Warren Murphy - Last Rites

And for a solid year they hadn't. No one had.

Then one day in July the buried motion-sensor array picked up an intruder. Punching up his security cameras, Vinnie saw a man approaching on foot. He was lean and neat with his hair cut on the short side.

"Oh, man, what is this shit?" Vinnie moaned.

In his gray chinos and T-shirt, the guy looked like a poster boy for AIDS awareness.

"Those cocksucker fucking rumors musta spread like wildfire. Now I got the local fags sniffing around, looking for action."

Vinnie hit the loudspeaker system. "You! Get offa my property. You want people to talk?"

But the guy kept coming.

"I get it. I get it. He's bait. That's it. Don Silvio thinks I'll give him a tumble, and either the fruit whacks me or I contract AIDS offa him. Fuck! Gotta get rid of him."

He called out, "Numbnuts, Fatface, Bonehead-where are you stupid mutts?"

The dry padding of sandpapery paws came rushing out of the playroom, where the three ridgebacks had been sleeping contentedly.

Pushing their eager brown muzzles away from his crotch, Vinnie said, "See the guy on the screen? You gotta get rid of him for me. Got that? He's bad."

And Vinnie pulled down the drop stairs that led to the roof and the only exit from his underground tire fortress.

Not having seen daylight in weeks, the dogs poured out, their big, muscular, toast-colored bodies eager.

Vinnie sat back to watch the guy being torn limb from limb. There were no dogs more ferocious than the African ridgeback, for they had been bred to fight lions and hunt men.

REMO SAW THE DOGS coming for him and decided his search was over. They came out of a hole in an embankment. And knowing that dogs don't normally dwell underground, he figured he had the right patch of dirt.

Howling and yapping, the three dogs galloped toward him like small toast-brown horses.

Remo let the first one pass between his legs. The dog kept on going, snapping at legs that his eyes told him were still in front of him.

The second dog went for his throat, and Remo got him by his floppy ears. Spinning, he sent the canine flying tail first into an evergreen.

The third dog, seeing all this, skidded to a stop. The dark bristly ridge along his smooth back lifted like hackles. He growled.

Remo casually tossed him a dog treat. The dog sniffed it, gobbled it up and Remo tossed another.

By this time the other dogs had gotten themselves organized, and Remo began flinging treats in all directions. The dogs fell upon them with eager, sniffling muzzles.

While they were occupied, Remo opened the hatch in the ground and yelled down. "Vinnie Cerebrini?"

"You get outta my house!" an agitated voice shouted up.

"You Vinnie 'Three Dogs'?" Remo asked.

"I said, you get out my house, gaybo. I don't swing your way."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I'm here to kill you."

"Stay away from me," Vinnie said. "Don't touch me."

And Vinnie lifted a Mak-90 assault rifle.

"Look, you're a bad guy and that thing won't help you much," Remo told him. "Let's just get this over with, okay?"

"Listen, I'll blast you to hell before I let you lay hands on me."

Shrugging, Remo set himself as if about to drop in for a visit.

Vinnie "Three Dogs" Cerebrini opened fire. The Mak-90 emptied itself up at the hovering fruit. Trouble was the fruit had some really smooth moves. He sidestepped every shot. Must have studied ballet, Vinnie decided, yanking the clip out and inserting another.

He was about to bring the weapon up to bear when suddenly the roof started coming down. Dirt showered, then heavy tires started dropping like bombs. They hit, bounced and rolled crazily. Vinnie had to dance out of the way to keep from being run over by the very protection he had labored to create for himself.

Above, the fruit seemed to be stamping and stomping around in controlled, angry circles.

"Oh, man, look at him go. This flaming hornbag must not have gotten laid since Christmas."

So Vinnie began shooting wildly into his own roof. The trouble was, the very tires that had kept bullets out also absorbed those trying to go the other way. Try as he might, Vinnie could not whack the annoyed fruit. "You are a dead man," he shouted up during a lull.

"Not yet."

"After you are dead, I'm gonna piss into your dead mouth. I am going to abuse your corpse. I don't care what people say. How you like that?" raged Vinnie, peppering the ceiling above with hot lead. Cold dirt showered down in response.

More roof tires sagged and spilled earth. The air became a cloud of unbreathable dust.

Vinnie was on his fourth clip, surrounded by dirt and rubber with a big patch of New England sky overhead when he felt a hand on his shoulder. The hand felt like a claw bucket. Then the fingers dug in.

Vinnie looked up to see the deadest eyes in the world looking at him as if he was dead meat.

He screamed. And the other hand reached out for the Mak-90.

There was nothing he could do. Vinnie was helpless. As the man brought up the loaded Mak-90 to his head with casual ease to intimidate him into surrendering, Vinnie decided right then and there he would rather be dead than raped by some faggot from the Maine woods.

"I'll show him," Vinnie thought, and pulled the trigger.

REMO STEPPED BACK as the body of Vinnie "Three Dogs" Cerebrini fell facedown onto the dirt floor, wondering why it had been so easy.

As he left the grounds, tossing his last dog treats to the three yellow dogs, he decided the Mak 90 must have had a hair trigger to go off prematurely like that.

Cloudy dirt hung in the afternoon air. It billowed slowly out from the zone of destruction, following him down a path of sticky pine needles.

A quarter mile down the road, Remo came upon the Master of Sinanju atop the largest, ugliest moose Remo had ever seen in his life. The moose had antlers like spreading trees.

"Where'd you get that bag of hair?" Remo asked warily.

"Have a care how you address the awesome Arcadian Hind."

"A moose?"

"Hind," corrected Chiun, giving the moose's hindquarters a whack. Obligingly the moose launched itself at Remo, head down, antlers sweeping ahead like plows.

Remo dodged the first pass easily. The moose turned on its clumsy, ungainly legs and came at him again. This time Remo reached up and grabbed hold of a tree branch. When the antlers were almost into his belly, he snap-rolled up.

The moose clopped past noisily.

The Master of Sinanju piloted him back, coming to a stop under Remo's branch.

"You must come down and defeat him," Chiun insisted.

"I'm not fighting any freaking moose!"

"It is the Hind of Arcadia. You must defeat him as Hercules defeated him."

"If that's the Arcadian Hind, where are its golden horns and brass hooves?" Remo shouted back.

"This is a very old Hind. Sadly, its gold has faded."

"Well, I'm not coming down."

"You cannot stay up there forever," Chiun warned.

"You're right," said Remo, standing up on the tree branch. It bowed under his weight, and when it was at its most springy, Remo launched himself off and into the next tree.

The moose followed.

Jumping from tree to tree, Remo stayed ahead of the galloping moose.

When he reached the edge of the tree line, he doubled back. Doggedly the moose doubled back too. For a solid hour, Remo played the game. He started to tire, but only because he had been through so much in so short a time.

In the end the moose began to show the worst signs of fatigue and disorientation. Its clumsy legs went wobbly. It stumbled.

"You are abusing this magnificent beast," Chiun complained.

"I'm not the one riding him into the ground," Remo shot back.

The moose's long red tongue was hanging out now. Its sides pulsed like laboring bellows.