"Kimberly, this is not funny. I can barely breathe."
The silk constricted. When Mrs. Baynes really, really could no longer breathe, she brought the other hand up to fight the tightening noose. It refused to budge.
She grabbed the cruel, tightening fingers. They were implacable. The edges of Mrs. Baynes's vision began to darken. The roaring sound in her ears reminded her of a seashell sound, but greatly magnified.
"She loves it," Kimberly sang through the growing blood roar. "She loves it."
Allison Baynes tried to tell Kimberly that she didn't in fact enjoy being choked, but since no air could squeeze past her windpipe, speaking was impossible.
And as her mind darkened, Mrs. Baynes was struck by a very odd thought.
If these were Kimberly's hands holding her down, whose were tightening the yellow scarf?
The police found Mrs. Allison Baynes hunched and kneeling in the middle of her living room, nose and forehead pressed into the rug, surrounded by the scattered pieces of her silver tea set. Her eyes bulged in an incredulous death stare. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, a rich purplish-black. Robin's-egg blue was the color of her face.
Detective Oscar Sale took one look and rushed out of the house.
"We got another one," he called to the medical examiner.
The medical examiner was overseeing two morgue attendants as they rolled a sheet-covered gurney out of the house to a waiting ambulance.
The M.E. fingered one ear forward. "What?"
"Same method-looks like a ligature strangulation."
The M.E. hurried over to the house.
"What?" he repeated.
Detective Sale led the M.E. to the front door, saying, "The door was ajar. No one answered, so I pushed it. That's what I found."
The medical examiner looked in. When he saw Mrs. Baynes, curled in a kneeling fetal position like a hibernating larva, he said, "Jesus, just like the Quinlan woman. Better check every house on the block. We could have a serial killer running loose."
But they never found the killer. Although they did find a large moist spot in an upstairs bedroom whose irregular edges were flecked with bits of a whitish substance that they rushed in evidence bags to an FBI forensics laboratory in Washington.
When the report came back that the whitish substance was common modeling clay, they decided it was not important and focused on finding Mrs. Baynes's missing granddaugter, Kimberly.
All they found of her was a shredded yellow dashiki that looked as if it had been savagely torn from its owner's body. It was found stuffed into a trashcan five houses down the street.
A nationwide alert was posted for a possible sex-maniac killer, but since no one knew what he looked like, all the lawenforcement authorities could do was wait until he struck again.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he wasn't asking for much. Just someone to kill.
"C'mon, Smitty," Remo said testily. "Give me a name. Or an address. Anything." Traffic hummed behind him, exhaust fumes thickening the humid summer air.
"Where are you, Remo?" came the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith. It was an astringent voice, one that might have been produced by a larynx cured in lemon juice.
"In a phone booth, okay?" Remo snapped. "And I'm running out of quarters. Just give me someone to hit."
"Remo, I think you should come in." Smith's voice was suddenly tender with concern. Now it sounded like a hasp sawing wood. For Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, that unpleasant sound constituted tenderness.
"Smith," Remo said with sudden fierceness, "are you hunched over your computer?"
"I am at my desk, yes," Smith allowed. "I would not describe myself as hunched. I take pride in my posture."
"Take it from me," Remo growled, "you're hunched. Look, you've got a computer full of bad guys. I just want one. I don't care where he is. I don't care who he is. I'll go there. Just give me somebody-anybody-to hit."
"If I do this, will you return to Folcroft?"
"Maybe," Remo said noncommittally.
"That is not a satisfactory answer," Smith returned stiffly.
"It's not a freaking satisfactory world!" Remo shouted suddenly.
Miles away, the earpiece against Harold Smith's ear actually buzzed with the force of Remo's shouting.
Adjusting his rimless eyeglasses on his patrician nose, Smith shouldered the phone closer to his ear so that both hands were free to attack his desktop computer keyboard. As he reached forward, his back fell into a natural stoop.
"What city, please?" Smith asked stiffly.
"Tacoma."
"I have a report of a crack house on Jane Street. Number 334."
