The Ultimate Death td-88

by Warren Murphy

  Remo watched. The terrapin-Remo thought he was Porthos-was systematically being pummeled to the ground by ninja nunchuks. But before they could deliver the killing blow, Aramis, Athos, and d'Artagnan popped up from a manhole cover and sent the ninjas flying in all directions.

  To Remo's eyes, it looked painfully slow and staged.

  The audience went crazy; laughing and hooting and throwing things. A butterfly knife sailed up at the screen and impaled the blonde neatly in her cleavage.

  Remo sighed. It hadn't been this much of a zoo when he was young.

  His gaze settled on a man in the front row, over on the right aisle, and his face froze. It was Tarantula, reputed head of the Spanish Spiders, and he was taking advantage of the din to tell someone across the aisle what he thought of him.

  The object of his abuse was watching the screen intently, but his body was twisted in the seat toward Tarantula, and there were at least a dozen teens on either side of the aisle who were intently interested in his response to the verbal abuse.

  Remo exhaled slowly through his nose.

  So much for an evening lost in popcorn aroma and nostalgia. Taking the tub of popped corn with him, Remo started to move sideways down the row. He slid easily across the sticky cement, as if the soles of his Italian loafers had been impregnated with anti-stick.

  ". . . you marachita," Tarantula finished, snapping his head sideways as if in punctuation. Then he leaned back, having vented his rage, and waited for Faroom, Supreme Sheik of Allah's Swarm, to respond. His posse lounged around him on the Spanish Spiders' side of the cinema, their leers mocking, and their attitudes saying that Faroom couldn't possibly match their leader's invective.

  But their smiles disappeared as Dum-Dum Dudley, the teen beside Faroom, started spitting a bass beat, and Faroom himself began spewing an obviously prepared rap.

  Obvious, because it was so tight. There was no way anyone could do that off the top of his head. The words were coarse, and the rhymes vicious. They told Tarantula what he could do, where he could do it, and with whom.

  Tarantula's face became an onyx sculpture, and his baseball jacket billowed open. His fingers reached quickly inside, and his hand yawned open to grip the shining, nickel-plated handle of the weapon within the tan leather shoulder holster.

  Remo flicked a kernel of popcorn in the tough's direction.

  "Snack?" he asked, simultaneously shoving the cardboard tub under Tarantula's nose.

  Tarantula's hand came out of his jacket as if his namesake had bitten it, and stared dumbstruck at the crushed popcorn petal imbedded like shrapnel in his hand. He looked to his right just as his main man seemed to vault up in midair back first, then land in the lap of another thug in the row behind him.

  Suddenly Remo was sitting beside him, rooting around in the popcorn, intent on the screen. "The movie's pretty lousy," he remarked. "But the floor show's good."

  Tarantula looked at Remo, who added, "I see you've finished your popcorn. Care to try some of mine?"

  The Spanish Spiders started to rise from their seats, but Tarantula held up his bleeding hand. "You better haul butt out of here, you anglo fruit," he spat.

  Remo just kept taking fistfuls of popcorn, looking at them sadly, and dropping them on the floor. "It's a pity," he said. "You can't even go out to the movies anymore."

  "Whatchu talkin' about, man?"

  "Oh, you know what I'm talking about, Tyrant. May I call you Tyrant?"

  "The name's Tarantula, jack-off," the teenager spat at him.

  "The name's Remo, Tyrant. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me? I used to be a big name in these parts."

  "You're nuts, you know that, man?"

  "No, but I am ticked off," Remo said casually, dropping more popcorn. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Because I love this place. This is the place where I learned what heroes are all about. They gave me hope, and made me want to make the world better."

  Remo took a fistful of popcorn. "Then you and your buddies come along and turn the place into a shooting gallery. Bad enough you do it on the streets-my streets-but at least you know where each other live. Here, you outnumber the innocent bystanders ten-to-one."

  He squeezed his fist, and the popcorn turned to glittering powder. He let it stream out of his hand. "Now nobody comes to the movies anymore. They stay home, cowering in their living rooms, watching videos. You're killing movies. You know what that means?"

