"Get away," Istoropovich said. "Don't come near me." He skidded and lumbered to his feet, noticing that the side of his trousers was covered with slime and fish scales.
"You don't have to be uptight, mister," the girl said. "This is California. Home of the free. Here, I'll even let you hold Dustin Hoffman's skivvies."
"My dear child," Istoropovich said acidly, "that is the last thing I am about to hold. Now, go away."
"I got some other incredible stuff over at my place. Want to come look it over?"
"Hardly," he said.
"Feel like getting high? I got a couple of incredible 'ludes."
"Whatever the 'lewds' are, I'm sure you've got them. Perhaps a doctor and a bath would help. . . ." He drifted off as his concentration
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focused on a page of the Los Angeles Times half buried in the muck at his feet. In the lower right-hand comer was the headline: "GARBAGEMAN ARRESTED FOR COWORKER'S MURDER."
The story went on to relate how Marco Juan San Miguel de Ruiz Gonzales, 25, who was now being held in a holding cell in the Los Angeles County Courthouse, for his own protection, had been arrested for the bizarre skinning murder of his partner, Lewis J. Verbanic, at the Hollywood Disposal Service grounds after the two men had finished their final pickup of the day, from UCLA.
Istoropovich seized the paper, stared at it a moment, then stuffed it excitedly into his coat pocket. He sniffed a lead. Only one thing could have prompted one garbageman to murder another on Tuesday night after a pickup at UCLA. This Gonzalez had to have seen the value of the LC-111 and kept the computer. He had wanted it badly enough to kill, but he was still an amateur, Istoropovich thought as he ran down the filthy mound of the dump toward his car. An amateur with a very short time to live. The LC-111 was strictly for the pros.
Through a mist of Quaaludes and Kool-Aid, Helen Wheels saw several figures rooting through the trove of the Garbage of the Stars. She opened her mouth to speak, but only a belch came out. The figures coming into focus seemed to notice her, and she smiled fuzzily.
Her vision was obstructed by thick crusts of mucus over her eyelids, brought on by hours of drug-induced sleep in the septic conditions of the
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Hollywood Disposai Service grounds. Once the crud was out of her eyes and safely nestled in the folds of her sleeve, she saw that the figures were five or six males dressed in chrome and leather.
"I told you she'd be here," one of the group snickered. "Whatcha doin', Helen? Looking to stretch out with a rotten banana?" The group laughed loudly.
"Hi, Ratman," she said.
"Me and the guys were looking for some action. You know, the heavy stuff."
Helen's voice was a squeak. "I told you, I'm not into that anymore," she said, rubbing her hand over her blue crewcut. "You burned off all my hair the last time."
"We just got kinda carried away. It won't happen again. Honest." He crossed his heart in a broad pantomime the others found uproariously funny.
"You all got girlfriends," she said, trying to raise her rubber legs from the debris.
"Yeah, but they ain't as low as you," another member of the group chimed.
The one called Ratman moved closer. "Listen, fly turd," he said, "You come out here from the boondocks looking for some real men. Well, who takes you in, huh? Who shows you the good times?"
"I didn't have a good time with you, Ratman. You just beat me up and sicced your creepy friends on me and stuck pins through my nose and set my hair on fire. It wasn't like in the movies."
"We're New Wave, fly turd. And you loved it."
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"I didn't." She struggled to her feet. "That's why I ran away from you. I just want you to leave me alone."
"Hey, fellas, she wants us to leave her alone. How 'bout that?"
Someone wearing a row of safety pins in his ears pulled a short, heavy linked chain from inside his jacket. "I don't think I want to leave her alone," he said.
"Ironhand never could stop playing with garbage. Hey, just like you, huh, Helen? Maybe you two garbage freaks ought to get together."
"Go away," she said miserably.
"We'll go away," Ratman said. "But first, we're gonna teach you a lesson about running away from the High Riders."
He grabbed her wrist. She struggled, but another High Rider had her by the leg, and then the whole group was carrying her as she screamed and bucked, to the top of the mountain of garbage.
