Prophet Of Doom td-111

by Warren Murphy

  Suddenly the elevator chimed, and the doors slid open.

  Five burly men lumbered out as if joined at the hip.

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  The seams of their white cotton shorts were stretched to the bursting point as muscle fought fabric in a contest Remo was certain the fabric would lose.

  The man at the fore of the group appraised Remo's lean frame. "Another Fed?" he asked Dr. Coffin. A pin over his breast pocket identified him as Roy Hark-ness, R.N.

  Dr. Coffin's face was flushed. She smoothed her dress as if she and Remo had been discovered in flagrante delicto. "He says he's a reporter," she said to Roy, crossing her arms and plumping her ample bosom.

  "He don't look like no reporter to me," one of the meat-piles said from the back. "Looks kind of faggy, in fact."

  "That's not quite the look I was shooting for," said Remo. "I thought of going for the grizzled-news-vet approach, but opted for the cub-reporter persona instead. Now, how many of you are guilty of murder? Can I have a show of hands?" His invisible pencil hovered over his tiny notepaper.

  Dr. Augusta Coffin sighed. "I suppose you have to take care of him now," she said to Roy.

  "We can't let him escape," Roy suggested. He seemed puzzled that she even asked the question. "You want a piece of him?"

  "In the worst way."

  They looked at her.

  I "I affect some women this way," offered Remo. "Just do it," Augusta Coffin said, a hint of regret in her voice. Roy and his male-nurse brigade escorted Remo onto the waiting elevator, piling in around the edge of the

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  tiny car like a solid, living wall. The elevator groaned under the weight as Roy stabbed at the Down button.

  "Isn't there a weight limit on these things?" asked Remo. '"Cause if there is, you're it." He pointed at a nearby pectoral muscle that looked like a beef flank.

  "What agency are you with?" Roy demanded.

  "Agency?" said Remo, feigning surprise. "I told you. I'm cub reporter Remo Welby, hot on a story that's going to win me the big prize that all reporters dream of."

  "Da Pulitzer?" suggested one of them.

  "That's the one. I'm gonna win it hands down. Now, first nosy question—how many old people have you guys snuffed so far?"

  "Apparently, one too few," said Roy.

  The other nurses snorted.

  The elevator stopped downstairs at a basement laundry room. The five nurses escorted Remo out into the room and fanned out in a circle, surrounding him.

  Roy cracked his knuckles against his open palm. "Sorry about this, buddy," he said to Remo. "But business is business."

  "I wouldn't know anything about business," Remo said. "I went to journalism school. They taught us to be suspicious of anyone who worked for a living. But if you want, I can put something special in your obituaries."

  All live rushed him at once. Rippling arms and tree-trunk legs swung and flew in wild arcs around Remo's head. Remo yawned.

  A meaty paw flashed at his face, and Remo leaned back. The fist swooped past his head and landed with a I hump on the temple of a male nurse closing in on

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  Remo. The man let out an "Oof and sank to the floor.

  "Oh, now that isn't fair," said Remo.

  Roy shot out a right hook that flattened the face of one of his comrades, tumbling him into a laundry basket. Soiled linen flew everywhere.

  "Hey," said Remo. "You're not supposed to do it yourselves. Leave me something."

  "Something this, buddy," growled Roy. He wrapped his arms around Remo's chest and squeezed. This was how he had finished the first government investigators who had come to nose around Sunnyville Retirement Community. Roy had snapped their spines like dry noodles.

  The other men—even those injured—pulled themselves up to gather around their leader. They liked to watch Roy in action. Roy could bench-press a transmission. One of his favorite moves was to stretch his fingers all the way around the ankles of selected elderly patients and break both legs with one squeeze. He called it "making a wish."

  But something wasn't right with this latest government snoop. The skinny guy hadn't even turned red yet. He seemed to be breathing, too. At least it didn't look as if he wasn't breathing. And he was whistling. The tune sounded like "Everything's Coming up Roses."

  "Spiffy trick, Roy," Remo chirped. He slid from the huge man's grip like liquid margarine and trotted across the room. He scooped something up from the floor. "See if you recognize this one."

