"That's gotta be a felony," Remo muttered, and began moving through the press of bodies again, searching for a place where he could confront the goons without endangering the revelers.
From Ham DuBois he had gleaned a first name, bits and pieces of a story that could still be crap, despite the fact that his informant seemingly believed it. Remo needed more, and he was hoping that the four punks on his tail could add a few more bytes of information.
Remo began negotiating his way through the crush, moving inexorably toward the north side of the street. The human current had already passed Desire House, drawing Remo and his tail toward the terminus of Tchoupitoulas Street at Jefferson Avenue, with Audubon Park just beyond. South of Tchoupitoulas, the Mississippi River snaked its way along the outskirts of the Crescent City, dividing New Orleans proper from the suburbs of Westwego, Harvey, Gretna and Marrero. Narrow side streets had their own block parties going on, no respite from the crowd, and even alleyways were populated with partiers whose costumes mingled 1950s horror movies and sci-fi with all the trappings of a modernday Gay Pride parade.
Ten minutes after leaving Ham's Hock Shop, he found what he was looking for. It wasn't perfect, but he would find nothing better at this end of Tchoupitoulas Street.
A cemetery. How appropriate.
He wormed his way in that direction, left the surging crowd behind him as he broke into a trot.
JEAN CUVIER HAD NEVER made it with a Gypsy, and the more he thought about Aurelia Boldiszar, the more that lapse in judgment struck him as a critical mistake. She had the kind of look he had always liked in women: slim but not emaciated; elegant, even though her clothes were far from stylish; intelligent but quiet, keeping to herself a bit instead of showing off how smart she was.
The women in the past, let's face it, had been mostly bimbos. They were good at what they did, but without the bedroom and the shopping mall they had no purpose in life. With a Gypsy, now-this Gypsy, anyway-he had the feeling that he would be traveling uncharted territory. It excited him to think about it...but, predictably, there was a problem.
When Aurelia looked at him, which wasn't often, it was as if her eyes glazed over and kept on moving, anxious to find something else to focus on. Okay, the Cajun knew he wouldn't pass for Mel Gibson or that younger guy, Matt What's-his-name, but he had never been described as hideous. Some women went for him, some didn't. But none of them had ever told him that they couldn't stand to look at him.
The more he thought about it now, the more it troubled him. A part of his brain told him that his manly honor was at stake, he had to make the Gypsy really see him, but another part was getting worried. Cuvier was wondering if what he saw there, when her eyes glazed over, was in fact revulsion toward him as a man, or maybe something else.
He thought about the stories he had heard about the Gypsies when he was growing up. He had believed them as a child, and still believed enough of them to recommend that Remo seek out the Gypsies for information on the loup-garou. Some of the stuff he'd heard was crazy, while some other parts made sense. Jean Cuvier had never really stopped to dwell on whether Gypsies could predict the future. Tell someone when they were going to die, for instance. Maybe tell them how.
But what if this Aurelia babe could see his fate? Suppose that what she saw, just glancing at him from across the room, was so damn horrible it turned her stomach and she had to look away or lose her dinner right there on the coffee table.
What if she was seeing him dissected and devoured by old loup-garou?
The warmth that he had felt between his legs, watching Aurelia move around the room or simply sit there, paging through a magazine, was gone now. In its place there was tightness, as if his scrotal sack were shriveling to peanut size, attempting to retreat inside his body. Cuvier felt nauseous, dizzy, trying to imagine what the Gypsy's powers had revealed to her about the graphic details of his death.
He crawled back into the bed, tried to sleep but couldn't. He pictured monsters rushing at him from the shadows, tearing into him with fangs and talons, eating him alive. That was the worst part, fearing that the damn thing wouldn't kill him outright, that he would be conscious when it started gobbling his flesh and gnawing on his bones.
After a couple hours of that, he knew that he would have to face the Gypsy, find out what she knew. She might not want to tell him right off, but he had some money squirreled away. If that failed, or the price tag was beyond his reach... Well, he would simply make her tell him. Who was there to stop him? The old Chinaman?