"You're no High Riders," she yelled frantically. "You're just a bunch of losers."
A fist shot into her abdomen. She looked around in panic. The place was deserted. Helen's fellow scroungers in the Garbage of the Stars had all left for other hunting grounds as soon as the High Riders had appeared. She was alone with the young toughs she thought she had left behind. As the sun blazed high in the California sky, they set her roughly on the debris. One of them picked up an old tin can and scooped it full of dirt. He tossed it in her face.
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They waited until her coughs and sputters died down before the Ratman spoke.
"Now, just so you know what happened to you, in case you pass out or anything, I'm going to lay it out for you now. First, we're all going to take turns doin' you. You'll like that part. Old Smiley'11 be last, cause he got the creepy crawlies. Then we're gonna make sure you don't run away from nowhere again, 'cause we're going to break both your legs and both your arms. Then Ironhand's going to chain you up real good, and ..."
He took out a packet of matches and lit one. Helen swallowed hard as the flame danced in the breeze and burned to the bottom.
"Oh, please, Ratman, please ..."
"The Garbage of the Stars is gonna burn, baby," he said slowly. "And when they find your little red boots, there ain't gonna be nothing in them but ashes."
"Fink ashes," Ironhand said. He moved toward her head, the chain winding tightly between his fists.
"Don't, please don't," Helen uttered helplessly as the chain came down slowly, teasing around her neck. Her body was caught with trembling, and she closed her eyes. Then, for no explicable reason, the cold links of the chain lifted from her throat, and the one called Ironhand was looking away from her into the distance. The others were looking in the same direction. She twisted her head around to see, about ten feet away, a thin man approaching, with dark hair and very thick wrists, and wearing a black T-shirt.
"What's going on?" the stranger asked.
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"We're just having a little fun with the lady," Ratman sneered.
"Suppose you have your fun without the lady."
"Suppose you learn how to live without legs," Ratman suggested, bringing a knife swooping toward Remo's face. The knife missed, arced, and then it was falling to the ground „.because Rat-man's hand had left his body and was succumbing to gravity. He screamed at the bloody stump for a moment, but stopped when two fingers to his windpipe sent him careening back silently into an abandoned refrigerator. The impact made the refrigerator rock and roll backward, landing on top of its contents with a thump.
The one they called Ironhand flashed his chain out in front of him. The sight of the metal chain swooping through the air, making a low hum, terrified the girl on the ground. It caused a thin smile to appear on the lips of Ironhand. Remo thrust his foot out, met the last link of the chain perfectly, and sent it back to its owner with a crack. When the chain lodged between Iron-hand's legs, his smile disappeared. So did his manhood.
Two others charged Remo. They realized that the attack was a mistake as soon as they were two feet below ground level, their heads clearing the earth as they were steamshoveled downward, their teeth leading the way. The others ran.
The girl rose slowly to her feet. "Hey, that was really incredible," she said.
"So's your face." Helen's spectacular makeup had streaked downward, making her look like a mime. Still, beneath the red and black smears, it
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was the face of a pretty girl in her early twenties. The baby smoothness
of her cheeks seemed out of keeping with her odor, which reminded Remo of the riper residents of New York's Bowery.
"Suppose you tell me what you were doing in a garbage dump in the first place," Remo said.
"The same thing you are," she answered blithely, searching the ground with sweeps of her hands. "Looking for the garbage of the stars." A few feet away, she emitted a little squeal and ran back, waving a gray rag with elastic across the top.
"Here," she said, proffering the rag to Remo. "Since you helped me out, I'll let you have my underpants."
"No offense, sweetheart, but unless you take a bath, Attila the Hun wouldn't want your underpants."
"Attila the Hun?" she asked. "They New Wave?"
"Old," Remo said. "Back before the Beatles, even."
Helen pondered this possibility, clutching the valued Hoffman underwear to her chest. "Before the Beatles?" she asked, astonished. "Was there life back then? Was there even LSD?"
"Hard to tell," Remo said. "They can only guess by carbon-dating the bones of old guitar players."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Do you come here every day?"
