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  Chapter 4

  The flight to Omaha was perfectly routine. Routine required that Chiun, the Master of Sinanju Emeritus and veteran of more airplane flights than the entire flight crew, spend the majority of the time staring out at the wing. Watching for the signs that it was about to snap off. He lost interest in quizzing Remo somewhere over Kentucky.

  The flight was over its quota on annoying and obnoxious travelers, including a big-mouthed businessman crammed in next to Remo. A bleached-blond single mother and her two unruly children swarmed into the row in front of them. A red-haired boy with catastrophic freckles stood on his seat and spotted Chiun, calling out to his mother, "Lookee at the Chinaman!"

  Remo could feel Chiun steaming in the seat immediately to his left. The mother shushed her brat, and Remo was relaxing when the stranger to his right said, "So, your friend's Chinese?"

  "Korean."

  "Too bad. I was in China for a couple months last year. Wide-open marketplace for auto dealerships, you know. Fantastic. I don't know about Koreans, but the Chinese people are the nicest folks you'd ever want to meet. Of course-"

  "You've got a piece of lint there," Remo said and reached out toward the salesman's lapel.

  The slightest touch was all it took. The businessman who liked Chinese people went to sleep. He'd regain consciousness about the time they landed in Omaha.

  "Sweet dreams," said Remo, making his face into an evil sort of grin.

  The red-haired child saw it all and watched wideeyed.

  "I think he'll stay quiet now," Remo said with a manic grin. "Will you?"

  The boy nodded, mouth agape, and sat in his seat. He didn't make another sound.

  Chiun's face was blank but his breath came out, "Heh heh heh."

  "You're welcome," Remo said. "Heh heh heh."

  AT OMAHA'S EPPLEY AIRFIELD they picked up a midsize Chevrolet sedan in the Avis lot. Remo puzzled over the Auto Club street map and drove them north and west of Omaha on Interstate 680, catching Highway 6 eastbound, for a run past malls and hospitals to Eastland Park.

  Jean Cuvier-alias "Rick Baker"-lived alone in a smallish house near the Elmwood Park country club. Small didn't mean cheap in that neighborhood, and Remo wondered briefly if the informer would miss it.

  Not that it mattered. He was leaving, one way or another. The witness had run out of options. He could leave or he could die.

  Remo found the house after only a couple of wrong turns and parked half a block away, to the west. He had already worked out the move with Chiun, who had decided at the last minute to come along.

  Remo waited for a moment near the car, while Chiun vanished into the backyard of a house two doors from Baker's. He gave the Master of Sinanju a few seconds, then ambled down the block and up to Baker's door.

  Inside the house the doorbell played a little tune that Remo couldn't quite recognize. He rang it again. The door opened and he was still trying to figure out the song so he rang it a third time.

  "Oh," he told the man at the door. "The Rocky theme. Oh, brother."

  Remo had been expecting some sort of a tough guy to answer. What he got was an animated version of the Pillsbury doughboy.

  "I don't want nothin'," the man said. "I guess that makes you one of a kind."

  "Says what?"

  "Everybody wants something," Remo answered.

  "Not me. Now go away."

  "Staying alive. I bet you want that, don't you?"

  The eyes narrowed. "Does I know you?"

  "I know you, Mr. Cuvier."

  It took a second for the name to register, then the doughboy recoiled-and backed into Chiun, who'd come in through the rear without making a sound. The witness yelped and Remo caught his arms before he started sending windmill punches at the old Korean.

  "See, now that will get you killed," Remo chided Cuvier. "I've already saved your life, and we've only known each other fifteen seconds."

  Remo carried him into the living room and propped him upright on the sofa. Cuvier started swinging again as soon as Remo freed his hands, so he grabbed them again. Cuvier found his hands locked in twin steel vises. The guy wasn't even putting an effort into holding him prisoner.

  "All right," Cuvier said at last, slumping. "Go on and do what you come for."