"Great!" Remo said joyously. "Just what I need. A crack house. It might take all of thirty minutes to clear it out. Thanks, Smitty. I owe you one."
"Remo, wait!" Smith called urgently.
The click in Smith's ear was final. Harold Smith hung up, and addressed his humming computer. He input a command that would scan all incoming data feeds for reported violence in Tacoma, Washington. He wondered how long it would take until the computer verified that the crack house on 334 Jane Street had been violently cleared of its criminal element.
Of Remo Williams' success, he had absolutely no doubt.
It took one hour and fifty-seven minutes.
It broke down this way: Eight minutes for Remo to hail a cab and be whisked to the target neighborhood. Fourteen-point-seven minutes for the assignment itself, and a total of six minutes for the news of the Jane Street Massacre-as it was subsequently dubbed-to hit the wire services, from which it was conveyed to Harold Smith a nation away in Rye, New York, in the form of luminous green letters on a glareproof screen.
The remaining one hour and seven-point-three minutes constituted the police-response time from the time 911 received the first estimated body count from concerned Jane Street neighbors. That number was five. Before the call was concluded, it was seven. Before it was all over, the death toll was twenty-three.
Soapy Suggs was number five.
He loitered inside the front door to 334 Jane Street unaware of the four bodies sprawled on the sidewalk outside. Not that he would much have cared. They were satisfied customers, passing around a crack pipe in the battered Camaro because they had been in too big a hurry to get high to bother driving somewhere less public. No big deal. In Soapy's line of work, customers had a high mortality rate.
Soapy heard the polite knock on the door and grew immediately suspicious. Nobody knocked polite on his door. Not thrill-hungry uptown yuppies. Not the police. And definitely not the neighborhood.
He bounced off an overstuffed chair, grabbing a Mac-10, which he cocked with a quick, nervous jerk.
Soapy threw open the door, leaning so his gun hand was hidden by the jamb.
A man stood there with his arms folded impatiently.
"Yeah?" Soapy asked. "Whatchu want?" He didn't notice the corpse-filled Camero out on the curb. His eyes were on the man. He was a white dude. Roughly six feet tall, but looking taller because he was so skinny.
"Welcome Wagon," the skinny man said in a chipper voice. "I've been sent by request of the neighborhood to formally welcome you from Jane Street."
"You mean to," Soapy suggested.
"My mistake," the man said. "I'm new at this."
"You shittin' me?" Soapy asked, spitting out the words. "You really with the Welcome Wagon?"
"Absolutely," said the man. "May I come in?"
"Not dressed like that, you don't," Soapy said with a raucous laugh. The stress lines in his face melted with his widening grin of relief. "We got standards in this house. Just look at you."
"Oh?" the white guy said with a falling face. It was a strong face, lean with deep-set dark eyes and high cheekbones. He wore his dark hair short. His T-shirt was as black as his flat pupils. His chinos were blacker. He looked like a pool hustler in mourning. "Perhaps you'd like me to come back after I've changed into something more formal," he added
good-naturedly.
"Yeah, you do that," Soapy Suggs said, his trigger finger loosening. "You get silked down. And while you're at it, trade in those jivy shoes for some good Nikes or something. Those things look like they'd scratch my floor some."
The white guy looked down at his well-polished loafers.
"These are Italian leather," he complained. "What's wrong with them?"
"They out of style," Soapy barked, spitting on the left shoe. "By about thirty years." Laughing, he drew back to shut the door.
Instead, the polite man from Welcome Wagon gave him a close-up look at the hand-tooled Italian leather.
Splat!
Soapy Suggs swallowed his teeth. His head flew back. His Mac burped reflexively, chewing the wood like a runaway buzz saw.
"Welcome Wagon!" Remo Williams sang out, stepping in and slamming the door behind him.
On the floor, Soapy gurgled as he tried to claw loose teeth from his mouth. He was having inexplicable trouble breathing-inexplicable because everything had happened so fast.
Remo gave him another close look at his very expensive shoes. He pressed one of them into Soapy's eyes.
