Sweet Dreams Page 9

  Wooley showed up twenty minutes later. He was wearing a short-sleeved yellow shirt, open at the neck, with double knit blue slacks.

  As Wooley came through one of the back exit doors the 300 students stood and cheered. None of them knew exactly why, but they had heard that Wooley last night had somehow embarrassed Lee (Woody) Woodward at a conference, and anybody who had done that rated a cheer.

  Wooley looked as if the cheers were only his normal due upon entering a classroom. The lecture began, and Donleavy thought that Wooley was a pretty good instructor. Sharp facts peppered with personal observations and experience. Occasionally, a humorous anecdote to illustrate a point. But after fifteen minutes, Donleavy could no longer hear. The chanting had grown too loud. All he could hear was Kill For Us.

  He heard the voices. He saw Wooley standing in the front of the room. He felt the weight of the object under his jacket. Sweat appeared on his forehead. The saliva built up in his mouth and he swallowed it. He pulled on a pair of black leather gloves.

  Kill For Us.

  Donleavy looked at his watch.

  Kill For Us.

  It was twenty-five minutes into the lecture. All the other classes in the building would have been started by now.

  Kill For Us.

  The hallways would probably be empty.

  Kill For Us.

  Donleavy stood up in his seat. A few heads turned toward him, then looked away, toward one of the side doors. The faint buzz in the room vanished away into silence. Entering through one of the hall’s side doors was Lee (Woody) Woodward, director of college affairs. His hair was a white thicket around his reddened face. His clothes were wrinkled and baggy. His pants were stained dark at the crotch.

  T.B. Donleavy did not see him. He was walking down the aisle toward Wooley who was now writing on the blackboard. Donleavy heard a sound. He turned as the students yelled, and Lee (Woody) Woodward ran by him. Woodward pulled a pistol from his jacket pocket and shouted, “You bastard. You ruined me. You bastard.”

  As Wooley turned, Woodward raised his pistol to fire at him.

  Donleavy saw the revolver in the man’s arm and as the arm raised, Donleavy reached under his Army jacket, pulled out a medieval mace, and smashed it down across Woodward’s arm. The revolver dropped harmlessly to the carpeted floor of the lecture hall. The students cheered, but choked on their cheer as Donleavy raised the mace up over his head and smashed it down, deep into Woodward’s skull.

  The look of gratitude on Wooley’s face as Donleavy had saved him from the shooting changed into a look of horror. And then there was no look at all as the metal spikes on Donleavy’s mace ripped off Wooley’s face.

  The first swing was right to left, splattering Wooley’s face on the floor and left wall. The second swing was a vicious backhand stroke from left to right, pushing part of Wooley’s head into a red spiraling arc, some splattering students in the first two rows.

  The quick first swings held the body upright. The third and last swing was up over Donleavy’s head and came whistling down to cleave Wooley’s head. Bone and brain bubbled up onto the carpeted floor and over the mace which had become a semi-permanent fixture on the neck of the late William Westhead Wooley.

  T.B. Donleavy left it there and ran out the nearest exit door. He had things to do now that the chanting had stopped.

  He had just finished his third pack and he had to find some more cigarettes. Quick.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “LOOK,” REMO SAID, “we’ll protect this guy for you because you’re going to buy me a house. But that’s all. Just because you want us to. Not because this is important. This Wooley’s invented a cartoon gadget is all. How the hell can you think that’s important?”

  “It’s important,” Smith said. He sat behind the wheel of his car, his hands clenching and unclenching on the wheel.

  “Sure. Earth shattering,” Remo said. “Like most of the other nonsense you get us involved in.”

  “I don’t pretend to understand everything about it,” Smith said. “But just for openers, it would be invaluable in police interrogations. A good questioner can find out any secret. Imagine its application in intelligence work. Those are for a start. And try this. This Dreamocizer could be the ultimate drug. Somebody takes drugs now, he’s leaping off into the unknown. But with this machine, he can go right where he’s always wanted to go and do whatever he’s always wanted to do. I can see two hundred million people sitting in front of these damn things and never moving. Zombies.”

