Bloody Tourists td-134 Page 3

  "I wanna cut him, don't I?" demanded a buzz-cut Anglo man with a steel stud in each nostril.

  "You do not want to cut him-none of you wants to hurt Fumar. All you want to do is spread the word."

  "Spread the word." The black woman nodded, her eyes now bright with fervor.

  "Spread the word. Spread the word about Fumar," the crowd agreed.

  "You right," the black woman cried suddenly, "You right about Fumar, and you right about you! You the greatest!"

  She came at him, and Grom groped for the window switch but was too slow.

  "I love you to pieces, white bread!" Her upper body wriggled into Greg Grom's car, forcing the window down, and she wrapped her bony arms around his neck, mashing her mouth against his. Her breath was putrid. Grom struggled, but his paramour was powered by passion. When she opened her mouth and probed his clamped lips with her tongue he felt the bile rising.

  He was saved by a shout from the crack-house crowd. "It's Fumar! He's coming!"

  Grom's admirer joined the mob. Every one of them faced the same way, watching Fumar come. And they chanted.

  "Spread the word."

  "No violence," Grom announced loudly, then added, "Unless he starts it."

  "We hate Fumar," the crowd growled. "Spread the word."

  "Spread the word."

  "Spread the word."

  The chant quickly became a battle cry as a tight knot of toughs rounded the corner. Grom pulled the rental car into Reverse.

  "You! Yeah, you! Where you think you're goin'!" The towering Latino stalking down the middle of the street had to be the man himself. Fumar was outfitted in embroidered jeans tight enough to profile his manhood and a green polyester sports jacket loose enough to hide his piece. A small army of powerful-looking bodyguards was at his heels, and every last one of them carried a persuader-a crowbar or a section of steel pipe.

  Grom knew they had guns, too. The question was if they could get them out and get a bullet into him before he got the hell away. He stomped on the gas, gripping the wheel as the rental screeched backward down the decrepit street.

  Fumar grabbed inside his coat just as Grom oversteered and sent the back end of the Buick into a brick building facade. A giant crunch came from the rear end and left Grom momentarily dazed.

  He rubbed his temple and blinked to clear his blurry vision, and by then he found the whole scene changed. Fumar and his boys had forgotten about Grom. They were too busy with the chanting crack house crowd.

  "Spread the word. Spread the word. We hate Fumar!" The neighborhood drug dealer wasn't used to this lack of appreciation from his loyal customers. They moved in on him, a congregation united by a common hatred.

  Grom was so enthralled he forgot his predicament. Had he done it? Was it working? He could see the intensity in their clenched faces, but the crack heads didn't lash out.

  There was no violence. At first.

  All it took was a shove. Fumar pushed one of the crack addicts out of his way. She was a skin-and-bones teenager who didn't look as if she had enough muscle mass to lift a cigarette, but she struck back at the drug dealer in a blinding fury. Her jagged fingernails sank into the flesh under his eyes and dragged down, tearing skin off his cheeks.

  Fumar staggered away, mouth dangling open, but the girl wasn't done. Flinging away the scraps of human tissue, she leaped at him again, clamping her scrawny arms around his rib cage and sinking her teeth into the open wound on his cheek.

  Fumar's boys moved in to help, grabbing the girl by her amazingly quick stick arms. The other crack heads crowded around, shouting belligerently, but they didn't touch Fumar's boys.

  Now Greg Grom understood. His suggestion had been that they should not resort to violence unless the other guys started it. The suggestion was holding, but the impulse to violence was too strong. They were exploiting the loophole he had provided them.

  The inevitable happened. The enforcers began thrusting the addicts out of the way, which was good enough to qualify as "starting it." The crack heads turned on Fumar's boys with sudden savagery.

  The crack heads grabbed and bit and slashed with their fingernails. Fumar's boys gave up on their big sticks in a hurry, and there was a flurry of gunshots. Bodies started falling, but the addicts got their hands on a few metal clubs and started cracking skulls. Their obsession gave them a huge battlefield advantage-a disregard for their own safety.

