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  The camera closed in on the fallen center. The trainer crew rolled the big man over onto his back, and then they did something the football-viewing audience had never seen before: they started giving him chest compressions to try to restart his heart. Meanwhile, players from both teams were yelling excitedly, waving at the sidelines and pointing at the downed Lobster quarterback.

  "What's going on over there?" Freddy said. "Get a tighter shot."

  They did. In middle of the man's shoulder pads, the neck hole of his uniform yawned. It was empty. "Oh, Jesus, where's his head?" Chunk cried. "Where's the quarterback's fucking head?"

  "Look in his hat," Chiun suggested, snuggling deeper into the La-Z-Boy.

  The camera zoomed in on the missing helmet, which rested top side up on the carpet at midfield. There was a face inside it, and remarkably the chin strap was still buckled. The angle of the shot produced a disturbing illusion: it looked like the QB had just poked his head up through the Astroturf for a quick peek around.

  From his expression, he didn't like what he saw. The feeling seemed universal.

  Players from both teams turned away from the red helmet, some of them slack jawed with horror, others bent over at the waist, puking through their face guards. This while Bradley the Fighting Vehicle Boomtower continued to strut his stuff: slow-motion moonwalking, he struck classic bodybuilder poses to the beat of the sideline photographers' flashguns. Understandably incensed, the Lobster bench rose up en masse and attacked the showboating nose tackle, burying him under a heap of bodies. Not to be outdone, Boomtower's whole team rushed onto the field to try to defend him. The roar of the hometown crowd drowned out Chunk, Sal and Freddy as the stadium police surrounded the wildly shifting, hundred-man dog pile.

  Then, abruptly, the network cut away from the live-action melee to a row of triple-bacon cheeseburgers dancing the Macarena.

  "Fifteen yards," Chiun proudly announced. Remo shook his head to clear it. Smoke from the burning wok hung heavy in the room. "What's fifteen yards?"

  "The penalty for roughing the passer."

  As Remo opened his mouth to speak, the telephone rang. It was the scrambled line.

  Chapter 3

  Like the tire of some gigantic earthmover, the landmark sign loomed over the flat white cinder roof of the Big-O doughnut shop. Dramatically lit from beneath on both sides, the dimpled stucco ring could be seen for blocks up and down busy Sepulveda Boulevard. No doughnut known to man was ever so huge, so pink, so utterly indigestible.

  Chiz Graham stood under the Big-O's red awning, watching through the service window as a plump, short Latina girl in a white paper hat and long braids finished pulling together his order from the rolling racks of freshly baked treats. The clerk was so short she had to reach up to push the pair of wide, flat boxes across the counter to him.

  "Por, favor, Senor Cheez... " she said, straining on tiptoe to stick her bare arm through the service window. Fingers gloved in clear plastic offered him a black permanent marker.

  Chiz uncapped the broad-tipped markie, and with big, looping flourishes, autographed the inside of her brown forearm from wrist to elbow. He wrote, "Warmest wishes, Chiz Graham."

  "Muchas gracias, " she cooed, cradling her autographed arm to her bosom like a newborn babe.

  "De nada," said the movie star, scooping up the boxes.

  As he turned for the waiting limo, the girl clawed herself above the level of the counter so she could watch the action-film Adonis walk away. At his broad, densely muscled back, she aimed a shrill, undulating cry: the same hair-raising sound voiced by female ballet folclorico dancers-and chickadees in heat. She punctuated the "I am Woman" yodel with a heartfelt "Estupendo!"

  Long accustomed to having girls go glassy-eyed at the sight of his massive, jutting buttocks, Graham paid her no mind. All he was thinking about was the fragrant burden-the forty-eight oven-fresh doughnuts-he carried. His jaws ached in anticipation of their succulent, deep-fried goodness. He felt a ferocious urge to sit down on the curb and eat every single one of them himself.

  But he knew if he did, there would be pure hell to pay.

  As he reached far the limo's rear door, it swung open. Crouched inside, in the midst of the litter of empty paper bags from the BurgerMeister up the block, in her black Gucci tank top, matching leather micromini and stiletto-heeled ankle boots, was Puma Lee, the movie star's even bigger movie star of a wife. The ravishing, tawny-skinned, raven-haired grade-school dropout pronounced her screen name "Poo-mah," not "Pew-mah," and everyone in the show-biz know followed suit.

