Remo turned, saw Bobbi lying on the snow, blood oozing out of her almost severed midsection, melting the snow where it touched it, creating a purplish brown paste. He looked at the window where Smith still held the gun.
“Nice work, Smitty,” Remo said sarcastically. “She’s with us.”
Smitty passed by the bedroom door on his way outside. He called to his wife, “Stay inside there, dear. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Are you all right, Harold?”
“I’m fine, dear. Just stay in there until I call you.”
Smith put the gun against the wall and went outside onto the porch, which wrapped around the small cabin.
Remo looked up at him and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Smith said.
“Somehow I had this idea you slept in a gray suit,” Remo said, gesturing toward Smith’s pajamas. “I thought you always wore a gray suit.”
“Very funny,” Smith said.
Chiun was leaning over the girl. When Remo and Smith approached, she hissed to Remo: “You are one with the despoilers of the stone. You must die.”
“Sorry, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to be able to carry it off,” Remo said.
“She was trying to shoot you,” Smith explained.
“She wouldn’t have,” Remo said.
“You had your back turned.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Remo asked. He knelt closer to Bobbi. “What’s your interest in all this? Just because I wouldn’t play tennis with you?”
“I am a daughter of Uctut. Before me, my father and before him, his father, through many generations.”
“So you helped them kill your own mother?” Remo said.
“She was not of the Actatl. She did not protect the sacred stone,” Bobbi said. She sipped air heavily. It gurgled through her throat.
“Who’s left to protect the stone now, kid?” Remo asked.
“Jean Louis will protect it and he will destroy you. The king of the Actatl will bring you death.”
“Have it your way.”
“Now I die with the secret name on my lips.” She spoke again, and Remo leaned close and heard the secret name of Uctut as she spoke it Bobbi’s face relaxed into a smile, her eyes closed, and her head fell to the side.
Remo stood up. Lying on the ground in her fur coat, surrounded by bloody slush, she looked like an oversize muskrat lying on a red pillow.
“That’s the biz, sweetheart,” Remo said.
Remo looked up toward the hill. The man on the snowmobile was gone.
“Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” Remo turned. The new noise was Valerie, who had finally worked up nerve enough to come see what was happening after having heard the shots.
She stood at the corner of the cabin, looking at the bodies lying about the snowfield.
“Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” she said again.
“Chiun, will you please get her out of here?” Remo asked. “Muzzle her, will you?”
“I do not do this thing because it is a command,” Chiun said. “I do not take commands from you, only from our gracious and wise emperor in his pajamas. I do this thing because it is so worth doing.”
Chiun touched Valerie on the left arm. She winced and followed him back to the car.
“Well, you’ve got to get rid of these bodies,” Smith said.
“Get rid of your own bodies. I’m not the dog-warden.”
“I can’t get rid of the bodies,” Smith said. “My wife’s inside. She’ll be nosing around in a minute. I can’t let her see this.”
“I don’t know, Smitty,” Remo said. “What would you do if I weren’t around to handle all these details for you?”
He looked at Smith, self-righteously, as if demanding an answer that would not come. Remo went to the shed near Smith’s front door and dragged out Smith’s snowmobile. Every cottage and cabin in this part of the country came with one because the snow sometimes was so deep that people without snowmobiles could be cut off for weeks. And having guests freeze to death or die of starvation did nothing for Maine’s tourist business.
Remo started up the snowmobile and drove it to the pile of corpses, which he tossed onto the back of the ski-equipped vehicle like so many sacks of potatoes. He put Bobbi Delpheen on the top and then used some random arms and legs to tuck everybody in so they wouldn’t shake loose.
He turned the snowmobile around, aiming it toward the top of a hill, which ended at a big gulley with a frozen river in its bottom, then cracked the steering mechanism so the snowmobile’s skis could not turn. He jammed the throttle and jumped off.
The snowmobile lumbered away up the hill, carrying its thirteen bodies.
Remo said to Smith, “They’ll find it in the spring. By that time, you do something to make sure no one knows who rented this place.”
“I will.”
“Good. And why don’t you go back to Folcroft? No need for you to keep hiding here.”
Smith glanced up the hill. “What of the king of this tribe?”
“I’ll take care of him back in New York,” Remo said. “Don’t worry.”
“With you on the job, who could worry?” said Smith.
“Damn right,” said Remo, impressing himself with his own efficiency.
He looked around at the blood-stained snow, then picked up a loose yellow feather and began brushing snow around to cover the stains. In a few seconds, the yard looked as pristine as it had before the start of the battle.
