Holy Terror Read online

“Not here, you’re not,” said the operator, his voice rising with his temper.

  Chiun spoke over his shoulder. “Remo, talk to him. Threaten to report him to Mr. Disney.”

  “Why don’t we leave?” said Remo.

  “You don’t want to see me win either,” said Chiun. “You’re jealous.”

  “Right. I’m jealous. All my life, I’ve wanted my own goldfish, three yellow rubber duckies, seven stuffed pussycats, a plastic checker game, and two armfuls of slum.”

  The operator looked up at Remo, recognizing “slum” as the in-carnival word for junk prizes.

  He looked at Remo questioningly. Remo nodded and winked as if sharing a fraternity secret. The operator understood now. Remo was a hustler, preparing to pluck this old yellow pigeon. He nodded back imperceptibly.

  “Sure, old man,” the operator said. “Go right ahead.”

  “Watch this, Remo,” said Chiun. “I will do it with my eyes closed.” He screwed his eyes tightly shut. “Are you watching, Remo?”

  “Yes, Little Father.”

  “Can you see me?”

  “Yes. Your eyes are closed, not mine.”

  “Good. Now watch.”

  Chiun leaned forward over the railing, his eyes shut tightly. He flipped the nickel off the fingernail of his right thumb, high into the air, almost up to the canvas roof over the game. The nickel spun rapidly, flipping all the way up, flipping all the way down, made one final turn, and landed flat on its side, directly in the center of a red circle.

  Chiun kept his eyes closed. “I can’t look. I can’t look. Did I win?”

  Remo nodded toward the nickel. The concession operator put his toe on it and slid it off the red spot, half onto the white.

  “No, you lose,” said Remo.

  Chiun opened his eyes in shock. “You lie,” he said. He looked at the nickel, half on the red, half on white. “You cheated me,” he said.

  “What’s worse,” said Remo, “you have to give back all the prizes.”

  “Never. Never will I part with my goldfish.”

  “All except the goldfish,” said Remo. He gave the operator back the prizes he and Joleen held. The operator happily put them back on the shelf. Remo still held the goldfish bowl.

  “You cheated,” said Chiun, surprisingly even-voiced. “Tell me the truth. You cheated, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t need all that junk.”

  “I agree. You may need your arms free.” Chiun’s eyes were narrowed, and he seemed to be sniffing the air.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Remo.

  “Nothing,” said Chiun, “yet.”

  “Don’t drop the goldfish.”

  When he saw the young white man holding the prizes and the elderly Oriental leaning over the nickel toss game, Ferdinand De Chef Hunt knew. He knew that these were his targets. He felt a strange sensation in his throat, a lump of flesh that would not go up or down. It was a new feeling: was it the feeling that generations of De Chefs had felt when they were on the prowl?

  While they played, Hunt stopped at a booth across the way. He paid a quarter and was handed three baseballs. He had to knock six wooden bottles from the top of a barrel. Hunt backed off and tossed the first ball underhand. The operator smiled. Like a fairy, he thought. The ball hit the center bottom bottle, knocked all bottles to the top of the barrel. The ball skidded around, bumping against bottles, and knocking all of them off onto the ground.

  The operator stopped smiling when Hunt did the same thing with his second ball. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the two targets and the girl in the pink sari moving away. He tossed the third ball softly toward the concession stand operator.

  “Your prizes,” the operator said.

  “Keep them,” said Hunt, following the three at a stroller’s pace.

  He let them get twenty yards ahead of him. They were heavy into conversation, but he knew they had not realized that he was following them.

  In fact, the conversation was, from Chiun’s standpoint, much more important.

  “I only had four rides,” Chiun said. “You promised me five.”

  “You said if I let you ride the boat, you wouldn’t ask for the fifth ride.”

  “I don’t remember saying that,” said Chiun. “And I remember everything I say. Why would I say I would be satisfied with four rides when you promised me five? Can you think of a reason I would say that?”

  “I give up,” said Remo.