He took it easy getting out of bed, no noise to warn the Gypsy or disturb the old man on the sleeping mat on the floor. Aurelia had the folding cot, had taken it when Remo left. Jean hadn't understood much of their whispered conversation, but he meant to hear the details now and find out what was coming to him, one way or another.
She seemed to be asleep as Cuvier crept to the cot on tiptoe. He stifled a curse as he collided with a corner of the coffee table and a bolt of pain shot from his shin up to his knee, and so on to his skull. He stood there, frozen like a statue, waiting for the pain to subside, afraid to breathe in case the sound had roused Aurelia from her sleep.
But she was still unconscious, with the sheet pulled up across her shoulder, bare skin showing in the dim light from the curtained window.
He knelt beside the bed and woke Aurelia with a hand pressed tight across her mouth. She was prepared to struggle, but the sheet got in the way, and he was leaning down to whisper in her ear by then.
"Relax," he said. "It's only me. We need to have a talk."
She glared at him, dark eyes above his hand, but then she nodded. He drew his hand away reluctantly, still feeling her soft lips against his palm.
"What do you want?"
"I seen you lookin' at me there, a while ago," said Cuvier. "Gypsies can see things, sometime, like what's coming, yes?"
"Sometimes," she said.
"So, what I wanna know is this-what's comin' after me."
"You know the answer," she informed him, "or you wouldn't ask the question."
He felt bright anger flare inside of him. "I don't need riddles from you, I guarantee," he told her, leaning close enough for her to smell the garlic on his breath. Aurelia tried to shrink from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. Her breasts made lumps beneath the sheet and set a faint alarm bell clanging in his head.
"You want to know if you're in trouble," the Gypsy said. "Well, you are. You made this trouble for yourself, and now you can't escape it."
Curiously, it aroused him, listening to her pronounce his death sentence. He couldn't help it. Even as he willed himself to concentrate on business, yet another part of him was thinking what did he have to lose?
"I wanna know what's left," he told her, climbing awkwardly onto the yielding mattress. "You're going to tell me how much time I got."
His left hand settled on her breast, began to knead the pliant flesh through layers of fabric. "How much time?" he said again.
"Not much," she answered, bringing up a knee between his meaty thighs.
The impact stunned him, overwhelmed him with a blast of pain eclipsing anything he could remember from a lifetime of hard knocks. He barely noticed as her right arm freed itself and whipped a rock-hard fist into his face.
The next thing Cuvier remembered, he was lying on the floor beside the bed. Aurelia was kneeling on the mattress, miles above him, cursing him in languages he didn't even recognize. The lights were on, and would have hurt his eyes if there had been a spare nerve left to carry more pain signals to his brain. Too late for that, though, with the piercing agony that clutched his groin.
The little Asian stood over him, regarding Cuvier with an expression that may have been curiosity, amusement or disgust.
"Sleepwalking is very dangerous," Chiun informed him, grinning now.
"You could have helped," Aurelia said.
"You needed no help," the old Korean answered. Next thing Cuvier knew, the wizened little man had picked him up
with one hand, gripping the denim fabric of his shirt, and toted him back to the bed. He tossed Jean onto the mattress as if he were slinging a sack of dried beans.
"Sleep now," the scrawny apparition said. "No more chit-chat. No more hanky-panky."
Cuvier felt obligated to respond somehow. He found his voice-it had been hiding somewhere in the neighborhood of his left kidney.
"Hey, Chinaman!"
The little Asian faced the bed again, no longer smiling, and leaned over Cuvier, a slim hand reaching toward the junction of the Cajun's neck and shoulder.
"Too much noise," he said. "Too little brains." The Asian barely touched him, but at once the pain below his waist evaporated, swallowed in the sudden, wrenching agony that gripped his upper body. Cuvier was frozen, powerless to move or even scream, until the lights went out again and blessed darkness carried him away.