  In just seconds the tide turned against Fumar's boys, who quickly came to a conclusion-these weren't just crack heads and waste cases. They were mad animals. They were maniacs. Fumar's boys tried to flee and didn't get far.

  Grom was intrigued by a few desperate crack heads dancing around the fringes of the bloodbath and trying to maneuver themselves into the thick of the fighting. His suggestion was still holding. They were in hysterics, but they couldn't break the no-violence suggestion until and unless they were physically assaulted by one of Fumar's men. Grom observed this behavior with the fascination of a true scientist.

  But inevitably they managed to insert themselves into the fray and get shot or pushed or hit by one of Fumar's men, and then they were released into a frenzy of violence. Grom thought of a mad dog at the moment the leash snapped-and the cat that had been taunting him was just sitting there; ready to be snapped up. Grom's eyes grew bright. There was none of the scientist in his appreciation for the ensuing slaughter.

  Then the mayhem became stillness. Fumar and his boys were obliterated.

  One pathetic crack head, the human trash pile who had accepted Grom's first sample, danced around the massacre shouting at the bloody remains. "Spread the word! We hate Fumar!" Somehow, he or she had never managed to get into the fray.

  The other crack heads were disoriented and muddled, several of them wounded and some of their number sprawled in the street with Fumar's men.

  Of Fumar himself there was nothing recognizable left. The teenage girl who drew first blood had torn the flesh from his body until her fingers broke, then hacked at his corpse with a pry bar until her adrenaline was used up.

  Sirens. Greg Grom was startled back to the reality of his situation. He pleaded with the rental car to start, and it did. He begged it to actually roll on its wheels and it did that, too, although some part of the crushed rear end was rubbing against a tire.

  The rental car got him across town, which was good enough. He pulled to the curb in a Nashville industrial park. When no one was looking, he yanked off the stolen license plates that covered the rental car tags. He tucked the plates into a sewer, along with his hairpiece.

  Then he pulled out his notebook and flipped to his chart, scanning the left-hand column of alphanumeric identifiers. The column next to the list was headed Results.

  He found the entry GUTX-SPF-OR1. The Oregon lab had held out high hopes for its patented system called slow-process fermentation. Slow-process fermentation, however, looked like a big fat failure. Greg Grom meticulously penned in his one-word summation of today's trials.

  "Imperfect."

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Harold W. Smith didn't pick up the phone. Mark Howard, his assistant, did.

  "Hi, sonny," Remo said, "could you put your old man on the line?"

  "Dr. Smith is tied up at the moment, Remo. Give me your report."

  Remo stood at a small end table using a house phone in a parlorlike sitting area, which was dwarfed by the vast hotel atrium. It was a classy place, but Remo had stopped noticing hotel lobbies after the first few thousand. "This is grown-up talk, youngster," he said. "I think I better speak to your dad."

  "Dr. Smith is tracking an event, Remo," Mark Howard explained.

  "Right now?" Remo asked. "Where is it?" Suddenly Remo found himself on a speakerphone, and he heard Dr. Harold Smith's lemony voice over the bad acoustics.

  "Nashville, unfortunately, Remo."

  "Crap. I'm still in Boston."

  "The event has concluded anyway," Smith said without emotion. "What did you discover?"

  "I discov
ered exactly how much spaghetti and meatballs are lethal to an adult male scumbucket."

  "That's all?"

  "Eight plates, and then the stomach bursts. It's quite a sight."

  "That's all you learned?" Smith pressed.

  "That's it."

  "The bad narcotics didn't originate with Figaroa or Moroza?"

  "They didn't deal them and they don't know who did. Figaroa said somebody claimed the drugs were giveaways, but there wasn't enough of it to look like new competition."

  "What do you mean, not enough?" Smith asked.

  "Huh?" Remo asked. "Not enough means you need more before it's enough."

  Without thinking about it, Remo's stance was an instinctive balance of muscle and bone, but it was more that just your average good posture. His stance took into account a hundred factors that any other human being would have failed to sense.