“What about Valerie?” Smith said.
“I’ll keep her quiet,” Remo said. He walked away. A moment later Smith heard the car’s motor start and begin to move away.
Smith waited a moment before reentering his house. He paused inside the front door and yelled out at the empty open countryside: “That’s enough fooling around. If you fellas want to practice your games, go somewhere else. Before somebody gets hurt. That’s right. Get moving.”
He waited twenty seconds, then closed the front door, and went into his bedroom.
“You were right, dear,” he said. “Just some fools practicing war games for the bicentennial. I chased them.”
“I heard shots, Harold,” Mrs. Smith said.
Smith nodded. “That warned them off, dear. I fired off into the trees. Just to get them moving.”
“The way you were acting before, I thought there was really something dangerous happening there,” Mrs. Smith said suspiciously.
“No, no. Nothing at all,” Smith said. “You know what, dear?”
“What?”
“Pack. We’re going home.”
“Yes, Harold.”
“These woods are boring.”
“Yes, Harold.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be a good enough skier to get off the children’s slope.”
“Yes, Harold.”
“I feel like getting back to work, dear.”
“Yes, Harold.”
When he left the room, Mrs. Smith sighed. Life was dull.
Dull, dull, dull.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ACROSS THE RIVER FROM NEW YORK CITY, in Weehawken, New Jersey, is a small exercise in concrete called a park, which commemorates the murder of Alexander Hamilton by Aaron Burr.
The park is a postage stamp alongside a bumpy boulevard that snakes its way along the top of the Palisades, and it is supposed to commemorate the spot where Hamilton was shot, but it misses by some two hundred feet. Vertical distance.
Hamilton was shot at the foot of the Palisades cliff, down in a rock-strewn area of rubble and debris that used to be cleaned up regularly when the ferry to Forty-second Street in New York was running. Since the closing down of the ferry, it had been ignored. So it was hardly likely that one more rock in that area would have captured anyone’s attention.
If it had not been for Valerie Gardner.
After making good on his promise to clear the bodies of Willingham and the other dead Actatl out of the special exhibit room at the museum, Remo had found
a way to put Valerie’s big mouth to good use.
And while she still thought he was a homicidal maniac, he had explained carefully to her that a successor would soon have to be named for Willingham, and who would have a better shot at the job than the young female assistant director who had worked so hard to preserve museum property?
So after Remo had contracted with a special moving company in Greenwich Village, which was used to working at night because it specialized in getting people and their furnishings out of apartments between midnight and five A.M. when landlords slept, Valerie got on the telephone with the representatives of the New York TV stations, the newspapers, wire services, and news magazines.
At one o’clock the next afternoon, when the gentlemen of the press arrived at the rock-littered site of the Hamilton-Burr duel, they found Valerie Gardner and a giant eight-foot stone, carved with circles and awkward birds, which Valerie informed them had been kidnapped from the museum and held for a “sizeable ransom,” which she had paid personally, since she had not been able to contact the director, Mr. Willingham, for authorization.
A strong north wind blew in the face of the stone statue, as Valerie explained that it was the ritual god “of a primitive Mexican tribe named the Actatl, a tribe which distinguished itself by vanishing absolutely with the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadores.”
“Any leads on who took the stone?” one reporter asked.
“None yet,” said Valerie.
“How did they get it out of the museum? It must weigh a ton,” another reporter asked.
“Four tons,” said Valerie. “But our guard force was depleted last night because some of our men were ill, and the burglars were able to break in and remove this, probably with a fork lift truck.”
The reporters asked some more questions, while cameramen took film of Valerie and the stone, and finally one reporter asked, “Does this thing have a name? How do we refer to it?”
“To the Actatl, it was god,” Valerie said. “And they called it Uctut. But that was its public name. It had a secret name known only to priests of the Actatl.”
“Yeah?” said a reporter.
“Yes,” said Valerie. “And that secret name was…”
Cameras whirred almost noiselessly as Valerie spoke the secret name of Uctut.
The case of the kidnapped stone was on the press wires and on the television all over the country that night. And across the country, even around the world, people who believed in Uctut watched as Valerie spoke the sacred name. And when the skies did not darken, nor the clouds fall, they sighed sadly and began to think that perhaps, after almost five hundred years in the west, they should stop thinking of themselves as Actatl, a hardly remembered tribe that worshiped a powerless stone.