  "That would be the saving-your-life thing I was talking about," Remo told him.

  "You all want to explain that?"

  "Three of your former associates have been killed recently." Remo gave him the names, watching the color drain from Cuvier's face as he spoke. "Someone traced their new identities and ran them down. It wasn't pretty. You're the last in line."

  "How were the killings done?" Cuvier demanded.

  "The medical examiner suspects a pack of animals."

  "Loup-garou!" Cuvier nearly bolted from the couch, despite Remo's restraining grip.

  "What's that again?" he asked.

  "Never you mind."

  Remo looked at Chiun, who looked bored. "Loup-garou is werewolf," he explained.

  "I'm getting out of here right now," Cuvier declared.

  "That's exactly what we had in mind," Remo said.

  Chapter 5

  The rabbit had been dead for half an hour, maybe forty minutes. It was crossing Highway 85, between Papillion and La Vista, when it met a Dodge Intrepid doing half-past sixty in the northbound lane and was dispatched to bunny heaven on the spot.

  It was a clean kill, relatively speaking: fractured vertebrae and shattered skull, with visible extrusion of the brain, but no great damage to the carcass overall. In fact, the rabbit's body still retained a hint of warmth that pleased the leader of the pack, his nostrils flaring.

  He was a carnivore by breeding and by inclination, craving meat and mostly passing on the veggies when his stomach growled for food. As it was growling now.

  The little problem that isolated him from humanity also prevented him from strolling through a supermarket, loading up his basket with a pile of steaks, chops, ribs and such-but still, he had to eat. Back home, in the bayou country, he would go out prowling with the pack, or sometimes on his own, and not stop looking until he had satisfied his hunger. On the road, it was a different story. He could pack meat with him, ice it down, but it would only last so long and stretch so far. When he ran out, or the supply on hand went bad, the leader of the pack improvised.

  Roadkill, for instance.

  It was everywhere, though obviously more abundant in some areas than others. If you had the time to shop around, the nation's highways offered up a menu that would rival that of any gourmet restaurant. A savvy shopper had his pick of snake and turtle, squirrel and chipmunk, raccoon and opossum, rabbit, woodchuck, every now and then a deer to feed the whole damned pack. Some districts had their local specialties, like Texas armadillo, prairie dog on the Great Plains and wolverine in Michigan. He didn't care for cities, where the bill of fare was mostly cats and dogs, but meat was meat.

  This night, the rabbit was an appetizer. There wasn't enough of it to go around, and he wasn't inclined to offer any of it to the pack. They leered and grumbled at him, little whiny noises from the bitch, but he ignored them. They would all be feeding soon enough.

  And so would he.

  In truth, he could have passed by the rabbit and waited for the main event, but they had time to kill, and there was no point wasting food. If life had taught him anything, it was that you could never count on getting lucky. When you saw a free meal lying on the center strip and failed to stop, you could just as well go hungry down the road.

  He twisted off the rabbit's shattered skull and slit it down the belly with a ragged talon, disemboweling it before he peeled the skin. A glance in each direction told him that he had the highway to himself, no traffic at the moment, but solitude was like luck.

  It didn't last.

  The leader of the pack wasn't inclined to reminisce in any great detail, but there were times, like now, when he considered the peculiarities of life. A simple accident of birth had made him
stand apart from others of his kind, shunned even by his father and his older siblings. When his mother stubbornly refused to give him up, the old man thrashed her and expelled them both, to live or die according to their wits. His mother had been smarter than the old man reckoned, though, devising ways to make ends meet. Survival was the first priority, pursuit of food and shelter, leaving little room for dignity. They had survived, all right, but it had worn his mother down by degrees, with physical exhaustion, personal humiliation, finally disease, until the beast-child found himself alone at ten years old.