"Ever since I left the High Riders."
"Did you find ^anything interesting today— besides those?" He indicated the contents of her hand.
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"Nah, today was pretty dull. I thought I made a real find this morning. A movie reel. Well, it wasn't exactly like a real movie, it was this small." She cupped her hand to show the size of her find. "I thought maybe it was a dirty movie or something. But it was just numbers. Every frame was numbers, or else paper strips with holes in them."
"What did you do with it?" Remo asked.
"I took it home, just in case. Sometimes you can make a trade. I figured who knows, maybe some freak'U be into numbers and maybe trade me something terrific like Nick Nolte's old dental floss for it."
"Where do you live?"
"Gower Gulch. Want to hang out with me?" she asked hopefully.
"Lead the way."
The girl's eyes suddenly brightened. "Hey, nobody except the High Riders ever wanted to come home with me before. You're real nice, you know that? I'll give you a good time, honest. I'll even shave my armpits if you're not into natural."
"Let's see the tape," Remo said.
The apartment in Gower Gulch was a maze of Day-glo posters and dust sculptures heaped beneath furnishings salvaged from the eight a.m. sanitation pickup, and decorated with artifacts from the garbage of the stars. Helen Wheels rooted behind a skeletal mass, which she designated as Faye Dunaway's douche bag, for a small spool of film on a chipped plastic reel.
"Here's the tape," she said. "A bummer. No screwing, nothing. Just numbers and holes."
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Remo held it up to the light. The entire tape seemed to consist of zeros and ones jammed between algebraic symbols, spliced with long streams of punctured green paper.
"I think I need this," Remo said.
The girl shrugged. "You saved my life. It's yours."
"Well, I'd better go now," Remo said, trying to control his intake of air in the fetid room.
"They all do," Helen said. "That's okay, though." Absently she scratched her arm. A thin line of pale skin showed beneath the layers of dirt. "Hey, can I ask you a question?" she said timidly.
"Sure."
"Why don't you want to sleep with me? I mean, you're in my apartment, and I'm not fighting you off or anything."
"Because you're a dirtball," Remo said.
"Oh." She thought about it for a moment. "If I got cleaned up, do you think I'd be pretty?"
"Could be. I can't see enough of whatever's under all that crud to tell."
"Just a minute," She walked into a filthy bathroom and closed the door. Remo heard an old faucet squeaking to life for what must have been the first time since the apartment had been occupied, then a rush of water. Billows of steam gushed from beneath the door.
In a few minutes a pale, skinny waif appeared naked in the doorway, her blue eyes sad beneath the blue crew cut.
"You're not half bad, after all," Remo said.
"Look at mel" she wailed. "I'm a mess. What
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about my identity? I can't go back to the dump looking like this. I smell liker'soap. My skin's showing. My friends'11 run me out of town."
Remo slid a hand down her back, over her buttocks.
"Screw the friends," she said. "Let's get married."
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Remo wrapped and mailed the tape to Harold W. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. There, under cover as the director of Folcroft, Smith would take the tape into his private inner office and close the door. He would press a button, and one entire wall would slide away to reveal the most sophisticated computer hookup in the world.
Every piece of information available to any stationary computer on earth could be pulled out of Smith's terminal. The lemon-faced, middle-aged man was a genius at his trade, Remo knew. If anyone could figure out what was on the strange tape Helen Wheels had unearthed, it was Smith.
When Remo returned to the Forty-First Street Inn, Chiun was sitting on a tatami mat in front of the television, a look of sublime contempt stamping his ancient features as the Channel 3 News came on.
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"News," Chiun spat. "What is new about war, famine, pestilence, and plague? Never do these programs relate the serene doings of a Master of Sinanju in their very midst."
"So don't watch it."
"I must watch it," Chiun said, staring raptly at the screen. "The news is the only program which features persons of the right color."
Remo glanced at the TV, where the Channel 3 anchorwoman, Cheeta Ching, was staring darts at her audience while spewing out the day's events in a voice that would sharpen razorblades at fifty feet.