But not everyone saw the broadcast on television.
After Valerie and the reporters had left, three men stood at the park atop the Palisades looking down at the huge monument.
In the center, looking down upon Uctut, was Jean Louis deJuin, who smiled and said, “Very clever. But of course it was all clever. How did you find me?”
The man to his right answered.
“Your name was in Willingham’s files,” Remo said. “All the names were. You were the only Jean Louis, and that was the name Bobbi gave me.”
DeJuin nodded. “Information will be the death of us all yet.” He looked to the old Oriental at his left side.
Chiun shook his head. “You are an emperor and this is what you get for not hiring qualified help. Entrusting serious business to amateurs is always a mistake.”
“Now what is to happen?”
“When this is all on the news tonight,” Remo said, “sacred name and all, the Actatl will see that Uctut’s a fake. And that’s that.”
“And your secret organization will just pick up the pieces and continue as before?” deJuin said.
“Right,” Remo said.
“Good,” said deJuin. “Done is done and over is over. I don’t think I was ever really cut out to be a king. Certainly not king of people who worshiped a rock.”
He smiled, first at Remo, then at Chiun, as if sharing a private joke with them.
They did not smile back. Remo thrust a hand into deJuin’s pocket, leaving there a piece of paper. And Chiun threw deJuin off the cliff down onto the statue of Uctut, which deJuin hit with a splat.
“Good,” Chiun said to Remo. “Over is over and done is done.”
DeJuin’s body would be found that evening by sightseers who watched the news item on television and hustled to the foot of the Palisades to see the big stone.
Police would find in deJuin’s pocket a typewritten note that admitted that he had planned and carried out the murders of the congressman, Mrs. Delpheen, and Joey 172, in retribution because they had not prevented the stone Uctut from being defaced. The note would also say that Uctut was a false god, and that Jean Louis deJuin, as king of the Actatl, renounced the ugly hunk of rock and was taking his own life in partial penance for his part in the three savage, senseless murders.
The press would cover all these events thoroughly, just as thoroughly as they would ignore the return to Folcroft Sanitarium of Dr. Harold W. Smith, sanitarium director, well rested after his vacation trip to Mount Seboomook in Maine and now busy revamping the sanitarium’s sophisticated computer system. And Remo and Chiun would sit in their hotel room and argue about dinner.
“Fish,” said Chiun.
“Duck would be nice,” Remo said.
“Fish.”
“Let’s have duck. After all it isn’t every day we kill a king,” said Remo.
“Fish,” said Chiun. “I am tired of looking at feathered things.”
About the Authors
WARREN MURPHY was born in Jersey City, where he worked in journalism and politics until launching the Destroyer series with Richard Sapir in 1971. A screenwriter (Lethal Weapon II, The Eiger Sanction) as well as a novelist, Murphy’s work has won a dozen national awards, including multiple Edgars and Shamuses. He has lectured at many colleges and universities, and is currently offering writing lessons at his website, warrenmurphy.com. A Korean War veteran, some of Murphy’s hobbies include golf, mathematics, opera, and investing. He has served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America, and has been a member of the Screenwriters Guild, the Private Eye Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the American Crime Writers League. He has five children: Deirdre, Megan, Brian, Ardath, and Devin.
RICHARD BEN SAPIR was a New York native who worked as an editor and in public relations, before creating The Destroyer series with Warren Murphy. Before his untimely death in 1987, Sapir had also penned a number of thriller and historical mainstream novels, best known of which were The Far Arena, Quest and The Body, the last of which was made recently into a film. The New York Times book review section called him “a brilliant professional.”
Also by Warren Murphy
The Destroyer Series (#1-25)
Created, The Destroyer
Death Check
Chinese Puzzle
Mafia Fix
Dr. Quake
Death Therapy
Union Bust
Summit Chase
Murder’s Shield
Terror Squad
Kill or Cure
Slave Safari
Acid Rock
Judgment Day
Murder Ward
Oil Slick
Last War Dance
Funny Money
Holy Terror
Assassin’s Playoff
Deadly Seeds
Brain Drain
Child’s Play
King’s Curse
Sweet Dreams
The Trace Series
Trace
And 47 Miles of Rope
When Elephants Forget
Pigs Get Fat
Once a Mutt
Too Old a Cat
Getting up with Fleas
Copyright
This digital edition o
f King's Curse (v1.0) was published in 2013 by Gere Donovan Press.
If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.
Copyright © Warren Murphy
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Errata
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