  “Good,” said Chiun. “There’s the ride I want to go on.” He pointed ahead of them toward “The Flying Bucket,” then leaned to Joleen. “You can ride with me. Remo will pay for it.”

  “Anything you say,” said Remo wearily. With Chiun leading the way, the three walked into a narrow corridor between concession booths, toward “The Flying Bucket,” a Ferris wheel type of ride in which riders sat in a plastic bucket, attached to an overhead wheel by two steel cables.

  As they turned the corner, Hunt lost sight of them. He walked faster toward the corridor they had entered.

  Just then, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to look into a red-fatted angry face. Behind it stood four other equally red, equally angry faces.

  “Here he is, boys,” said Elton Snowy. “Here’s the kidnapper now. Where’s my daughter?”

  Hunt recognized the man as the driver of the black car that had followed him from Divine Bliss headquarters. He shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have the wrong man.”

  “Don’t lather me with that, sonny,” said Snowy. He grabbed Hunt’s arm tightly. The other three men moved up, also grabbing Hunt, and quickly they pushed him between tents into a surprisingly quiet grassy area, deserted of people, yet only a dozen feet from the main midway.

  “I don’t know anything about your daughter, sir,” said Hunt again. He would not spend too much time here; he did not want to lose track of his targets.

  “Boys, what do you say we work him over to loosen his tongue?” said Snowy.

  The four men lunged into Hunt and bore him to the ground with their weight.

  Two were on his legs, and two more on his arms, pressing them down into the mushy turf.

  “Now we make the sumbitch talk,” said Snowy.

  The fingers of Hunt’s left hand snaked out and curled around one of the triangular metal stakes used to anchor a tent rope. With his fingertips he plucked it from the ground and curled it into his palm. He felt his face being slapped from side to side.

  “Talk, you kidnapping bastard. What you doing at that Blissy Mission? Where’s my little girl?”

  Hunt’s right fingers scratched at the ground. He came up with a handful of dirt and a rock the size of a grape. He let the dirt trickle through his fingers.

  “It’s all a mistake. I don’t even know your daughter.”

  Snowy, who had been holding down Hunt’s left arm, while slapping him, now released the arm with a cry of rage and sprung with both hands toward Hunt’s throat to strangle the truth from him.

  His arm freed, Hunt whizzed the tent peg through the air, catapulting it with just a flip of the wrist.

  “Aaargh,” came a scream from behind Snowy. He turned to look. The man anchoring Hunt’s left leg had a tent peg driven deep into his right bicep. It seemed as if an artery had been severed. Blood stained the man’s white short-sleeved shirt and pulsed out of the wound with each heartbeat. Horrified, the man grasped his right arm with his left hand and staggered to his feet.

  At almost the same instant, the grape-sized stone curled off Hunt’s fingertips. It whistled through the air, then struck the left eye of the man holding Hunt’s right leg. The man shouted and fell back heavily, both hands clutching his face.

  Snowy, confused, then angry, turned back and plunged downward with both hands toward Hunt’s neck. But both legs and the left arm of the intended victim were now free. He rolled his body to the right. Snowy’s hands drove into the dirt. At the same moment,
Hunt again filled his right hand with dirt and flipped it upward into the face of the man still holding onto his right arm. The man coughed and gagged and released his grip, and Hunt rolled to the right, curled his legs up and flipped up into a standing position.

  The bleeding man was in a state of shock. The man hit by the stone still knelt, both hands over his face. The third man was still trying to cough the dirt from his lungs. Snowy knelt on the ground as if terrorizing an invisible victim. But the victim was behind him, and now he put a foot against Snowy’s butt and pushed. Hard. Snowy sprawled face forward into the earth.

  “Last time,” said Hunt. “I don’t know your daughter. If you ever bother me again, you won’t live to tell about it.”

  He brushed himself off and walked away, hoping that his intended victims had not escaped him. Behind him, Elton Snowy looked at Hunt’s back, groped in his mind for something to shout, something to say that could show the frustration and rage he felt at that moment. His lips moved. Mentally, he rejected words without knowing he did. Then finally he spoke, more of a hiss than a shout: “Nigger lover.”