"She is Korean," Chiun said knowingly.
"Oh, turn that barracuda off," Remo said.
"Barracuda? You, with the taste of an earthworm, dare to call the lovely Cheeta Ching a barracuda?"
"Sorry."
"You are incapable of appreciating true . beauty," he said. "Even the lovely daytime dramas are filled with your kind, ugly fat white men and cöwlike women with udders like hot air balloons. Only the news shows women of decent ancestry." He turned back to the screen. "Barracuda," he groused.
Cheeta Ching crouched forward and licked her lips. "And now for today's lead story," she spat with wicked glee. "A bizarre murder at the site of the Hollywood Disposal Service is perhaps the harbinger of a new era of grisly 'skinning' killings in the Los Angeles area."
Ms. Ching's viperous stare was replaced by a black and white photo of the deceased Lewis J.
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Verbanic, who was found by L.A. police at 1:15 a.m. today.
"Already there is speculation as to the nature of the skinning," Cheeta screeched on. "Spokespersons for the Society of Brotherhood in Terrorism have reportedly found a link between Verbanic's death and the lastest demands of the PLO, IRA, and splinter movements of the People's Republican Army of Afghanistan."
"That guy looks familiar," Remo said, studying Verbanic's picture.
"Of course. All white men look alike," Chiun
said.
"The victim's accused assailant, Marco Juan San Miguel de Ruiz Gonzalez, is being held without bail in the L.A. County Courthouse. According to the coroner's office, Verbanic was .slain and then skinned on the spot."
"I think there's something about the nose," Remo said.
As he spoke, the television picture changed to an employee identification photo of the accused Marco Gonzalez, the gap in his teeth gleaming darkly.
"Gonzalez, who claims to have been a witness, rather than the perpetrator of the murder, alleges that Verbanic was killed by a six-foot-tall metal robot. Gonzalez is scheduled to undergo extensive psychiatric testing later this week."
Chiun chortled. "Six-foot-tall metal robot. Heb. heh. White men will say anything, Heh heb.."
&
nbsp; "The lab," Remo whispered.
"And now for a brighter look at the news," Cheeta Ching continued. "Revolutionary freedom
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fighters in EI Salvador scored a brilliant coup against American-trained imperialist troops today in a stunning grenade action against the U.S. Embassy. This marks the fourth such victory in two months of valiant fighting. . . ."
"Where are you going?" Chiun said to Remo's retreating back. "Do you not wish to gaze on the charming visage of Cheeta Ching?"
'Td rather gaze at a baboon's butt," Remo said. "I'm going to jail."
Chiun snorted. "Good. That is where louts who cannot understand beauty belong."
The jail was ringed with protestors, some carrying placards demanding immediate execution of Marco Gonzalez, others demanding his release on the grounds that "Skinners Are People Too." A third group, carrying 60-pound radios broadcasting disco music, blared through loudspeakers that Gonzalez was being used as a scapegoat by racist elements of society seeking the extermination of Hispanic citizens.
A fat young man with a radio stopped Remo as he was bounding up the stairs to the building. "Shake Your Love Thing" was playing so loudly that he couldn't hear anything except the lyrics, but he could read the man's lips, which curled around two rows of greenish, fuzzy tombstones faintly resembling teeth.
"You a newsman?" the fat boy mouthed.
"No, actually I'm from a super-secret government agency investigating the role one of the prisoners in custody played in the disappearance of a top-secret defense weapon," Remo said,
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knowing that the man wouldn't be able to hear him unless he turned down his radio, which was about as probable as getting him to use mouth-wash.
"We only letting press in there," the man mouthed, jamming his ample stomach with its attached radio into contact with Remo. "The American people going to know about this injustice before the court can make a mother of Gonzalez."
"A mother?"
"Yeah, stupid, a mother. Like Jesus. Can't you speak no Inglese?"
"You mean martyr," Remo said.
"He gonna die for a cause," the man with the radio continued.
"If you don't move, I'm going to die from your breath," Remo said.
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