Warren Murphy - Last Drop

"Forget the Romans," Remo said testily. "What did Sloops call the Washington warehouse for?"

"To see if they'd sell us some beans. Like I said, Sloops didn't want to use the new beans, on account of he thought they was hot."

"So did you get more beans from Washington?"

"Hell, no. They were in the same situation as us. More orders than they knew how to fill. But they were filling them. You know what with?"

"George Brown's beans from Indiana," Remo said.

"You got it, buddy."

Remo loaded the bags in silence, grateful that the loquacious Ty had finally run out of conversation.

"What'd Sloops do?" Remo asked finally, throwing a bag onto a high pile.

Ty grinned. "He admitted I did right in making the deal on the new beans. That's all we're shipping out now."

Startled, Remo snatched back the bag he had just loaded. "These are the beans?"

"All of them. And more coming in every day."

A thin line formed across Ty's brow as his eyes fixed on the 150-pound bag suspended between Remo's thumb and forefinger. "How are you doing that?" he asked suspiciously.

Remo wasn't paying attention. With his left thumb nail, he sliced open the heavy burlap. A cascade of fragrant coffee beans spilled out.

"With your thumb," Ty gasped. "Man, how'd you ever get hands like that? You squeeze tennis balls or something?"

Remo tasted one of the beans and quickly spat it out. It was exactly what he was looking for. "Where do these come from?"

"Colombia, I told you. I knew all along, even before I seen the proof. See, I can spot beans—"

"Where in Colombia?" Remo yelled.

Ty walked over to the rows of bags stacked eight deep across the length of the block-long warehouse. "Lemme see," he said. "There's a stamp on the first bag of every shipment. Colombian government stamp. It gives the location."

He pushed at the stacks. "Sorry, buddy. There can't be more than six or seven stamped bags in the whole place. We'd never find... What the hell are you doing?" he whispered, rubbing his eyes.

Remo was going through the stacks like a crazed ferret. He lifted them two at a time, scanning their fronts and backs, then tossed them over his shoulders with exactly enough force so that they rapped lightly against the opposite wall and slid into place in high piles.

"Here's one," Remo said, throwing the other bag in his hand casually onto the skid.

Ty walked over to him, his gaze still riveted on the far wall as he counted the bags. "Thirty-eight, thirty-nine... Mister, you just moved six thousand pounds in fifteen seconds," he said, astonished.

"Peruvina," Remo read, pointing to the blurry green stamp on the bag. "Is that the place?"

"Yeah," Ty said, poking a tentative finger into Remo's unspectacular-looking forearm. "I looked it up. It's about a hundred miles north of Bogota. Good coffee country. Must be a private plantation."

Sloops's voice called from near the office at the end of the warehouse. "Hey, Remo." His footsteps clacked slowly across the concrete floor. "I got some bad news. There's been a nationwide recall of all the coffee on the market. Some tampering scare. Everybody except me and Ty's laid off until further notice. You want me to send your wages to the Happy Rest Motel?"

"Keep them," Remo said, heading toward the door.

"Hey, wait a minute," Ty called, running after him. "I got to ask you something."

"About how I moved the bags so fast?" Remo never missed a step.

"Yeah. How'd you do it? I mean, you're not even built. You got no delts to speak of. You work out with isometrics or something?"

"Pins," Remo said.

"Pins?"

"Every night I stick a hundred pins all over my head."

"Ouch." Ty swallowed. "Any special kind?"

"Long. With blue tops. They've got to be blue. And eat a lot of rotten cabbage. Keeps your skull hard."

"Sounds like a weird workout," Ty said, testing his skull for tenderness.

"It was used by the ancient Glods. Ever heard about the Glods?"

"Uh, they make statues or something?"

"That's the Glods, all right."

"Guess they knew what they were doing."

"Trust the Glods, kid," Remo said, and vaulted over the ten-foot-high fence out of the compound.

From the shadows, a pair of eyes watched. A pair of legs moved slowly toward the two men who remained in the warehouse. A pair of gray-gloved hands raised a Browning Automatic and screwed a large webbed silencer over the barrel.

Two small pops sounded. Ty and Sloops lay together in a heap, the wounds in their foreheads not bleeding. The eyes on both the corpses stared in the same direction, and the expression in them was one of wonder.

?Chapter Seven

Paul "Pappy" Eisenstein was an optimist. Even though his livelihood had disappeared from under him, he had faith in the future of America. And that future, he firmly believed, lay in the hands of the children inside the hallowed walls of P.S. 109.

He waited hopefully, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as the final bell sounded inside the old brick building and the fifth and sixth graders whose classrooms were located nearest the entrance poured out, shrieking with their usual jubilation.

"Hey, Frankie... Frankie," he whispered hoarsely, trying to manage a smile as he shuffled toward a tough-looking twelve-year-old. "Got some good stuff. Panama red. Blow your socks off."

"Get out," Frankie said loftily. "Marijuana's uncool. Nobody smokes reefer these days."

"Come on, kid. Just an ounce or two. As a favor, for old times' sake."

"I'm not running a charity," Frankie said, holding his fists firmly over the fifty-dollar allowance in his pockets.

"I'll give you a discount," Pappy pleaded. Frankie strutted away. Pappy chased after him. "Hey, how about a referral, huh? You send over a couple of kids, maybe some bozos don't know what's in, what's out, and I'll give you a cut of the action. What do you say, Frankie, huh?"

The child considered. "Nope," he said with finality, shaking his head. "Nobody's tubular enough to think marijuana's in. Besides, coffee's better. You can mix it with ice cream."

Pappy played his trump card. "Oh, yeah? Well, you can forget about getting zonked on coffee malteds, because coffee has been recalled. You got that? There ain't no more coffee." He smiled triumphantly.

Frankie sneered. "There's nothing sadder than an old pusher," he said.

"Whaddya mean?"

"I mean you're so out of it, you ought to be put out to pasture, Pappy." He pointed through the wire mesh of the playground fence across to the other side.

Past the seesaws and spring-mounted ducks were a large cluster of children waving money. In the center of the group was a tall gray-haired lady with glasses.

"Who's that?" Pappy asked, walking quickly toward the woman.

"Meet your competition," Frankie said.

The woman was handing out small glassine envelopes filled with brown powder and exchanging them for five-dollar bills.

"Is this any good?" one of the children asked.

"Folger's crystals," the woman said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes crinkled behind her bifocals.

"You got Maxwell House?" a boy wearing corduroy pants with a bear on the pocket asked knowledgeably. "My brother says Maxwell House is the best."

"I'll have some next week," the woman promised. "And Hills Brothers, too."

"Oh, boy!"

The woman chucked him gently under the chin. "And if you're willing to pay a little more, I've got some special edition A & P Fresh Ground for parties. Dynamite."

"I'll take some."

"Me, too," a little voice squeaked as the grandmotherly lady passed out her envelopes.

Pappy shook his head. "I can't believe it," he said disgustedly. "Selling nickel bags to schoolkids."

"What do you think you were doing?" Frankie said, sniffing deeply from his envelope of instant coffee and rubbing a little over his gums.