Warren Murphy: Murder Ward

"And the big money?"

"This hospital is used by two dozen of the top officials in the federal government for annual checkups, routine medical treatment, that kind of thing. Can you imagine what other governments would pay to have me produce instant old age in, say, the secretary of state? Maybe on the eve of a big summit conference?"

"Kathy, that's downright unpatriotic," said Remo.

"Sure, but highly productive. And I was just about to begin. I figured Mrs. Wilberforce for our last guinea pig. And then you came here, and got a little too close for comfort. Why did you come up here, by the way? I hate to see people die."

"I came up because I thought since I was going to leave the world anyway, I'd do it with a bang, not a whimper."

She smiled. "You can try. But I do this thing to men. Ten seconds is all they can take."

"I should have that much time left," said Remo.

He scooped her up in his arms and bore her back toward the filing cabinet where he placed her down gently.

"I think the position we started in would be satisfactory," he said.

"Far be it from me to stifle an old man's fantasy," she said. She turned away, over the open file drawer, and smiled to herself. The drug was working of course. And the longer she kept him here, the surer would be the result. Maybe she'd let him prolong it. She'd give him, perhaps, a full thirty seconds of ecstasy. She felt her skirt being lifted up around her hips, and then she felt Remo. He felt strangely oily, but the lubrication was somehow exciting. Maybe forty seconds, she thought.

Then it was underway, but he was like no one else had ever been. His body was strong and with his hands he controlled her movements. She counted to fifteen and then began an internal movement which men had always told her they had never experienced before, but he matched it with a movement and a swelling of his own, and she kept counting but when she reached thirty, she stopped, because she was too busy moaning her pleasure. There was pleasure again, and again, and again, and through it all, she wished that she did not really have to kill this Remo, because after all these years, she had found a man whose performance matched her appetites. And there was pleasure again and again.

How long it went on, she did not know, but then, without reaching his own peak, he was gone, moving away from her.

She hung there, over the file cabinet, trying to catch her breath. She heaved a big sigh and turned. He was zipped up and in his fingers he was holding a test tube from the laboratory. She recognized it. He dropped it into her wastepaper basket.

"Empty," he said. "No point in saving an empty container."

"Was that…" she said, pointing.

"Right," he said. "Your aging oil. You know, if it doesn't work the way you wanted it, you could always package it as a sex lubricant."

"But why?" she said.

"Tissues, honey. Absorption. Right now, that juice should be pouring through your bloodstream. You'd better sit down. You don't look any too well."

Remo pulled her roughly toward her desk and lowered her into her seat.

"And you? It's on your tissues, too, you know," she said.

"Sorry, sweetheart. I'm immune."

She put her hands out in front of her on the desk, then clapped them to her head as the pain exploded behind her eyes, inside her temples. It was a blinding flash, and then gone.

"The pain'll get worse before it gets better," Remo said. He took her hands from her head and extended them before her on the desk. "It's a shame," he said. "Look at these hands. A young woman like you with such old woman's hands. You should change your detergent."

As she looked down at her hands, she saw that indeed they were harder looking, dry, almost wrinkled. Before her eyes, she saw in horror small veins on the backs of her hands begin to swell and rise under the skin. She was aging. Growing old. Right at her desk, before her own eyes.

She looked up at Remo with hopeless panic on her face.

He shrugged. "That's the biz, sweetheart," he said, and then left, jamming the door on his way out. It would be hours before anybody could get in. By that time, Kathy Hahl would be out of it. For good.

He felt fine as he walked down the hall toward the corridor to his room.

He whistled "Deck the Halls."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"For crying out loud, Chiun, what's Smith going to say?"

Chiun sat impassively, watching his television set.

"Don't pull that do-not-disturb business with me," Remo said. "I know you're watching reruns. Just look at this place. Ears on the floor for crying out loud. Bodies, vomit, blood. Don't you ever clean up?"

Chiun listened only to Dr. Lance Ravenel.

"And you know Smith didn't want any violence. No more Scrantons. And now you've run amok. What's wrong with you anyway? If you don't have any Christmas spirit, at least you could be good-humored for the Feast of the Pig."

Dr. Ravenel was talking to Mrs. Claire Wentworth in his office at Brookfield Hospital, about the prognosis for her daughter who was suffering an overdose of Quaalude.

"I think we'll have good news for you tomorrow," Dr. Ravenel said.

On the television screen, the distinguished looking actor rose and came alongside Mrs. Wentworth, whom he had loved twenty years before, back before her marriage to old Josiah Wentworth, the clothing tycoon.

"Yes," Dr. Ravenel said. "I think we'll have a fine Christmas present for you. I think our daughter's going to be all right," he said, exposing to anyone retarded enough not to have guessed it six years earlier, that Mrs. Wentworth's daughter had been fathered by him.

Ravenel put his arm around her. The camera panned back. Dr. Ravenel and Mrs. Wentworth stood silhouetted against a giant Christmas tree.

"A merry Christmas," Mrs. Wentworth said.

"A very merry Christmas," Dr. Ravenel said.

"Your tree is beautiful," Mrs. Wentworth said.

"Yes, it is. The most beautiful Christmas tree I've even seen," said Dr. Ravenel.

"Aaaiieee," said Chiun, reaching forward and slapping off the television set.

He rose. Remo said nothing.

Chiun turned.

"One can trust nothing in this country. Nothing. Those doctors turn out to be fakers. And people in whose judgment you trust turn out to have no taste. Why did he like that tree?"

"It was a beautiful tree, Chiun."

"No. What I gave you was a beautiful tree. Even if it was not appreciated. You are not going to give me the gift I sought?"

Remo shook his head. "I can't."

"All right. In its place, you may clean up this mess."

Remo shook his head.

It was therefore agreed upon by a mutual silence of thirty seconds that they would leave the debris in the room for the sweeper and Smith and his reactions be damned.

They rode the elevator down in silence. In the lobby at the desk was the same guard who had greeted them upon their arrival.

Chiun motioned to Remo to wait and walked to the guard.

"Do you remember me?" he asked.

The guard looked puzzled, then his face brightened. "Sure. Doctor Park, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Tell me, have you looked at this tree?" Chiun asked, waving over his shoulder at the huge tree behind him.

The guard said, "Funny, I never did until you mentioned it. But now I look at it all the time. It's beautiful." He stood up, reached forward and took Chiun's hand. "I wanted to thank you for helping me to see it. It was really clever, how you did it. Thank you, Doctor Park. And a merry Christmas."

Chiun just looked at him, then walked back to Remo.

"It is no wonder he is a hospital guard," he said. "He has taken leave of his senses."

They stepped out into the crisp December cold, Remo going first.

He was halfway down the steps when Chiun halted him.

"Remo," he called.