"These particular shoes are made by diligent craftsmen in Milan," he was saying. "Notice the all-leather soles. The heel is a single piece. Also notice the tasteful absence of neon labels. No factory stamped these out."
Soapy spat up a squirt of blood. A bicuspid danced momentarily atop the red fountain. The squirt died. The tooth slid down Soapy's spasming gullet.
An inner door opened and a long black face peered around its edge.
"Who you?" he asked.
Two more faces looked down from the top of the stairs.
"Yeah," one said gruffly, "and whatchu doing to my man Soapy?"
"Educating him on the fine points of quality footwear," Remo said, trying to sound convincingly like a shoe salesman. "Come on down. This is for all of you. Don't be bashful." Remo wiggled a playful finger at them.
The two black faces at the top of the stairs exchanged dumbstruck glances.
The face at the door crack withdrew cautiously. It asked: "You ain't said who you was yet."
"Welcome Wagon."
"You said that. Don't mean nothing to me." This from the stairs.
"Neither does proper English, it seems. Welcome Wagon is a benevolent organization dedicated to making new neighbors feel a part of their chosen community."
"By steppin' on their faces and making 'em squirm on the floor?" the face at the door asked.
"Oh," Remo said, remembering Soapy under one shoe. "Sorry. I was so engrossed in our highly educational exchange, I forgot about your friend." Remo looked down. He said he was sorry. He sounded sincerely contrite. Then he brought his left heel up and down like a jackhammer. Once. Once was enough. When the foot came away, Soapy Suggs's throat looked like a Tonka toy steamroller had flattened it.
Thus did Soapy Suggs become number five.
Remo put his hands on his hips. He looked up. "Now, where were we?"
"Getting dead," snarled Jarris Jameel, flinging the door open and launching himself out. He carried a combat knife held low. His angry eyes were on Remo's flat stomach.
Remo unfolded his arms. Jarris Jameel drove in, his knife arm out like an uncoiling viper. The knife went through a ghostly afterimage. Jarris kept going.
Remo chopped at the back of his neck in passing. It was a quick, casual chop. But it sent Jarris Jameel's head rolling out the open front door to bounce down the steps. The jettisoned body took two stumbling steps and banged off a wall. It struck a throw rug, raising dust. The spurting neck stump began repainting the fading wallpaper, actually improving it, Remo thought.
"Anyone else?" Remo asked, looking up hopefully.
"One moment," he was told.
"Yeah. We be with you in a mo', Welcome Wagon," the other added.
They retreated. To get weapons, Remo assumed.
Remo went up the stairs like a bouncy wraith. His feet on the rubber runners were silent. He was actually in a good mood. It was good to work again. Really work.
The hallway was long and definitely not designed by a claustrophobic architect. Doors lay open on either side of its narrow length. A variety of odors assaulted Remo's nose. Some were chemical. Others organic. Sanitation did not seem to be a household tradition at the modest two-story frame dwelling that was 334 Jane Street.
Remo gave his abnormally thick wrists a warm-up twist. Then he casually began going from room to room, where people sprawled on beds and couches with vacant expressions.
Most of them were drugged out, which disappointed Remo. He wanted action.
"Hello?" he called, ducking his head into a promising room. "Anyone sentient?"
"Who you?" a sleepy voice asked.
"I answered that already," Remo told the muscular man who quickly pulled a silk sheet over his naked legs. The nude woman beside him lifted a rust-red head off a ridiculously large pillow.
"I ax you a question," the black man snarled, taking a chrome-plated revolver from under his own fluffy pillow.
"And I ax you back," Remo returned, relieving the man of his threatening weapon with a chop of his knifelike hand.
Chuk! Bunngg!
The pistol bounced off the floor, where the attached hand finally shook loose. The man used his remaining hand to grab his bloodied stump of a wrist. He looked from it to Remo with a horror-struck "Why me?" expression.
The expression was so piteous that Remo erased it with the heel of his hand. The gunman fell back on his pillow, his face turning into a massive bruise like a concave prune.
The redheaded woman jerked her head up, saw the blood, and asked a shrill question.
"You don't do womens, do you?"
