The Final Death td-29 Read online

  The Final Death

  ( The Destroyer - 29 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The fat's in the fire when a Texas beef mogul is found skinned and gutted like one of his steers. Soon after, innocent people across the country are dying from eating meat injected with a powerful poison. Fearing a threat to national security, the White House orders Remo Williams, the Destroyer, to find the butchers and stop the killing. The grisly deaths are no mystery to Chiun, Remo's Sinanju master, but the work of an ancient Chinese vegetarian cult of murderers sworn to kill the meateaters of the West. Now the Destroyer's got to cut off the fanatics before they slaughter the U.S.!

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  * Title : #029 : THE FINAL DEATH *

  * Series : The Destroyer *

  * Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *

  * Location : Gillian Archives *

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  CHAPTER ONE

  The last piece of meat Vinnie Angus ever ate was cut from the shoulder section of a steer that had been taken from the fields of a rancher near Wyoming and driven in a tractor-trailer slat truck to a train that took him and thousands just like him to an auction. The steer was stuck in a Midwestern bin, then paraded before fat cowboys wearing Stetson hats, Gant shirts, and Izod three-button V-neck sweaters with little green alligators over the left breast, cowboys who had not seen hard work in 20 years, give or take a year.

  The steer was bought, with 300 others, by Texas Solly Weinstein who put him into another truck for the drive to the slaughterhouse.

  Cold bored men in flannel shirts and heavy corduroy pants prodded him out in the early Houston morning with electric-shock sticks, moving him first into the ear-marking bin, then the milk-wash canal, then into the feeding yard where he was fattened up to 1,200 pounds, give or take a pound.

  Texas Solly, who spoke Hebrew with a twang every Saturday at the synagogue, had cooed and primped as Vinnie Angus' steer, now all fattened up, had been herded into another truck, telling him how good he looked and how big he was and what nice skin and good legs he had.

  As the truck had moved off, Texas Solly had gone inside and sold him. He sat down at his desk with its beige phone with 12 lines and sold the whole lot of beef to Meatamation, an East Coast meat distributor, and its Connecticut salesman, Peter Matthew O'Donnell.

  O'Donnell was on the phone to Vinnie Angus as the steer stepped from the truck into the tight steel coffin with the trapdoor floor.

  A man wearing a white lab coat and dark plastic glasses reached down quickly and pressed a long tube against the steer's forehead and the animal was dead before the trapdoor dropped out and he rolled down to the big boys.

  The big boys were the men who stood next to the conveyor belts. They could have been laying bricks or shoveling coal or making steel or spending eight hours a day, five days a week screwing one nut onto one bolt in some automobile factory, but instead, because of geography or family or desperation or dumb luck, they had wound up at the slaughterhouse, steeling themselves every day so they could go home and tell their friends, "Ahhh, it ain't so bad."

  And after awhile, they started believing it themselves, so every day they could come in and stick a dead cow's back legs into a harness to be lifted up a shaft so that they, wrapped around in plastic and apron cocoons, could stick a knife in the cow's throat and rip it open up to the stomach so the steaming blood could pour out onto the floor, pushed by gravity and convulsing dying blood vessels.

  Then they cut slowly around the head until it rocked easily and a final cut took it off. They stuck the head on another hook so a machine could rip off the skin with as little effort as a person pulling the plastic off an individually wrapped slice of cheese.

  Then the skull would be steamed until the eyes cataracted and the exposed mess turned milky white. Meanwhile, the cow's body moved down to a man with hydraulic scissors who cut off the four hooves and dropped them into a hole in the floor. The carcass then gave up its final few drops of blood.

  Further down the line, another big boy reached into the steer's belly and started hauling out the entrails, pulling them toward him like a large pot in a poker game, with both hands, then hurling them down a nearby chute.

  Another machine peeled back the body skin until the meat-laden carcass was exposed. The trail then led into the freezer.

  O'Donnell was talking to Vinnie.

