"I say we cuff him nice and tight," Goatee said, "stick him in the trunk and haul his sorry ass up to Portland to collect our dough."
The quartet of Baby Hueys began to close in. Remo decided it was time to make his excuses-and his exit. "The road trip sounds great, a real hoot," he told them, "but I've got to get home to cook this puppy." He opened the end of the package and showed them the green-fanged snake head.
"Christ on a crutch!" Snub-gun exclaimed.
"It's probably part of one of his twisted blackmagic rituals," Taser said.
"I think we ought to pound the little bastard flat and fold him twice before we stash him in the trunk," Goatee suggested. "I think it'd do him a world of good."
At this point, Mr. Yi appeared in the shop doorway, smiling as big as all outdoors.
"Stay back, this is official business," Snub-gun growled, holding up his phony gold badge for Yi to see.
Remo spoke a few words of fractured Korean, asking Yi to please not concern himself with this unimportant matter, that it was under control.
"I call 911?" Yi offered.
"Ask for two ambulances," Remo said. "These guys won't all fit into one."
"What was that mumbo jumbo you laid on the gook?" Taser snapped as the still-smiling Yi retreated into his shop.
"I told him you're mistaking me for somebody else. Better take a closer look, before something bad happens..."
"The shrimpboat's trying to tell us he works out," Pump-gun scoffed.
"Looks to me like he does wrist curls, big time, and forgets about the rest," Goatee said. "Some reason for that?"
"It's all in the wrist," Remo confided.
"Did this peckerwood threaten us?" Snub-gun said, outraged as the idea finally sank in. "I think he just threatened us!"
"Let's take him down," Pump-gun urged.
Taser had a better suggestion. "Shit, let's do a Rodney on him."
While Taser kept Remo covered, the others put away their guns and pulled out black rubber truncheons.
Snub-gun waggled his foot-long sap under Remo's nose and said, "Role-play this...." The bounty hunter thought for sure he had a solid grip on his trusty truncheon, but then it was gone, vanished, his hand empty. Just as suddenly, the blunt weapon reappeared out of the ether, its lead-weighted tip violently colliding with the point of his chin. With a bone-splintering crunch, his jaw hinges gave way and flying teeth skittered across the sidewalk.
"Muhhhh!" he cried, clutching his face in both hands.
It all happened so quickly that it caught the other bounty-hunters flat-footed.
Taser recovered first. He aimed the stun gun at Remo's chest and fired from a can't-miss distance of six feet. With a phut of compressed air, the microdarts launched, trailing the fine copper wires that connected them to the hand-held power source.
Remo could see the little darts racing for his chest. At just the right instant, he blew a quick puff of breath. As the burst of air escaped his lips, it cracked like a small-caliber gunshot. The chi-powered gust veered the tiny missiles wide of their intended target.
Goatee shrieked as the twin darts caught him in the top of the right thigh, sending fifty-thousand volts coursing through his body. For a heartbeat, he went bug-eyed rigid, then his head drooped. As his chin dropped to his chest, his knees went rubbery soft. In slo-mo, he slumped down to his hands and knees, then to his face on the sidewalk. He lay there motionless, except for the kicking, solo dance of his right leg.
Pump-gun discarded his truncheon and made a grab for his shoulder-slung side arm.
A bad choice.
Without apparently moving from the spot on which he stood, the hairtail still safely tucked under his arm, Remo threw the bounty hunter fifteen feet through the air. Pump-gun landed with a hollow thunk, belly first on the car's hood, caving it in. Unconscious, he slid off the right front fender like a 250-pound over-easy fried egg.
Remo reached out for the guy with the stun gun. With a downward slash of a single razor-sharp fingernail, the assassin neatly slit through the front of the Kevlar body armor. Before the bounty hunter could get his hand on the butt of his pistol, Remo groped inside the foot-long gash for his pound of flesh. And catching hold of it, he wrung it out like a fistful of wet socks.
"Yeeee, Mama!" yelped Taser, dropping to both knees on the sidewalk with a shuddering thud.
"Who am I?" Remo asked him.