  Ferdinand De Chef Hunt heard the words behind him and laughed.

  · · ·

  “Whee,” said Chiun.

  “Whee,” said the pretty blond girl with him.

  And “wheeze” went the twin cables holding up their fiberglass bucket as it slowly turned upward on the converted Ferris wheel superstructure.

  “Let us spin the bucket,” said Chiun, his eyes alight in merry excitement.

  “Let us not spin the bucket,” said the girl. “They do not allow us to spin the bucket.”

  “That is not nice of Mr. Disney,” said Chiun. “Why does he have this nice bucket and not allow people to spin it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl. “There is a sign down there that says do not spin the bucket.”

  “Oh,” said Chiun.

  “Oh,” said the girl.

  “Oh, oh,” said Chiun.

  “Oh, oh,” said the girl.

  “Funny, funny, Mr. Disney,” said Chiun. “Wheeee,” he added.

  Finger hooked in the goldfish bowl, Remo waited patiently below for the ride to end. His attention was fixed upward. Behind him stood Ferdinand De Chef Hunt. His pockets held nothing to use as a weapon. He looked on the ground, but it was asphalted and there was not a stone, not even a pebble he could use.

  Hunt turned. Behind him was a concession booth, “The Discus Throw.” For a dollar, a player got four thin metal plates, and the chance to scale them frisbee-like through a small hole in the back of the tent. Two plates through won a prize, but few won because the plates were not uniform, and a toss that would send one plate through the hole would send another plate flying skyward toward the roof of the tent.

  Hunt pulled a clump of bills from his shirt pocket and tossed them on the counter, grabbing three plates in his left hand.

  “I want to buy these,” he told the operator, who shrugged. The plates cost him ten cents each. Hunt turned and began walking slowly toward Remo, whose eyes were still staring upward. It would be simple. First the white man, and, then, when he came down, the yellow man.

  One plate for each. And a spare. No way to miss. He was twelve feet from Remo now. Another step. He was ten feet away.

  Up above, Chiun had stopped “wheee”ing. He saw the man move toward Remo. His eyes narrowed into slits. There was something wrong; he could feel it, just as he had felt before that someone was following them. But then the Ferris wheel spun up over the top and the wheel assembly was between Chiun and Remo, and he could see Remo no more.

  Remo relaxed. The ride was slowing down. It would soon be over. Then he sensed movement behind his right shoulder. He turned casually.

  Flashing at him, like a flying saucer, was a metal plate. It spun, noiselessly, at his head, directly on a plane with the ground, its hard cutting edge moving straight for his two eyes.

  Damn, and here he was with a goldfish bowl that he couldn’t let get broken. The best he could do was slip his head to the right. His left arm crooked at the elbow, and then his hand shot forward like a spear. Its hardened fingertips caught the center of the plate just before it buzzed against his head. The plate shuddered, its metal center crumpled, and dropped at Remo’s feet.

  Now he looked up. Ten feet away, he saw a thin young man holding two more plates. Remo smiled. He had called the Divine Bliss Mission to let them know where he was, just so that anyone sent by the Maharaji Dor would be able to find him.

  Hunt smiled and waited as Remo moved another step closer. The fool. By chance, he had gotten his hand up and stopped the first plate. He would not be lucky this time.

  Another step by Remo, who was being very careful and moving slowly, so as not to spill any water from the goldfish bowl.

  The plate in Hunt’s right hand curled back under his left elbow, then shot forward toward Remo’s throat. At eight feet it could not miss.

  But, damn it, he was lucky again. He caught the edge of the plate, sliding off his left wrist, and the plate spun off its course, down into the asphalt pavement, where it dug a six-inch-long gouge before stopping.

  Remo took another step forward. Hunt realized plates would not do. He needed a sturdier weapon, and he had no stomach for hand-to-hand combat. He heard another “whee” from the Flying Bucket.

  Time to split.