  Without a word, the leggy beauty snatched one of the boxes from him. Before he could get the limo door shut, Puma was stuffing heavily sugar iced cinnamon-apple fritters into her face with both hands. Chiz sat in one of the jump seats, as far away from her as he could get. Hunched protectively over his own flat of treats, he started ramming assorted glazed doughnuts into his mouth. For Chiz and Puma, the act of eating had become an athletic event, in this case, the twenty-four-doughnut sprint. Neither wanted to be the last to finish, because neither wanted to share the stub end of the final cruller with the other. Rainbow sprinkles and shards of icing glaze flew left and right, as did the grunting, gulping sounds of their frantic swallowing.

  The noise was such that the uniformed limo driver lowered the one-way privacy window to make sure his passengers were both all right. In his rearview mirror, he watched the highest-paid actors in motion-picture history make total pigs of themselves.

  It was common knowledge in Tinseltown that between the two of them, Chiz and Puma pulled in a minimum of thirty million dollars per film. Puma invariably commanded a good deal more money than Chiz-and the salary gap was a touchy subject. He had been typecast by the industry as an action-adventure star who showed his bare behind; Puma had a much wider dramatic range. She was perfectly believable taking off all her clothes not only in summer shoot-'em-ups, but also in historical romances, modern-relationship pictures, cancer tear-jerkers, disaster flicks and Shakespearean rehashes.

  The driver wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of something dank and musky floating through the window from the back. He'd read the tabloid stories about how the celebrity couple always bathed in vintage sauvignon blanc. He decided that whatever liquid they soaked themselves in, they didn't use soap. Having hauled around Hollywood types for half his adult life, the driver thought he'd witnessed every conceivable eccentricity of the filthy rich. But even a bingeing Orson Welles couldn't hold a candle to these two. Like wild animals, Chiz and Puma sought out and gobbled the lowest forms of junk food. And the question the chauffeur kept asking himself was how could people who ate so bad look so good?

  By the time the limo driver exited the parking lot and merged with oncoming traffic on Sepulveda, four dozen assorted doughnuts were history. He started to accelerate in order to change lanes for the freeway ramp.

  "No, pull in there," Chiz told him, waving to the right.

  "Excuse me, sir," the driver said, "but we're going to be late for the benefit if we stop again-"

  "He told you to pull in!" Puma snarled.

  End of discussion. "Yes, ma'am," the driver said flatly.

  Their new destination was Tito's Tacos, another fast-food landmark of West Los Angeles. It lurked in the shadow of an elevated section of Interstate 405. With the double-parked limo blocking half the small lot, Chiz trotted up to the outside service window.

  "Aue quieres, senor?" asked a guy with pomaded salt-and-pepper hair, long sideburns and a pencil-thin mustache. For forty years he had been folding tortillas at the same location, and in an identical white polyester guayabera shirt. Awaiting Chiz's response, he held the stub of a pencil poised on a paper pad. Over his shoulder, one of the cooks-a shorter, wider version of the counterman-lowered stainless-steel baskets of tacos into boiling vats of dark amber oil. A peculiarity of Tito's cuisine, the picadillo meat was already packed inside the folded tortilla shells when they were plopped into the deep fryer. This meant that as the
meat was heated, it soaked up oil like a sponge.

  "Give me a dozen beef tacos with double guacamole," Chiz said. Then he thought better of it. "No, wait a minute. Hold the tacos. I'll take a couple of quarts of that, instead."

  The taco bender seemed irritated as he used what little was left of his pencil's eraser on the order pad.

  Looking up, he said, "Que quieres frijoles, menudo?"

  "No. Dime la grasa."

  Chiz's unusual request confounded the seasoned counterman.

  "Yeah, you heard me right," Chiz assured him. "I want the deep-fry oil. Pour it in a couple of those jumbo drink cups. Make them to go."

  Puma scowled at her husband when he returned, practically empty-handed. "Where's the tacos? You were supposed to get tacos!" She wasn't just disappointed; she was furious. And venting her fury, she seized handfuls of the back seat's gray Corinthian leather, which parted under the points of her long red fingernails like so much pebble-grained tissue paper.