THE GROUND ON WHICH New Orleans stands has been so wet, historically, that corpses are entombed above the earth instead of buried in it. Wealthy individuals and families lean toward elaborate vaults and monuments, while those without the surplus cash on hand wind up in simple tombs resembling the foundations of so many narrow toolsheds swept away by tropical storms. The graveyard Remo chose that night was more elaborate than most, and offered countless hiding places.
The goon squad trailing him had the combined IQ of a normal human being. It took them a while to figure out where Remo had got to. "Criminy," he complained, making it easier for the goons by lingering at the curb outside the cemetery gate. Finally one of them spotted him and started bawling at the others, pointing out their quarry. Even then, Remo stalled until the first of them had churned free of the crowd and come toward him. Only then did he continue into the boneyard, merging with the night.
It was no challenge to avoid them. Remo could have led them in and crept around behind them, disappeared while they were hunting him among the tombs and monuments, but that wasn't his plan. The way he saw it, Fate had handed him four chances to improve upon the information he had gained from Etienne DuBois, and he would be a fool to throw that opportunity away.
The goons who stalked him now were leg breakers and killers, undeserving of sympathy. He heard the four gorillas fanning out. They called to one another in the darkness, sounding nervous, making noise enough to wake the dead around them as they combed the cemetery for their mark. Remo decided it would be a smart move to secure at least one POW first, in case it got too hairy later on, and so, while they were stalking him, he did a little hunting of his own.
As luck would have it, Remo came upon the human fireplug first. Like many small men with tough attitudes, this one had tried to compensate with iron. His weapon was a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle semiautomatic, stainless steel with jet-black plastic grips. He held the massive pistol well in front of him-his first mistake-and swung it in an arc before him, as if it had been a flashlight rather than a gun.
Remo came up behind him and pulled the punch that should have crushed his adversary's skull. The gunner's consciousness winked out as if someone had flicked a light switch, and before he crumpled, Remo plucked the Desert Eagle from his fist and twisted the barrel like a wrung-out washrag.
A quick frisk of his dozing captive turned up knuckle dusters, a blackjack, a switchblade knife.
It was a wonder that the little bastard didn't rattle when he walked. He squashed every weapon. "Sleep tight," he told the fireplug, and went off to find his friends.
The next one was a relatively tall man pushing six feet, with the shoulders of a high-school jock and waistline of a slacker who had lost the taste for exercise. The goon had reached a point where his physique could still go either way, but it was nothing he would have to be concerned about from this night on.
Remo sped up to intercept him, marking where the others were by their insistent jabbering. His chosen target didn't answer them, but as he closed the gap between them, Remo heard the shooter whistling softly to himself, and understood that these tough guys were frightened of the graveyard, more like children than the soldiers they aspired to be.
He passed the shooter, moving swiftly, covered by the night, and ducked behind a minimausoleum that stood directly in his target's path. Someone had placed a small bouquet of flowers on the threshold of the tomb, and Remo stepped around them, noting that the blooms had wilted and were on their way to dropping petals in another day or so.
A moment later the tough guy's pistol nosed around the corner of the mausoleum. It was a snubnosed .38, blue steel, and Remo waited for the arm to follow, using both hands as he grabbed the shooter's wrist and elbow, whipping him around the corner, to his knees.
The wrist bones and the elbow snapped together, but he had a grip on the shooter's throat by then, bottling up the scream.
"You want to live?"
The kneeling gunner tried to nod, eyes bulging with surprise and pain.
"So take a nap."
The death grip shifted slightly, fingers finding the carotid arteries on either side and cutting off the flow of blood to one befuddled brain. The shooter wilted. Remo made scrap of his snubby and another switchblade.
It was a moment's work to dump his latest prize beside the human fireplug, and he went back to the hunt. His third mark was of average height and heavyset, a waddler who compensated for his flab by packing a Colt .45. His wingtip shoes made little squishing noises as he moved among the tombs.
With half the crew already snoozing, Remo had an urge to wrap up the preliminaries and proceed to his interrogation. Waiting in the shadows of another tomb, he jabbed a punch at number three and dropped him in his tracks. As the shooter fell, a reflex action of his muscles triggered off a loud round from the Colt and brought his final sidekick on the run. Remo hadn't planned it that way, but it was okay. The next goon would come to him.