  "Big Vin, this is Pete."

  "Yo, what have you got?" Vinnie's voice was a deep rumble, a vocal coal mine. He was only five feet eight inches tall, but everybody called him Big Vin because of his voice.

  "I got what you want."

  O'Donnell's home life was not all it could be. He was divorced, his kids did not like to talk to him, his ex-wife did not like to talk to him, so he enjoyed stretching out conversations before coming to the point. Which made everyone else not like to talk to him.

  "What do I want?" asked Angus, noisily nursing his second beer of the morning.

  "What do you need?"

  "Two tons of rib, two of shoulder, two of flank, two of shank. Thin skin, no dirt under the skirt."

  "Can deliver, except the shank. Can do one of shank."

  "I need two."

  "Don't do it. Shank is dying. I can get you one of shank."

  "Two," said Angus.

  "Shank is looking up a dead cow's heinie, for God's sake. Nada. One ton."

  Big Vin barked out a laugh which sounded like an ax rebounding off a petrified tree.

  "Never mind, skip the shank," he said. "I'll take the rest."

  "Two rib, two shoulder, two flank," said O'Donnell, writing it down.

  Vinnie Angus hung up without any further discussion of shank.

  By the time he hung up, his last piece of meat had already been sectioned in the Houston freezer by a man so used to seeing his breath form a white cloud in front of him that driving home at night, it took him a few minutes to get over the fear that maybe he was dying because he couldn't see his breath.

  The man made six uniform cuts into the body of the steer, then passed it down to a sallow-looking man who poked at it, peeled back an occasional layer of fat, felt along the rib cage, all the while moving quickly from foot to foot.

  Finally satisfied with the quality of the cuts, he took a roller stamp and smacked purple United States Department of Agriculture insignias all over the cut-up carcass.

  Two weeks later, Vinnie Angus left his wood-paneled, windowless office in the basement of his split-level home in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and got into his Monte Carlo sedan, the one he hoped he still had the good taste to hate.

  His wife had harangued him into buying it to show their neighbors the higher status they had achieved by opening the second Vinnie's Steak House in Milford, just before the West Haven town line.

  Before the Monte Carlo, there had been the swimming pool and the split-rail fencing all around their home and a gigantic station wagon and professional landscaping. All for status.

  "What is this status thing that keeps eating at you?" Vinnie asked his wife. "Status? I sell steaks and hamburgers."

  "Stop it, Vincent," his wife said. Her mouth puckered up. "You make it sound as if you were running McDonald's."

  "If I was really making it, I'd be McDonald's. I'm not that good, so I run Vinnie's Steak House. So come off all this status thing, will you. I'm not made out of money."

  "Is it that you don't have it, or you just don't wish to spend it on me and the girls? You always seem to have enough money for what you want, though. Those hunting trips. I've never heard you put one oif because you didn't have the money."

 
"It costs me a tank of gas to go hunting, for Christ's sakes. What do you spend hunting?" asked Vinnie.

  "Not much more than you spend around here on us, I guess," his wife said, her voice biting.

  "Ah, stuff it. Buy what you want," Vinnie said. And she had. And the latest was this pussy car Monte Carlo that he hated.

  His mood improved as he drove away from the house. He could mock his wife's insistence on status, but Vinnie Angus had come a long way from dishwasher in a greasy spoon in South Boston, where success meant not getting killed by getting in between the blacks and the Irish who kept trying to murder each other.

  He had watched and learned and saved his money, then made the jump to his own restaurant in New Haven. Everyone said that a good steakhouse could not be successful in a college town. Vinnie had made it work. He got the restaurant rolling and married the cute, leggy Jewish chick behind the cash register and moved into the suburbs.

  His good mood went as fast as it had come.

  What had it all gotten him? A too-big house with a too-big mortgage. A wife who covered her age with so much makeup that he had not seen the skin of her face in 10 years. A pair of daughters who were God's gifts to the orthodontics profession. And this gas-guzzling pussy car that he hated.