  The gang made a move toward him, but Tarantula stopped them again. "No, anglo. What's it mean?"

  Remo looked at him and smiled like a skull, rolling a popcorn kernel on his thumbnail with his forefinger. "It means that when this generation grows up, there'll be less people like me, and more people like you. And that pisses the hell out of me."

  Tarantula gave him his biggest death's-head smile-the kind that doesn't involve the eyes. "Well, don't you worry about it, baby." He quickly reached into his jacket. "Because you're a dead man!"

  Remo let him pull out the gun. He let the others reach for theirs. Then he flicked the single popcorn kernel on this thumb into Tarantula's right eye.

  The piece of popcorn shot across the small distance like a barbed-wire BB pellet, and had the same effect.

  The popped edges of the kernel tore open Tarantula's pupil, and the corn heart wedged deep in his cornea. He screamed, as Remo lightly gripped the thick rectangular barrel of the huge automatic weapon.

  "That a custom job?" he said lightly. "Looks it. I don't know much about guns. They dilute the art."

  Tarantula was in no mood to answer. He continued to scream and turn, one hand over his eye, trying to keep the blood and ocular fluid in. To the others, it looked as if he and Remo were dancing around an invisible maypole.

  "Fifteen rounds," Remo judged, examining the weapon. "Nickel-plated. Must've set you back a ton of crack."

  Tarantula fixed him with his good eye, brought the gun down until it was against Remo's nose, and pulled the trigger.

  Tarantula's right-hand man went down, a smoking crater in his chest. Which was weird, since he stood off to the left.

  "Smart move," said Remo, as the rest of the audience started to scream and bolt. "Can't shoot people in the head around here. Skull shrapnel really flies."

  Tarantula screamed again. His arm had somehow been moved so it was pointing off to his left. He brought it around until it was against Remo's right breast, and pulled the trigger again.

  Something propelled it away. Something too fast to be seen.

  Dum-Dum Dudley, coincidentally named for the kind of bullet that killed him, went down next to Faroom.

  Ignoring the stampeding audience, the Spanish Spiders and Allah's Swarm all took out their guns-with Remo and Tarantula in the middle.

  Tarantula hit the carpet and rolled for his life.

  The two street gangs started firing at each other. Normally they'd all miss, hitting a variety of innocent bystanders, but this time they had Remo to contend with. What their bullets didn't accomplish, his hands did.

  He weaved among them, pushing and pulling gang members so that ripping lead smashed between ribs and into hearts. He spun, knocking them into the line of fire, jerking their wrists and guns so that their own shots found their marks.

  It was like a macabre ballet. Remo was a blur, always one step ahead of death, and although the seats and floor became spattered with blood drops he remained unsprinkled by gore.

  Finally the crackle of gunfire abated, and there was no one left but Faroom and Tarantula, who stood on the opposite sides of the wide aisle staring at each other in stunned silence. Remo leaned against the stage. He watched the two gang leaders impassively as the film continued to roll.

  The theater was empty, save for those two, and the dozen corpses at their feet. Remo picked up his blood-splattered popcorn tub and began crushing the last of the kernels.

  "Play nice," he instructed the gang lords.

  They immediately raised their guns like duelists, aimed at each other's
faces, and pulled the triggers.

  The guns boomed and bucked in their hands. Tarantula's bullet went wide and slammed into an emergency exit's steel latch-bar. It whined away with a grinding snap. Faroom's round cut a chunk out of the stage next to Remo's elbow.

  "I said nice," said Remo, and flicked a popcorn kernel into Faroom's eye.

  As the other gang leader was cycloped he screamed, firing off another round into the ceiling.

  Both gang leaders looked at each other through their one good eye, each holding their free hand over their destroyed ones. They were both hunched over, both gasping for breath, and both got the same idea at the same time.

  Faroom aimed at Remo. Tarantula aimed at Remo. They transferred their hate for each other to this amazing white man. They pulled their respective triggers and held them down, so that all the remaining bullets in their fifteen-round clips were pumped out. Too late.