  Remo did not answer. He was thinking about what it would be like to live in a big wooden house with big grassy lawns and big brown trees.

  Remo pictured himself lying down on his lawn. He was holding something. It was an acorn. Across from him was a squirrel. It looked at Remo quizzically. Then it looked at the acorn. And it was not afraid. It hopped forward then stopped. It was no more than five inches from Remo’s hand. In his mind’s eye, Remo could see that he could have snatched it up or broken it in half or smashed its head in, but he didn’t. Not his squirrel. Not on his lawn. There was no need for violence. There were no secrets, no national security to worry about, no spies or madmen or scientists or assassins. No junkies, Mafia, government. No Smith.

  Remo saw himself offering an acorn to the squirrel and the squirrel took it.

  He heard a voice call in his imagination.

  “Remo.”

  Remo turned, as the animal ran off with its prize, and saw her there, standing in the doorway of his house.

  She was beautiful.

  Remo didn’t see what she was wearing. He did not see the color of her hair or her eyes.

  He just saw her and she was beautiful.

  She came down the lawn calling his name.

  “Remo. Remo. Remo.”

  Remo rose to meet her.

  “Remo.”

  She had Smith’s face. The thin graying hair. The face that looked as if it were sucking a lemon. She was wearing a gray suit and a white shirt.

  Remo shook his head, blinked, and was back on the campus of Edgewood University.

  He stared at Smith who was now standing beside him, a worried look on his face.

  “Remind me never to invite you to my house when you buy it for me,” Remo said.

  “Are you all right?” Smith asked.

  “Fine. Can anybody use this Dreamocizer?”

  “It is evil,” Chiun said.

  “Keep out of this,” Remo said.

  “It is evil,” Chiun repeated. “Dreams are meant to be only visitors in one’s life.”

  “You’re a great one to say that,” Remo said. “You and your soap operas.”

  “My daytime dramas are just that. Stories. Lovely poems. I live in the real world.”

  “And so do I,” Remo said. “Smitty, I want that house. And I’ll protect your Professor Wooley and I’ll make sure the wrong people don’t get his machine and I’ll…”

  “Hold,” Chiun said. “We are co-equal partners. Yet you prattle on about what you will do. What will I do?”

  Before Remo could tell Chiun that he would no doubt be busy finding new things to kvetch about, they heard the scream.

  They turned toward the sound.

  A wail of many voices rose, then passed like a cloud. Then a young coed stumbled through the pine boughs.

  Remo caught the girl just as she was falling face first onto the asphalt of the parking lot. She sank into his arms. He gently turned her over so her blank eyes stared upward. She whined softly, piteously.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  The girl looked through Remo, unable to focus her eyes.

  “Blood,” she said. “Blood everywhere. I heard the noises. I looked up…hit me in the face…wet, couldn’t see. I wiped it off…felt ear, eye…blood…Poor Doctor Wooley.”

  She started to wail and Remo let her down gently and told Smith: “Wait here until I see what’s happening.”

  He ran off between the trees. He heard loud shouting ahead
of him now.

  Chiun cradled the girl in his arms and touched her on the neck, then rubbed the back of her head. He looked up at Smith.

  “She will forget now,” he said.

  On the other side of the stand of trees, Remo ran past stunned, stumbling students until he found the exit doors that led into Fayerweather Hall’s main lecture auditorium.

  He stood beside the blackboard staring at the huge pool of blood with the broken-headed corpse in the middle.

  He recognized Wooley at once; the body of Lee (Woody) Woodward meant nothing to him.

  The red sea of blood reached across both exit doors and was building up slightly in the small declivity formed by the blackboard wall and the incline of the first row of seats.

  Remo saw the blood circle around a pair of shoes. The shoes had feet in them, feet that led up to a boy, sitting in a seat, doing an excellent impersonation of advanced catatonia.