  He had two restaurants, both successful, but the government and rising prices took out the money faster than his customers could put it in. Yet what else could he do but keep doing what he had always done? A failure, it occurred to him, could stop anywhere and start over, but a success was doomed to ride on the back of the tiger forever.

  Vinnie Angus turned onto the Post Road and moved north, past the garbage antique shops, the railroad salvage stores, the tacky shoe stores, all the colored lights, the sparkling signs, the neon, the plastic, and turned left into his parking lot.

  The warm gray-brown of his exterior wood visually softened the area. The muted lights glowing through the thick dark-yellow drapes gave the restaurant a glow even in the daytime.

  When Vinnie Angus entered the restaurant, he forgot his problems. He was in another world, a world of his own creating.

  Sitting on a crate in the simple cement block kitchen was his cook.

  "It in yet?" Vinnie asked.

  "Yeah," the cook said. "Just this morning."

  The man got up and moved past Vinnie to the floor-to-ceiling refrigerator. He pulled out a slab of flank steak, sliced away at the outlying fat, poked it professionally a few times with a large two-pronged fork, then slapped it on the grill.

  "Easy, you sucker," the cook said. He always talked to his meat.

  "I'll be at the bar," Vinnie said.

  Vinnie sat at the bar telling the bartender how he kept trying to teach grill jockeys that a good piece of meat was like a good whore. Slap her around a little and she'll get nice and soft for you. But beat the hell out of her and she'll be tough as nails.

  "I hear you talking," said the bartender and poured another beer.

  Twelve minutes later, the cook was out of the kitchen with a brown stoneware plate with beige trim clutched in a towel in his hand. Sitting in the middle of the dish was a dark, sparkling hunk of prime steak.

  Vinnie cut into it, exposing a grey-orange plateau that seemed to suck at the blade of the knife.

  "Nice," Vinnie commented. "Texture's good."

  He sliced crossways with the serrated edge of the knife, then harpooned a piece with a thick silver fork the bartender laid in front of him. Vinnie plopped it into his mouth, ran his tongue across the outside for any sign of charcoal, then bit down.

  The meat seemed to make way for his teeth until he got to the other side where, along the edge, it became tough and tinny for a microsecond, then seemed to melt and dissolve down his throat.

  Except for that split second, it was the best flank steak Vinnie Angus had ever tasted. He finished it in seven big bites.

  "There you go, sucker," said the cook to the empty plate on the way back to the kitchen. And Vinnie Angus went to his office to complain to Peter Matthew O'Donnell about the tinny taste around the government's USDA insignia.

  "It's like eating goddam solder," Vinnie roared into the telephone.

  "Easy, Big Vin. Easy. I'll light a fire under the ass of those Texas bastards. It won't happen again."

  "Okay," said Vinnie Angus.

  The Anguses has tuna casserole that night. Vinnie poked at three noodles, excused himself, then went upstairs to pack for his hunting trip the next day.

  "Can hardly wait, can you?" said his wife in a tone somewhere between snide and shrill, from the other end of the table.

  "Now, now," said Vinnie with practiced patience. He winked at his daughters as he disappeared out of the room.

  Behind him he heard Rebecca, his younger daughter, say: "Do I have to? Daddy didn't."

  "You want to look like him when you grow up? Eat," said Mrs. Angus.

  And his older daughter, Victoria, said sharply, "Stop it, mother." He could hear her chair push back from the table.

  Vinnie, Angus sat down on the hard, thick wooden chair in his stuffy study. The chair creaked uncomfortably under the 20 pounds he had put on in the last five years.

  He looked at his trophies and guns and looked forward to tomorrow. His throat would be scraped raw by the cold morning air. His breath would come in huge noisy gasps. His arms would grow tired from holding his twelve-gauge shotgun. His legs would ache by mid-morning. And he would love it. When he hunted, he was alone with himself, young again.

