Warren Murphy: Killer Chromosomes

"Shhhh," whispered Remo. "You get air for quiet. Quiet for air. It's a trade, sweetheart."

The man didn't say all right but Remo knew he meant all right. His body meant it. Remo let some air into the man's lungs as the big face reddened. Then like kicking on an engine, Remo compressed the lungs gently once more and they opened full, sucking in a large and blessed supply of oxygen for Houk Hubbley, who lay there still on the diner driveway.

Hearing the sucking gasp of air, Chiun looked up from his writing pad.

"Please," he said.

"Sorry," said Remo.

"Not everyone can write a love story," he said.

"Sorry," said Remo.

"When a man gives the wisdom of the ages to a coarse gruntling, the least the gruntling can do is keep a certain quiet about places where important things are being done."

"I said I'm sorry, Little Father."

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," mumbled Chiun. "Sorry for this and sorry for that. Propriety does not require a sorry. Correctness means never having to say you're sorry."

"So I'm not sorry," said Remo. "I'm out here tending this guy so he won't make noise, stopping him from starting his truck so it won't make noise, because I want you to be disturbed. See? I'm cunning about it. I'm not sorry at all. Never have been. I'm inconsiderate."

"I knew that," said Chiun. "Now I cannot write."

"You haven't written for a month on that thing. You just stare at it, day after day. You're using everything for an excuse. I stopped that track and this guy just so you'll face the fact that you're not a writer."

"There are no good love stories around today. The great day dramas of your television have degenerated into nothing. They have violence, even sex. This is a pure love story. Not cows and bulls reproducing. But love. I understand love because I know and care enough not to disturb people at productive work."

"Not for a month, Little Father. Not a word."

"Because you make noise."

"No noise," said Remo.

"Noise," said Chiun and tore up the pad with a flurry of his sharp fingernails. He slid his hands into the sleeves of the opposite arms of his kimono. "I cannot compose while you carp."

Remo massaged Houk Hubbley's chest with his foot. Hubbley felt a lot better. Well good enough to get to his feet. Good enough to take another poke at the skinny guy.

Skinny guy hardly noticed him. Just a little bit. Enough to be where the punch was not.

It was the strangest thing. Skinny guy didn't duck, didn't dodge, didn't block a punch. Just wasn't there when the fist was.

"Even if you got it down on paper, which you won't, nobody's interested in love stories in this country. They want sex."

"There is nothing new to sex," said Chiun. "Sex does not change from emperor to peasant, from Pharaoh to your cab drivers. Babies are made very much the same as they have always been made."

"Well, still Americans like to read about it."

"Why? Can't they do it? You people seem to breed well enough. There are so many of you. Almost all of you with meat on your breath and insults on your tongue, making noise."

"You want to sell a book, Little Father, write about sex."

"That takes up less than one page," said Chiun, his eyebrows furrowing in worry. "The seed meets the egg and a baby happens. Or the seed does not meet the egg and a baby does not happen. This is a subject for a book? The white mind is mysterious."

Remo turned back to Hubbley who was still throwing punches. The crowd on the diner steps now was cheering Remo on and laughing at Hubbley.

"Enough. No more games," said Remo to Hubbley.

"All right, you sumbitch, I'll show you what no more games is."

Big Houk Hubbley went to the cab of his truck. From underneath the seat, he pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. It could shiver a telephone pole in two. Or mutilate a wall. At close range, sawed-off shotguns made people chopped liver.

The folks on the porch stopped laughing at Houk Hubbley. That made him feel better. That was what he wanted. Respect. And he was going to get it from that skinny fellow too.

"Put that away," said Remo mildly. "You can hurt with that. That's not nice playing."

"Apologize," said Houk Hubbley. So he would do a few years in the state pen if he had to for sausaging the guy. So what? Lots of loggers had done time. Time didn't make a man no different. Time nowadays was just about the same as not doing time, now that they had you out in the forests working. You could also get yourself a woman in prison if you had the right connections and you kept your smarts. So why not kill the guy? Unless, of course, he apologized.

But then an even stranger thing happened. Sure, it was mighty peculiar that the skinny guy couldn't be hit by a punch. Not even right up close, sometimes so close the knuckles felt the black T-shirt and they had the chest right there in the path of a good punch and then it was gone. That was peculiar enough, but now something even weirder happened. And Houk Hubbley would swear for many a year afterward that this thing really happened.

As soon as he had decided he was going to pull the trigger, without saying anything different, without making any special move, the old Oriental lifted his head as if he were a mind reader. The skinny white guy stopped his conversation with the Oriental and also looked. At the very same time, as if both of them knew instantly what had gone on inside Houk Hubbley's mind.

"No," said the white guy. "Better not."

Houk Hubbley didn't threaten, didn't smile, just stood there with his right trigger finger cradling that deadly strip of metal that could send a wall of shot out at the yellow Toyota and the two men.

It was a quiet moment. Then suddenly the old gook wasn't in the seat anymore and Houk Hubbley could swear all he did was try to get a peek at where the old guy was and then he didn't see anything.

There was this bright light up above and this fellow with a green mask and the place smelled of ether. If this was the diner driveway, why was there a ceiling above him? His back was on a very hard thing and someone was talking to a nurse, and there were now three people with green masks and green caps looking down at him and someone was saying something about a local anesthetic and someone was coming to.

Houk Hubbley realized that it was he who was coming to. The people looking down at him were doctors. He could hear their problem. Something about rectal canals. And two unfired shells in the chamber. And the trigger guard being inside. They would have to cut to it, because a yank might explode the shells.

And then a doctor noticed Houk was aware of what was going on.

"Mister," he said, "would you mind telling us how you got a sawed-off shotgun, loaded, into your intestinal tract? I mean, how did you do it without the thing going off? I know this model. It's got a hair trigger. How did you do it?"

"You won't believe it but I think it was because I had a nasty thought."

In downtown Portland, Remo waited by a telephone booth, looking at his watch. He did not need it to tell time but he needed it to make sure that upstairs was telling time correctly. In one hand he had a dime and in the other hand he had a telephone number. He was no good at this code thing and the only time it worked for people was when they were code people themselves. Remo suspected that every intelligence agency or secret organization had a code nut. Nobody else understood what the code nut was up to, except other code nuts, often in competing services. These code nuts made their codes more and more complicated to prevent other code nuts on the other side from understanding them.

Meanwhile, the people who had to use those things went stumbling along, guessing at what was what. If Remo understood what upstairs wanted, then the third number in the telephone number was the number of times he should let the number ring before phoning back and the fourth number was the time of day he should phone. The third number was two and the fourth number was five.