"You're a fucking maniac!"
"Who am I?"
Desperation filled the man's eyes. "Think, think," Remo urged him.
"You're not William Ransom," the bounty hunter wheezed.
"Bingo." Remo slightly loosened his grip. "Now, what am I?"
The man with the Taser squinted up at him, teeth clenched, anticipating more pain.
Remo smiled. "I YAM WHAT I YAM."
"Huh?"
"A wrist joke. Forget it. Time for night-night." Cocking his middle finger against his thumb, Remo delivered a precisely measured snap to the side of the bounty hunter's head. The man's eyelids fluttered shut, and he went limp. Remo eased the unconscious man onto his back.
As Remo retrieved his wallet, Yi reappeared in the shop's entrance. He seemed pleased by the sight of all the downed bodies, but then again, he always seemed pleased.
"You come tomorrow," Yi said in English, "I have sand eel for Master. Very fresh. No parasites, or money back."
Remo left the parking lot, whistling. As he crossed Olympic Boulevard, the sounds of approaching ambulances made a seesawing counterpoint to his offkey hornpipe.
REMO AND CHIUN'S vacation rental was on a side street a few blocks from Mr. Yi's shop. Since its inception, the surrounding neighborhood had passed through three sets of ethnicities-white, black and Latino-before becoming largely Korean. Remo would have preferred Malibu or even Santa Monica; the location had been Chiun's choice. Although the Master of Sinanju often claimed to enjoy being around "his own people," the farther they got from the fishing village of Sinanju, the less use he had for them. A person from Seoul might as well have been born in Namibia. Or Afghanistan. For Remo, the whole "my neighbor, my brother" thing was made even more laughable by the fact that in the ten days since their arrival, Chiun had left the house only once.
Remo turned down the narrow concrete walkway that divided a double row of clapboard dollhouses. The little court of eight bungalows had been built in the 1930s. All the houses were white, and they'd been painted and repainted countless times without proper sanding between coats-nowhere on the siding was there a square foot without a spall, a burst blister or a painted-over dust ball. Stunted orange trees decorated the walkway. A sign of the times, every front door had a black steel security screen, and every window was barred.
As he put the key in the lock, Remo heard the blare of a TV commercial through the door. Though he couldn't make out the words, he knew the spot had to be selling either trucks or beer, the cornerstones of "Friday Night Football." He opened the door onto a cool, dark, postage stamp of a living room that seemed even smaller because of the projection TV that covered the entire rear wall. At Chiun's insistence on the day of their arrival, Remo had arranged delivery of the seventy-two-inch Mitsuzuki Mondiale from a local Rent-to-Own appliance and furniture store.
Three-foot-high beer bottles danced the Macarena in the gloom of the window-draped room. In front of the Mitsuzuki, a little man with a face like a yellow raisin sat on a La-Z-Boy recliner. In a long silk kimono, with his TV tray at his side and the TV Bible opened to the night's playbill, reposed the deadliest killer on earth.
"You haven't moved a muscle since I left," Remo complained as he shut the door.
A slender hand appeared out of the cuff of the silk robe. The Master of Sinanju raised a long-nailed finger to his lips and shushed his inconsiderate pupil. In the erratic light of the TV, he was flipping through the little magazine's full-color-insert section.
"You're not reading that godawful gossip crap again?" Remo said. "Can't you see all the stories are just unpai
d ads for upcoming shows? The whole damned magazine is self-congratulating boosterism run amok."
Chiun pressed the TV Bible over his heart and said, "Only a fool scolds a cat for licking its own behind." There was no arguing that one.
So Remo didn't bother trying.
He turned for the tiny kitchen. After depositing the hairtail on the counter, he set the lightly oiled wok on the gas burner to heat and started a pot of jasmine rice. As the Mondiale's enormous quartet of speakers blasted an all-too-familiar theme, he stuck his head back out of the doorway.
With an opening montage of fireworks, Lycra-clad, gyrating cheerleaders, superb computer graphics and raucous country-rock fanfare, "Friday Night Football" was under way. Huge helmets in the competing teams' colors-pumpkin orange for the L.A. Riots and crustacean red for the Maine Lobsters--collided and exploded into a sea of glittering fragments.
