Childs play the destroye.., p.14
Child's Play (The Destroyer #23),
p.14
“She lied.”
“Of course, she lied,” said Chiun.
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
“You didn’t tell me to stop her,” Chiun said.
Remo shook his head. “Did you ever think of enlisting? You’d go far.”
“I do not like armies. They solve problems by killing many when the solution to all problems is to kill one. The right one.”
The MP at the gate told Remo, yes, sir, he had seen the woman leave, sir. A man in a car had come up to the gate, looking for her, had driven inside, and a few minutes later had left with the woman, sir.
“Who was the man?” Remo asked.
“Heavyset man. I took his name down. Here it is. George Watkins, sir. From the Justice Department.”
“What’d you say?” Remo asked.
“From the Justice Department. He had credentials.”
“Thanks,” Remo said, driving past the guard booth. It all came together now. George. The Justice Department leak.
“Where are you going?” Chiun asked.
“After George.”
“If he beats you up again, do not look to me for help.”
“Hmmmppphhhh,” Remo grunted.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
REMO’S RENTED BLUE FORD caught up with George’s rented green Ford two miles from the Army post.
As he drove up close behind George’s car, Remo saw Sashur Kaufperson sitting in the front passenger seat swivel her head around continuously, watching Remo as if she were wishing he would somehow vanish.
Remo planted himself right behind George and began to blow his horn.
George turned to look. Remo motioned him to pull over. Sashur, with her left hand, turned George’s head forward to look at the road. With her right hand, she gave Remo the finger. Up close, he could see her well. Her mouth was working, sputtering. He could imagine the words pouring out of it.
“Hold tight, Chiun,” Remo said, as he swerved left to pull out around George’s car on the narrow two-lane road.
“No,” said Chiun. “Hold tight is wrong. Loose is the secret to safety. Loose. Free to move in any direction.”
“All right, already,” said Remo. “Hold loose if you want to.”
He was alongside George’s car now, riding on the left side of the road. Again he leaned on his horn and began motioning to George to pull to the side of the road.
He saw Sashur Kaufperson’s right hand come up slightly to hold the bottom of the steering wheel in George’s hands. Then she gave the wheel a strong counter-clockwise twist. George’s car swerved sharply to the left, just as Remo feathered the brake with his toe. George’s car shot across the road in front of Remo, hit a low steel guard rail, and bounced along the rail for fifty feet before rolling to a stop.
Remo pulled his car in behind George, but before he could even turn off his key, George was out of his car, stomping angrily back toward Remo.
He stopped outside Remo’s door.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve warned you for the last time. Get out of there.”
“Is there anyone you wish me to notify, Remo?” asked Chiun.
Remo growled and shoved open his door. It hit George square in the midsection and drove him backward over the guard rail. He landed on his shoulders in a small patch of roadside tiger lilies. He got heavily to his feet.
“That’s not too smart, buddy,” he said. “You’ll pay for that.”
“George,” said Remo. “I want you to know that I think you’re an asshole.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Who says so?” demanded George.
“You work for the Justice Department, don’t you?”
“That’s right, and you better not fool around with me, pal.”
“And you know where the Justice Department is hiding out its big witnesses, don’t you?”
“That’s none of your business, buddy,” said George heatedly.
“And for a little nookie, you spill it to that leather-lunged bitch in your car…”
“Hold it. Hold it right there,” George said. “I don’t have to…”
“Yes, you do,” said Remo. “I just want you to know why you’re going to die.” Behind him Remo heard a car’s engine racing. “And do you know she’s been killing off the government’s witnesses?”
George laughed. “Sashur? My Sashur? Killing witnesses? Really, fella. Now that’s too much. Sashur is the kindest, sweetest, most gentle…”
“George,” said Remo. “You’re too stupid to live.”
Behind him Remo heard a car pull away. In front of him, George went into a shoulder holster to pull out an automatic.
Between removing the weapon from his holster and getting it into firing position, an unusual thing happened to George. He died as Remo jumped over the guard rail with an elbow thrust that carried George’s enlarged stomach organs before it and mashed them against George’s backbone.
“And besides,” Remo said, looking down at George’s corpse, “you annoy me.”
“Good, Remo,” called Chiun through the open door of the car. “I was afraid he might beat you within an inch of your life.”
“Oh, blow it out your ass,” mumbled Remo. He looked at George’s body, lying like a large mound alongside the road, and realized he couldn’t just leave it there. It was certain to be spotted and to draw attention, so Remo lugged the body back, over the guard rail and shoved it into the rear seat of his car.
He got behind the wheel, and Chiun pointed a long-nailed finger at the windshield. “She went thataway,” he said.
“Thanks, co-equal podner.” Remo found Sashur’s car three-quarters of a mile down the road, where the narrow two-lane blacktop road had widened into a four-lane divided highway. The green Ford was parked alongside the highway and was empty.
As he sat in his car behind the other auto, wondering where Sashur had gone, Remo saw a state trooper’s squad car go by in the opposite direction.
In the back seat was Sashur Kaufperson. As the squad car passed Remo, she turned and looked out the rear window and gave Remo the finger again. And a victorious smile. Then, with a whoop of its sirens, the squad car was off down the road at high speed.
After Remo had followed the car to a nearby hospital, into which a smiling Sashur was aided by two state troopers, he called Smith.
He told him that George was the Justice Department contact and that Sashur had been in charge of the kids for the killing operation. He told Smith where she could be found, but Smith ordered him not to bother her in any way.
“Leave her to us, Remo. We should be able to get some information from her that’s worth having.”
“All right,” said Remo. “And take care of George too, will you? He was a schmuck, but he shouldn’t be left to rot in the back seat of a car.”
