"Maybe I should call the TV channels," Gregory said.
"Naah. They won't believe you anyway," said Baker.
"And besides, they might trace the call and find us," Lizzard said.
"Let them," Tolan said. "Nothing nicer than shooting a left-wing pinko newspaper reporter."
They sat in the room and watched reruns of "The Honeymooners," "The Odd Couple" and "Twilight Zone." Lizzard drank Vodka. Gregory finally fell asleep and Tolan grabbed the other two and motioned for them to follow him into the bathroom.
"Here's our chance to do something for The Eraser," Tolan said.
"Yeah?" asked Baker suspiciously. He did not like being in the bathroom with The Exterminator.
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"If we do it, can we get another bottle of Vodka from room service?" asked The Lizzard.
"Sure," said Tolan with a big fake smile. "And you'll get paid an extra bonus tomorrow, Baker."
"What is it?" Baker asked.
"Those two guys we saw tonight at the club. The skinny one and the old Chink. They're next door."
"Next door, here?" Baker asked. Already, he didn't like it.
"Right," Tolan said. "And if we get them, then Rocco Nobile will be a piece of cake."
"Good. You go get 'em," Baker said.
"I need your help," said Tolan.
"Two of them, we ought to get two bottles of Vodka from room service," said The Lizzard.
"I'll get you three," said Tolah. "I'll go get them myself so you don't have to wait for no waiter."
The Lizzard had no problem with that. And when Baker was told by Tolan that he'd get Gregory not only to double but triple Baker's pay and then it was off to Las Vegas for a life of baccarat and broads, Baker agreed. Particularly, since it was so simple and safe.
The door to the skinny guy's room was probably unlocked. All they had to do was to sneak into the other room after the men were asleep. Flick on the light switch inside the door and flee. The two men, the skinny one and the old Chink, would come rushing after them. And Mark Tolan would be in the parking lot, waiting. He would level them both. That would get rid of Rocco Nobile's bodyguards and also make sure that the work of The
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Eraser and the Rubout Squad made the newspapers.
"That's all we got to do?" asked Baker. "Open the door, reach in and turn on the light and then run like hell?"
"Right," said Tolan. "I'll handle the rest."
"Triple pay?" asked Baker.
"I guarantee it. If Gregory won't give it to you, you can have mine."
Baker rubbed his hands. "Let's go," he said.
"Could we get one bottle of Vodka first?" asked Lizzard.
"No," said Tolan.
The Exterminator was in position. He was crouched between two cars, directly opposite from Remo and Chiun's room. His Gregory Sur-Shot was in his hand. Baker and Lizzard waited outside the window, making sure no one was awake inside the room.
Yeah, it would be easy, Tolan thought. Lights on, they run and he nails the two frigging ping pong players as they came out. Ping pong players deserved to die, yeah, almost as much as Mafia thugs and evil-doers. All he had to do was make sure that The Lizzard and The Baker got out of the way first, and he wasn't all too worried about that. After all, accidents happened. They had signed on for, yeah, a dirty dangerous business when they signed on to go to war against the Mafia.
He watched as the two men skulked along the concrete strip of sidewalk outside the door of the ping pong players' room. Tolan wondered who they were. They were driving Rocco Nobile around so
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they weren't just ping pong players. But ping pong was big in China and China was starting to deal with the United States and the old guy was a Chink so that was it, yeah, they were Mafia businessmen putting together a big new drug deal with China and, yeah, he would be the guy to kill them before the deal could get off the ground. The thought of doing a public service made Tolan smile a little, the way he used to smile in Nam when he was doing another public service by shooting anything that was yellow and moved.
Baker and Lizzard were outside the door now. It took the two of them to have the courage of one man, Tolan knew. He saw Baker reach for the doorknob. He saw the door open slightly. He saw Lizzard's long skinny arm snake through the crack and reach inside for the light switch.
Then he saw Lizzard catapult into the room, banging the door wide open with his body as he went. Baker dropped the doorknob as if it were hot. He tried to turn, to run, to flee but suddenly he was yanked into the room also, as if he had been a paper clip on the end of a rubber band, stretched tight, then suddenly released.
The door slammed closed.
And The Exterminator knew something was wrong. Yeah. He ran back to his room and shook Sam Gregory awake.
"What is it?" Gregory said.
"They got them. The Lizzard and Baker. We've got to get out of here."
"Who? What?"
"I'll tell you about it when we drive," said Tolan. "Let's go."
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"Dammit, Chiun, did you have to do that?" Remo pointed at the two bodies in the corner.
"No, I did not have to do that. I am sure that they were just sneaking into our room in the middle of the night to ask us to donate to the Blue Cross."
"Red Cross," Remo said.
"So I did not have to do that. I could have waited for several hours until the brass band arrived and you finally woke up to do something about these two."
"I was awake," Remo said. "I heard them. I was going to let them get in so we could find out who they were."
"Who they were is very simple. The big thing with no meat on his bones was the thing who dressed up as a woman."
"And the other one?"
"I have no knowledge of that one," Chiun said.
