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  Last Drop

  ( The Destroyer - 54 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  It's enough to give a drug pusher nightmares: thousands upon thousands of sober citizens are suddenly turning on and dropping out-for-free-and the illicit narcotics business has ground to a halt.

  Under other circumstances, the pushers' plight would be cause for official celebration. But this time Washington's good and worried. And when the rock-ribbed Harold W. Smith, head of the supersecret agency CURE, knuckles under to the first buzz of his life, it's clearly time for Remo and Chiun to take matters into their own hands. Trouble is, Remo's suffering a mid-life career crisis, and he's flirting with retirement...

  With the backbone of America melting into Silly Putty, will the land of the free be transformed into the land of the Lotus-Eaters? It's a loaded question, and the answer lies with an 80 year old Korean assassin and his rebellious pupil...

  Last Drop

  The Destroyer #54

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  Copyright © 1983

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved.

  Last Drop

  A Peanut Press Book

  Published by

  peanutpress.com, Inc.

  www.peanutpress.com

  ISBN: 0-7408-0577-0

  First Peanut Press Edition

  This edition published by

  arrangement with

  Boondock Books

  www.boondockbooks.com

  for Jeannie

  ?Chapter One

  When Leith Blake was sent home from school, he didn't know he was the harbinger of a national epidemic that would make the Black Plague look like a mild case of zits by comparison. He only thought he was stoned.

  It was a fair assumption. He'd consumed five Seconals, three Tuinols, a handful of Quaaludes, and approximately a half-ounce of marijuana before breakfast. All in all, Leith felt pretty much the same as he had on every other schoolday morning since his twelfth birthday four years before.

  He wasn't sent home for illness. Once every couple of months, when the faculty of the Southern Palm Beach Preparatory Academy felt like partying, a schoolwide drug inspection was held. The goods were confiscated, and the offenders sent home. Then, having cleared out the entire student body, the faculty was free to get blasted on their own without the bothersome interruption of teaching. It was a good system. Palm Prep knew how to keep morale high.

  Leith staggered in through the colonnaded portals of his family's Palladian mansion. "Hi, Mom," he said as he passed the yellow satin bedroom where his mother, dressed in an ostrich boa and pearls, diddled the wife of a frozen-foods magnate while she snorted a line of cocaine.

  "Aren't you supposed to be in school or something?" Mrs. Blake asked. Her son mumbled something, but the response was lost in the shrieks emitted by the frozen-foods queen as she writhed in ecstasy.

  "What's that, dear?" Mrs. Blake said, popping a handful of Valium.

  "Got sent home."

  "For what?" Leith's mother rasped while lighting a bong of hashish.

  Leith walked over to the bed and slogged a fistful of barbiturates into his gullet. "Drugs," he said phlegmatically. The frozen-foods lady tweaked the zipper on his jeans.

  "Drugs again," sighed Mrs. Blake, shaking her head. "Honestly, these kids today. What's the world coming to, I'd like to know."

  "Mff," replied her companion as she tilted a bottle of champagne to her lips.

  "Your father will have to be told, of course."

  "Yeah."

  Big deal, Leith thought. His father, hotshot of the Miami business scene, got as shitfaced as his mother did. Both of them could out-consume Leith hands down. He shambled away toward the kitchen. He wanted a cup of coffee.

  Funny, he thought. His bedroom was stocked with enough drugs to put Squibb out of business, but all the pills and powders and assorted mind and mood elevators seemed old hat now. What he really wanted— no, not wanted, but needed, craved, longed for— was a good steaming cup of black coffee.

  Well, he supposed the school guidance counselors had been right when they'd told him that his various drug habits were a passing phase. He would miss the good old days of his early teens. Even now the memory of stumbling down the street, crashing headfirst into his locker each morning, lying supine on the floor in English class and wrecking the family Mercedes every weekend were passing into misty nostalgia.

  Yes, he would miss those times. But for now, he had to get a cup of coffee down his throat before he killed somebody.