“Leave the car in the airport parking lot. We will see to George,” Smith said.
Remo hung up, but instead of feeling satisfied over a job neatly wrapped up, he felt disquiet.
He talked to Chiun about it on the plane back to Chicago.
“This is all over, completed, finished,” he said.
“If you say so,” Chiun said, refusing to interrupt his usual flight routine of staring at the left wing to make sure it was not falling off.
“Then why do I feel rotten about it?” asked Remo.
“It has been a complicated matter, with many ends that are loose,” Chiun said.
“That’s no answer,” Remo said.
“Then you are not ready for an answer. When you are, you will not need me to give it,” Chiun said. “I think that wing is loose.”
“If it falls off, you can float to earth on a cushion of your own hot air,” Remo said sullenly.
“Do not blame me for your ignorance,” said Chiun. “There is some learning that must be done alone. No one can teach a bird to fly.”
On a scale of one to ten, the consolation that thought brought Remo was a minus three. He was dissatisfied throughout the rest of the plane flight, dejected when he reached Chicago, and disgusted when he and Chiun went to Atlantic City for a rest. Chiun was overjoyed to find that Atlantic City’s streets were the inspiration for the game of Monopoly, even though his joy dissipated when he passed the Boardwalk and Baltic Avenue six times in one day and no one gave him two hundred dollars.
Ten days later Remo was still down when he talked to Smith.
“Everything has been taken care of,” Smith said. “Our friend George was unfortunately killed in a car accident. However, his widow will collect his Justice Pension.”
“What about Sashur?” Remo asked.
“She is now in custody,” Smith said.
“What’s she being charged with?”
“That, unfortunately, poses a problem. We cannot try her. The publicity would tear our anti-crime program apart, and who knows how many mental cripples would try to follow her act?”
“You mean, she’s getting off scot free?” Remo said in dull surprise.
“No, not exactly. Ms. Kaufperson has been very helpful to us in preparing cases against those people with whom she contracted for…er, work. Many of them may be going away for a while as a result of her information.”
“But what about her?”
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “After it’s all over, maybe a new identity, a new start. Obviously, we couldn’t send her to prison. With the people she’s offended, she wouldn’t last twenty-four hours.”
“Where is she now?” asked Remo.
“The Justice people have her safely away, out of harm’s reach,” Smith said.
“Where?” Remo asked casually.
“She’s squirreled away in a little town in Alabama. Leeds,” Smith said. “And how are you do—” Smith was cut off by the click of the telephone.
Remo turned and looked across the hotel room to where Chiun sat on the threadbare carpet, meditating.
“This bird is learning to fly, Little Father,’’ Remo said.
Chiun looked up and smiled. His hands opened and the fingers moved upward like a blooming flower.
“The blood of Sinanju runs in you, my son, as strongly as if you were born hearing the waters of the bay. When you were first attacked by those children, you could not respond because you were but a child yourself in the ways of Sinanju.”
“I know,” said Remo. This time he did not feel insulted when Chiun spoke of his ignorance.
“But you quickly grew,” Chiun went on. “And you are growing still.”
“It is a terrible thing to teach children to kill, is it not?” Remo asked.
“It is the worst of all crimes because it not only robs the present of life, it robs the future of hope.”
“I know,” said Remo.
“Then you know how it must be answered.”
“I do now,” Remo said.
· · ·
Leeds’ main real estate broker was delighted to show the young man some of the property for sale in the town, but unfortunately the house on the hill overlooking the town had just gone off the market.
“Oh? Who bought it?” the young man asked.
“Fella from up north. Said he needed rest and quiet. Didn’t look sick though. Heh, heh. Nothing too sick about a man who pays cash for a house.”
In the house on the hill that night, Sashur Kaufperson felt good. Even though she was disgusted with Alabama television and its good ol’ boys with their “hi yalls” and their “golly gees,” and even though the Justice Department man assigned for her protection had rejected her offer of bed and bod, she felt on top of the world.
A few more sessions and she’d be clear, with some money, a passport, and a new identity. She would be off to parts unknown and eventually to Switzerland where several hundred thousands of dollars waited for her in a numbered account.
As she lay in bed listening to the crickets outside her window, she smiled. She had challenged the system and won. Free. And rich.
As she thought of all the things the future had to hold for a rich, liberated female-type person, she did not notice the crickets hush. Nor did she hear her window open quietly. She only realized someone was in her room when she felt a hand clasp over her mouth and another hand move into her collarbone and press nerves that made it impossible for her to move.
“Killing is bad enough,” a voice whispered to her. “But making children into killers is the worst crime of all. The punishment is death.”
When he had finished her, the killer took her body into the bathroom, where he ran a bath, forced water into Sashur’s lungs, and left the body crumpled in the tub.
Then as silently as he had appeared, he went out the window, closing it behind him. He moved into the deep grass, where his shadow blended with the other shadows of the night, and only the sudden stilling of the crickets marked the movement of the youngest Master of Sinanju—in that ages-old house, hardly more than a child himself.
A happy child.
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 into a film. The book review section of the New York Times 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 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 Destroyer Series (#26-50)
In Enemy Hands
The Last Temple
Ships of Death
The Final Death
Mugger Blood
The Head Men
Killer Chromosomes
Voodoo Die
Chained Reaction
Last Call
Power Play
Bottom Line
Bay City Blast
Missing Link
Dangerous Games
Firing Line
Timber Line
Midnight Man
Balance of Power
Spoils of War
Next of Kin
Dying Space
Profit Motive
Skin Deep
Killing Time
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 of Child’s Play (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 © 2012 by 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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Warren Murphy, Child's Play (The Destroyer #23)
