Warren Murphy: Last Drop

Remo was stunned. "Hassam, too?" he said softly.

"Yeah," Pappy said, his face grim. "Hassam. And his wife. And all them dancing girls he had hanging around. It was on the news. Listen," he said, putting his arm around Remo's shoulder. "I know it's none of my business how you get your rocks off, but maybe you been working too hard, you know? I mean, all them dames..."

"I didn't kill them," Remo said in a daze. Then he looked up into Pappy's face, realized he'd already said too much, and pushed him away.

Pappy held up his hands. "Okay, okay, I'm not saying nothing." He sounded scared. "I only told you about Hector so's you'd know I was on your side." His upheld hands were shaking violently. "I thought then maybe you wouldn't kill me, too. Huh? Whaddya say, pal?"

Remo stared at him. Dead. All dead. All the targets he'd spared, and a lot more besides. How? Who?

Pappy Eisenstein was trembling. In his eyes was the look of a man who'd been cornered by a beast. "Get out of here," Remo said.

Pappy backed shakily down the sidewalk.

At a pay phone near the school, Remo punched through the long routing code to Folcroft Sanitarium. He hit the buttons so hard the whole unit threatened to come off the wall.

"Yes?" Smith's voice at the other end of the line was grim.

"What's going on?" Remo said.

The reply was agitated and sharp. "I'd like to ask you the same question. There was simply no reason ... Well, what's done is done. I'll expect a full accounting for this after the assignment is over."

Remo hardly heard him. He kept seeing Pappy Eisenstein's eyes in front of him, frightened eyes that regarded him as a killer who couldn't help killing.

But he didn't kill them, he couldn't have...

He heard his own voice speaking, sounding hollow and faraway. "How'd they die?"

"The police reports list cause of death as single gunshot wounds to the head in all cases."

"All of them? Arcadi, Hassam?" He gritted his teeth. "The women, too?"

"All but one. A twenty-three-year-old woman named Sandra Hess. A dancer."

"Sandy," Remo said, remembering the pretty blonde with the bright eyes.

"She's in a coma. She's not expected to come out of it, so at least there won't be a witness."

"A wit... God, you cold bastard, you think I did it, don't you."

"Hassam's four bodyguards are dead, too, and the butler," Smith went on mechanically. "And two men at the Port Henry warehouse. A man named Tyrone Bates and the manager, a Mr. Sloops."

"Sloops?" Remo whispered. "He didn't know anything."

"Neither did the women at Hassam's," Smith said coldly. "Remo, do you mean to tell me that you know nothing about these killings?"

Remo forced himself to breathe deeply. "I'm only going to say this once," he said. "I didn't kill any of those people. Not one. Is that clear?"

Smith took a long time answering. "Yes," he said at last. "I don't believe you would find it necessary to simulate gunshot wounds. It wouldn't be logical."

Remo tried to collect his thoughts. "Two things," he said. "I'm going to need ten thousand dollars."

Smith exhaled. "I'll wire it to you. What else?"

"Do you have any data on a George Brown with the North American Coffee Company in Saxonburg, Indiana?"

The Folcroft computers whirred. "That doesn't compute as a whole," Smith said. "But I'll examine the elements. Why?"

Remo told him about the man who had sold the coffee to the Port Henry warehouse without bothering to collect the payment, and about the plantation in Peruvina.

"That may fit in somewhere," Smith said. "But the fact remains that everyone you've come in contact with is dead. Have there been attempts on your life?"

"No," Remo said, bewildered.

"Then whoever the killer is wants you alive, and everyone around you dead."

"Everyone... Pappy."

"What did you say?" Smith asked.

A dial tone answered him.

Eight blocks away, Pappy ducked into the crumbling doorway of an abandoned building and waited. Even though the air was warm and he was wearing an overcoat, he felt cold. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, held it shakily to his lips, and lit it. He puffed furiously, looking to the right and then the left. When at last the familiar black Cadillac Seville pulled up close to the curb in front of him, he breathed a sigh of relief and ground the cigarette on the sidewalk with his shoe.

"Thought you'd never get here," Pappy said, the sweat popping from his brow. "That guy nearly had me."

The hands inside the gray leather gloves smoothed over one another, as if caressing themselves. "He's going to the airport?"

Pappy nodded. "Everything went just like you said. Except for Hector Gomez. Who'd think he'd show up?"

"I did," the figure in black said.

The gloved hand slid inside the lightweight black coat.

"Five grand," Pappy reminded his contact. "You said you'd give me five grand to get him to the airport."

"You were going to run away."

"I got scared," Pappy said, swallowing. "I mean, the guy's some kind of nut, killing everybody right and left. I just got scared for a second. Wouldn't you?"

"Me? No."

Out of the coat slid a .38 Browning with a silencer.

Pappy's eyes widened. "You ..."

"Good-bye, Pappy."

And before Pappy could scream, the left side of his face blew into fragments.

A mob of horrified onlookers was crowded around an ambulance. Several feet away, two men in white were lifting a stretcher covered with a white sheet soaked in blood.

Remo threaded his way through the crowd to the stretcher and threw back the sheet. Someone gasped. A man standing nearby threw up violently onto the crowd. Pappy's features were mangled beyond recognition.

"Hey, you, get away," the ambulance attendant commanded, shoving Reno's arm away. "You know this guy or something? Maybe you'd better make a statement to the police."

"No... No," Remo said, backing away.

"Freaking ghoul," the attendant said, covering Pappy's remains with the sheet.

Remo walked away toward the airport. Pappy, too. They were all dead, every one.

But why? And a bigger question: why had Remo been left alone?

Only one thing was certain. Someone, someone who thought nothing of murder, was on to him. How far did that knowledge go? To Chiun? To Smith? To CURE itself?

He made one more phone call outside the airport.

"Chiun, you can be mad at me later. Just get to Folcroft and stay with Smitty until I get back to you."

"Is the Emperor's life in danger?"

"I don't know. But stick with him. I'm scared."

?Chapter Eight

Smith was scared, too. The vague killings through heroin overdoses were rapidly turning into specific murders through bullets. And those bullets had all been directed at people Remo had talked to.

Again and again he fed what little information he had into the Folcroft computers. The mysterious George Brown of the North American Coffee Company. Does not compute. Does not compute. There was no connection between Arcadi, Hassam, the men at the warehouse. And the deaths of Mrs. Hassam and the other women in residence at the Hassam mansion seemed to be completely extraneous.

Only one thing was clear: whoever was behind the killings wanted absolutely no witnesses, and that person was as ruthless as they came. But why hadn't the killer tried to eliminate Remo?

The computers repeated their answers, the only answers possible.

Someone knew about Remo, and wanted him alive— at least for the moment.

And that someone might know about CURE, and want it destroyed.

Coffee. Coffee was the only thread Smith had to go on.

At 10:30 in the morning, Smith switched off the computer console, picked up his brown fedora and the attaché case with its portable telephone, divested himself of all his identification except for some falsified credit cards and a bogus government credential from a file in his office containing every type of identification from the post office to the White House, and set off for Washington.