  Maybe someone standing beside him would have felt the slight movement of the circulating air, if they concentrated. But they never would have been able to sense, let alone make sense of, all the other shifting pressure waves flickering through the atmosphere.

  Remo did feel them, and balanced his body to them just as he adjusted himself to the force of gravity. He didn't feel these dynamics in a conscious way, but absorbed them as part of the ebb and flow of his environment.

  The part of his environment he was trying to ignore at the moment was the concierge, an outgoing woman in her forties with mannequin-perfect grooming. She caught his eye and gave him a sultry smile.

  Well, Remo thought, you ask somebody to point you to the phone and you're just looking for trouble.

  "I am asking about the quantity of the drugs that were distributed," Smith clarified.

  "I told you, Smitty, a handful of samples."

  "You don't know that," Mark Howard observed. "There could have been thousands of samples distributed on the streets and only a small percentage were contaminated."

  The concierge was coming out from behind her desk, moving languidly, eyes locked on Remo Williams as she sauntered in his direction. Remo gave her his back.

  "That's true," Smith said. "Figaroa's customers wouldn't be forthcoming with that kind of information so he might not have known. Remo, you could survey the populace."

  Remo's exasperation crested. "Okay, Smitty, First, no. Second, the Boston Freak Party happened on one street corner, so even if there's a thousand other untainted doses floating around out there, so what? Third, here's the important part-I'm not Peter Falk and the word investigator is not on my business card."

  "I know this-"

  "Fourth, you've got so much computer brainpower in the loony bin basement that even Bill Gates would be hard-pressed to monopolize it. Why haven't they figured this out?"

  "The data coming in to the mainframes is only as good as the data our gatherers can uncover," Smith explained with forced patience.

  "So put the Folcroft Four on the streets," Remo insisted, referring to the mainframes that collected and served data for Upstairs. "Have your Boy Howdy slide 'em in the ass end of that rustbucket battleship you call a car. When you get here you can put them on toy robot treads to move around town."

  "I don't think that is a reasonable plan."

  "You know what these people drink?" Remo continued. "Ripple. I didn't even know they still made Ripple. I don't even know what Ripple is. But that whole end of town smells like Ripple."

  "Remo-"

  "I bet the Folcroft Four know what Ripple is. They're way smarter than I am-we both know that. You get them out here, they'll put two and two together in a big way."

  "This is foolish. The mainframes cannot serve as gatherers."

  "Then get other gatherers," Remo retorted.

  "We have the best gatherer on the planet. You."

  "Just when I think I've heard it all you go and lay some flattery on me," Remo grumbled. "Well, there was the one time you thought I was just the right one to be framed for murder and electrocuted, but since then, no compliments. So today you don't have any credibility."

  There was a sigh. "Remo, it was not a compliment, it was a statement of fact. When no one else can get people to tell what they know, and tell the truth, you can do it."

  "There's lots of things I can do better than other people-" Remo said.

  "I'll bet there is." It was the concierge. She lounged on the sofa by the phone, one long leg crossed on the other. A dressy high-heeled sandal dangled from her toes. Remo had been pretending she wasn't there, but she didn't get the hint.

  "Who's that?" Smith demanded.

  "Hold on," Remo said. "Who are you?"

  "I'm Madelaine," she purred. If her blouse had not somehow become unbuttoned almost to her belly, her white lace bra wouldn't have been so exposed.

  "She's Madelaine," Remo said to Smith.

  "I didn't want you to ask her name," Smith responded, his voice becoming more tart.

  "I'm the concierge," she said.

  "She's the concierge," Remo relayed.

  "Remo, I don't care," Smith said.

  "I do things for people," Madelaine breathed.

  "She does things for people," Remo told Smith.

  "I don't care," Smith insisted. "I meant-"

  "What kinds of things?" Remo asked the woman.

  "For you? Anything."

  "Smitty, great news," Remo said into the phone. "She'll do anything. So you can have her walk the Boston beat" Smith came close to raising his voice.

  "Remo, please stop this foolishness."

  "You first" Remo hung up, then severed the cord from the phone with a tug.

  Madelaine was delighted. "Now it's just the two of us."