  He had never been to school in all that time, of course-it would have been impossible, unthinkable-and there was no thought of it now that he was on his own. His mother loved him, but she recognized that others would not share her sentiment, so she had concealed him from the world at large. So skilful was the deception, that at her death, no social workers had come sniffing after him to place him in a foster home. Nobody came at all, in fact, until the next month's rent was two days late, and Mr. Landlord used his master key to let himself inside the miserable two-room flat. Later, when he was babbling to the lawmen, they smelled whiskey on his breath and would have locked him up to sleep it off, if not for the ragged bite marks on his arms.

  There was no living in the big town after that. His mother had been Cajun through and through. Her roots were in the bayou country, and she used to take him there sometimes, on the rare occasions when she had some free time on her hands. Not to visit her people, mind you-they would certainly have viewed her monster offspring as a curse from God-but to show him the ways of nature, teaching him by bits and pieces how the greater system worked. It wasn't long before he had the basics figured out.

  Kill or be killed.

  Once he was on his own, he went back to the bayou country. It was touch and go, the man-child trying to compete with predators who had their act down cold. He lived on carrion at first, and precious little of it, but he learned. And it was almost good enough.

  Almost.

  A careless accident had nearly ended it, when he was coming up on twelve years old. He should have seen the moccasin, its thick body draped across a drooping mangrove branch, but he was concentrating on the fish that darted just beneath the surface of the brackish water. When the snake struck him, going for the face, there was no warning but a blur of motion and the stinging impact as its fangs sank home.

  Between his panic and the poison coursing through his system, he had nearly died. He would have died were it not for the old Cajun hermit who had found him and decided it was worth a try to save the boy-thing's life. He had recovered, slowly, and the old man let him hang around, taught him the fine points of survival in the swamp ...and other things.

  It was the hermit who had taught him he was special, blessed with certain powers that made other people cringe from him in fear. It was the old man who had shown him what it meant to be a loupgarou.

  By teaching him to accept and even embrace his true nature, he had been prepared for the next great change that came over him.

  Years later, when the hermit was too old to scrape a living out of the harsh and merciless bayou, his young protege was more than skilled enough to provide for them both. But the hermit was worried for the young beast he had adopted. The beast was mature, full-grown and vibrant with energy and vitality that should not be confined to their isolated corner of the swamp.

  Then fortune, for the first time, smiled on the hermit. The strange woman appeared out of nowhere and offered the hermit cash money. In exchange, he gave her a piece of paper allowing her to set up her house trailer on their lonely bayou for three months.

  She wasn't on vacation, and her mobile home was different from any RV the hermit or his ward had ever seen before. It was a living machine, always humming with energy. There were generators and air-conditioners and other roof-mounted machinery. The smells that came from inside were not to be believed.

  The woman was fascinated with the hermit's young beast. She spoke to him without pity and exhibited no fear of him or his bizarre appearance.

  She was a scientist, she said, and she recognized the young man's condition as nothing more than a standard case of hypertrichosis. Well, maybe a little more extreme than the cases she had heard of. "All victims of the condition are covered with dense hair all over their bodies," she explained matter-of-factly.

  Aside from his mother and the hermit, this scientist woman was the only person he had ever known who treated him as something other than a freak.

  When he told her he liked being what he was, the scientist smiled and asked, "Why?"

  He told her about his love of the hunt.

  The scientist began to show a glint in her eyes. Suddenly, the young man knew. It seemed impossible, but he knew. The woman scientist also enjoyed the hunt, strange as it seemed.

  "What if you could be more of what you are?" she asked him then.

  He was confused.

  "What if you could be faster, stronger? The ultimate hunter? The leader of your own pack?"

  He wasn't even sure what she was talking about. But of course he answered, "Yes."

  WAY NORTH, from the direction of La Vista, the leader of the pack saw headlights coming, shining like a distant pair of luminescent eyes. He finished with the rabbit, tossed the clean-picked bones aside and walked back to the van. His brothers and the bitch all crowded in to lick his bloody fingers, and he left them to it. It would whet their appetite for what was coming.