  Growing up was hell.

  Forty miles away in downtown Miami, Leith's father, Drexel Armistead Blake, strode confidently into the board room of International Imports. He was the chairman of the board, and had prepared a brief statement to read to the other members. Rather, his secretary, the loyal but homely Harriet Holmes had prepared it while Blake was defending the company's honor against the president of a rival importing firm on the racquet ball courts.

  The report didn't look too difficult. Blake had cautioned Miss Holmes against using too many words of more than one syllable, lest he lose the attention of the other board members. They understood how rough it was to read all those big words when you had a heavy golf game waiting.

  He scanned the two typewritten pages. They looked all right. All the words he was supposed to stress were underlined, and Miss Holmes had left blanks in the spots where he was supposed to pause. He could get through it in ten minutes.

  Blake nodded cordially to Miss Holmes, who was serving coffee to the members of the board.

  Harriet Holmes blushed. Mr. Blake's brief nod was all the thanks she required. Beaming, she poured the steaming coffee from the silver server into the cups set before the twelve illustrious men at the table.

  "Delicious, Harriet," a distinguished white-haired man said. He was a millionaire many times over.

  "Perfect coffee," agreed another gentleman. He was the head of the Miami Philanthropic Society. He had dined at the White House.

  "Thank you," Harriet said meekly. The big ones, the really successful men, always appreciated small things. She sat down on her stool in the corner to take down the minutes of the meeting in flawless shorthand.

  "Gentlemen," Blake began.

  "Freaking fantastic," blurted the head of the Miami Philanthropic Society.

  "I beg your pardon?" Blake asked from the head of the table.

  "The coffee," Miami Philanthropic roared, crashing the cup in his hand onto its saucer with a splinter of shattering porcelain. "Let's have some more, damn it."

  "Of course, sir," Harriet said, rising quickly.

  "A blast over here, too," demanded the distinguished white-haired gentleman who, to Harriet's dismay, was languidly scratching his privates.

  "Hey, babe," shouted a little balding fellow toward the far end of the table.

  Harriet worked like a dervish replenishing the empty cups as her boss tried valiantly to begin his speech.

  "Gentlemen, our quarterly profit scheme—"

  "Where's the frigging coffee?"

  "I'm making a fresh pot, sir," came Harriet's meek voice from the doorway.

  "The quarterly profits—"

  "Screw the profits. Bring on the java."

  "Gentlemen—"

  "Soak your head, Blake," the balding fellow advised while assiduously picking his nose. The remark was met with loud guffaws from around the table.

  Blake took in the scene with calm despair. The twelve men at the table, normally as hurried and brisk as he was, sat lounging and jawing like a bunch of Sunday picnickers, their jackets off, their ties hung in loopy lassos around their necks. Two or three of them
were so relaxed, they were actually nodding off.

  "Gentlemen..." Blake tried again.

  The man from Miami Philanthropic blew a Bronx cheer.

  With a sigh of resignation, Blake sat down and sipped at his cold coffee. Golf was rapidly becoming a thing of fantasy. Nine holes, maybe, if he could clear out this bunch of coffee klatchers within a half-hour.

  The coffee. It wasn't bad at that. He took another sip. No question about it, that Harriet certainly knew how to start off the morning.

  "Damn, that's good," he said after licking the last drop out of the cup with his tongue.

  "No shit," the white-haired millionaire said, blowing his nose with a honk into a monogrammed linen handkerchief.

  "Where's Harriet?" he yelled. The others took up the chant.

  "Coming, sir. Sirs," Harriet squeaked, traveling as fast as she could down the hall with the overflowing coffee server.

  The board room was a shambles. Several of the members lay stretched over the mahogany table, snoring loudly. The others swiveled in their chairs, scratching themselves and muttering incoherently. Drexel Blake rose shakily to his feet as she entered and staggered over to her. He grabbed the pot out of her hands and gulped down its contents, to the feeble protests of the other board members.