  All he had to do now was to saddle soap his Timberline boots, make a lunch, pack his equipment, set his alarm clock for 4 a.m. and…

  He remembered one more thing he had to do. His monthly call.

  He had been making them for eleven years, back since the time when the first Vinnie's Steak House had just opened and was floundering. The rich college kids had not yet discovered it and the visiting businessmen had not known it was there. Angus was desperate for money and the banks were not listening.

  Then a Massachusetts friend had told him about a number he could call just to give information on the latest developments in the American meat industry. And Vinnie would get money for it.

  By then, Vinnie would have separated his mother into cold cuts for cash, so he called.

  A recorded voice told him to talk so he did, rambling on for 10 minutes on prices, stock, supply, preparation, control, and service. The recording asked him if he was finished, after a 10-second silence, then thanked him. Three days later in his mailbox, Vinnie found a postal money order for $500. With no return address.

  When he tried calling back, the recording told him to return his call on the first of the month. And for 11 years, on the first of every month, Vinnie Angus called the number and rambled for cash.

  He wasn't sure that he liked it but the 66,000 tax free dollars he was sure he liked. And what law could he be breaking?

  Vinnie picked up the telephone, dialed the area code and seven-digit number, stuck the receiver between his jaw and shoulder, then started picking apart and cleaning his .9 mm sharpshooter's rifle.

  The line rang twice before Vinnie heard a series of tonal clicks and then a monotone female voice said: "State name, address, zip code, and information please."

  Vinnie was so anxious to get it over with that he did not recognize one more soft click as the upstairs extension phone was lifted.

  "Supply has been steady," he said, "but it tapers off in different areas each month. This month it's shank. The quality of the meat itself is the best in years, so I'm expecting a price rise pretty soon.

  "I've bitched to my distributor about the USDA markings being darker and deeper than usual. Today I bit into one and it was like eating tinfoil. We have to cut a little more of the fat to insure it all coming out."

  Vinnie kept talking until he began to hear another conversation going on dimly in the background. At first he thought it was just a telephone echo, but then he was able to distinguish what was being said.

  "Spock. This
is no time for logic."

  "Doctor. There is always time for logic."

  "Are you saying, Mr. Spock, that Jim is lost out there somewhere and we are powerless to do anything about it?"

  "It is a big galaxy, doctor."

  Vinnie Angus quickly finished up. The recording thanked him, there were another series of clicks and the extension was broken.

  "Viki?" he exploded. "Is that you?"

  Far in the distance, he heard Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise answer: "Warp Factor Eight. Now!"

  "Viki? Are you there?"

  His oldest daughter answered over the extension from upstairs. "Yes, Daddy. Who you talking to?"

  "That's really none of your business, young lady," Vinnie said.

  "Really, Daddy. I should think you would be much more respectful to this quadrant's representative from the United Federation of Planets. You're not doing much for intergalactic cooperation."

  Vinnie Angus shook his head, despite the fact that he could almost see the smile on his daughter's face over the telephone. She was obsessed. Her room was filled with posters of the Star Trek crew, models of the Starship Enterprise, the Star Trek technical manual at $6.95, the Star Trek Concordance at $6.95, the Star Trek Reader, $10 in hardcover, six dolls of the Star Trek crew and one Klingon and cheap plastic replicas of the phaser, tricorder, and communicator.

  "Try cooperating with this, Viki," Angus said, "I pay five thousand a semester to Yale so you can become a Trekkie?"

  Victoria's voice lowered, conspiratorially. "You a spy, Daddy?"

  "No. I've been doing this for years. For… for the Bureau of Agriculture."

  "I never knew they had spies."

  "Forget spies, will you. Here you are, 19 years old…"

  "Almost 20."

  "Almost 20 and you still play with Star Trek dolls. Stop it already. The show's been off for eight years."

  "Nine," said Viki. "Do you know what those clicks were at the beginning and end of your call?"

  "So they were taping the conversation. So what?"

  "Not they, daddy. It."

  "What?"