I?"

Desperation filled the man's eyes. "Think, think," Remo urged him.

"You're not William Ransom," the bounty hunter wheezed.

"Bingo." Remo slightly loosened his grip. "Now, what am I?"

The man with the Taser squinted up at him, teeth clenched, anticipating more pain.

Remo smiled. "I YAM WHAT I YAM."

"Huh?"

"A wrist joke. Forget it. Time for night-night." Cocking his middle finger against his thumb, Remo delivered a precisely measured snap to the side of the bounty hunter's head. The man's eyelids fluttered shut, and he went limp. Remo eased the unconscious man onto his back.

As Remo retrieved his wallet, Yi reappeared in the shop's entrance. He seemed pleased by the sight of all the downed bodies, but then again, he always seemed pleased.

"You come tomorrow," Yi said in English, "I have sand eel for Master. Very fresh. No parasites, or money back."

Remo left the parking lot, whistling. As he crossed Olympic Boulevard, the sounds of approaching ambulances made a seesawing counterpoint to his offkey hornpipe.

REMO AND CHIUN'S vacation rental was on a side street a few blocks from Mr. Yi's shop. Since its inception, the surrounding neighborhood had passed through three sets of ethnicities-white, black and Latino-before becoming largely Korean. Remo would have preferred Malibu or even Santa Monica; the location had been Chiun's choice. Although the Master of Sinanju often claimed to enjoy being around "his own people," the farther they got from the fishing village of Sinanju, the less use he had for them. A person from Seoul might as well have been born in Namibia. Or Afghanistan. For Remo, the whole "my neighbor, my brother" thing was made even more laughable by the fact that in the ten days since their arrival, Chiun had left the house only once.

Remo turned down the narrow concrete walkway that divided a double row of clapboard dollhouses. The little court of eight bungalows had been built in the 1930s. All the houses were white, and they'd been painted and repainted countless times without proper sanding between coats-nowhere on the siding was there a square foot without a spall, a burst blister or a painted-over dust ball. Stunted orange trees decorated the walkway. A sign of the times, every front door had a black steel security screen, and every window was barred.

As he put the key in the lock, Remo heard the blare of a TV commercial through the door. Though he couldn't make out the words, he knew the spot had to be selling either trucks or beer, the cornerstones of "Friday Night Football." He opened the door onto a cool, dark, postage stamp of a living room that seemed even smaller because of the projection TV that covered the entire rear wall. At Chiun's insistence on the day of their arrival, Remo had arranged delivery of the seventy-two-inch Mitsuzuki Mondiale from a local Rent-to-Own appliance and furniture store.

Three-foot-high beer bottles danced the Macarena in the gloom of the window-draped room. In front of the Mitsuzuki, a little man with a face like a yellow raisin sat on a La-Z-Boy recliner. In a long silk kimono, with his TV tray at his side and the TV Bible opened to the night's playbill, reposed the deadliest killer on earth.

"You haven't moved a muscle since I left," Remo complained as he shut the door.

A slender hand appeared out of the cuff of the silk robe. The Master of Sinanju raised a long-nailed finger to his lips and shushed his inconsiderate pupil. In the erratic light of the TV, he was flipping through the little magazine's full-color-insert section.

"You're not reading that godawful gossip crap again?" Remo said. "Can't you see all the stories are just unpaid ads for upcoming shows? The whole damned magazine is self-congratulating boosterism run amok."

Chiun pressed the TV Bible over his heart and said, "Only a fool scolds a cat for licking its own behind." There was no arguing that one.

So Remo didn't bother trying.

He turned for the tiny kitchen. After depositing the hairtail on the counter, he set the lightly oiled wok on the gas burner to heat and started a pot of jasmine rice. As the Mondiale's enormous quartet of speakers blasted an all-too-familiar theme, he stuck his head back out of the doorway.

With an opening montage of fireworks, Lycra-clad, gyrating cheerleaders, superb computer graphics and raucous country-rock fanfare, "Friday Night Football" was under way. Huge helmets in the competing teams' colors-pumpkin orange for the L.A. Riots and crustacean red for the Maine Lobsters--collided and exploded into a sea of glittering fragments.

Which dissolved into a three-shot of the show's hosts in the stadium broadcast booth. As if anyone with a functioning brain didn't already know who Chunk, Sal and Freddy were, the network superimposed their first names under the live picture. Chunk was the former offensive lineman and now the color commentator, Sal was the canny play-by-play guy and Freddy the brainy statistic-and-trivia king. All three of the media personalities wore matching navy blue blazers, but there the similarity ended. Sal and Freddy could have used Chunk's sports coat as a two-man tent.

In Remo's opinion, Chiun's long-running fascination with the boob tube had taken a decided turn for the worse. The Reigning Master of Sinanju had become a pro-football junkie. Though his understanding of the fine points of the game left much to be desired, Chiun had caught the fever.

"We've got a good one for you tonight, folks," said Sal. "A real grudge match between two of the league's newest expansion teams...."

"If anything, that's an understatement," Chunk said. "If you don't believe me, just take a look at some tape we shot during warm-ups. Even the team mascots hate each other."

Images of a man-size velour dog-thing with a huge head, and a man-size red foam lobster with one big claw flooded the screen. A nose-to-claw shouting match ended with a flurry of blows exchanged and the two mascots rolling around on the artificial turf.

"Ol' Lootie the Coyote is really giving it to Clawboy," Freddy said.

"The bad feeling goes from the bottom up, folks," Sal said into the camera as it switched back to the booth, "from the towel boys to the general managers. Like I said, we've got a humdinger tonight. Stay tuned."