Warren Murphy - Dr Quake

"Yeah. Bodies."

Sheriff Wyatt gasped for air.

"Sheriff?"

"Yeah?"

"Uh, some of the fellows just got a bag from Binky Burger and we got an extra goulash here with sloppy joe sauce if you want it."

"Get the bodies out of the motel," said Sheriff Wyatt, who did not fire his deputy on the spot only because he was too weak to do so.

Out in the San Aquino sun, looking down the hillside at the rising spruce and the valley beyond that and the mountains beyond that, with the homes dotted here and there, clean and fresh and sprawling, not cramped like some other places, Sheriff Wyatt regained his breath and his composure, then ambled across the gravel shoulder to his official car parked there. Even on an investigation, he would not park the official car in front of the Cowboy Motel lest there be nothing there to investigate and someone should later remember seeing the red bubble and the sheriff's gold stars on the black and white Plymouth. Then the rumours.

Rumours could kill an elected official.

Sheriff Wyatt plopped himself into his front seat, drew another breath, then drove to the offices of the First Aquino Trust and Development Corporation, Lester Curpwell IV, President, marched across the neat conservative gray rug, past the two secretaries with their polished wood desks, and into a panelled office where he waited for Lester Curpwell IV.

Curpwell was there in five minutes.

"Harris Feinstein is dead," Wyatt said as soon as Curpwell entered.

Curpwell sat at the brown leather chair behind his wide desk, without looking up, just staring vacantly at the desk. He sat under a larger-than-life-sized portrait of the first Curpwell, and like the portrait, said nothing.

Wyatt fingered his Stetson some more. He shifted his weight.

"Oh, no," said Curpwell, bleakly. "What happened?"

"Damned if I know. Harris and this guy from the Interior Department were found about twenty-five minutes ago, dead in the Cowboy." Sheriff Wyatt did not bother to say Cowboy Motel. Everyone knew the Cowboy was the Cowboy Motel. "Naked as the day they was born. I spoke to this McAndrew fellow just yesterday. He talked to Feinstein and I guess he came back with him for a look-see. Beats me why they came to the Cowboy to play fag games."

"Not a word of this must get in the papers," said Curpwell. "Have you notified Mrs. Feinstein?"

"Well, gee, not yet, Mr. Curpwell, I came here as soon as...."

"Good, I'll do it."

"I don't know about the papers. There's been a lot of talk, a lot of people at the motel, and. ..."

"You don't have to report he was found nude, with a man."

"No sir. He had the guts sucked outa him. Both of 'em."

"Is that how they died?"

"Must of. It was bad."

"In your coroner's report, you will have them ... have them...." Lester Curpwell paused.

"Found in bed with women?"

"No. You'll have them die of ptomaine. Probably from a bad meal back in Washington."

"Shoot, no. I mean, you're a Curpwell and everything but I ain't going to commit no felony for you."

"You're going to do what you're told, Wade Wyatt, and now get out of here."

Sheriff Wade Wyatt stood for a moment in glum protest.

Then he got out of there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Silas McAndrew and Harris Feinstein had left a gift to America.

The gift was simply a memo to McAndrew's superior in the Department of the Interior. This was the chap who was always interested in anything unusual or in cases of corruption. He was the man who had asked for reports on the peculiarities out in California-specifically the geological ones.

The memo McAndrew wrote said he had corroborating evidence from a Harris Feinstein that indeed someone had found a way to tamper with nature to produce-or prevent-earthquakes. Not a hoax, McAndrew said. Could mean major scale destruction for the state. He was going to California. He meant to discuss the problem with a certain professor out there.

So that was the memo. The superior who had been curious about what was going on out there in California did not file the memo. He sent it along to the people who had told him what in general to look for and recently had expressed great interest in California geology. He didn't mind sending the material to the people who asked for it. They gave him $400 a month non-taxable spending money and arranged for him to be promoted faster than his colleagues.

He thought they were the FBI or the CIA or something.

McAndrew's superior did not know whom the information ultimately reached, for if he knew, that organization's main mission would have failed; a mission that had been given by a young President to an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency who quickly went on the retired list.

The mission was part confession. The United States Constitution did not work. To follow it meant chaos in the future. To abandon it meant a police state. Crime was winning, and so the young president created the new organization-CURE-a name never written on a memo and which only three Americans would ultimately know: The President, the chief of CURE, and the enforcement arm, a young former policeman named Remo Williams, who as the legend grew, came to be known by the Oriental name, Shiva, "The Destroyer."

What the Constitution could not do, CURE did. Quietly. Evidence from bribed witnesses would suddenly and mysteriously be changed. A judge who owed a political debt to a corrupt machine would discover he owed a greater debt to his secret mistress and she demanded a fair verdict. Information on government corruption would accidentally be leaked to a newspaper by a man who had a second salary.

A Mafia don, armoured with money and influence, would hear a curtain rustle but never even see the hand that smashed his skull.

An enforcer for a crime syndicate would suddenly disappear.

The wave of crime, corruption and chaos that seemed ready to engulf the giant young democracy subsided and started to meet setbacks. The Constitution survived.

In Rye, New York, on the third floor of Folcroft Sanatorium, overlooking Long Island Sound, a thin, lemon-faced man looked over McAndrews' last memo. Then he dialed a phone number. It would take four minutes to complete because a route check on that line would disclose that a bakery in Duluth, not Folcroft Sanitarium, was making the call to the Caribbean.

When the call was completed, Dr. Harold Smith, director of Folcroft and director of CURE, heard the line buzz. Then the receiver was lifted.

"Hello," Smith said. "Vacation's over."

On the other end of the phone, fifteen hundred miles away, in a Caribbean hotel room, Remo Williams felt very, very good. Vacations were boring. It would be good to work again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Harris Feinstein was buried before the Lord God of Israel, King of the Universe and the leading citizens of San Aquino. Most citizens of San Aquino wondered why the casket was not opened.

Presumably, the King of the Universe knew.

So did Sheriff Wade Wyatt and Lester Curpwell IV.

The rabbi, a man of fine sensitive features who had just been graduated from the seminary, somehow or other got the Vietnamese war into Harris Feinstein's death.

Mrs. Feinstein shot him a dirty look. The rabbi ignored her. Sheriff Wyatt shot everyone a dirty look. Everyone ignored him. Les Curpwell stood with his head bowed.

Wyatt kept looking around to see if he could spot anyone he knew, maybe wanted on a charge of something or other. He didn't.

The rabbi defined what a good man meant. He defined what a good life was. He defined what thousands of years of study had decided was a good life and a good death.

Sheriff Wyatt thought that sounded okay, depending on how you interpreted the rabbi's sentiments.

In the last calling to the creator of all that is, was, and ever will be. The Shalom Cemetery into the clear California sky. Its ancient, vibrant cadences were part of the meaning of the Universe.