  He looked up. The car carrying the Oriental had reached the bottom point of the ride and was now on its way up again. Hunt’s right hand again snaked back under his left elbow and then sent the third plate silently screaming toward the ride. Remo turned to watch, then moved toward the ride. The plate flew toward the car Chiun and Joleen occupied. Its front edge bit through the thin steel cable holding up the right side of the car, hacked through it, before the plate clattered off the side of the car toward the ground.

  The car started to drop.

  “Wheeee,” said Chiun, giggling. His left arm reached up and grabbed the frayed strand of cable. His left toe found a crevice inside the car and hooked itself into it. His right hand grabbed the safety bar. His left hand overhead, and his left foot and right hand below, prevented the car from plunging, and still shouting “wheeee” with all his might, Chiun held the car together as it rode up, around, and over the top of the wheel, with Joleen huddling in panic on her side of the compartment.

  “Stop that damned thing,” Remo yelled at the operator, who instantly pushed the heavy lever that tossed in the clutch of the motor, then squeezed the hand grip that acted as a brake. When the cars came around, the operator saw the broken cable and the old Oriental holding the car together. Expertly the operator brought the ride to a stop just as Chiun’s car reached the wooden boarding platform. Chiun released his left hand grip on the cable. The car dropped four inches and settled against the wooden platform.

  Chiun’s face was framed in a smile. “Wheeeee,” he said. He jumped out of the car. “What a wonderful ride. Do you have my goldfish?”

  “Yes, I have it. You all right?”

  Chiun smirked and looked toward Joleen, recovering from her shock and rising slowly to her feet.

  “Of course, we’re all right,” he said. “These rides are safe. No one ever gets hurt. Mr. Disney would not let that happen.”

  Remo turned. The young man had gone. Following him now would be a waste of time.

  Later, outside the carnival, Chiun confided, “There is one thing, Remo, I do not understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When Mr. Disney shoots the plate at the cable and breaks it, how many people have the control to grip the cable and hold the vehicle together? Do not some fall?”

  “No,” said Remo, his right index finger hooked into the goldfish bowl. “That’s the first thing we Americans learn. How to grab the cable and hold the ride together.”

  “A very curious thing,” said Chiun. “Here you are, a nation of people who cannot talk and cannot run and cannot move well, who eat the flesh of every sort of bea
st, and yet you can do that.”

  “It is easy,” said Remo.

  “Another thing. Did you see someone following you in the park? A thin, young man?”

  “No,” said Remo. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “Typical,” said Chiun. “You never notice anything. Don’t drop the goldfish.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Although he fled the amusement park, Hunt had a smile on his face that would have been hard to ascribe to failure.

  The young American had been able to block the plates, and Hunt would no longer call it luck. So this Remo was exceptional. So? So it did not matter. Hunt had been warned years before by his grandfather that there were some such people.

  In recollection now, it seemed as if his grandfather had been trying to prepare him for the life of the assassin, but that too was immaterial. What was important was that his grandfather had told him of the way to deal with people who had physical skills that were out of the ordinary. A simple technique, but foolproof. Next time, there would be no swift hands blocking plates.

  Hunt smiled again as he drove out toward the lower edge of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. He knew how he would handle this Remo the next time they met, and he looked forward to the meeting.

  · · ·

  Meanwhile, Elton Snowy had other things on his mind.

  He stood at the counter of the sporting goods store on Market Street.

  “I want a gross of shells. Double O buck.”

  “A gross?” asked the clerk, smiling faintly.

  “A gross. That’s one hundred forty and four.”

  “Yes, sir. Big hunting trip, eh?”

  “You might say that,” said Snowy. He paid cash and angrily signed his real name and address to the register kept in the gun department. The clerk noted the name as Snowy left the shop, then, recalling the look of grim anger on the big man’s red face, walked toward the telephone.

  Snowy’s next stop was another sporting goods store at the farthest end of Market Street, where the street dissolves into a maze of crossing streets and highways and trolley tracks, seemingly always under repair. There he purchased a .38 caliber revolver and ammunition, again paid cash, again signed a register, and again, a clerk, noting the set to his jaw, waited until the man had left and then called the police department.