"Did they have weapons?"
"No."
"I wonder how they found us," Remo said. He remembered something. "The Mayor," he said and ran to the door connecting their room with the mayor's. Rocco Nobile was sound asleep, unharmed.
Remo went back into his own room.
"Maybe they were registered in the motel," he said.
"You will not find out by suggesting it to me," Chiun said. "I am not a room clerk."
Remo went to the door to check at the front desk. He looked over his shoulder at Chiun who
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was back on his sleeping mat at the end of the room.
"Remember, you clean these up yourself," Remo said.
"One each," Chiun said.
"You do them both," Remo said.
"We will discuss it in the morning when I wake up. If ever I am allowed to sleep."
The desk clerk remembered them. There were four men in the room, only two doors from Remo's. No, he didn't really know what they looked like. They kind of kept to themselves.
When Remo got back, the room was empty. He went through it quickly, but except for a pocket-book containing women's makeup, there was nothing.
When he returned to his own room, he heard voices inside the room of Rocco Nobile. He moved quickly inside and saw the mayor talking to a large uniformed police captain. The con-versaton was finished and the captain was leaving.
Nobile waited until he had gone before turning to Remo and swearing softly.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked. "Those dumb bastards. They traced the pencils and they didnt bother to tell me about it till now."
"So what'd they find out?"
"The pencils were bought at the Cole Stationery Supplies, except they weren't really bought. A big guy came in and took the box and refused to pay for them. He was so big and nasty-looking that the owner just let it happen. He was afraid to call the cops."
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"Big and nasty-looking? Anything else?" Remo asked.
"They described him as a big guy. Dark hair and muscular. Always scowling. Had glinty eyes and looked like a psycho."
Remo nodded. He knew the man. It was the pest who had come to their door to
stop the ping pong practice. And Remo had just let him get away.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The tractor trailer was parked around the corner from City Hall. It took up parking spots at three meters and when the policeman on the beat first saw it at 10:20 A.M., he realized he had a problem.
Since the red flags were up on three meters, did he give it three parking tickets or one parking ticket? A difficult question but, under its last mayor, the Bay City police department had made it a point to send all their patrolmen to leadership training classes, and since he had graduated third in the class, the policeman did not hesitate more than a few seconds. He wrote two parking tickets, neatly halving the difference between regulations and compassion which was one of the things they learned in leadership class.
He also looked for the driver in the two luncheonettes on the block but did not find him. He therefore made another leadership decision. If he came back at 11 a.m. and the truck was still parked
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there, he would write one more additional ticket. That would total three tickets for three parking spaces. He regarded this as a neat solution to a complicated problem and told himself that neither the chief nor the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association would have been able to figure it out, because they were not part of the new breed of cops.
At ten to eleven, Sam Gregory, who had been leaning on a light pole across the street from City Hall, reading a newspaper, saw the mayor's car go into the City Hall parking lot. He started to walk back to the truck.
At two minutes to eleven, the patrolman again turned the corner at the end of the street. He saw the truck still parked there. He had his ticket pad open as he walked down the block toward it.
As he drew near the truck, the back doors of the vehicle swung open wide. Two heavy metal ramps clanged out of the truck onto the street. The cop stopped. It couldn't be.
He blinked and looked again.
It was.
An Army tank, painted olive drab, chugged down the steel ramps. The ramps buckled under the weight of the tank, but the war machine reached the pavement in one piece. It totaled a Volkswagen in the parking spot behind the truck, then made a U-turn and headed toward City Hall.
The policeman wondered what to do. Leadership training hadn't covered tanks. Maybe he should call headquarters. On the other hand, maybe it was a tank for a parade. But if they were going to have a parade, they should have told him about it.
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Leadership required that. It wasn't Armed Forces Day. It wasn't even Memorial Day. But who the hell knew? Everybody had parades nowadays. The Germans and the Italians and the Irish and the Puerto Ricans. Who knew? Maybe it was the annual parade of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They might feature tanks. He decided he would not embarrass himself by calling headquarters and appearing dumb. He would wait until he saw what happened. He put his ticket book away and walked slowly after the tank as it lumbered down the middle of the block.
It turned the corner into the street fronting City Hall.
The driver of a white diesel Oldsmobile saw it coming at him and drove up on the curb, smashing into a parking meter to avoid getting hit. When the car's engine died, the driver realized it was the first time in weeks that his ears hadn't hurt from the motor's noise.
The driver shook a fist at the tank. He was about to charge it and scream at the driver when he realized the driver wouldn't or couldn't hear him. He continued shaking his fist. He wondered what else he could do to vent his anger, when he saw the turret of the tank open and a dark-faced man with a swoop of thick black hair over his forehead stick his head out. He was carrying guns in both hands. The Oldsmobile driver decided not to argue with the guns. The eyes of the man in the tank turret were darting little pinpoints, flashing as he looked from side to side.
The policeman who had been trailing the tank reached the corner just as the tank* turned in the
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middle of the street so that it was facing City Hall.