  "Yeah, well, not counting the fifty people I can see in the restaurant and the bar and at the front desk."

  "Forget them. Let's go to your room."

  Remo shrugged. "Sorry, Madelaine. I can't tell you how great you've been. I mean, who'd have thought I'd get so much personal attention just because I asked where the phone was? But I'm off to Nashville."

  "Can I come?"

  "Without a doubt. But not with me."

  Madelaine sat up suddenly. She was alone, just like that. The hunk in the T-shirt had vanished.

  She stood and looked all around before glimpsing a figure in a black T-shirt slipping through the stairwell doors. Was that her hunk? He could never have traveled that far through the obstacle course of the lobby in just a couple of seconds.

  Could he?

  Chapter 5

  "Cue the music," the director ordered.

  From the speakers came a swell of steel-drum rhythms with an underlay of romantic strings. "Action," the director called.

  The camera on its lofty crane perch drank in the scenery of lush gardens embracing the base of palm trees, which stretched over the sugar-white sandy beach and the turquoise Caribbean Sea.

  The camera crane descended to the level of the woman in the bikini, strolling on the shore with the waters tasting her toes. Her lithe body was deeply tanned but detailed with freckles. Her hair was luxurious and dark, with just enough of an auburn hint to match the terra-cotta trim of the white bikini and the translucent wrap on her waist. She looked off camera, admiring the glorious tropical view, and produced a smile. The smile, warm and provocative and friendly all at once.

  Todd Rohrman smiled along with her. He always did. She was something special. You couldn't put your finger on it, but you knew she had a gift of, well, attractiveness. Everybody liked her. Men lusted after her, and women gravitated to her as if she were their best friend. People just wanted her.

  She turned from her beautiful view of the beautiful ocean, looking directly into the camera with her beautiful blue-green eyes.

  Rohrman thought, She's looking right into the minds of every man and woman who'll see this commercial. She's unbelievable.

  His trousers buzzed.

  Rohrman retreated on tiptoe through the snaking cables and equipment tables. He didn't answer the phone until he reached th
e pool deck, but the caller hadn't given up.

  "Hello, Todd, this is Amelia. I have the president on the line. He would like to speak to the minister."

  "It'll have to wait. They're right in the middle of the new commercial shoot," Rohrman said.

  "He's calling from the United States, Todd," Amelia Powlik pressed.

  "This island is the United States, Amelia."

  "The mainland, I mean."

  "He'll have to wait," Rohrman said patiently.

  "He's meeting with federal officials in two minutes," Amelia insisted.

  Rohrman didn't get excited. Sometimes people just didn't understand the pecking order around here. Even people who were a part of the pecking order. "I will not interrupt the minister of tourism in the middle of a shoot."

  Amelia pursed her lips with displeasure-Rohrman didn't have to see her to know she was doing it. Below him they were doing another take of the same shot, this time with a reflector positioned to backlight that beautiful mass of dense hair. Nice, Rohrman thought approvingly. The auburn highlights glimmered in the added burst of backlighting, and the vision of loveliness in the bikini was even more radiant.

  "This is the president," said a new voice on the phone.

  "This is Todd Rohrman, Mr. President."

  "Why am I not speaking to the minister of tourism?"

  "As I explained to your secretary, Mr. President, there's a shoot today."

  "Mr. Rohrman, I am the president of Union Island, and I want to speak to my minister of tourism. Now."

  "Sorry, Mr. President. Not until the shoot is done."

  There was a long, tired sigh. "Oh, all right."

  "It will just be a few minutes-maybe ten," Rohrman added cheerfully. Then Todd got to do one of his favorite things in the whole world.

  He put the president on hold.

  THE DIRECTOR WATCHED in the monitors, which received video feeds from all the cameras. It was their eighth take of the afternoon, but the star of the commercial didn't show it. She gazed into the lead camera, and even the director felt as if she were looking directly at him. When she spoke it was both intimate and friendly.

  "I am Union Island," she said with her delicious half smile. "Come to me."

  She was perfect. She stirred you up when she talked like that.