Murder Ward Read online

  “Hey, hey, hey. Pretty chipper,” Al said.

  Chiun ignored him. “Because you are going to die, I am going to tell you the reason.”

  “Oh, yes,” Freddy mocked. “Tell us the reason, before you tear us apart with your bare hands.” He winked at Al.

  “You are going to die because you laid a hand upon the child of the Master of Sinanju.”

  Al rotated his finger near his temple. “He’s gone, Freddy. Maybe the big dose wipes out the brain. Nutty as a fruitcake.”

  Freddy said, “We’d better put him back in the jacket, so he doesn’t create any row. How’d you get out of that anyway, Williams?”

  Chiun rose slowly to his feet, twisting as he rose so he faced the two men across five feet of carpeting.

  He was silent

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Freddy said. “Let’s get you back into it.” He walked forward, extending his arms to put them on Chain’s shoulders.

  His fingertips were only inches from Chiun’s shoulders when there was a yellow blur as Chiun’s hand moved. Freddy felt the side of his neck turn wet. He clapped his hand to his head and felt, under his palm, that his right ear had been severed.

  “Bastard,” he shouted and turned at Chiun, swinging a roundhouse right hand. But it hit nothing and again Freddy felt the pain, but this time on the left side of his head. His other ear was gone and the blood ran wildly down the side of his jaw and neck. Chiun stood motionless as if rooted in the one spot. Freddy screamed, his hands over the gaping wounds where his ears had been. Al stepped forward to help him, but before he could intercede, he saw two longnailed hands flash out and he heard the crack as they hit into Freddy’s head. It was a sickening, breaking sound; Freddy dropped to the floor and Al knew he was dead.

  Al stopped halfway in his charge, then turned and fled toward the door. But alongside him—by God, the old man was moving along the wall—there was a green figure, and then the grim aged Oriental specter stood in front of the door, a hand upraised to stop him. Al swallowed, then charged, and Chiun imposed upon him a slow lingering death, before he experienced which, Al wet his pants.

  Chiun stepped over the bodies and went back to the television set which was now booming organ music and showing the introductions to his personal rerun of that day’s showing of As the Planet Revolves. Chiun looked around at the corpses, the blood, the vomit, the various body parts, and shook his head sadly. Remo would have to clean up this mess. The room was getting disgusting.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  KATHY HAHL WAS BENT over a file cabinet, sticking papers into a briefcase, when Remo went into her office. He moved silently toward her, reached around her and grasped her breasts.

  He squeezed them gently, his fingers kneading the tips through her thin sweater. He could feel her instant arousal, and he pressed his lower body against hers.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “Is that any way to talk to a man who’s going to be old enough to be your grandfather?”

  He released her, stepped back, and she turned around. Her face showed her shock at seeing him, then she relaxed into a smile.

  “I’m surprised to see you still up and about,” she said, “Mr. Williams. Is it really Mr. Williams?”

  “Yes, it is. Remo Williams.”

  “Are you really a billionaire hermit?”

  “Afraid not. Just your everyday garden-variety assassin.”

  “I see,” she said. “How do you feel? Has the headache gone yet?”

  “I just got over it.”

  “That’s normal. The aging process starts any moment now. You may already be able to feel it. Does the skin at the side of your eyes start to feel a little tight? That’s the loss of elasticity that comes with age. And the back of your hands. Your veins should become more pronounced and the skin should start to wrinkle. Has that happened yet? No worry. Any moment now.”

  “Good. It’ll give me something to look forward to,” Remo said.

  “How did you get here? Freddy and Al went down for you.”

  “They missed me. I’m sure they found enough to keep them busy.”

  “Remo Williams, eh? Who are you with? The IRS? The FBI?”

  “None of those. I’m kind of a freelance for the government. Tell me, Kathy, since it doesn’t matter any more, what was this all about? Was it just the money?”

  She smiled, showing even, crystal white teeth. “Since it doesn’t matter, I’ll tell you. Sure it was the money. But not the small change I got for doing in people on the table.”

  “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 ge
t 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 Quaaludes.

  “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.

  Remo turned slowly and looked back at Chiun who waited on the top step.

  “Merry Christmas,” Chiun said.

  “Thank you,” said Remo, meaning it.

  “Even if you do not give me a gift.”

  About the Authors

  WARREN MURPHY was born in Jersey City, where he worked in journalism and politics until launching the Destroyer series with Richard Sapir in 1971. A screenwriter (Lethal Weapon II, The Eiger Sanction) as well as a novelist, Murphy’s work has won a dozen national awards, including multiple Edgars and Shamuses. He has lectured at many colleges and universities, and is currently offering writing lessons at his website, warrenmurphy.com. A Korean War veteran, some of Murphy’s hobbies include golf, mathematics, opera, and investing. He has served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America, and has been a member of the Screenwriters Guild, the Private Eye Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the American Crime Writers League. He has five children: Deirdre, Megan, Brian, Ardath, and Devin.

  RICHARD BEN SAPIR was a New York native who worked as an editor and in public relations before creating the Destroyer series with Warren Murphy. Before his untimely death in 1987, Sapir had also penned a number of thriller and historical mainstream novels, best known of which were The Far Arena, Quest and The Body, the last of which was made into a film. The book review section of the New York Times called him “a brilliant professional.”

  Also by Warren Murphy

  The Destroyer Series (#1-25)

  Created, The Destroyer

  Death Check

  Chinese Puzzle

  Mafia Fix

  Dr. Quake

  Death Therapy

  Union Bust

  Summit Chase

  Murder’s Shield

  Terror Squad

  Kill or Cure

  Slave Safari

  Acid Rock

  Judgment Day

  Murder Ward

  Oil Slick

  Last War Dance

  Funny Money

  Holy Terror

  Assassin’s Playoff

  Deadly Seeds

  Brain Drain

  Child’s Play

  King’s Curse

  Sweet Dreams

  The Trace Series

  Trace

  And 47 Miles of Rope

  When Elephants Forget

  Pigs Get Fat

  Once a Mutt

  Too Old a Cat

  Getting up with Fleas

  Copyright

  This digital edition of Murder Ward (v1.0) was published in 2013 by Gere Donovan Press.

  If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.

  Copyright © 2012 by Warren Murphy

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Errata

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