Killing Time td-50 Page 2

  "No gun, see?" another worker said, demonstrat­ing his lack of weapons by raising his arms high in the air and wetting his pants.

  "No gun, see?" the other said, falling to his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.

  "You the boss?" Remo asked.

  "No way," the worker said with touching sincerity. "We're just labor. Management's what you want, yessir."

  "Who's management?"

  "Mr. Bonelli. 'Bones' Bonelli. He's over there." He gestured wildly toward the interior of the warehouse.

  Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli sat behind a desk in the only carpeted and heated room in the place. Behind him was one small window, placed high above the floor. Seated in a huge red feather chair, he looked more like an overaged wraith than an underworld her­oin don. His hair was thinning, and his leather skin fell in folds down his skull-like face, which was grinning in ecstasy. The top half of Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli was a tiny, wrinkled, happy crone. The bottom half, displayed beneath the leg opening of the desk, was an ample, satin-covered rear end facing in the opposite direction. Below it protruded two spiky black high heels.

  The satin oval swayed rhythmically. Bonelli's mouth opened to emit a small squeal of joy. "Oh. . . oh. . . shit," he said, noticing Remo standing in the doorway. "Who're you?"

  One hand twitched frantically in his lap, while the

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  other pulled a ludicrously large Colt .45 from his jacket. "Arggh," he screamed, throwing the gun into the air. "Zipper. The freaking zipper's caught."

  "Thanks," Remo said, grabbing the gun.

  "Freaking zipper. It's all your fault."

  "Use buttons," Remo said. "Or a fig leaf. In your case, maybe a grape leaf will do."

  Bonelli's trigger finger moved back and forth sev­eral times before he noticed it was empty. "Gimme that gun."

  "Sure," Remo said, crushing the Colt into dust and sifting it into Bonelli's open hand.

  "Smart shit," Bonelli muttered. He kicked the girl under the desk. "Hey, you. Get outta here. I got bus­iness."

  The satin ovai wriggled out backwards and rose. It belonged to a statuesque blonde who carried the im­print of Bonelli's foot on her chest. "What about me?" she groused, her face contorted with anger. Then she saw Remo, and the anger disappeared.

  Remo often had that effect on women. He saw her appraising eyes warm with approval as she took in the slender, taut body with the abnormally thick wrists, the well-muscled shoulders, the clean-shaven face accen­tuated by high cheekbones and long-lashed dark eyes, the thick black hair. She smiled.

  "You come here often?" she asked.

  "Only when I have to kill someone."

  "You're cute."

  "Get out of here!" Bonelli yelled. The girl sauntered away slowly, giving Remo the full benefit of her undu­lating posterior.

  "What's this 'kill me' crap?" Bonelli spat. "What kind of talk is that?"

  Remo shrugged. "That's what i'm here for."

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  "Oh, yeah?" With a quick motion, Bonelli yanked a knife out of his jacket and sliced the air with it. "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yeah," Remo said, catching the knife by the blade. He tossed it upward in a spiral. The knife drilled a neat hole in the ceiling. Plaster dust sprinkled down on Bonelli's head and shoulders.

  "Smart shit," Bonelii said. "Hey, what're you do­ing?"

  "I'm taking you for a ride," Remo said, imitating ail the gangsters he'd seen on late-night TV movies. He hoisted Bonelli over his shoulder.

  "Watch it, creep. This here's a silk suit. Mess up my suit, I'm going to have to get serious with you."

  Remo tore the pockets off the jacket. Two knives and a stiletto clanked out.

  "Okay, buddy," Bonelli raged. "You asked for it now. Shorty! Shorty!"

  "Shorty?" Remo guessed his cargo's weight at 110, tops. Bonelli was barely five feet tall. "Shorty? What's that make you, Paul Bunyan?"

  Bonelli sneered. He jerked his thumb toward the window. "That's Shorty," he said.

  The small overhead window was filled by a face. The face had little pig eyes and a nose so broken it looked like a ball of putty that had been run over by a tank tread. Soon the tops of two massive shoulders edged into the window. The pane burst in a shower of glass. Spiderweb cracks appeared in the window's corners and spread into the room, widening with thun­derous claps. Then the wall gave and Shorty shot through the opening like a sausage with a lit fuse.

  "You called, boss?"

  "Yeah. Take care of this smart shit."

  Shorty lumbered over to Remo. "This one?"

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  "Who else?" Bonelli roared. "There's you, me, and him in this room. You thinking about offing me?"

  Shorty's face fell with humility. "Oh, no, boss. You're the boss. ! wouldn't do that to you."

  "Then you're maybe thinking about offing your­self?"

  Shorty pondered for several moments, his brow fur­rowed in concentration. Then his forehead smoothed and he broke into a happy grin. "Oh. I get it. That's a joke, huh, boss? Off myself. That's funny, boss. Ha, ha "

  "Shut upi"

  "Okay, boss."

  "Then who's that leave, Shorty?" Bonelli asked pa­tiently.

  Shorty looked around the room, counting on his fin­gers. 'Well, there's you. You ain't the one. And there's me. . . ha, ha, that was funny, boss."

  "Who else, stupid?"

  Shorty lumbered around until he faced Remo. "That leaves him," he said with conviction. He pulled back his oaken arm and blasted it forward.

  "Right," said Boneili.

  "Wrong," said Remo. He flicked out two fingers to deflect the blow. Shorty's arm kept going, swing­ing around in a circle and finally landing in the mid­dle of his own face, causing his oft-broken nose to dis­appear entirely. He fell forward with a deafening thud.

  "So much for Shorty," Remo said as he lifted Bon­elli again, this time by his belt, and carried him through the wrecked wall, dangling at his side.

  "The belt, watch the belt," Bonelli said. "It's Pierre Cardin."

  Remo began scaling the sheer wall of the ware-

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  house. Bonelli looked down once and screamed. "Holy freaking shit," he yelled. "Where are you taking me?"

  "Up." Remo climbed the wall methodically, his toes catching on the bricks of the building, his free hand gently guiding ahead and working with gravity to pull him upward.

  "May the saints curse you," Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli sobbed. "May your days be filled with suffer­ing and hardship. May your mother's lasagne be laced with cow turds. May your children and your children's children-"

  "Hey, zip it up, will you? I'm trying to kill somebody. You're wrecking my concentration."

  "Always with the smart shit. May your grandchil­dren be smitten with boils. May your wife lie with lepers."

  "Look, if you don't stop hurting my feelings, I'm going to forget about you and leave," Remo said.

  "That's the idea. May your uncles choke on chicken bones."

  "Just a second," Remo said, stopping. "Now that's getting personal. You don't mess with a guy's uncles. I'm leaving." He tossed Bonelli into the air. Bonelli shrieked, his voice growing small as he catapulted up­wards.

  "Take that back," Remo said.

  "I take it back," Bonelli howled.

  "How much?"

  "All of it. Everything." He paused in midair for a mo­ment, then began his screaming descent. "Help!"

  "Will you shut up?"

  "Yes. Yes. Forever. Silence."

  "You'll let me concentrate?"

  "Do anything you want. Jest catch me." As he ap-

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  preached eye-level with Remo, Remo reached out and clasped Bonelli by his belt. With a whoosh of air and frantic movements of a drowning man, Bonelli whin­nied once, then opened his eyes a crack and discov­ered he was still alive.

  "Smart-"

  "Ah-ah-ah," Remo cautioned.

  Boneili was silent.

  The rest of the six-story climb was peac
eful. Remo whistled an ancient Korean tune he'd learned from Chiun. The melody was haunting and lovely, and the sound it made in the crisp winter air made it even more beautiful. In the background, birds were singing. Remo half forgot about the narcotics king dangling from his right arm as he made his way up the building.

  Sometimes Remo almost enjoyed his job. He sup­posed that made him a pervert. Assassins weren't generally happy people, and Remo guessed that he was probably no happier than most people who killed other people for a living. But at least he killed people who deserved to be killed. He didn't hire himself out to greedy landlords who had stubborn tenants put away because those tenants didn't have the good grace to die quickly in their rent-controlled apartments. He didn't shoot foreign students because a thrill-crazed dictator decreed it. He killed when there was killing to be done. When there was nothing else that could be done.

  Like all professional assassins, Remo did not de­cide whose souls would be liberated from their bodies. That was done for him by an organization developed by a president of the United States long ago as a last-ditch emergency measure to control crime. Only the emergency never passed, and the president was him­self murdered, and so the organization continued.

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  It was called CURE. CURE was possibly the most highly illegal instrument America had ever devised to combat crime. Unknown to ali but three people on earth, CURE worked outside the Constitution-utterly outside. CURE had no rules, and only one objective: to control crime when every other method of con­trolling it had failed.

  Of the three people who knew about CURE, the president of the United States was the least important. It was his option either to use the special red phone in a bedroom of the White House or not. The red phone was a direct line to CURE'S headquarters in Rye, New York. Almost every president, upon learning from his predecessor about the red phone, swore that CURE would never be used. The existence of an organiza­tion like CURE was an admission that America's legal system had failed miserably, and no new president would admit that. And so the red phone would rest, forgotten, for months at a time at the beginning of each new administration. But eventually it was used. It was always used.

  And when that red phone was picked up, it was an­swered immediately by a lemony-voiced man, the sec-, ond person who knew of CURE'S existence. That man was Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  Smith was as unlikely a personality to run an illegal organization as could be found on the face of the earth. His principal interest lay in computer informa­tion analysis. He was precise, fastidious, methodical, and law-abiding by nature.

  His job, as director of CURE, brought him into daily contact with murder, arson, treason, blackmail, and other forms of man-made catastrophe. The long-dead president who had begun CURE had hand-picked Smith, knowing that illegal work would be difficult for

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  him. Smith had been chosen because he possessed one quality, which the president knew would override all possible objections Smith could have about the na­ture of his work: Harold W. Smith loved his country more than anything else. He would see to it that the job got done. Or didn't get done, according to the best interests of the country. Even the president himself could do no more than suggest assignments to Harold W. Smith. CURE obeyed no one.

  The third person who knew about CURE was the en­forcement arm of the organization. One man, trained in an ancient form of defense and attack developed millennia ago in the small Korean village of Sinanju. One man who could perform the impossible.

  That man was Remo Williams.

  He had scaled all six stories of the warehouse now, the silent but pained-looking Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli in tow. Below, the two dock workers were once again loading the crates full of white death into the parked truck. As he tossed Bonelli onto the flat, snow-covered roof, the small man grimaced and ciutched at his side.

  "What's the matter?" Remo asked dubiously.

  "It's just that song."

  What song?"

  "The one you kept whistling. You know, over and over, over and over."

  "What about it?"

  Bonelli doubled over. "It gave me gas," he said. "I didn't want to say nothing over there"-he gestured vaguely over the side-"but, I mean, like if you've got to sing, couldn't you do 'My Way' or 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco'?" Not that" weird shit. Gives me a pocket, right here." He pointed to a region of his intes­tines.

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  "You've just got no taste," Remo said. Chiun was getting to him, he knew. He was even beginning to re­mind himself of Chiun.

  But he wouldn't worry about that, he decided. He wouldn't worry because at the moment there were other things to worry about. Like the fact that Giu­seppe "Bones" Bonelli had reached into his inside coat pocket and was unfolding something metallic with a black handle. It was a hatchet. Chortling with glee, Bonelli swung it in Remo's direction, the blade singing.

  "Okay, smart shit. You asked for it." He brought the blade home. It struck at exactly the place where Re­mo's head was, only Remo's head was no longer there. The thin young man had miraculously moved to another spot in a movement so fast that Bonelli couldn't follow it. Bonelli struck again. And missed.

  "I wish you'd cut this out," Remo said, casually tossing the hatchet away. In the distance, outside the compound, it buried itself deep in a large tree.

  "Nice," Bonelli said admiringly. "Hey, who are you, anyway?"

  "Call me Remo."

  Bonelli smiled broadly. "Remo. That's a nice name, sonny. Sounds Italian. You Italian?"

  "Maybe," Remo said. He was an orphan. As far as he knew, his ancestry could have been anything.

  "I thought so. You got a brain like a paisan. That was good, that tree. Say, Remo, I could use a guy like you in the business."

