Warren Murphy: Last Drop

"That's good enough for me," Thompson said, rising and spitting a blob of red onto the grass.

"We've got a helicopter," Remo said. "Think you can show me how to fly it? Maybe I could get us to a hospital."

Thompson scanned the area. "What helicopter?"

Remo pointed up to the trees.

"How in hell—"

"I'll get you up there."

In the chopper, Thompson looked over the controls. "I'm not checked out on this type," he said with a grimace. "I think I might be able to fly it myself, but I don't know enough to talk you through it. Besides, that hand of yours is in rotten shape."

"Hell," Remo said. "You can't—"

"Get in. I won't let us crash." He started the engine. "Where are you going?"

"Bogota," Remo said. "To a hospital."

"For you?"

"I'm okay," Remo said. "You're not."

Thompson smiled as they lifted off. "You're some kind of Fed, right?"

Remo winced. "Don't ask so many questions."

"You're a Fed, all right. You on a job?" No answer. "I want to know where you're going, so I can take you there, that's all."

"We're going to a hospital, I told you. I can't get where I'm going fast enough in this thing, anyway."

"You got connections?"

"What do you mean?"

"There's a new Air Force base on Malagua Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico. They've got F-16s there, and God knows how many experimentals, all supersonic. If you've got the connections."

"How far?"

"I can make it."

Remo thought. "Do they have a hospital?"

Thompson laughed. "For a base full of test pilots? Are you kidding?" He looked at Remo, waiting.

"Yeah, I've got the connections."

Thompson whistled. "A big Fed," he said. "But then you did tear off the DC-3's door with your bare hands. Not to mention crushing Belloc's gun into a lead golf ball and jumping out of the plane without a parachute. I didn't think you worked as a clerk in the New Rochelle courthouse."

Remo felt a wave of panic rising in him. Not him, he said inwardly. After all the crumbums I've spared, don't let Thompson be the one I have to kill. Not the only decent man in this whole foul, dirty can of worms. "They won't believe you," he said quietly.

The pilot smiled. "Yeah, I know. I'm not planning to talk."

Some time passed. "Why'd you get into this lousy business, anyway?" Remo asked.

"You here to save my soul or something?"

"No. Just curious."

"Ah," Thompson said. "Curious." He was quiet for a long time. "I guess it was the flying," he said at last. "For a while, after I got fired from the airline, I had this crazy idea that I'd borrow some money and buy myself a used bird. Rent it out for charters in the Caribbean, that sort of thing.

"What happened?"

"No guts. My wife left. The drinking," he explained. "They'll do that once they find out you've pissed your pants in the arms of a fifty-year old hooker." He laughed, then his smile disappeared. "Took the kids with her. The house got sold. Lost my car. But I wouldn't stop drinking, no sir. Bills everywhere, no job-think I gave a shit? Stuck on the ground like some kind of slug, crawling on my belly for a drink. God. Sometimes I'd look up at the sky, and I'd want so bad..." His voice trailed off.

"Bad enough to quit drinking," Remo said.

"Enough to do anything," Thompson reflected quietly. "Just to fly again... Oh, balls." He smiled, embarrassed. "What a pile of sentimental horseshit. I did it for the money."

"I don't think it was the money," Remo said.

"Well, you're wrong. The law's going to see that I never fly again after this stint, and I don't really give a good goddamn, because I'm no better than Belloc when it comes right down to it, otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I? Now, do you want to go to Malagua or don't you?"

"I think you just wanted to fly again."

"Christ," Thompson said. "You're an even bigger horseshitter than I am. We're going to Malagua."

They radioed an emergency before they landed, and a stretcher, along with a greeting party of interrogators, was waiting for the chopper from Colombia.

Thompson cast a glance at Remo as they descended. "Hey, quit worrying. The plane crashed, we both survived it, and then I passed out. When I came to, you were there with the chopper. That's all I know. Can you cover your end?"

Remo nodded distractedly. He wasn't worried about covering his end. "Those guys down there are going to want you to talk. About what you were doing in Colombia."

"Don't be sappy," Thompson said. "What happens, happens."

"You'll go to jail."

"So what." He landed the helicopter. "Hey, do that thing with my back again, will you? The pain's getting bad."

Remo touched the pilot's spine.

They got out. "This man's been hurt, and I need to make a phone call," Remo said by way of greeting.

Fifteen minutes later, Thompson was being prepared for surgery. Tubes of whole blood were being pumped into his drained body. Remo made his way past a battery of protesting nurses to Thompson's bed. "You'll be all right now," he said.

"That noise outside. It's an F-16. That for you?"

Remo nodded.

"Big Fed," Thompson said, smiling.

Remo turned to go. "Hey," Thompson called. "Thanks. Thanks for coming back for me."

Remo didn't respond. If it hadn't been for Thompson's body between the flying piece of metal and himself, Remo would probably be dead somewhere in Colombia by now. If it hadn't been for Thompson's insistence on flying to an Air Force base instead of a quiet little hospital in Bogota, Remo would be trying to figure out a way to get out of South America instead of taking off in a supersonic plane. And now Thompson was going under the knife, and after that, Thompson was going to go to jail for something he didn't even know anything about. And Thompson was thanking him.

That was fate, Remo thought, not without some bitterness. The way the world went. That was the biz. And Thompson understood that, because he was one of those creatures who kept on going while fate was throwing sucker punches to his insides. He was a man.

"I'll remember you," Remo said.

?Chapter Eighteen

Smith stood by the large tinted one-way windows of Folcroft Sanitarium that looked out over the beach of Long Island Sound. He was alone. He had never been so alone.

The first streaks of dawn were just beginning to lighten the sky, causing the ocean waves below to sparkle pink and purple. The pain in Smith's side still throbbed, but only dimly now. Chiun's ministrations had been better than any doctor's. The old man had even offered to remove the pain entirely, but Smith hadn't permitted that. He didn't hold with any system of medicine in which there was no pain. There was something vaguely immoral in the concept. Besides, the pain helped him think.

Back to the beginning.

Coffee. Someone had put heroin into every brand of coffee used in the United States. From what Remo had gathered, that someone wasn't a regular drug dealer.

The closest they had come was a name on a business card: George Brown of Saxonburg, Indiana. George Brown, who had virtually given the drugged coffee beans to every warehouse in the country, according to Smith's investigations.

The Folcroft computers had ascertained that there were four George Browns in the five-square-mile around Saxonburg, Indiana. The FBI claimed that none of them had been out of town in the past six months. That meant that the George Brown, the one who didn't compute in the Folcroft information banks, was an alias. Back to square one. Unless George Brown was Hugo Donnelly, government employee.

But Remo would have to find that out. Before it was too late. Or was it already too late?

And then the murders. Fourteen that Smith knew of for certain, and probably a fifteenth. Remo had mentioned the name "Pappy" in his last phone call before leaving the country, and a Paul "Pappy" Eisenstein, a known drug dealer, had cropped up on the homicide lists that same day. Fifteen victims, all of them in contact with Remo.