  Then, with a smile on his face, he slumped bonelessly to the floor.

  At 10 A.M., the board members were all sound asleep.

  At 10:30, Harriet Holmes called in the company nurse, who prescribed aspirin.

  At 11:00, Harriet called in the wives of the board members to take their husbands home.

  By noon, sitting in a local restaurant with her friend, Ann Adams, Harriet was too exhausted to eat. While Ann stuffed herself with lasagna and burgundy, Harriet downed two cups of black coffee with trembling hands.

  "It was the strangest thing I ever saw," Harriet said, recalling the bizarre events of the morning. "All those men scratching and snorting and yelling, and poor Mr. Blake flat on his face on the oriental rug."

  "Sounds like somebody had one tee many martoonis," Ann Adams said, tittering as she repeated her favorite phrase.

  "But it was the first thing in the morning." Harriet drained her second cup of coffee and collared the waiter for another. When it came, she swigged it down with expertise, wiped her chin savagely with her napkin, and heaved a deep sigh. "Balls," she said resolutely, her eyes glassy.

  "Harriet?"

  "Thash one fine cup of coffee."

  "It's three," Ann Adams corrected. "Better watch it. You'll get the jitters."

  Harriet responded with a reverberating belch. "Yeah. Jitters." She stretched out until she was on a diagonal with the table.

  "Harriet? Harriet?"

  "Jush taking a little resht, hon," Harriet said, sliding woodenly off the seat.

  Ann Adams never finished her lunch. After pouring her companion into a taxi, she returned to her desk at the First National Bank and Trust Company, where the chief loan officer lay draped across her "in" basket. She called for one of the bank guards to remove him, but the guard was busy wetting his pants near the tellers' windows. She tried to get to the bank president, but he'd left for a breakfast meeting at 8 A.M. and never returned.

  Ann Adams took the rest of the day off.

  At home, she meticulously cleared her kitchen table and set upon it three sheets of white paper and two ballpoint pens.

  This would have to be reported. It was her duty. She never liked preparing these reports. They reminded her of TV movies she'd seen about Communist Russia, spying on friends and all that. Turning them in to the Thought Police.

  But the U.S. government wasn't anything like the Thought Police, she knew. It wasn't as if whoever was getting her reports was throwing anybody into jail or anything like that. In fact, no one seemed to be doing much of anything about the reports.

  For twenty years Ann Adams had been receiving monthly checks from the Treasury of the United States of America in exchange for reporting any unusual activities at the bank where she worked; yet nothing whatever had been done about them. When she'd exposed the blonde hussy in the small-business loans department for her shameless carryings-on with one of the junior accountants, the government had not expressed even the slightest interest. Ditto for the ten pager she'd written on her upstairs neighbor who secretly harbored ten cats in her apartment. It wasn't banking business, but anybody who kept ten cats in the city ought to be turned in. Still, the government never lifted a finger.

  There was, of course, the incident of the vice-president at First National who embezzled $18,000 before Ann Adams sniffed him out. That was a peculiar episode. She'd gone to the bank president about it, and was told she was mistaken. Then she'd written the report. As usual, no troopers came in to finger the V-P. She doubted seriously if anyone at the Treasury Department even read the reports.

  Then, a funny thing happened. Three days after she mailed the report, the crooked V-P turned himself over to the police and returned all the money— 18,000 plus interest. And the bank president retired that very week on grounds of poor health and opened a gas station on Key West. It was a very weird coincidence, and it only went to show that Providence was on the lookout even if the federal government was sitting on its thumbs.

  But worthless or not, the government reports were part of Ann Adams's patriotic duty. Also, the monthly checks would help pay the bills if the First National Bank and Trust folded, an occurrence that seemed imminent, considering the state the home office was in.

  She organized her thoughts. Harriet Holmes's strange story about the board meeting of International Imports, Harriet's own outlandish behavior at lunch, the bizarre doings at First National— they would all be included in the report. She opened a new can of coffee, prepared a pot, and began to write.

