Mob Psychology td-87 Read online

  "Great! Can you write?"

  "No. Can you?"

  "'No."

  More silence. Jeter Baird and Devin Western eyed their pizzas with a sad mixture of disappointment and hunger.

  Popular culture stood at a crossroads at that moment, although neither artist knew it. Had they fallen to eating their cooling pizza in sullen silence, billions of dollars would never have changed hands, tens of thousands of craftsmen, assembly-line workers, shippers, and truck drivers worldwide would have gone without work, and millions of children across the globe would have grown up with lives somehow emptier and joyless, and no one would ever have known it.

  It was then that Devin said, "I know. We'll both write and we'll both draw."

  "Great," they said in unison, flipping open their sketchbooks to blank pages.

  As their pizzas cooled and congealed, they swapped ideas.

  "Terrapin Warrior," suggested Devin. "We'll make him a ninja. Ninjas are hot."

  "That was last year. Androids are big this year. Personally, I think androids are too plastic to last. Mutants are good for another five years. We should do mutants."

  "Mutants suck. They're always whining and complaining about being mutants. Besides, I don't want to be too commercial. I'm a serious comic-book artist."

  "Yeah," said Jeter. "When you're too commercial, no one respects your work."

  Marketing philosophies in synch, Jeter Baird and Devin Western brainstormed to closing. The trouble was, they found, all the great superhero character names were taken.

  "Cow Princess," Jeter announced, holding up a pencil rough of a voluptuous Amazon with a triple-decker bosom. "She gores her enemies with her forehead horns."

  Devin frowned with his mouth and ogled with his eyes.

  "My mother would kill me if she caught me drawing a girl with six breasts," he said. "Besides, cows don't have horns."

  They went back to work.

  "Ira-dah!" Devin shouted. "Giraffe Boy."

  "How will he get through doors with that neck?" asked Jeter critically, looking at the hasty sketch. "You know how much trouble Flaming Carrot has."

  "Good point. Maybe we should get away from animals and fish. Be original. Go with. . . ."

  "Fruit. "

  "The Ultimate Pistachio," cried Devin, sketching up a storm. "See, he wears a giant kevlar-titanium pistachio shell over his face to conceal his true identity as a migrant worker. "

  "Do pistachios have superpowers?" wondered Jeter.

  Devin chewed his pencil eraser. "They're hard and salty," he ventured.

  "so's Popeye the Sailor, and he hasn't been big since the fifties. "

  "I still like my terrapins," Devin said forlornly, scribbling a quartet of happy reptilian faces.

  "Mutant Terrapins!" Jeter shouted in triumph.

  "No. We gotta be original. Can't call them mutants."

  "Transformed Terrapins," suggested Jeter, adding a row of domino masks to his newfound collaborator's sketch.

  "Good start," said Devin, grinning with approval. "How about giving them nunchuks?"

  "How about Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins?" blurted out Jeter Baird, inadvertently coining a new industry.

  "Yeah, yeah. It's fresh, it's original, and most if all it's not commercial."

  "Right. No one will take us seriously if we're too commercial. "

  Little did they dream.

  By emptying their tuition funds, Jeter and Devin printed five hundred thousand copies of the first issue of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins, and when the first shipment arrived at their dorm, they ripped open the boxes and reveled in the thrill of being published comic-book artists at last.

  Then harsh reality sank in.

  "This isn't as funny as I remember," said Devin.

  "Maybe we should have hired a writer," muttered Jeter.

  They looked at one another, going as slack-jawed as their creations.

  "Will anyone buy these?" wondered Devin.

  "Will we ever finish our education?" worried Jeter.

  Their eyes widened in alarm as they realized that their mothers were going to kill them when they found out.

  Jeter and Devin canvased every comic-book store and newsstand in Amherst, trying to sell Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins to anyone that would take them.

  Where they weren't laughed at, they were spit upon.

  " I can't tell my mother," wailed Jeter.

  "Neither can I," moaned Devin.

  It was Jeter who hit upon the thing that was to enable them to recoup their investment and make them millionaires many times over.

  "There's only one thing we can do," he said.