  He was staring straight ahead and gently touching dried brown bloodstains on his face.

  Teachers and students from other classes began to gather around the pool of blood. They stood staring at the corpses of Wooley and Woodward. Several threw up. Some moved around to get a better look, then all started talking at once.

  “Did anyone call the police?”

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Some madman. Woodward tried to shoot old Wooley and this lunatic took off both their heads with that mace.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Dunno. Army jacket, steel-rimmed glasses. Looked like us.”

  Remo moved outside, walking past huddled moaning shapes. One had thrown up and was trying not to again. Another youth, who couldn’t take his eyes off the exit doors, was trying to comfort a girl who was weeping hysterically.

  This wasn’t a dream. The students who had seen the murders would never forget it; they wouldn’t have to strap their heads to a television set to conjure up a fantasy of blood and death. They had seen it, had it dumped into their laps.

  Remo walked back through the pine trees. Chiun and Smith were still crouching over the girl.

  Before Smith could say anything, Remo said:

  “Wooley’s dead, Smitty.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find him. You can forget the house for awhile,” Remo said. “This one’s a freebie. Will she be all right?”

  Chiun nodded.

  “Then leave her and let’s go. We’ve got work to do. So long, Smitty.”

  · · ·

  Leen Forth Wooley felt something pull at her. She took off her stereo headphones and tried to dig on the new vibrations.

  But it was only someone banging on the front door of her house. Usually, she would ignore it because Wooley wasn’t home, but the knocking seemed more insistent, faster, than one of her father’s usual visitors.

  She drifted slowly toward the door, remembering Wooley’s injunction to be cautious.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Leen Forth,” came a student’s young sounding voice. “Your father’s been killed.”

  “Oh, my god,” Leen Forth cried and fell backward into the living room. She took a deep breath, then rose and went to the door.

  “How did it happen?” she coolly asked the student there, an eighteen-year-old boy with a complexion like pizza and the insecurity of an unfed kitten.

  “Murdered. Some maniac at Fayerweather Hall,” the student said unfeelingly, then stopped when he saw the effect of his words on Leen Forth.

  “Thank you,” she said and slammed the door.

  So they had gotten to him. All those people with their greed and their promises and their threats, and someone had gotten to William Westhead Wooley because the world was afraid of his genius and wanted to silence it.

  Never. Not if she could help it.

  She fished in the pocket of her jeans and found the scrap of paper, and dialed the telephone number.

  “Yes, Mr. Massello, dead. Murdered. Yes, I know where it is. Yes, I’ll be right there. Of course, I’ll bring the machine.”

  Then Leen Forth Wooley hung up the phone and ran from her house toward safety. Toward the houseboat of her father’s friend.

  Don Salvatore Massello.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  REMO AND CHIUN SEEMED hardly to be walking, yet they were covering ground as if on a dead run toward Professor Wooley’s cottage.

  “First we’ll make sure that the girl is all right,” Remo said. “Then we’ll see if we can get the dream machine. I’ll need your help.”

  “Why?” said Chiun.

  “She’s…well, Oriental.”

  “She is Vietnamese,” Chiun said. “You know what I have told you about Vietnamese.”

  “Yeah, but she might trust you.”

  “Why? Because we look alike?” Chiun said.

  “Well, some Orientals all do look alike,” Remo said lamely.

  “All you pigs’ ears look alike and I would not trust any of you,” Chiun said.

  “Do it for the country then,” Remo said.

  “What country?”

  “America.”

  “What has this country done for me?” Chiun said.

  “Ask not what this country can do for you,” Remo said. “Ask what you can do for this country.”

  “Did you just make that up?” Chiun asked.

  “No. President Kennedy did.”

  “And where’s he now?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Remo said. “I’ll handle it myself. Just like I do everything else.”

  “Good,” Chiun said. “It is almost time.”