  Chiz would never have admitted to actually being afraid of his better half. Such a thing ran counter to his image, public and self. After all, it was he who had carved out a celluloid career by battling armies of terrorists, mutant zombies, hair-shirt barbarians, and it was he who had whipped their evil butts, all by his lonesome. But of late, whenever Chiz considered thwarting Puma's expressed wishes, he thought about it long and hard.

  He handed her one of the big cups. "Try this instead."

  Puma tried to sip through the straw and got nowhere-it was already soundly plugged with congealed grease. She took off the plastic lid, cracked the white film of beef fat with a long nail and daintily sipped at the brownish picadillo-spiced oil underneath.

  The sip quickly became a gulp.

  "I figured, why not cut to the chase?" Chiz told her as he raised his own cup to his lips.

  They were licking away their fry-oil mustaches as the limo climbed the 405 on-ramp, heading for Hollywood. Two exits from Sunset Boulevard, they passed a freeway billboard advertising Chiz's new action flick. The movie's title, Big Bore, was supposed to refer to weapon caliber, as in elephant gun. That no one had caught the unfortunate double entendre until after the picture was in distribution was a prime example of Murphy's Law.

  The billboard's airbrush painting showed a threetimes-life-size Chiz stripped to the waist with a massive chromed Magnum revolver braced on his inner thigh. The yard-long, vent-rib barrel was raised in a highly suggestive fashion. Across the top of the billboard, huge letters proclaimed Tougher ...Bigger... Harder. Beneath the banner, a row of infinitely smaller type credited the review quote to Nigel Plimsole, of the Agoura Weekly Advertiser.

  As the billboard zoomed by, Chiz couldn't help but recall the strain of getting into shape for Big Bore. Prior to the filming, he'd spent six hateful months with personal trainers and holistic-diet consultants. It wasn't just vanity that drove him to buff out for his movie roles. His fans expected it of him. His fans and his producers. When your bare ass was up there on the screen, twenty feet tall, you'd better be able to bounce quarters off it, baby.

  The problem was, Chiz Graham was slipping into his mid-thirties. Forget about bulking up-it took more and more effort just to keep in shape what muscle he had. Between films, he had taken to hiding his burgeoning layer of flab under loose shirts and baggy slacks.

  No more.

  A shit-eating grin spread over the movie star's internationally recognized, square-chinned mug. His flab-hiding days were done. Tonight all he was wearing above the waist was a custom-tailored red leather vest with extralarge armholes designed to showcase his deeply tanned and monumental biceps and lats. Thanks to a miracle of modern science, without having lifted so much as a finger, Chiz was totally megabuffed. His body fat was under ten percent. Muscle mass up by thirty percent. Strength more than doubled. And it all came from a two-by-two-inch adhesive patch. Which, as far as he was concerned, was worth twice its million-dollar-a-year price tag.

  Chiz wasn't wearing the drug-dispensing bandage stuck on his bum, where it would certainly have shown through the skintight seat of his red cycling shorts. He'd applied it below the shorts's waistband in front, where it blended nicely into the gridwork of his abs. Puma wore her patch as high as possible on the inside of her right thigh.

  The dark-haired screen queen sat there, alternately flexing her arms, transfixed by the pop of her own sleek, powerful muscles. After the quart of warm taco grease, Chiz could almost see his own biceps growing in size, too. He felt the pleasure-pain burn in the core of the muscle, like he'd just done 150 reps of dumbbell curls.

  A few minutes later, the limo pulled up in front of the Venom Club. On the marquee, a pink-and-green neon rattler coiled and struck, coiled and struck every few seconds. At Tinseltown's newest in spot, it was said, the creme de la creme could let their hair down among their own kind. The assembled paparazzi and crowds of fans on the sidewalk were kept behind a velvet-rope cordon by a phalanx of bouncers.

  The nightclub's ponytailed head of security opened the limo door for them. In his trademark black leather trench coat, leather pants and cowboy boots, Pismo Pete quickly ushered Chiz and Puma through the entrance, beneath a huge banner that said Oxfam Benefit Gala.

  Inside on an elevated stage, under a huge rotating glitter ball, tall, thin and beautiful people boogied to retro seventies rock. The main body of clubgoers surrounded the long buffet table in the center of the room. Chiz and Puma said their hellos, waving, air kissing cheeks, moving quickly through the mob to the front of the food line.

  Without bothering to pick up a plate or utensils, Puma plucked a big sticky gob of blue cheese from the top of a spinach-salad mountain. She only had it in her mouth a second before she spewed it back over the heaped greenery. "What was that crap?" she gasped, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

  A guy in a white uniform and chef's hat scurried over at once. "It's Virtual Gorgonzola," he told her. "A cheese-flavored tofu product. Not to worry. It's completely fat free, like everything else we're serving here tonight. So, just enjoy..."

  But Puma's attention-and her anger-had already wandered.

  Chiz looked over his shoulder and saw whom his wife was staring at with such focused malice. Vindaloo.

  The tall, blond, former world-class model turned movie actress was Puma's only real competition for global box-office supremacy. The baby-smooth Swede had piled her plate high with a rich-looking chocolate dessert. When Vindaloo smiled at Puma, there was no-fat mousse cake all over her perfect white teeth.

  Right off, Chiz knew there was going to be trouble.

  Chapter 4

  "The illustrious Emperor beckons," Chiun announced as the scrambled link to CURE's headquarters continued to chirp. The Reigning Master of Sinanju made no move to get up to answer the phone himself, even though he was closer to it. With his words, Chiun was just pointing out the existence of the irritating noise, on the off chance that his one and only pupil had somehow failed to notice.

  From decades of experience, Remo knew there was no purpose served by standing fast. His butt cast in concrete, Chiun wasn't going to budge from the La-Z-Boy, even if the phone rang all week. Remo crossed the smoky room and turned on the speaker phone. "What's up, Smitty?"

  Without preamble, a very distraught Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Turn your television to 'Friday Night Football.'"

  "Exalted One," Chiun warbled, "it is already our privilege to be witnessing that glorious contest."

  "Then you saw what just happened to the Maine quarterback?"

  "If you ask me," Remo said, "it was a little over-the-top, even for sweeps month."

  "We have the makings of a major problem on our hands," Smith continued. "Please switch to Channel 8."

  Chiun picked up the Star Trek Next Generation Phaser remote-control unit from the arm of the recliner. The Master of Sinanju didn't question the purpose of the order or grouse about missing the rest of the game as he would have done if Remo had made the request. After all, his Emperor ha
d spoken. According to the ancient code of Chiun's predecessors, the generations of highly sought master assassins from the Korean peninsula, fealty-and the choice of light entertainment-invariably went to the guy with the most gold. Like a good and faithful servant, Chiun pushed the channel-change button.

  The Mitsuzuki's giant screen blipped, and a man and woman appeared. They were seated behind a stylishly modern desk that conspicuously lacked a modesty panel. More annoying than their perfectly sculpted hairdos, than his impeccably tailored gray Armani silk suit or her red Adolfo, more annoying even than his reliance on dimples to drive home a point or her habit of crossing and recrossing her long legs under the table, were their matching, synthetically earnest expressions.

  "Peephole USA" was one of those tabloid-news magazines that specialized in "T and T." Titillate and Terrify. And its producers were only truly content when they accomplished both objects in the one-minute feature story. With respective dimples and upper thighs bared, Jed and Molly were doing their standard chitchat wrap-up of a tale called "When Easter Bunnies Attack-the Texas Day Care Nightmare."

  Chiun immediately read the handwriting on the wall. "You wish these two people dead for unspeakable crimes against the Emperor? Say no more. Consider it done."

  "Off with the talking heads," Remo concurred.

  "Shh. Just listen for a minute," Smith instructed them.

  With a whirlpool flourish of computer graphics, "Peephole USA" plunged into its next feature, which was entitled "What's Got into Great-Great-Grandpa?"

  "By now," began Molly's giggly voice-over, "all of America's heard about the past-ninety Southern senator and his beauty-queen girl toy. Well, this time tomorrow, Senator Ludlow Baculum and Bambi Sue Stimple will be on their honeymoon. It's her first, and his thirteenth. Last night's 1-900 viewers' poll tells us you think old Lud's robbing the cradle, but is little Bambi robbing the grave?"

  As the screen filled with a panning shot of poolside at a Malibu Beach mansion, the "Peephole USA" reporter offered a few tidbits of pertinent background: that this was the May-December marriage to end all, Bambi being sixty-nine years her intended's junior, and that Baculum was the chairman of the powerful Term Limits and Election Finance Reform Ongoing Investigation and Research Committee.