Warren Murphy: Blood Ties

It struck the man called Remo Williams squarely on the breastbone, shattering that bone and turning the connective cartilage to mucus. That was just the beginning. The force of the stroke vibrated through the gunman's body, initiating a chain reaction of breaking bones and jellifying muscles and organs.

The gunman with the scar stood poised for an infinite second, his contorted face seeming to soften as the hardness of his skull dissolved, and then he slipped to the floor like a pile of potatoes tumbling out of a ripped sack.

His last sight was of Remo's empty hand coming at him and his final thought was not his own. He could hear Maria's last words and finally he understood:

"A man will come to you. Dead, yet beyond death, he will carry death in his empty hands. He will know your name and you will know his. And that will be your death warrant. "

He did not feel himself slip from his body. Instead, he felt his mind contract, tighter and tighter, until it was as small as a pea, then as small as the head of a pin, then smaller still until his entire consciousness was reduced to a point as infinitesimally tiny as an atom. When it seemed that it could compress no tighter, it kept shrinking and shrinking.

But the gunman did not care because he no longer cared about anything. His very essence became part of a darkness greater and blacker than he could ever comprehend, and not knowing where he was and what was happening to him was much, much better than knowing.

"I killed him," Remo said in a strangled voice. "I killed my own father. Because of you."

"I am sorry, Remo. Truly sorry for your pain," Chiun said.

But Remo did not seem to hear him. He just kept mumbling the same words over and over again in a lost little boy's voice:

"I killed him."

Chapter 28

Remo sat down heavily and touched the limp body of the man he called his father. It felt as formless as a jellyfish. All that was now left of the man was a casing that surrounded broken bone and tissues.

Lavallette's door opened slowly and he peered outside. He saw the dead man and then Chiun.

"What happened to him?" he asked.

"Sinanju happened to him," Chiun said.

"Did he say who hired him?" Lavallette asked.

"No. He did not have to," Chiun said.

"Why not?"

"Because I know that you hired him," Chiun said.

"To kill myself? Are you crazy?"

"Only one stands to gain by the killings of the carriagemakers. That one is you," said Chiun.

"What motive would I have?" Lavallette said. He looked away as his secretary, Miss Blaze, walked into the reception area. She saw him, then quickly looked down at a piece of paper in her hand.

"Your public-relations man called, Mr. Lavallette," she said. "He said he's planted a story that all three auto companies are going to ask you to head them." She smiled and looked up, then saw Chiun standing by Lavallette, and Remo sitting next to the dead body.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know you had company. "

"Idiot," Lavallette snarled. He ran to the open elevator, pressed the button, and the doors closed behind him.

"Well, what got into him?" Miss Blaze said. "Can I help?"

"You may leave, bovine one," Chiun said. He walked to where Remo still sat next to the body.

"Remo," he said softly. "The man who is truly responsible for this death has just left."

"What?" Remo said, looking up at Chiun's hazel eyes.

"All the pain you feel, all the hurt, is the fault of the carriagemaker Lavallette. It was he who caused all this trouble. "

Remo looked again at the dead body, then got to his feet.

"I don't know," Remo said. "I don't think I really care. "

"Remo, you are still young. Know this. There are so many times in a man's life when he must do things that later he may think are wrong. All a man can do is act with a spirit of rightness and then he need fear no one, not even himself."

"Rightness? I killed my father."

"As he would have killed you," Chiun said "That is not a father's love, Remo. A father would not do that." And Remo thought back to the battle the previous evening atop the building near American Autos, thought back to how Chiun had done nothing but parry Remo's blows, had done nothing to hurt Remo, and in a brilliant flash, he understood the nature of fatherhood and family. He was not an orphan; he had not been since the first day he had met Chiun, because the old Korean was his true father, a fatherhood based on love.

And Sinanju, the long line of Masters stretching back through the ages, was Remo's family. Thousands strong, all reaching their hands across the centuries to him.

His family.

"You say Lavallette's skipped?" Remo said.

Chiun nodded and Remo said, "Let's go get the bastard, Little Father."

"As you will, my son."

Lavallette sped from the auto plant in the prototype Dynacar.

Let the cops sort it out, he said to himself. I'll deny everything. Who's to know different?

As he turned onto the roadway, he looked into the rearview mirror to see if any cars were following him. All he saw were two joggers. Good. He pressed down on the accelerator and the Dynacar sped ahead. But the two joggers in the mirror did not fall behind in the distance. They were getting closer.

How could that be?

Then Lavallette saw who they were. It was the Oriental and the young man with the dead eyes. They were running after him and they were gaining.

Lavallette checked his speedometer. He was going seventy miles an hour. He pressed the pedal down to the floor, but it did no good. The two men were getting bigger in the rearview mirror, and then they were abreast of the speeding Dynacar.

Lavallette glanced through his open driver's window at Remo, who was now alongside him, "You can't stop me," he snarled. "I don't care how fast you can run."

"Yes, we can," Remo said.

To prove he was wrong, Lavallette pulled the wheel hard left, turning the car into Remo, but the young man, without breaking his stride, dodged away. Lavallette laughed but then Remo's hand floated out and the fender on the driver's side of the car flew away from the tire. The passenger-side door came next. It opened with a screaming wrench and bounced down the street. Lavallette glanced over to see the old man jogging lightly alongside.

"Still think we can't stop you?" Remo said.

Lavallette hunched over the wheel. He was going eighty-five now. It wasn't possible for them to be running alongside him, but even if they were, they would soon tire.

The roof came off next after the pair of runners broke the support posts. Then the trunk lid was ripped off and then the rest of the fenders flew.

The two men grabbed one of the support posts of the car, and Lavallette could feel it slowing down, and in only a few hundred yards it came to a stop, stripped to its chassis.

Lavallette stepped out, still holding the steering wheel, which was no longer attached to anything.

"Don't kill me," he pleaded.

"Give me a reason not to," Remo said coldly.

"Why did you hire the killer?" Chiun asked.

"I wanted to get rid of the competition. With them dead and me with the Dynacar, I would have run all of Detroit."

Remo walked toward the back of the car. "If this damned thing was any good, you wouldn't have had to do that. "

He looked inside the open trunk. "There's batteries back here. What are they for?"

Lavallette was pleading now for his life. He said, "The car's a scam. It doesn't run on refuse. It runs on electrical batteries, nonrechargeable."

"What does that mean?" Remo said.

"It means the car runs for a month or two and then goes dead and you have to buy a new car."

"I had a Studebaker like that once," Remo said.

"It does not turn garbage into energy?" Chiun said.

"No," Lavallette said. "That was just for show."