Warren Murphy - The Final Death

Charlie ran his wet tongue across his full lips. It was his childhood dream come true. He had sat in that mesh enclosed detention room at P.S. 189 waiting for that faggot sadist who passed for an assistant principal to come in, coo appreciatively at him, then slam his fingers in a desk drawer or slam his rear end with a heavy plastic ruler, and Charlie thought about someday being as big as King Kong, as mighty as Godzilla, and laying the whole country to waste.

The vice-principal had gotten what he deserved when his throat had been cut on the way to dinner at a Chinatown restaurant one night, but the country had yet to pay.

It would. And soon.

"What's this? What's this?"

Sheng Wa was looking up at Charlie, stabbing the sheet of paper near the bottom.

Charlie moved over to the bar and jabbed an orange slice and a cherry with his fingernail. He lifted the fruit shishkebob and dunked it in his glass.

"What's what?"

"This, at the bottom. We have to kill two more guys?"

"Sure. Separate and destroy. Like it says, Like we did to that guy and his wife."

Yat-Sen spoke up in his thick, careful, Oriental accent. "Must we kill them in the same way?"

"That's the way the leader "wants it," said Charlie.

"Can't we shoot them?"

"Nope."

"Blow them up?"

"Uh-uh."

"Run them over?"

"No. What's the big deal? It's just two more guys."

"But it's so disgusting," said Yat-Sen, who had been the one holding onto Mrs. Angus' chin, and doing all the giggling.

Now several people in the room laughed.

Charlie looked around. "Shit," he said. "I do all the work. What the hell are you complaining about? I'm the one who sticks the finger in. Look, you get your pay, right?"

Yat-Sen nodded.

"It's enough to keep you and your teenage whores happy, right?"

The group giggled. Yat-Sen turned to them, then smiled.

"I let you wear rubber gloves to strip the carcasses, right?" said Charlie.

"Sure," said Yat-Sen. "But next time, do you have to go through all that Christianity, meat-eating mumbo jumbo?"

Charlie moved directly in front of Yat-Sen and put his fingernail on the bridge of the man's nose.

"If I hear any more of your garbage, Jap, I'm going to pluck out your eyes and make you eat them."

The group howled. Yat-Sen only swallowed and nodded.

Steinberg spoke up. "Same as before?" He was one of the new boys contacted on a rush basis. He had only heard about the butchering of the bodies, but he looked forward to trying it.

"Yeah," said Charlie. "We wait until we get them alone. Then we stick it to them." He stabbed the air with his fingernail.

"You do that," said a voice at the door, "and there won't be enough left of any of you to find."

The group turned toward the sound of the voice. It was the same voice that had told them to finish off a drunken widow in a cellar of Woodbridge. It was the same voice that instructed Charlie's partners to wait at a factory office in Westport for a tall, thin, dark-haired man. And it was the same voice that told them what the old man had to say.

The voice belonged to the leader's top agent in the field, the translator.

The translator walked into the room.

"You know what that man did at Meatamation," said the translator. "By the time you got your fingernail up, your head would be in your hand."

"My partners ain't me, baby," said Charlie Ko.

"You'll wind up like them if you try messing with these characters," said the translator, moving over to the couch and sitting down next to Gluck.

Charlie licked his lips again. "What do you want from me? You heard what the leader said."

"The leader is old. He's senile. He says that this other chink will just stand there and let us slit his throat. Then he thinks that the white guy will be so broken up about it that we'll be able to do anything we want. He's crazy. I've seen these guys. They ain't that bad or that stupid."

"So?" said Charlie Ko.

"So I'll tell the old man that we did as he asked. Then we make sure these guys get it."

"If they're so good, how are we going to do that?"

"I've checked with their room service in Connecticut and here. All they ever order is duck or fish with rice."

Charlie Ko leaned against the bathroom door and smiled.

Eddie Cantlie nodded and pulled out a small, rubber stamp with a purple USDA on the bottom. He lightly popped it against his hand a couple of times.

The rest of the group looked at the translator like cancer cells waiting to be formed.

"Yeah," said Marion Beriberi Greenscab, the translator. "The fucker lied to me. He ain't no vegetarian."

CHAPTER NINE

Texas Solly nearly lost his lunch of gefilte fish and ribs when Remo brought in Jacob and Irving. One over each arm.

Remo dropped them on either side of Texas Solly's big oak desk with the metal legs as Texas Solly started choking and hiccuping at the same time while trying to get on his knees.

Texas Solly's office was half a city away from his slaughterhouse but the smell of death still seemed to hang in the air. Solly's office was a modern, artificially paneled wood affair with aluminum chairs that were guaranteed impossible to get comfortable in.

Irving Pennsylvania Fuller was living up to that guarantee when Remo had padded in. Irving rose quickly, partly from his professional training and partly because it was such a pleasure to get up, and placed his chest on Remo's nose.

"You got an appointment?" asked Irving, flexing his shoulder muscles and pressing the outline of the Smith and Wesson in his shoulder holster against his jacket.

"Have," said Remo.

"What?" Irving said threateningly, since he always said "what" threateningly whenever he was answered by anything but "yes" or "no."

"Have. The question should be 'Do you have an appointment?' " said the thick-wristed man in Irving's chest.

"I don't need an appointment," said Irving. "I work here."

Remo had smiled benignly, raised his shoulders, as if to shrug, and Irving felt his middle freezing. He felt a soft pressure on both his hips and then the cold had risen to his head directly along his back and he felt nothing else until he woke up across Texas Solly's desk set.

Remo had taken Irving by the back of the collar and walked through the door marked "Weinstein's Meat and Poultry Sales," until Jacob had run up and thrust his gun out.

"Hey," said Jacob Schonberger. "You can't come in here."

"I just did," said Remo, not wanting to get into the philosophy of being. If Jacob had been as intelligent as Irving was, they could have been in the hall all day discussing the viability of Remo's existence within it.

Jacob had suddenly seen Irving sitting against the back of Remo's leg. He moved back.

"What is this?" he said.

"This is a hallway," said Remo. "I thought we had already established that."

"Did you drop Irving? Jesus, you dropped Irving!" was Jacob's incisive reply. Jacob was a few inches shorter than Irving, but wider. He moved back even farther and thrust his gun out in a straight line toward Remo's chest.

Remo decided against informing him that the uniformly accepted way of pointing a gun at someone was from the hip so that you could not be disarmed if someone just reached out and took off your hand.

But the man looked too agitated to be interested in Justice Department training at that moment.

"What's your name, buddy?" Jacob had asked since his habit was to intimidate his victims by asking them for their names, then telling them, 'Alright, so and so, move!' And if he got some wise crack from some mealy mouthed punk, he'd crack the barrel of his .38 between the kid's teeth. It had worked since his days at the correctional facility and had been a comfort to him ever since.

"I'm the man from Hebrew National," said Remo.