  The men lunged all at once, Roy leading the charge.

  "Hey, I didn't get my turn!" said Remo. He mixed

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  with the charging behemoths, joining their attack. "Naughty, naughty," he admonished, dancing between them and clanging a silver bedpan from head to head. "Must play fair."

  Five sets of sounds echoed through the room.

  Bong! Crack! Four left.

  Bong! Crack! Three left.

  Bong! Crack! Two left.

  Bong! Crack! Roy left.

  "Bye, Roy," said Remo. "I guess you won't be playing with old folks or government agents anymore."

  Roy seemed genuinely disappointed. "No more old folks?"

  Bong! Crack! No more Roy.

  "I trust you incinerated the body?" asked Dr. Augusta Coffin without looking up from her desk.

  "Which one?" asked Remo.

  Dr. Coffin's head snapped up. "Sweet thing, you're back!" She rose from her seat as Remo clicked her office door shut. "Where's Roy?"

  "He took something for his head," said Remo. He glided across the plush green carpet to the gleaming mahogany desk. "You're next."

  "I don't know what you mean," said Augusta Coffin.

  Remo glanced to his right. An enormous Plexiglas window overlooked a well-equipped gymnasium.

  Basketball court, weights, parallel bars—Remo assumed all of this stuff had been used only by Roy and the other nurses. To one side of the gym was an unused shuffleboard court. He imagined that the residents

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  of Sunnyville—the people for whom all of this was intended—only saw the inside of the gym when they were forced to clean it.

  "I'm glad you're all right," said Dr. Coffin. She circled the desk and pulled up beside Remo. "We can be good together, baby," she breathed.

  "Did you have raw onions for dinner?" Remo tried to block the fumes with his hands.

  "What's that?" asked Dr. Coffin, pointing to the shiny, dented metal object that Remo had been hiding behind his back.

  "It's a bedpan," said Remo. "Don't see too many of these, do you?"

  "Ick, of course not," said Augusta Coffin. "If they have to crap in a bucket, we don't want them around here. I didn't even think we had any more left. Where did you get that one?"

  "Downstairs." Remo tapped it and smiled. "It's not supposed to look like that, is it?" "Nope. It should look like this." Remo flipped his wrist, and the bedpan, which had been dented by the skulls of the dead in the basement, popped back open like a folding top hat. "Hey, that's neat." "It gets better."

  Dr. Coffin pushed in closer. "If you took care of Roy, you're somebody I can use." She rubbed her hands on his chest. "And you can use me, too," she added breathily.

  "Keep it up," warned Remo. "It's only going to make it easier for me to kill you."

  Augusta Coffin was startled back to attention. "Kill me?" she said.

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  "Thought you'd never ask," said Remo. He reached over and unplugged her life-support system, medically known as her cerebral cortex.

  Whistling, Remo stuffed as much of her head as possible into the bedpan and flung her at the Plexiglas. The partition shattered, and Dr. Augusta Coffin skidded across the floor of the gymnastics area before landing on the "10" triangle at the top of the shuffle-board court.

  "That's what you get when you mess with a member of the Fourth Estate," he pronounced solemnly.

  Remo parked his rental car at a pay phone by a busy highway a block away from the nursing home.
>
  He didn't have any change so he shattered the coin box with his forefinger and inserted one of the quarters that poured out back into the slot. He hummed to himself as he jabbed the "1" button a half-dozen times.

  There was a series of clicks over the line as the call was rerouted halfway up the East Coast and back down again. Finally a parched, lemony voice came on the line.

  "Report."

  "The sun has set on Sunnyville," intoned Remo.

  "Very poetic," the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith responded dryly.

  ' 'And you might want to get someone over there to take care of the residents."

  "I am making arrangements for the patients."

  Remo sighed. "Knowing you, you're trying to sell the terminal cases on squandering their last days and life savings on the Folcroft three-meal-a-day plan."

  Smith said nothing. The organization for which they

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  both worked operated under the cover of Folcroft Sanitarium. Although he had a virtually unlimited budget for clandestine operations, Smith insisted on running Folcroft as a business.