  Both men danced and jerked as the projectiles ripped into them.

  Faroom was perforated from his forehead to his crotch. Tarantula got ten rounds directly in the head, all but blotting out his two-ounce brain.

  Remo watched Tarantula crumple to the floor, a big smoking hole in his head. "He who lives by popcorn," he intoned by way of eulogy, "dies by popcorn."

  And he walked out into the warmth of the Newark, New Jersey, afternoon.

  It was not the Newark he had grown up in. Not the Newark of the orphan Remo Williams, ward of the state, who had left St. Theresa's Orphanage-now a parking lot-for the Newark Police Department, pulled a tour in Nam, and returned to the force only to be framed for the murder of a pusher in the Ironbound section of town.

  He had not killed the man, but the state saw it differently. Remo had gone to the electric chair thinking he was about to die.

  After the juice had caused him to black out, Remo woke up in the place called Folcroft Sanitarium and discovered that the frame-up had been engineered to erase him so a government agency known as CURE could have its own White House-sanctioned assassin.

  Remo Williams.

  They had taken away his last name. They had erected a tombstone with his name chiseled in marble. They had destroyed every record with his name, face, and fingerprints on it.

  And most cruel of all, they had subjected him to plastic surgery, so that when Remo awoke to the chill unexpectedness of still walking the earth, his own reflection was unsettling and alien.

  Over the years Remo had had his face fixed several times, each time getting further and further away from the face that was genetically his own.

  But now, over twenty years after it had all begun, Remo. walked the streets of his childhood with his original features.

  He reveled in the knowledge that if Dr. Harold W. Smith, his superior, were even to suspect he had ventured back to his childhood haunts, he would stroke out. But twenty years was twenty years. Newark had changed. There was no one to remember even the true face of Remo Williams. He would tell Smith that, and that would be the end of any talk of going under the knife again. He hoped.

  Remo found himself in the Ironbound section of the city. It had not changed so much. He paused before the alley where the pusher had been found, Remo's badge gleaming in his drying blood.

  The place where Remo Williams' life had taken the wrongest turn possible was no shrine. It stank of urine and maggots and rancid leftovers. Remo tried to remember the pusher's name. It wouldn't come. There was a time, when he was imprisoned up at Trenton, when those kinds of unanswered questions had kept him awake at night.

  Now Remo Williams no longer cared.

  So long ago . . .

  He found his car-it was registered to "Remo Meyers," another in a string of disposable aliases-and drove north.

  As he drove, he thought back on the events that had given him his old face.

  It was hard to tell where it had all begun. Was it Palm Springs? Or Abominadad, Irait? Or Folcroft Sanitarium, where the surgery he had been tricked into undergoing had taken place?

  On reflection, Remo decided it all tied together. If it had not been for Palm Springs, where Remo and his mentor had found themselves playing button-button with a live neutron bomb, he would not have ended up in Irait, a tool of the government that had triggered the Gulf War. And if he had not become the official assassin to Irait, his face would not have been broadcast to the world, making it public and forcing Harold Smith to resort to plastic surgery.

  The joke had been on Smith, and on the Master of Sinanju.

  The plastic surgeon had discovered that Remo's face had been pared down almost to the naked bone. So he had gone in the opposite direction, building up the nose, the chin, the modeling.

  And inadvertently, restoring Remo Williams' original face with nearly one-hundred-percent faithfulness.

  Smith had been furious. The Master of Sinanju had been aghast. He had attempted to cajole the surgeon into giving Remo Korean features-Remo still wasn't certain his eyes hadn't been given a slight elongation. No one seemed to agree on this point.

  Still, for all Remo's pleasure, there had been a downside. He and Chiun had been forced to vacate their private home, to return to the old cycle of switching residences often.

  This time they were in a tower condominium complex on the former site of another landmark of Remo's lost childhood, Palisades Park in Edgewater, New Jersey.

  It was there that Remo had left his Master. It was to there he was returning.

  Since they had moved, Chiun had lapsed back into his mood of pique, blaming Remo for the fact that the Master of Sinanju had spent three months in a virtual coma at the bottom of a desert structure, where Chiun had taken refuge to escape the exploding neutron bomb.