Three goons were plenty, Remo calculated, and he met the fourth man with a palm thrust that took him underneath the chin and broke his neck. The guy was dead before he hit the ground, and Remo crushed two more shooting irons into steel lumps.
Remo gripped a shooter's belt in either hand and hoisted them, moved back in the direction of the tomb where he had stashed the other two. He swung the flaccid bodies as he walked, for all the world resembling a man out for a stroll with two light shopping bags-except that each of these weighed just about two hundred pounds.
He dropped the living gunman near his fellows, propped the dead one up against a nearby tomb, where he would be immediately visible to his companions when they came around. One small adjustment to his posture, and the scene was set.
Reviving his three captives took only fifteen seconds of pinching, probing, slapping. They were slumped together, muttering and shaking heads that throbbed with pain when Remo stepped in front of them and spoke.
"I guess you're wondering," he said for openers, "exactly why I called you all here this evening."
"What's that?" the fireplug asked, addressing no one in particular.
"I'm glad the three of you could join me," Remo said, still smiling. "I'll be your inquisitor this evening. Anyone who wants to live can simply answer all my questions honestly, first time around. There will be penalties for bullshit, bluffing or attempting to walk out before the game is finished. Do we understand the rules?"
"Where's Gabby?" asked the goon who had been carrying the .45.
"Oh, right." Remo pretended that the fourth punk had already slipped his mind. "We played a practice round while you three sleepyheads were snoozing. I'm afraid he lost."
That said, he stepped aside to let them see their friend. At first, the groggy shooters didn't understand what they were seeing, and it took a moment for the details of the scene to register: the late, lamented Gabby sitting with his back against a marble tomb, his head inverted so that he was kissing stone.
"Poor sap thought he was Linda Blair," said Remo. "That's the breaks. Hooray for Hollywood." The other three were staring at him now. The thug in the middle cradled his shattered arm, in too much pain t
o make a move, while the others were wondering if two-on-one was good enough to let them walk away from this alive.
"You've got two choices," Remo told them. "We can talk or we can fight. So far tonight, you haven't done that well with muscle."
The silence stretched between them, dragging on, until the fireplug spoke at last.
"Okay," he said, "what is it you wanna know?"
Chapter 11
Late Thursday morning, Armand Fortier was notified by Eulus Carroll, one of his least favorite prison guards, that he was favored with a visitor. The Cajun mobster was perplexed, because he hadn't summoned anyone to call on him, and no one he could think of had the balls to come and see him uninvited. Oh, the Feds had come a few times in the early weeks of his imprisonment, mostly to taunt him, hoping they could make some kind of deal now that they had him caged, but they had long since given up.
"Who is it?" he asked Carroll.
"How the hell should I know, shithead?"
Eulus Carroll was six foot eight and weighed at least three hundred pounds, most of it muscle. He was as black as coal, head shaved and took no shit from anybody in the joint. The story was that he had killed two inmates with his bare hands when they made the grave mistake of coming after him with shanks, and while Armand could never verify the tale he had a sneaking hunch that it was true, Carroll hated convicts, which at first blush seemed peculiar for a man who chose to spend his life with prisoners, but story number two involved a budding pro football career, sidelined when Eulus had been run down in a crosswalk by a car thief and escapee from the Fuiton County jail. The doctors told him he would never play again for money, and as soon as he could walk-or so the story went-he had signed on as a corrections officer to get some payback happening. And payback was a bitch.
"You know the drill," Carroll said, and shook the chains in Armand's face for emphasis.
"Yeah, yeah."
Embarrassed by the routine even now, the Cajun raised his arms above his head while Carroll wrapped the belly chain around his waist and locked it at the back. Next came the shackles. Carroll crouched behind him, and while it was tempting for Armand to kick old Eulus in his big black face, it also would have been the next best thing to suicide. The cuffs were last, secured to the belly chain so that Armand could neither scratch his balls nor wipe his nose.
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