Which dissolved into a three-shot of the show's hosts in the stadium broadcast booth. As if anyone with a functioning brain didn't already know who Chunk, Sal and Freddy were, the network superimposed their first names under the live picture. Chunk was the former offensive lineman and now the color commentator, Sal was the canny play-by-play guy and Freddy the brainy statistic-and-trivia king. All three of the media personalities wore matching navy blue blazers, but there the similarity ended. Sal and Freddy could have used Chunk's sports coat as a two-man tent.
In Remo's opinion, Chiun's long-running fascination with the boob tube had taken a decided turn for the worse. The Reigning Master of Sinanju had become a pro-football junkie. Though his understanding of the fine points of the game left much to be desired, Chiun had caught the fever.
"We've got a good one for you tonight, folks," said Sal. "A real grudge match between two of the league's newest expansion teams...."
"If anything, that's an understatement," Chunk said. "If you don't believe me, just take a look at some tape we shot during warm-ups. Even the team mascots hate each other."
Images of a man-size velour dog-thing with a huge head, and a man-size red foam lobster with one big claw flooded the screen. A nose-to-claw shouting match ended with a flurry of blows exchanged and the two mascots rolling around on the artificial turf.
"Ol' Lootie the Coyote is really giving it to Clawboy," Freddy said.
"The bad feeling goes from the bottom up, folks," Sal said into the camera as it switched back to the booth, "from the towel boys to the general managers. Like I said, we've got a humdinger tonight. Stay tuned."
The network switched to a commercial break: halfton pickups danced the Macarena.
"Haven't you noticed that those three bozos always talk that grudge-match stuff before the kickoff?" Remo said. "And that no matter what they say, the game always sucks royal. Why on earth are you watching it? Even the shopping channel is less predictable."
"I'm doing it for your sake," Chiun admitted.
"Why doesn't that surprise me?"
"Because my selfless regard for your betterment is nothing new," Chiun answered. "I make many sacrifices so that you will be prepared to take up the mantle of Master when I pass on."
"And how, pray tell, is 'Friday Night Football' going to help me become a better assassin?"
"Surly One, games are the yin and yang, the living, beating heart of a people. By watching your professional sport, I'm able to study the inner workings of the American mind. I do this so I can understand you, my pupil, more completely. Only then can I raise you beyond the limits of your native-born mediocrity. Only then can I help you be all you can be."
"Face facts, you're rotting your mind, Chiun." The Master dismissed Remo's concern with a toss of his hand. "Western culture cannot harm me. I observe with great detachment, from a high perch of wisdom. Besides, this entertainment of yours is very weak compared to the excitement of Korea's national games...."
"Teeter-totter and kite flying?"
Miffed at the tone of Remo's remark, Chiun pulled his hands into the baggy cuffs of his kimono and ducked his chin down into its round collar, a turtle retreating into its brocaded shell.
Back in the kitchen, Remo checked the rice, which was already filling the room with its fragrance. Before he took the hairtail from its package, he opened the kitchen window. He pried the fish's jaws apart and hooked the upper fangs over the edge of the windowsill. Then, holding the hairtail out straight with his left hand, he used the point of his razor-edged fingernail to make a slit in the skin all the way around the head, just behind the gill plate. In a single motion, he stripped the entire skin down to the tail, turning it inside out like a sock.
Remo flopped the skinned fish back on the counter and started the tedious separation of the greenish meat from the backbone with flicks of his guillotine nail. He sliced the resulting twin fillets into two-inch chunks, dipped them in beaten egg and dredged them in seasoned flour. As he drizzled a little more peanut oil in the wok, a cry came from the living room. "Aieeee!"
Remo abandoned the stove. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"Orange team has poked the peach."
"Pooch," Remo corrected.
Chiun waved impatiently for silence. Moses returned from the Mount, the color commentator was speaking.
"Well, guys," Chunk said, "let's hope that first-play fumble doesn't set the tone for the rest of the game. Otherwise, we could be in for a long evening."