  "I knew it!" Remo said.

  "If there is nothing else to report, I suggest we sever this connection," Smith said tightly.

  "There is just one more thing," Remo said. "About a hundred TV reporters saw me off that Coffin woman. I suggested they shoot me from the left. I think that's my better side. So if you tune in at about six-thirty tonight, you should see me on the news. And just so you don't think I hogged all the limelight for myself, I mentioned your name at least three dozen times."

  Remo slammed the phone down, not even waiting for a response. Placing his hands on either side of the squat upright phone stand, he ripped the entire booth from the pavement and sent it skipping down the street like a flat rock on a placid pond.

  "Connection severed," he announced to the empty night.

  Chapter Three

  Esther Clear-Seer couldn't believe her luck.

  She had been in the religion business for nearly twenty years and in all that time she had never experienced a genuine miracle until the day late last summer when Mark Kaspar showed up on her doorstep.

  The Biotechnics stock deal had pulled in nearly five hundred thousand dollars in three days before the little man had instructed her that it was time to pull out. She had wanted to let the money ride, but Kaspar had been firmly insistent and, reluctantly, she had acquiesced.

  The next day the bioengineering company had gone down in flames after a patent dispute with a larger pharmaceutical conglomerate. By then Kaspar had dumped half the cash in a five-hundred-acre parcel of land abutting the Ranch Ragnarok property, thus doubling the Truth Church's real-estate holdings, and invested the balance in a relatively safe soft-drink company. The money didn't explode like the initial investment had, but its value continued to grow stead-ily.

  Which was just fine with her. If there was one thing Esther Clear-Seer could appreciate, it was the enrichment of Esther Clear-Seer. Especially if she didn't

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  have to do anything to earn it. The land, however, was another deal entirely.

  When she first learned about the property purchase, she had marched angrily over to confront Kaspar and to explain to him, in no uncertain terms, the Ranch Ragnarok pecking order.

  The Truth Church ranch had been established by Esther on the grounds of a former industrial complex, and Kaspar and his silent female friend had moved into one of the many vacant cinder-block buildings that was set apart from the communal buildings where the rest of the faithful worked and lived.

  As Esther approached the large building, she noticed a strange cloud of yellow smoke rising from the central chimney.

  She sniffed the air like a hound on the scent of a fox. A smell like rotten eggs wafted through the afternoon breeze.

  What was he cooking?

  Esther stormed over to the building.

  She had barely raised her hand to knock before Kaspar called out for her to enter. It was as if he anticipated everything. Shrugging, she pushed the door inward.

  There was a communal fire area in the center of all Truth Church disciple buildings, and in this one, Kaspar had started a modest blaze out of sagebrush and broken fir twigs.

  Over the flames he had set up some kind of staggered scaffolding system out of heavy barbecue cooking grates. A long pan of water shivered on the lowest rack. The water boiled relentlessly, bubbling up against the heavy stone bottom of Kaspar's mysterious

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  urn, which he had placed on a thick steel grate above the pan.

  The lid was off the urn now. Esther caught a glimpse of a granular yellow substance just below the rim.

  Kaspar's female companion sat on a simple wooden stool next to the fire, her frail arms stretching a blanket up over her head. The woolen blanket caught the noxious yellow fumes that poured freely from the ancient urn, and the girl inhaled greedily as if it were steam from a vaporizer.

  The rotten-egg smell was stronger in here. As Esther studied the glazed look on the girl's face, she assumed that the yellow smoke was some kind of narcotic.

  Kaspar was seated in a plain wooden chair, stoking the fire with a simple metal rod. He looked up wordlessly at Esther Clear-Seer, fixing her with his dead-serpentine regard.

  Esther's smoldering anger was quenched by the unexpected strangeness of the scene within the building. She pointedly ignored the girl, who was gulping ecstatically at the smoke issuing from the pot, and focused her attention on Kaspar.

  ' 'Why did you buy that damn land?'' Esther asked.