"You sell drugs?" Remo asked.
"Sell, snort, and swallow," she said eagerly.
"I do women," Remo said, driving her nose flat and riddling her brain with splinters of nose bone. Her head was swallowed by the pillow.
Whistling "Whistle While You Work," Remo moved on to the next room.
It looked empty. But his highly attuned senses detected a heartbeat on the other side of the open door. Remo silently took the doorknob in hand.
"Well, nobody in this room," he said aloud.
He stepped back, pulling the door closed. A man inhaled sharply. A preattack inhalation. Grinning, Remo reversed the door on its hinges.
He used only the strength of his bare right arm, but the door struck the inner wall so hard that the plaster cracked on both sides, fissuring the wallpaper.
Putting a contrite expression on his face, Remo pulled the door back and peered around it.
"Oh, sorry," he said in a small voice as the lumpy body slid to the floor with the muffled gritty sound of pulverized bone.
In the next room, Remo simply lunged in and started picking up people. They were very obliging. Wherever he flung them, they would go. Quickly. And with hardly a complaint. Through walls. Out windows. And into one another.
Oh, there were a few rattling groans coming from heaps of broken limbs, but Remo took them as praise.
"Only doing my job," he said modestly.
The sound of commotion drew his attention to the remaining rooms. The noise the last bodies had made as they went through the windows had awoken even the most stupefied inhabitant of the house.
The house shook with the rattle of feet pounding on stairs.
Remo rushed out to intercept the escapees. A few made attempts to shoot him down. A weapon burped here. An automatic snapped there.
Remo dodged each bullet as he had been taught so long ago, with lightning ease. The bullets came so fast they cut shock waves in the air ahead of them. Sensing the approaching turbulence, Remo simply shifted out of the way. Even when they came from behind. His body automatically retreated from the warning pressure. He was like a paper kite that gave before the slightest wind. Except Remo wasn't at the mercy of those breezes. He gave before them, only then cutting away from the deadly bul
lets he could not always see coming.
Chuk! Chuk! Chuk! Chuk!
Holes chopped through wallboard where he had been. Remo kept moving.
Four men were pounding down the stairs. Remo went to the top runner and, bending at waist and knees, drove straight fingers into the wood. The staircase collapsed like a linchpin had been removed.
The quartet found themselves groaning and squirming in an astonishingly abrupt pile of splinters, like victims of a bombing.
"Did I mention the termite problem on this street?" Remo asked.
Someone tried sneaking up behind him. The sound of a clip driving home gave him away. Remo whirled, taking hold of the would-be assailant's gun arm with both hands.
Naturally, the man opened up with his automatic weapon.
Remo let him empty the clip, first making sure the muzzle was pointing down the nonexistent steps where four men groaned. Bone and meat spattered the walls. The groaning in the broken runners trailed off into dying gurgles.
The gunman added a stricken "What'd I do?" to the cacophony.
"I think you got the termites," Remo told him, brightvoiced.
The gunman spat an unintelligible curse. Remo showed him how deadly even an empty pistol can be when it strikes one's own belly muscles with pile-driver force. Whump! Behind his ridged abdomen, the gunman's stomach burst like a balloon.
With a careless toss, Remo sent him into the pile.
Crasshh!
He was number eighteen.
Remo Williams made a final sweep of the rooms. They were empty. But warm beds and a chair seat told him there were more unaccounted-for occupants. The closet gave up only one. A fat ball of blubber with a ring on every finger and one through each nostril.
Crouching on the floor, he tried diving out between Remo's legs. Remo faded back and used his head for a walnut. The slamming door and jamb were the nutcracker.
Cruunch!
Remo put his head out into the hallway.
"Come out, come out, whereever you are," he invited. His voice was cheerful.
Stealthy movement came from over his head.
"Ah-hah!" Remo said softly. "Naughty little children. They're hiding in the attic."
Reaching up, Remo felt the ceiling plaster. A slight but visible bowing told him of a foot coming to rest. Using both hands, Remo followed the man's progress. He was creeping to a definite spot in the attic.
Blood Lust td-85 Page 2