  "What that?"

  "Get on the Tuckahoe show."

  "How will that help?"

  "It won't," Jeter admitted. "But both our moms watch him every day. It's better than having to watch them cry when they learn what we did."

  They hitchhiked to New York City, a case of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins number one under each arm.

  It was surprisingly easy, they found. The research director of The Bil Tuckahoe Show had only to listen to their tale of woe once when she blurted out, "College students who squander their tuition money on comic books!" she cried. "It's perfect, and we can postpone that awful segment on monkey makeovers."

  "But we didn't buy them," Jeter started to say.

  "We had them printed," Devin finished.

  "Don't say another word! Bil likes his guests to go on cold."

  The next day, frightened and tearful, Jeter and Devin found themselves in front of a studio audience as the silverhaired Bil Tuckahoe fixed them with his sheepdog eyes and demanded, "You two boys are addicted to comic books, aren't you? Admit it. You'll do anything for a mint copy of The Fantastic Four. Lie, cheat, steal, sell your parents into slavery. "

  They tried to explain. Devin started to cry. Jeter lifted a copy of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins number one up to his face like a felon being hauled before a judge.

  A camerman rushed in to capture the cover in his viewfinder, while a studio technician punched up a slugline graphic which read, "Deter Baird. Addicted to Comic Books."

  The image of four fat masked sea turtles clutching Oriental weaponry was broadcast across the nation for the first time, electrifying preschool America.

  Jeter Baird and Devin Western never sold a single copy of their comic book. They never finished college or got their marketing degrees.

  They didn't have to. The cartoon, toy, and film offers began pouring in before taping ended on that day's edition of The Bil Tuckahoe Show.

  Soon the images of the four terrapins was unavoidable from Manhattan to Madagascar. The money came in by the sackful. Every toy deal triggered another. Modest TV cartoons led to full-length movie deals. Everything the scaly cartoon creatures touched turned to gold.

  It was an American success story of unprecedented proportions.

  And, like all American success stories, it had a downside.

  Jeter and Devin had enjoyed six years of exponential business expansion, moving directly from their cramped dorm rooms to a sprawling office park cum movie studio just outside of Amherst, when they realized the free ride was over.

  They realized this when, during the filming of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins III: Shell Game, a sniper killed the star, D'Artagnan.

  D'Artagnan was not the actor's actual name. It was Sammy Bong, an out-of-work chopsocky actor running around the TM backlot in a polyurethane-and-foam-rubber anamatronic Terrapin costume.

  D'Artagnan was about to run an evil ninja through with a fencer's sword when his polyurethane shell was split by a steel jacketed bullet and the green of his foam chest turned dark with blood.

  The demand note came in the morning mail, while Jeter and Devin were still in shock.

  The note said: "We get ten percent. Gross. Or Athos is next."

  To add insult to injury, the note was made from words cut out of Terrapin toy ads and paste
d onto a sheet of official Terrapin kiddie stationery.

  "What do we do?" asked Devin in a sick voice.

  "We pay. Next time it could be us."

  The trouble was, the note forgot to say whom to pay.

  They found Athos with his green throat slit and stuffed into a trash barrel on the backlot that very afternoon, his threetoed webbed feet dangling askew over the sides.

  Nicky Kix Stivaletta showed up as the private ambulance was hauling the deceased Terrapin away under the wide unblinking eyes of the surviving Terrapins, Aramis and Porthos.

  Nicky Kix stepped out of the work car and sauntered up to Jeter and Devin. He was flanked by two goons in pinstripes.

  Devin, quicker on the uptake, hissed to the surviving Terrapins, "Swim for it!"

  The Terrapins held their ground. They wanted to defend their honor.

  "Or you're both fired," added Jeter.

  The dejected terrapins slunk off to safety.

  "You get my message?" asked Nicky Kix, rolling a toothpick around his mouth as he pushed the hard words out.

  "Why'd you kill Athos? We were going to pay you!" demanded Devin, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Nicky Kix shrugged. "I like the smell of roadkill."

  "Ten percent?" said Jeter.

  "Cash. No checks."

  "Can we get a receipt?" Jeter and Devin asked in unison, their incomplete business courses coming into play.

  "No," said Nicky Kix in a bored voice.

  Dejectedly Jeter and Devin led Nicky Kix and his muscular entourage to their joint office, pushing aside plush Terrapin toys, edging past Terrapin arcade video games and cardboard movie-lobby standees.

  Jeter cleared a cardboard box containing breakfast-a pepper-and-onion pizza-from a chair so Nicky Kix could sit down.

  "I'll stand," said Nicky Kix, eyeing the stained seat warily. He snapped his fingers impatiently. "Now, pony up. I ain't got all day."

  In fact, Nicky Kix Stivaletta was destined not to have more than a minute and thirteen seconds remaining in his entire life.

  He got an inkling of this when the office door suddenly banged open, upsetting a three-foot-tall plush Aramis doll.

  Nicky's bodyguards whirled, hands going into coats, fingers wrapping around hard steel pistol grips.

  Webbed three-fingered hands beat them to the draw.

  One pair simply swept in for Sal (Toe Biter) Bugliosi's unprotected ears. He heard a thunderclap that kept his eardrums ringing until three days after his embalming. The air pressure scrambled his brain in its skull cavity and opened every fissure in the protective bone.

  The other Terrapin-his purple mask and short stature marked him as Porthos-employed a high kick to break Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga's pelvis like a soda cracker.

  Pauli let go of his half-drawn pistol and grabbed his crotch, which was leaking all manner of body fluids, and tried to claw his lower body back into an erect position.

  But his legs simply bent at ankles and knees and he made a messy moist pile where he had stood.

  "Aramis!" blurted Jeter.

  "Porthos?" gulped Devin.

  "Bullshit," snarled Nicky Kix as he drew down on the advancing Terrapins with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun he whipped out from under his coat.

  He hauled back on one trigger.

  The blast riddled Aramis. Unfortunately for Nicky Kix, it was the plush Aramis in a corner. It also cracked the arcade game screen and made a cheap plastic Terrapin alarm clock jangle discordantly.

  Porthos was wide open, however. Nicky sent a blast of buckshot toward his sappy face.

  The blast, however, made a kind of black spiral galaxy pattern in the dropped fiberboard ceiling.

  Nicky Kix looked up. He saw the peppery hits. He looked down, where he noticed a green three-fingered hand holding his smoking shotgun barrels at an upward angle.

  He was thinking: Where have I seen this shit before? when the shotgun was taken away from him rather harshly, and returned, stock-first, into his abdomen.

  Nicky Kix said "Oof" and doubled over, still on his feet.

  A spongy green hand grabbed him by his Brylereemed hair and led him over to a microwave parked on a corner table.

  "In you go," said a casual male voice.

  Nicky thought that he sounded nothing like the real Aramis. He also thought that he was in no danger. Sure, his head was in a microwave oven. But everybody knew they wouldn't work unless the door was closed. And this couldn't happen as long as his neck was in the way.

  The male voice asked, "Care to do the honors, Little Father?"

  "Normally I do not sully my hands with machines," said a strangely familiar squeaky voice, "but this one is guilty of cruelty to reptiles."

  Then came the funny noises. Bangings and crunchings. A piece of the oven wall pierced Nicky Kix's unshaven cheek and he realized that the oven was being compacted. He couldn't imagine how. A steel shard embedded itself in his forehead next. His ears were mashed against the sides of his head. The noises wouldn't stop, and when Nicky reached out for the microwave to pull his head loose, it felt like he had got hold of a crashed sputnik.

  "I'd say he's about ready, wouldn't you?" the guy said.

  "Let us see if the device still functions," said the squeaky voice.

  Despite his predicament, Nicky Kix managed a raucous laugh.

  "You guys ain't shit, you know that? It'll never work. There's a contact in the door that has to touch another contact to complete the circuit."

  "Thanks for reminding me."

  He heard the scrape of a mangled timer dial and the tenative toiling of the timer mechanism itself. Then a sound like a coin dropping into a cigarette-machine slot.

  Then Nicky Kix enjoyed the exquisite agony of having every water molecule in his cranium boil under an intense microwave bombardment.

  He came erect as if impelled by a cattle prod.

  He was dead before a three-fingered greenish hand slam-dunked the compacted microwave, Nicky's head and body following, into a trash barrel, incidentally yanking the plug from the socket.

  "I thought those things wouldn't work unless the door was shut," said Jeter Baird, eyeing the dead body partially stuffed into a small Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapin kiddie wastebaket.

  "They will if you rip the contact off the door and jam it into the other contact," said the tall green figure of Aramis.

  "Who are you guys?" asked Devin.

  "You know how some people have guardian angels?" Aramis asked.

  "Yeah."

  "You two have guardian Terrapins. Congratulations."

  This made perfect sense to Jeter and Devin, who had grown up on a steady diet of comic books.

  "How can we ever repay you?" asked a relieved Jeter.

  "You are allowed to tip," said the squeaky voice of Porthos.

  "Don't listen to him," said Aramis. "We work for free. You won't be bothered again."

  "Although we do not guarantee untipped work," Porthos added darkly.

  Jeter and Devin hastily brought out their wallets and gave all their personal cash to their guardian Terrapin, Porthos.

  "Pass," said Aramis when they offered him a plush D'Artagnan doll. "Just do us all a favor. Don't mention this to anyone."

  "Not even our mothers?" asked Devin.

  "Of course you should inform your mothers," said the squeaky-voiced Porthos. "One always tells one's mother of good fortune."

  After the pair had gone, Devin turned to Jeter.

  "You don't suppose it's true . . . "

  "If you think about it," said Jeter, "we have been having an unusual streak of luck since this whole thing started."

  For the rest of their days Jeter and Devin were never again visited by the guardian Terrapins. But they did discover the Hong Kong actors who usually played Aramis and Porthos. They were snoring, in full costume, in the back of the extortionists' car. They were unable to explain how they got there, nor why Aramis woke up wearing Porthos' head and vice versa.

/>   Chapter 29

  Dr. Harold W. Smith was attempting to do three things at once and was on the verge of succeeding.

  He was monitoring the LANSCII file as distant defeated fingers wiped clean the "TERRAPIN SKIM" heading. He was attempting to take his Zantac, a prescription ulcer medicine, and he was listening to Remo's brief report through the blue contact telephone.

  "Reptiles everywhere can snuggle in their shells in safety tonight," Remo was saying dryly.

  "Er, yes."

  "What's next?" Remo wondered.

  The office intercom buzzed. Reflexively Smith reached for the switch, inadvertently spilling his medicine.

  Suppressing his annoyance, he said, "Excuse me," as he depressed the switch while attempting to swallow a hot splash of stomach acid that had leapt up his esophagus.

  "Yes?" Smith said sourly.

  His secretary said, "The transfer patient has arrived, Dr. Smith. "

  "Excellent. Thank you."

  Smith returned to the blue phone. "Remo. Please ask Master Chiun to return to Folcroft."

  "What about me?"

  "I want you to go to New York City."

  "What's down there? Besides muggers?"

  "Don Fiavorante Pubescio. I want you to deliver a message to him."

  "What's the message?"

  "Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia is cheating on his rent."

  "Who's Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia?" Remo wanted to know.

  "The Boston don."

  "How'd you find out his name?" Remo asked, interested.

  "He foolishly listed himself on a payroll spreadsheet under the title of 'crime minister.' "

  "Catchy. And your snooping computers caught him ripping off his own people, huh?"

  "Not exactly," Smith said flatly. "Even as we speak, I am doctoring the LANSCII data base to show conclusive skimming of LCN profits for diversion into the Boston don's pockets."

  "You play pretty hard ball, Smitty."

  " I play to win," said Smith, hanging up. He reached for his Zantac, hoping there was enough left to quell his sour stomach.

  Chapter 30

  In his black walnut alcove in Little Italy, Don Fiavorante Pubescio waited for word from his soldier.

  "He should have called back by now," he said worriedly. "This thing should have been done by this time." He took a sip of lukewarm ginseng tea. It tasted bitter.