  "There are hot springs on the property," Kaspar explained.

  "I already knew that," Esther told him. "That's why I didn't want it."

  "The springs are crucial to our venture."

  Esther hesitated. "How crucial?"

  "They will make the difference between success and riches, and abysmal failure."

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  "Well, okay," Esther said grudgingly. "Just check with me next time."

  Kaspar nodded agreeably. "Of course," he said.

  And that was that.

  What could Esther say? The strange little man deferred to her nearly every time she challenged him, and even when he didn't—as in the real-estate matter—he didn't strike up a bold or defensive posture. He merely stated his position quietly, almost subserviently, and half the time Esther walked away thinking she had come to the same conclusion herself.

  Besides, the money Kaspar brought in was nothing to sneeze at. To Esther Clear-Seer, any business partner who swelled the coffers of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth and asked for next to nothing in return was the business partner for her.

  The property Kaspar purchased had once housed a modest crop-dusting and stunt-flying business back during the 1930s. Today the only visible sign of that long abandoned enterprise was a rusting corrugated tin hangar squatting at the far end of a sage-covered, crumbling concrete runway. Kaspar had gone to work, refurbishing the structure and altering the basic design of the vacant building into a sanctuary for special worship.

  At first Esther resisted the idea of using Truth Church funds on such an outlandish project. But after Kaspar had made her an additional four hundred thousand investing in a Texas cable company, Yogi Mom found her resolve weakened. The man did have a way with money.

  "Besides," Kaspar assured her, "fabulous wealth

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  will begin rolling in just as soon as the temple is completed."

  "How soon?"

  "Very soon."

  Esther was shocked at how soon.

  It was the day after construction was completed, nearly two months after Kaspar's arrival. The night was hazy, and thanks to the nearby hot springs, humid for Wyoming in autumn. Esther fell sound asleep the moment her head touched her pillow. She dreamed of gold and greenbacks. A soft yet persistent tapping at her front door awakened her after midnight.

  Esther was half-asleep when she answered. One of the female ac
olytes who was part of the compound's nightly patrol stood nervously on her front porch. She remembered the woman's name was Buffy something. An airhead, though she looked deceptively intelligent with her crystal blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses and her raven hair.

  "What is it?" Esther asked. It was obvious by her tone that she didn't like being disturbed at such an ungodly hour.

  "Zen and Gary are here!" Buffy Braindead whispered urgently.

  Esther blinked sleep from her eyes. Beyond the young woman she could see a rickety old Volkswagen van parked in the washed-out light of the Ranch Rag-narok compound. It was stenciled with daisies.

  "What are you talking about?" Esther demanded groggily.

  "You know, the ice-cream moguls," Buffy whispered. She shot a dreamy glance at the van.

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  Only then did Esther notice the two men standing near the rear of the vehicle.

  One was thin and reedy, with a mottled gray beard, thick glasses and a green snap-brimmed golfer's cap. The other was about five feet tall, 250 pounds, with a balding pate fringed by about a yard's worth of stringy graying black hair. The sheen of sweat on his scalp twinkled in the moonlight.

  She realized, with no small amount of surprise, that she had seen the pair of them an hour before. Their picture stared back at her from the side of a quart of almond-swirl ice cream in her kitchen freezer.

  Wide-awake now, Esther pulled the acolyte aside. "So what do they want?" she hissed.

  "They want to see him," Buffy answered, nodding toward the buildings where Kaspar had constructed his temple.

  So it was that at 2:00 a.m. that October night, Esther Clear-Seer had found herself—in khaki pants, Army boots and silk pajama top—trudging through the fields between the Ragnarok compound and Kaspar's new rusted-tin-and-concrete eyesore, trailed by the nation's leading producers of specialty ice cream.

  Neither man was in very good shape, and Esther found herself stopping every few yards to allow the wheezing, stumbling ice-cream gurus to catch up.

  "What are you two dinosaurs doing here?" she asked after Gary—the fat one—caught his foot in a gopher hole and fell nose-first into a thorn bush.

  "He told us it'd be finished today," the thin Zen answered.