"So what else is new," Remo muttered.
"That muffed catch on the kickoff turns the ball over to the Lobsters on the Riots' ten-yard line," Sal announced.
The camera cut to the Lobster sideline, where the Maine cheerleaders, known as "the Tails," cavorted with highly choreographed enthusiasm as their offensive squad took the field.
While the squads changed, Freddy started adding stats and gossipy trivia tidbits to the list of players' names that appeared on the screen. When he got to the Riots nose tackle, he said, "Whoa! That's got to be some kind of a typo. The roster has Boomtower weighing in at 502 pounds!"
"Can we get an iso shot of him?" Sal asked.
The camera zoomed in on the defensive players as they waited for the Lobster offense to come out of their huddle. Amid the milling orange uniforms, Number 96 loomed large indeed.
"What's happened to the Great Pumpkin?" Freddy said.
"Tonight he looks more like the Incredible Hulk," Sal quipped.
"I gotta tell ya, folks, I've never seen a physical transformation tike this," Chunk said. "You know we like to poke some fun at the overweight players from time to time. And we've stuck it to Mr. Boomtower on more than one occasion. But tonight against the Lobsters, he's really turned it all around. Folks, no exaggeration, Bradley Boomtower is truly enormous. Look at the thighs on him! They're as big around as my waist!"
"The only question is," Sal said, "what can he do with it?"
Remo decided to watch one play to find out.
Of course, it was typical FNF. At the snap of the ball, Boomtower took one step and slipped, falling on his face, and before he could get up, the play was over-the Lobster deep corner-end-zone pass had floated way out of bounds.
"Wow, that's a sorry start for the Great Pumpkin," Freddy said. "Flat on his mug on the carpet. I don't think he even made contact with an offensive player...."
"He's calling the head linesman over," Sal said. "There's something wrong with the Astroturf," Chunk added.
All the officials gathered at the line of scrimmage, apparently examining the playing surface. Whatever they were looking at was concealed from the camera by their huddled backs.
"Let's replay that in slo-mo," Sal suggested, "and see if we can pick up what happened."
The slow-motion replay did in fact show why Number 96 had lost his footing. With his initial burst of speed, with a single push of his forward leg, Boomtower's cleats had ripped up a yard of green carpet. That's what had tangled his feet and tripped him. "How'd he do that?" Freddy said.
Which was exactly what Remo was asking himself. While the grounds crew made a quick, tempor
ary repair to the artificial turf, Boomtower took off his shoes and threw them to the sidelines.
"He's playing barefoot," Sal said, with his trademark firm grasp of the obvious.
"There have been quite a few barefoot kickers, but never barefoot nose tackles," Freddy said. "We may have a major story in the making here tonight, folks."
"The oil is starting to smoke," Chiun declared without taking his eyes from the big screen. "You must clean the wok and start over."
"Yeah, yeah," Remo said, but he made no move to return to the kitchen. The players were lined up and ready to go.
At the snap of the ball, Number 96 surged between the center and the tackle, and as he did so, he delivered a left-handed blow to the middle of the center's back, dropping him like a load of bricks. Effortlessly, Boomtower sidestepped the offensive tackle's attempted block. He was well into the backfield as the Lobster quarterback rolled out for another pass. With Boomtower charging in his face, the quarterback reared back for a second throw to the end zone. He got the ball off, a wobbly, wounded duck that dropped incomplete, and for all his trouble took a tremendous square-on hit from the Riots nose tackle. Like it had been rocket launched, the quarterback's helmet flew off and sailed downfield; he crashed to his back under a quarter ton of Boomtower.
Number 96 jumped up at once and started doing his pelvic-thrusting, head-juking sack dance.
"What a hit!" Chunk gasped.
"Hoo-wee, that had to cost the Lobster eight-figure bonus baby some brain cells."
"It'll make this year's highlight film for sure," Freddy said.
Sal was less sanguine about the situation. "Uh, the center's still down and he's not moving," he said. "Neither is the QB. I think they're both hurt. Yep, here come the trainers."
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