  "I don't think I like your business."

  "Hey, it's good money. And you'll be part of the family. Do lots of family things together."

  "Like shooting dope into children."

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  "Remo, paisan," he said expansively. "It's busi­ness, that's all. Supply and demand. Buy low, sell high. I'll show you all the ropes."

  Remo thought about it. "No, I don't think so," he said. "There's something else I'd rather do."

  "More than making money? Come on."

  "No," Remo protested. "I really think I'd rather do this other thing."

  "What's that?"

  "I'd rather kill you."

  Bonelli snarled. "Okay, kid. You had your chance. No more Mister Nice Guy." He rifled through his trouser pockets and pulled out a grenade. "You leave now, or I pull the plug."

  "Like this?" Remo said, snatching it away from him and pulling out the pin.

  "What'd you do that for? Throw it, quick."

  Remo tossed the grenade up in the air absently and caught it behind his back. "Nah," he said. "I'm tired of throwing." He tossed it up in the air again. Bonelli leaped up, but Remo caught it just above Bonelli's reach.

  "Give me that." '

  "What for?" Remo asked, juggling the grenade in one hand.

  "I'll throw it," Bonelli said, sweat pouring down his face.

  "I've got a better idea," Remo said. "You eat it." He stuffed the grenade into Bonelli's mouth and shook his hand. "Nice to meet you. I'll keep your offer in mind."

  Then he flipped Bonelli into the air and the man fell, eyes bulging, on a direct course with the truck below. The crates had afl been loaded. The back of the truck

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  was sealed, and the two workers were sitting in the cab up front, its motor running.

  Good timing, Remo thought as Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli landed on top of the truck and blew to frag­ments.

  For a moment, the air was filled with a miasma of white powder containing shards of splintered wood. Then the sky was ciear again, and blue and cold, and Remo climbed down the building, singing an old Ko­rean tune.

  Chiun was singing the same tune when Remo walked into the Manhattan motel room they shared. The lyrics, translated from the Korean, went some�
�thing like: "O lovely one, when I behold your gracious ways, your beauty, like the melting snow of spring, makes my heart weep with tears of joy." He was sing­ing it while gazing at himself in the mirror, arranging the folds of his gold brocade robe. He swayed as he sang, causing the white wisps of hair on his head and chin to move softly. In the background, the television blared a commercial, in which a foul-tempered ten-year-old girl refused to let her younger brother use the family's coveted toothpaste, while her mother smiled on benignly.

  "What is this racket?" Remo said, switching off the television.

  "Lout," Chiun muttered. He jumped off the dresser, where he had been sitting, and seemed to float to the ground. "Who can expect a white man to appreciate beauty?" He turned the television on again. "O lovely one, when I behold your gracious ways. . ."

  "Look, Little Father, if you're going to sing, don't you think it'll be less distracting without the TV?"

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  "Only a pale piece of pig's ear can be so easily dis­tracted. Besides, there is nothing worth watching on the television."

  "Then why do you have it on?"

  Chiun sighed exasperatedly. "I have it on because there is going to be something worth watching. Any­one can see that."

  The screen now showed a boxy, cheaply con­structed compact automobile racing down a hill to the accompaniment of an orchestra.

  "What?" Remo shouted above the din of the Wil­liam Tell Overture.

  The automobile drove off the screen and was re­placed by the venomous stare of an Oriental newswoman who looked as if she ate babies for break­fast.

  "Oh, it is she," Chiun said breathlessly, his long-nailed hands fluttering to his chest as he drifted into a lotus position in front of the set.

  "This is Cheeta Ching welcoming you to the WACK NEWS UPDATE," she snarled. "It's really bad news tonight," she added, her flat features twisting into a malevolent grin.

  "O lovely one. O gracious person," Chiun rhap­sodized.

  "Oh, cut me a break," Remo said. "This is what's worth watching? This vicious harpy?"

  "Out," Chiun commanded. "You do not deserve to be in the same room as the beautiful lotus blossom Miss Cheeta Ching. You who prefer the cowlike teats of Western giantesses. You who prefer the vacuous stares of round-eyed, white-skinned fools like your­self."