Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

"I'm leaving," Donleavy said, trying not to shout over the volume in his brain.

From his jacket pocket, Donleavy pulled the hand grenade and with his teeth pulled the pin from it.

"I'm leaving now. If you're smart, you won't try to interfere," he said. He held the grenade in front of him as if it were a switchblade knife.

"Come to us. Come to us." The voices were shouting now, thundering inside his head, a rising roaring crescendo of noise that ripped at his brain like hammers. "Stop," he screamed. "Stop."

He tossed the grenade onto the floor toward Remo's feet and turned to race toward the front door. But the dark-eyed man with thick wrists was there, waiting for him, and T.B. Donleavy felt himself being dragged back into the room, his protesting kicks ineffectual, not even slowing him down and then his mouth was being opened, and he felt the taste of cold metal.

Remo jammed the grenade deep into Donleavy's mouth. Donleavy could feel the vibrations atop his tongue as the deadly little bomb's spring action wore down to explosion time. He tried to scream. But he could not hear himself over the voices, yelling "Come to us. Come to us."

And then he heard Remo say, "Here, give your honey a great big kiss," and he felt his face being pressed against Patti Shea's, her so usually soft lips turned by tension into strips of sinew, and the madman's hand was on the back of his head, holding him and Patti Shea together, mouth to mouth, and there was one final scream by the chorus:

"Come to us."

And T.B. Donleavy blew up.

The explosion blasted off the top of his head, but the tough human skull resisted the destruction just long enough for the rest of the blast to be diffused forward, where it blew off Patti Shea's face, and downward through Donleavy's body.

Remo matched the velocity of the exploding grenade in an outward push he performed after his brain pre-registered the original flash.

But the blast running down through Donleavy's body ignited, in a whoosh of fire, a pack of plastic explosive the Irish assassin had strapped around his waist.

A split-second after the first blast, the gelignite exploded with a muffled thump and Remo, unprepared for that concussion, was tossed across the room and against a wall.

Before he sank in a great expanse of dark, Remo thought, Now I'll never get that house.

And then he thought: That's the biz, sweetheart.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When the black limousine rolled up, Chiun was still sitting on the front steps of Dr. Wooley's house, contemplating the perfidy of an America where one could not find a television set when he needed one.

There were post office boxes on almost every corner, and who would want to commit anything to paper in this savage land? There were telephone booths everywhere and who would want to speak to an American?

But let it be something important, like one of the beautiful daytime dramas, and try to find a television set.

Even the Master of Sinanju was helpless in front of the face of such stupidity. But was that not always the way? Stupidity was invincible, else why had it been the single most significant characteristic of all man's recorded history?

Chiun watched as the big man and the Oriental got quickly out of the car and walked toward Wooley's house. The Oriental was Chinese and Chiun spat into the aspidastras of the garden. Remo would hear about this. Chiun's air space was being befouled by a Chinese, and the Master of Sinanju did not have a television set upon which to watch his daytime dramas, and where was Remo? Out someplace fooling around. He would hear about this, for certain.

Vince Marino and Edward Leung stopped in front of Chiun.

"Is there anyone in there?" Marino said.

But Chiun did not answer. He had heard something. He rose smoothly to his feet and brushed past the two men, moving quickly toward the back of the black limousine. The sound was familiar.

Chiun pulled open the back door.

It was. It was.

There was a television set built into the back of the front seat. A swarthy man sat in the back of the limousine watching the television which was tuned to a commercial for a driving school that was so good its owner was always pictured riding a bicycle, roller-skating, or skiing, but never behind the wheel of a car.

"What are you watching?" Chiun said as he slid into the back seat.

"Who are you?" said Arthur Grassione.

"The Master of Sinanju," Chiun replied. "What are you watching?"

Before Grassione could answer, the commercial faded and the green-tinted set blared forth into the music of The Divorce Game, a show in which newly divorced couples were the contestants and by telling stories of how their partners had mistreated them during marriage tried to win the support of the studio audience. The show had come under attack in its first year when a watchdog group had claimed many of the contestants were not really divorced, but the show's producers had pulled through by pointing out that no one had appeared on the show without being divorced within the next ninety days.

"You are not going to watch this drivel, are you?" Chiun demanded.

"I never miss it," Grassione said.

"Today, miss it," Chiun said. He flicked out his hand and changed the channel until the familiar organ music theme of The Gathering Clouds filled the back seat of the car, and Chiun sat back contentedly in the Cadillac's luxurious velour seats to watch.

"I will explain to you what it is all about," Chiun said. "You see, there is this doctor…"

Leen Forth Wooley pulled through the open gate of the boatyard and drove slowly over the rutted road toward the large white yacht in the back.

She parked in front of it and saw Mr. Massello standing on the main deck, smiling down at her. He walked toward the gangplank to come meet her.

She felt a feeling of relief at finally meeting a friend.

Leen Forth turned off the car's motor, and then reached under the dashboard for what appeared to be the car's stereo tape-player. It snapped loose at both sides, a small plastic box filled with transistors and hand-wired circuits. She clutched the Dreamocizer control box to her breasts and stepped out of the car to meet her father's friend, Don Salvatore Massello.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Remo saw happy children laughing, big warm houses and lovely women secretly smiling. But they kept bursting into flame. And what was worse, they didn't seem to notice. The children kept on laughing, the women smiling.

Remo woke up. He was sitting on a hot floor in the middle of a roaring inferno. One of his legs was stretched full length and the trousers had been burned through by drops of the explosive gelignite. He pulled the leg up to his other which was bent to his chest.

The room crackled with flames.

Outside, the entire fire department of Edgewood University-two men and a truck-had arrived to fight the blaze. They had battled for ten heroic minutes until St. Louis had sent in more equipment and trained firemen, whose technique in fighting fires was a little more sophisticated than pumping in enough water to launch Noah's Ark. The Edgewood firemen immediately began to drift off to talk to the Edgewood police about the terrible violence on campus.

Editorial staff members of the Edgewood Quill were at the fire scene, trying to sell copies of their mimeographed special edition on the violence, which reported that although Wooley and Woodward were dead, "there have been no reports thus far of student injuries. All's well that ends well."

The St. Louis Fire Department fought on for five more minutes, then the battalion chief in charge gave up on the house. He ordered his men to just keep it "wetted down" so that embers and sparks could not fly off and imperil any other nearby buildings.

"Let it burn out," he said.