  Three months in which Remo had believed his Master dead. Three months in which Chiun had slept in a watery grave, his spirit appearing before Remo, pleading and attempting to communicate his desperate plight.

  And during those three months the Master of Sinanju had hibernated through his one-hundredth birthday, a milestone called the kohi.

  Chiun had been bewailing that missed moment of glory ever since. And blaming Remo for it.

  Remo decided that he had had enough of the missed birthday. Screw the date. Chiun's hundredth-and-first wasn't far off. They'd have a celebration, regardless. Maybe it would get Chiun off his back once and for all.

  On the way home, Remo stopped in at a Japanese supermarket to buy a whole duck.

  He selected an oxymura jaimaicensis, better known as ruddy duck, because it was the most succulent, taking care to select a bird with the least subcutaneous fat content. A lifetime of alternating between duck and fish had made Remo, of necessity, an expert on both species.

  Whistling, he grabbed a pound of the kind of Japonica rice that had the nutty aftertaste Chiun liked so much.

  Yeah, he thought happily as he stepped out into the cool air that smelled of the nearby Hudson River, this will bring Chiun out of his snotty mood.

  Chapter 3

  The thirty-seventh annual Cahill picnic was memorable, to say the least.

  They held it, as always, in the back lot of the Fairfax, Virginia, high school, on the sunniest day of the spring. Back when they started the tradition in '55, the extended Cahill family struggled to predict the sunniest day of the season with the help of almanacs, psychics, palm readers, and astrologers. But soon they discovered that the less they tried, the sunnier it was. Old Mother Cahill started to take for granted the fact that the day she chose for the reunion-picnic-barbecue would be the sunniest day of the year.

  And while it wasn't always a perfect blue, never had a drop of rain disturbed so much as a single lock of hair on any Cahill head during the annual reunions, or turned any of their paper plates into soggy cardboard leaves.

  They came from all over the South, hauling their pots of picnic necessities and vats of regional delicacies. Ted and Cathy Cahill came all the way from New Orleans with their tongue-searing jambalaya. Jack and Ellen Cahill came from Baltimore with red pepper-steamed
hard-shell crabs. Don and Chris Cahill came from Sarasota with their onion flowers-whole sweet onions cut into the shape of roses, deep-fried, and tasting like an apple made entirely of onion rings.

  But no matter how many culinary heights they scaled, the single favorite item at every one of the thirty-six prior celebrations had always been Old Mother Cahill's fried chicken. That's what got the family to the first reunion, right after Uncle Dan came back from Korea, and that's what brought them back year after year. For more than three decades it had been the first thing they bit into and the last thing they talked about.

  This season was no exception. Fluffy white clouds dotted the deep blue sky, the cars filled the faculty parking lot, and the field was covered with a volleyball net, a croquet set, a kickball pole, and a badminton court; but all the relatives came to Old Mother Cahill's table first-to sink their teeth into a crispy, juicy, flaky, light, delicious piece of fried chicken. The party couldn't officially begin until everybody had coated their palates with chicken juice.

  The reunion went on all day, as each group of siblings took their turns at the different sporting events, alternating that with more eating. Following the chicken came the festival of salads. There was garden, Caesar, chef's, macaroni, three-bean, Waldorf, egg, tuna, potato, German potato, potato with egg, potato with egg and onion, potato with egg, onion, and celery, potato with egg, onion, celery, and peppers-and chicken.

  Then came the main dishes and casseroles, followed by the desserts. They were as myriad and ornate as the salads. There was chocolate layer cake, German chocolate cake, walnut cake, whiskey cake, lemon cake, and linzer torte. There was coconut custard pie, Boston cream, banana cream, and chocolate cream. There was blueberry, cherry, apple, pineapple, mince, pecan, and lemon meringue pie. There were brownies, blondies, cookies, homemade doughnuts, and fried dough. There were even candies and ice cream.

  Was it any wonder that at about six o'clock Ted Cahill was feeling a trifle queasy?