  The final target lived near Elmwood Park in Omaha, a few blocks from the College of St. Mary.

  Cruising in his Dodge Ram cargo van, the leader of the pack watched street signs, checking them from time to time against the map he had draped across the shotgun seat. His eyes were keen enough to chart a course without the dome light, following the trail that he had marked out with a yellow felt pen on the map when he was laying out the hit. The others huddled close behind him, bright eyes peering through the van's bug-speckled windshield as he drove.

  This was the last one. When this night's work was completed, he could go back home, rejoin the rest of his pack and recuperate for a while from the stress of being on the road. The balance of his money would be paid as usual, delivered by a pair of jumpy shooters who would drop the satchel at a designated point and speed away to minimize their risk of meeting the recipient. So far, the system had worked well enough. If he was lucky, there might even be some roadkill waiting for him on the highway near the drop.

  He found the street he wanted, signaled for the turn and held the van a mile or two below the posted speed limit. No cops in sight, but it could be a problem if he met one. There was bound to be a hassle, and he couldn't guarantee that his reaction would be swift enough to drop the officer before he reached his weapon, much less handle two of them if they were traveling in pairs. That would mean shooting, and while he wasn't concerned about the bullets on his own behalf, the noise alone would cancel any hope of taking his appointed quarry by surprise.

  This one was Cajun, like the last three, and he might know things. A trick or two for dealing with a loup-garou, perhaps. The leader of the pack had no desire to take that chance, if he could help it. It was better all around if he could catch his prey asleep, or at the very least distracted, tied up with the mundane chores of life when death dropped in to pay a call.

  The house was dark, as he had hoped it would be. Likewise with the neighbors, at this hour of the night. Nebraskans came from farm stock, as he understood it, early to bed and early to rise. His target was a working man, as well, some kind of minigolf amusement park where children gathered, chasing little balls on artificial grass. The leader of the pack had hoped he wouldn't have to take his prey at work, where there were witnesses. It would be so much cleaner this way, better for all concerned.

  He drove past the house and found a vacant house four doors down. There was a realtor's sign out front, and the carport was empty. He killed his headlights as he nosed the Dodge in off the street. His brothers and sister,
handpicked by him from the pack for this arduous journey, were obedient. They would wait for him, as always, while he checked the house. It made them restless, but they understood the rules and didn't challenge him.

  He left the van and closed the driver's door behind him softly, pressing gently till the latch engaged. It was a challenge, keeping to the shadows with a light directly opposite, but he was good at tracking, stalking prey. A little dog was yapping at him from a yard across the street, but it was no real threat. He worried more about the mongrel's owner waking, glancing out and spotting him, but he was almost at his destination now. A few more yards...

  He slipped into the target's backyard through a side gate. The grass was several inches long, in need of mowing. It was obvious the man he came to kill was not a conscientious gardener. He left weeds in the flower beds and didn't trim the shrubs that grew close in against his house. Not that it mattered now. A few more minutes, and his worries would be over for all time.

  He kept an eye out for security devices, spotting none. He was surprised from time to time that those he hunted made no greater effort to protect themselves. Not that a burglar alarm would have prevented him from doing what he came to do, but still, his quarry could have made the hunt more challenging.

  He found the back door, reached out with his thick, dark fingers. He tried the knob, gently, and was startled when it turned. Unlocked? He crouched and sniffed around the door, suspecting something in the nature of a trap, and drew back without noting any kind of threat.

  Should he go in without the others? They would never let him hear the end of it if he deprived them of a feast, but he could always scout the territory first, make sure the way was clear before he fetched them from the van. The kill itself was less important to the pack than feeding, after all.

  He took the chance.

  There was no word for protocol in his vocabulary, but he understood that he was stepping out of line. It was a small thing, but he told himself the others wouldn't mind. They would forgive him when they saw the kill and tasted blood. And if they didn't, well, it would be too damn bad.

  But there was something wrong.