The tank stood still but its motor kept chugging. The Oldsmobile driver realized that the tank idled more quietly than his diesel did.
"Hey," the cop called. "Hey, you in the tank." He had decided that this was no parade, and even if it was, the assembly spot sure wasn't the middle of the street in front of City Hall. The man in the top of the tank turned toward him.
"Hey, you can't park there," the cop yelled at Mark Tolan.
"No?" said Tolan. The cop drew his ticket book from his right hip. Tolan shot him in the left side of the chest.
Inside City Hall, Remo and Chiun were in the mayor's office with Rocco Nobile, who was hanging his jacket on the old-fashioned coat rack in the corner.
They all heard the noise out front and went to the window. As they looked out through the large double panes of glass, they saw the cannon on the front of the tank lift up, until it was pointing at them like a long accusing finger. On top of the tank, half in half out, Remo recognized the looney who hated ping pong. Behind him, in the street, was a dead policeman. Remo gritted his teeth, then turned to Chiun, but Chiun was not there. As Remo continued turning, he saw Chiun race across the room, dragging Mayor Nobile to the floor.
"Down, Remo," called Chiun and Remo hit the floor just as an artillery shell slammed into the side of the building just below the picture window. Brick and mortar flew into the room, dropping on Remo's body. A foot-wide hole opened in the front of the
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building. The glass above Remo trembled and cracked, and glass shards fell onto bis body.
"To the door," Chiun hissed.
Remo moved toward the big oaken doors. Behind him he could hear the faint sound of another shell before it slammed into the wall of the building with an ear-splitting crash.
He pulled open the door and Chiun dragged Rocco Nobile out of the office. Secretaries were scattering. Remo closed the oaken doors and turned to Chiun.
"Get him out of here, Chiun," said Remo.
"Where are you going?"
"After those nuts," Remo said. "You get to the parking lot and get him out of here."
Chiun nodded. Remo moved out into the marble-floored hallway. Behind him he heard another shell rip the front of the building. It had been years since he had heard tank shells exploding around him.
When he got to the front steps of the building, the tank was still firing away at the mayor's office. Remo saw that the hard-faced man had gone from the- tank turret and when he got outside, he saw the man, waving two guns, running down the block on the left side of the building.
That would take him to the parking lot, Remo realized. That could have been the plan all along. To drive the mayor out of his office by tank and then pick him off with a bullet in the parking lot.
Remo followed the man. As he passed under the open windows of the mayor's second floor oflice, another shell exploded above him aiid rocks and debris fell down toward his body. He dodged the
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flying rocks and got to the sidewalk just in time to see the hard-faced Mark Tolan climb the fence into the parking lot. "
Remo raced after him.
Chiun led the mayor down the back steps of the city hall building to the parking lot.
Before he stepped outside, he looked carefully both ways. No one was in the lot except the parking attendant with the rum nose and plaid shirt, who was sitting in a city car, reading Playboy magazine.
Chiun nodded to Nobile and they walked quickly toward the mayor's car.
Just as Chiun opened the door, he heard a voice behind them,
"Hey, Chinkie, that's as far as you go."
He turned to see the brooding dark-haired man staring at them. He had a pistol in each hand. Chiun moved in front of the mayor and hissed to him softly: "Into the car and down."
Nobile moved back from Chiun and into the car, trying to fit himself onto the floor on the passenger's side. His hand reached up to unlock the. door, and he pulled the handle so that the door was
open, in case he had to roll through it.
"That won't do any good," Mark Tolan said to Chiun. He had a smile on his face, a twisted smile that involved only his mouth. His eyes remained cold. "I'll shoot right through you to get to him."
"Have to shoot through me first," said a voice from behind Tolan.
Tolan wheeled just as Remo lightly vaulted the
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T
low cyclone fencing which surrounded the parking lot. He was ten feet from Tolan.
"Yeah," Tolan said. He savored the moment. Three people to kill and more maybe might come. Yeah, it was going to be a good day. A good day for dying.
"Well, well, well," he said. "If it ain't the other ping pong player."
"Are you The Eraser?" Remo asked.
"No. I'm The Exterminator."
"Cute," said Remo. "Any other fancy names?"
"The two guys you killed. That was The Lizzard and The Baker."
"Then who the hell's The Eraser?" Remo demanded.
"In the tank," Tolan said. "What's your name? Ping Pong?"
Remo looked across the ten feet of distance and smiled and his smile was colder and more heartless than Tolan's.
"Me?" Remo intoned the words softly. "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. You don't know what that means, do you?"
"No," said Tolan.
"It means you're done, axe-face."
They should have been in the parking lot by now, Sam Gregory realized, so he put his tank into "drive" and began to chug forward, around the corner back toward the lot, where he was supposed to pick up The Exterminator. He heard a few cartridges pinging off the heavy armor of the tank and smiled. Almost all done.
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Remo moved across the blacktop toward Mark Tolan. Tolan let hún come. The closer the target, the bigger the hole. At five feet, he fired with the Gregory Sur-Shot in his right hand.
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