Warren Murphy: King's Curse

Remo looked up at him and laughed.

"What's so funny?" Smith said.

"Somehow I had this idea you slept in a gray suit," Remo said, gesturing toward Smith's pajamas. "I thought you always wore a gray suit."

"Very funny," Smith said.

Chiun was leaning over the girl. When Remo and Smith approached, she hissed to Remo: "You are one with the despoilers of the stone. You must die."

"Sorry, but it doesn't look like you're going to be able to carry it off," Remo said.

"She was trying to shoot you," Smith explained.

"She wouldn't have," Remo said.

"You had your back turned."

"What has that got to do with it?" Remo asked. He knelt closer to Bobbi. "What's your interest in all this? Just because I wouldn't play tennis with you?"

"I am a daughter of Uctut. Before me, my father and before him, his father, through many generations."

"So you helped them kill your own mother?" Remo said.

"She was not of the Actatl. She did not protect the sacred stone," Bobbi said. She sipped air heavily. It gurgled through her throat.

"Who's left to protect the stone now, kid?" Remo asked.

"Jean Louis will protect it and he will destroy you. The king of the Actatl will bring you death."

"Have it your way."

"Now I die with the secret name on my lips." She spoke again, and Remo leaned close and heard the secret name of Uctut as she spoke it Bobbi's face relaxed into a smile, her eyes closed, and her head fell to the side.

Remo stood up. Lying on the ground in her fur coat, surrounded by bloody slush, she looked like an oversize muskrat lying on a red pillow.

"That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said.

Remo looked up toward the hill. The man on the snowmobile was gone.

"Oh, my god! Oh, my god!" Remo turned. The new noise was Valerie, who had finally worked up nerve enough to come see what was happening after having heard the shots.

She stood at the corner of the cabin, looking at the bodies lying about the snowfield.

"Oh, my god! Oh, my god!" she said again.

"Chiun, will you please get her out of here?" Remo asked. "Muzzle her, will you?"

"I do not do this thing because it is a command," Chiun said. "I do not take commands from you, only from our gracious and wise emperor in his pajamas. I do this thing because it is so worth doing."

Chiun touched Valerie on the left arm. She winced and followed him back to the car.

"Well, you've got to get rid of these bodies," Smith said.

"Get rid of your own bodies. I'm not the dog-warden."

"I can't get rid of the bodies," Smith said. "My wife's inside. She'll be nosing around in a minute. I can't let her see this."

"I don't know, Smitty," Remo said. "What would you do if I weren't around to handle all these details for you?"

He looked at Smith, self-righteously, as if demanding an answer that would not come. Remo went to the shed near Smith's front door and dragged out Smith's snowmobile. Every cottage and cabin in this part of the country came with one because the snow sometimes was so deep that people without snowmobiles could be cut off for weeks. And having guests freeze to death or die of starvation did nothing for Maine's tourist business.

Remo started up the snowmobile and drove it to the pile of corpses, which he tossed onto the back of the ski-equipped vehicle like so many sacks of potatoes. He put Bobbi Delpheen on the top and then used some random arms and legs to tuck everybody in so they wouldn't shake loose.

He turned the snowmobile around, aiming it toward the top of a hill, which ended at a big gulley with a frozen river in its bottom, then cracked the steering mechanism so the snowmobile's skis could not turn. He jammed the throttle and jumped off.

The snowmobile lumbered away up the hill, carrying its thirteen bodies.

Remo said to Smith, "They'll find it in the spring. By that time, you do something to make sure no one knows who rented this place."

"I will."

"Good. And why don't you go back to Folcroft? No need for you to keep hiding here."

Smith glanced up the hill. "What of the king of this tribe?"

"I'll take care of him back in New York," Remo said. "Don't worry."

"With you on the job, who could worry?" said Smith.

"Damn right," said Remo, impressing himself with his own efficiency.

He looked around at the blood-stained snow, then picked up a loose yellow feather and began brushing snow around to cover the stains. In a few seconds, the yard looked as pristine as it had before the start of the battle.

"What about Valerie?" Smith said. "I'll keep her quiet," Remo said. He walked away. A moment later Smith heard the car's motor start and begin to move away.

Smith waited a moment before reentering his house. He paused inside the front door and yelled out at the empty open countryside: "That's enough fooling around. If you fellas want to practice your games, go somewhere else. Before somebody gets hurt. That's right. Get moving."

He waited twenty seconds, then closed the front door, and went into his bedroom.

"You were right, dear," he said. "Just some fools practicing war games for the bicentennial. I chased them."

"I heard shots, Harold," Mrs. Smith said.

Smith nodded. "That warned them off, dear. I fired off into the trees. Just to get them moving."

"The way you were acting before, I thought there was really something dangerous happening there," Mrs. Smith said suspiciously.

"No, no. Nothing at all," Smith said. "You know what, dear?"

"What?"

"Pack. We're going home."

"Yes, Harold."

"These woods are boring."

"Yes, Harold."

"I don't think I'll ever be a good enough skier to get off the children's slope."

"Yes, Harold."

"I feel like getting back to work, dear."

"Yes, Harold."

When he left the room, Mrs. Smith sighed. Life was dull.

Dull, dull, dull.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Across the river from New York City, in Wee-hawken, New Jersey, is a small exercise in concrete called a park, which commemorates the murder of Alexander Hamilton by Aaron Burr.

The park is a postage stamp alongside a bumpy boulevard that snakes its way along the top of the Palisades, and it is supposed to commemorate the spot where Hamilton was shot, but it misses by some two hundred feet. Vertical distance.

Hamilton was shot at the foot of the Palisades cliff, down in a rock-strewn area of rubble and debris that used to be cleaned up regularly when the ferry to Forty-second Street in New York was running. Since the closing down of the ferry, it had been ignored.

So it was hardly likely that one more rock in that area would have captured anyone's attention.

If it had not been for Valerie Gardner.

After making good on his promise to clear the bodies of Willingham and the other dead Actatl out of the special exhibit room at the museum, Remo had found a way to put Valerie's big mouth to good use.

And while she still thought he was a homicidal maniac, he had explained carefully to her that a successor would soon have to be named for Willingham, and who would have a better shot at the job than the young female assistant director who had worked so hard to preserve museum property?

So after Remo had contracted with a special moving company in Greenwich Village, which was used to working at night because it specialized in getting people and their furnishings out of apartments between midnight and five a.m., when landlords slept, Valerie got on the telephone with the representatives of the New York TV stations, the newspapers, wire services, and news magazines.

At one o'clock the next afternoon, when the gentlemen of the press arrived at the rock-littered site of the Hamilton-Burr duel, they found Valerie Gardner and a giant eight-foot stone, carved with circles and awkward birds, which Valerie informed them had been kidnapped from the museum and held for a "sizeable ransom," which she had paid personally, since she had not been able to contact the director, Mr. Willingham, for authorization.