  Three hours later, she was still on the first paragraph. She tried to concentrate, but the words on the page kept melting together. She could barely keep her eyes open.

  Funny, she thought. Instead of keeping her awake, the six cups of coffee she'd drunk seemed to have the opposite effect. Smacking her lips sleepily, she picked up her pen. But her fingers were out of control, tearing through the paper and printing wobbly block letters on the tabletop.

  Something was wrong here, very wrong. Ann Adams picked up the torn sheet with its illegible scrawl and tried to read. Nothing made sense. Not on the page, not in her life. This was more important than the frowzy blonde in small-business loans or the embezzling V-P. More important, even, than her criminal neighbor with the ten cats. Something was happening to her, her body, her mind. And the same thing was happening to people all around her.

  Think about it, Ann, she told herself, concentrating. That man who was weaving down the street in front of her when she walked home. The clerk in the grocery store, passed out in the tomato bin. She had passed both instances off as drunkenness, but then there was Harriet. Harriet didn't drink, not even eggnog at Christmas, yet she seemed as pie-eyed as the rest.

  And now herself, Ann Adams, employed for thirty years by the First National Bank and Trust, confidant of the U.S. government, seeing double and feeling itchy all over and wanting only to sleep and never get up again.

  There was a phone number. It had been given to her twenty years before by the lemony-voiced man who had first asked her to write the reports. The number, he said, was to be used only in the most dire contingency. Calling the number would signal the end of Ann Adams's relationship with the government. There would be no more reports after the phone call, no more checks; all communication with her unknown benefactor would be severed. For reasons of national security, the voice had said. In other words, explained the man on the telephone, the number was to be used only under the most extraordinary circumstances of national emergency.

  A thunderous crash sounded outside her kitchen window. On the street below, three cars had collided in an impossible three-way head-on collision. Smoke and steam were pouring from the crumpled vehicles. A horn blew steadily. One by one, as
Ann Adams watched, the three drivers got out, yawning and leaning against their automobiles, barely noticing one another as the traffic lined up behind them. Occasionally a horn honked above the endless wailing of the stopped car. Squinting to get a better view, Ann Adams could see that many of the drivers appeared to be asleep at the wheel.

  "National emergency," Ann Adams muttered as she rummaged through her precise household files for the yellowed scrap of paper with the number written on it. She hesitated as she lifted the phone. Maybe it wasn't a national emergency, after all. Maybe it was just a case of everyone in Miami having one tee many martoonis. Including herself.

  "But I haven't had a drink since lunch," she cried.

  Losing it. Losing my marbles. She must have been drinking since the solitary glass of burgundy at noon, she reasoned. Nothing else could bring on the weird sensations that were washing over her like euphoric waves. Maybe she was a secret drinker, so secret that even she didn't know about it. She'd read about that sort of thing in magazines. Multiple personality, they called it. Maybe she was suffering from multiple personalities, and an Ann Adams she wasn't even aware of was a lush.

  Maybe what she needed was a drink.

  An idea came to her. "Hospital," she said aloud, fumbling with the telephone dial for the emergency number.

  It rang seventeen times.

  She hung up. "It's got them, too," she whispered, suddenly afraid.

  The police? She thought over the possibility, then dismissed it. What would the police do, give her a breathalizer test while the world fell apart?

  Outside her apartment door a long, protracted banging seemed to be moving toward her entranceway. Staggering wildly, she made it to the door and flung it wide, just in time to see her upstairs neighbor, the lady with the cats, rolling end over end down the last steps in the stairway and come to rest at a crazy angle on her doormat.

  "What's going on?" she screamed.

  An old man, the cat lady's husband, crawled on all fours to the top of the stairway. "Sara?" he called sleepily. His face was ghostly white.

  "She's down here," Ann Adams shrieked. "She fell down the stairs. I think she's dead."