  “Almost time for what?” Remo asked.

  “It is almost one o’clock. It is almost time for The Gathering Clouds to begin.”

  “Good luck,” Remo said, as he dashed into Wooley’s house, with Chiun close behind him.

  Remo searched the house for Leen Forth while Chiun inspected the television set, broken by a gangster’s head the night before, and determined that it was indeed broken beyond repair.

  “She’s not here,” Remo said when he came back to the living room.

  “This set is broken,” Chiun said. “If it hadn’t been for you…If I hadn’t had to protect you, this would not have happened…this set would not be broken.” He was working himself up from annoyance, through anger, to outrage.

  “Too bad,” Remo said.

  “Heartless you are. Heartless.”

  “You find your stupid television set. That poor girl may be with that looney that killed her father. I’ve got to find them.”

  “Follow your nose,” Chiun said. “Vietnamese smell funny.”

  Chiun went out on the porch and sat on the top step sadly, watching Remo race off across the well-watered grass of the campus.

  · · ·

  It had been more than eight hours since Arthur Grassione had heard from the two men he had sent to Doctor Wooley’s house to get the Dreamocizer and to dispose of Wooley.

  Finally, he had sent Edward Leung there to see what had happened, and Leung had come back to report that the two men’s bodies had been stuffed into garbage pails in the back of Wooley’s house.

  Leung’s heart-shaped yellow face looked sad as he delivered the news.

  “They were broken up badly,” he said, and his tone of voice sent a chill through Grassione.

  “Yeah, what happened to them?” he asked.

  “One shot with his own gun. His skull blown away. The other one, no marks. As if he died of fright.”

  “Just like the others,” Grassione said.

  “What others?” said big Vince Marino, standing by the window of the second-floor apartment, looking out into the curved drive below.

  “All those people we been losing. All over the country. Just like that. Shooting themselves. Scared to death. There’s somebody doing something to us.” He looked up and caught a hint of a smile on Edward Leung’s mouth.

  “
What are you smirking about, you goddam fish-eating, fortune-telling freak?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Leung said.

  “You’d better talk, coolie.”

  Leung took a deep breath before speaking. Slowly he said, “I warned you of this. All of life ends in death and dreams.”

  “Aaaah, I don’t want to hear your bullshit,” Grassione said. “I shoulda left you in that gook carnival where I found you.” He rose and walked to the window where he shouldered Marino out of the way. Looking down across the campus, he saw a thin man running. He had dark hair and even at this distance, Grassione could see his thick wrists. Something about him looked familiar. He must have seen him run before. But he had no time to puzzle about it because the telephone rang.

  Don Salvatore Massello wished to speak to him.

  “Were you responsible for what happened today in the lecture hall?” Massello asked.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Professor Wooley was murdered. And he had already agreed to our terms.”

  “Murdered?” said Grassione. “I didn’t know anything about it. Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. I am told it was a barbarian act,” Massello said, “so I assumed it was one of your people.”

  The insult flew so high above Grassione’s head that he did not even hear its wings flap. “Not my men,” he said. “We were staying away from Wooley until we heard from you. What about the machine?”

  “I have been in contact with the professor’s daughter. She is bringing me the machine. So all will work out all right,” said Massello.

  “Good. That’s good,” said Grassione with a heartiness he did not feel.

  “Yes, it is,” said Massello and without even the usual courtesies he hung up.

  Grassione moved quickly to the door. “Let’s go, Vince. You goddam chink. Let’s move it.”

  “Where are we going, boss?” Marino asked.

  “We got to get over to Wooley’s house. See if the girl’s still there and try to get that machine. And then we’ve got a date with Don Salvatore Massello.”

  · · ·

  Twenty-one Edgewood University students who wore Army field jackets and steel-rimmed glasses were in their rooms all over the campus dormitory area when they were visited by a dark-eyed man with thick wrists who put an index finger, like a railroad spike, into their shoulder muscles and growled: