"You know where Barrack Street is?" Nobile asked Remo.
"Yeah," said Remo. He spun the car around the corner, making a right-hand turn toward Bay City. The car strained upward on its two inside wheels. Just as it reached the point where it was sure to tip, Remo tromped on the gas pedal, and the sudden forward surge overcame the centrifugal force and brought all four wheels back to the pavement.
"You always drive like this?" Nobile said.
"Yes," said Chiun. "With callous disregard for the lives of people who are worth something, namely me."
"You ain't seen nothing yet," Remo said.
Mark Tolan knew the face of evil when he saw it, no matter how it was painted or disguised. His had looked into evil before, and it could not hide itself from him or from his judgment. The little brunette looked up when he came through the door. She smiled, the same kind of smile she smiled every Sunday at 11 a.m. when she sang in the choir of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church where she was the second alto and was hoping that she would be the first alto next year. She was still smiling when the first Gregory Sur-Shot string of fragmentation slugs ripped into her head.
The blonde secretary was not a choir singer. She was nineteen years old and by the brunette's standards already a fallen woman because she had once let her fiance touch her there and they weren't planning to be married until next year, when he got out of college where he was studying archaeology. She went next, a string of slugs almost severing her neck. She fell onto the table gushing red. Tolan thought, yeah, my favorite color, blondes wearing red.
Louie was sitting at a table in the back of the room and he looked up slowly when he heard the shots and saw the two girls hit and the big goon standing in the doorway. He was enraged because the two girls had been nicer to him than anyone else had ever been and he jumped to his feet and raced at Tolan.
"Bad man, I'm gonna get you," he cried out.
Tolan let him get close, fifteen feet, ten feet. Louie was waving his fists over his head, his puffy face distorted with rage and anger. At eight feet, Tolan squeezed the trigger.
The gun jammed. He squeezed again. It did not fire. Then Louie was on him, his hard little fists flailing at Tolan's face and Tolan didn't like it. For a moment, he thought of running way but then he remembered the other gun in his left hand, the .357 Magnum, and he put it to Louie's right temple and squeezed the trigger. This one fired and Louie dropped to the freshly linoleumed floor.
Tolan ran to the back of the office hoping there were more people there. But there weren't. He turned and ran back toward the street. He grabbed a handful of pencils from his pocket, and with one wrench broke off their eraser ends and dropped them onto the floor. On the street, he met The Eraser, The Baker and the Lizzard.
"All done," said Tolan. "Let's go."
The four men ran back up the steps of the tenement building where they kept an apartment, just as Remo's car turned the corner. He pulled up in front of the Bay City Improvement Association, as Gregory and his three accomplices began to look out the window. Remo was scanning the windows on the other side of the street.
"Hey, I know him," Tolan said. "That's the dip with the ping pong balls."
Remo looked up at their apartment and for one chill moment, it seemed to Gregory that his eyes had locked with those of the hard-faced man in the street.
Behind Remo, Chiun and Nobile had gone to the association offices.
"Oh, my God," Remo heard Nobile say.
He turned to see the mayor bent over the body of Louie near the doorway. Chiun was gesturing to Remo to go after the shooters.
"Nobile," Tolan said upstairs. "I can get him from here."
"No. We want him to sweat a little," Gregory said. "First his drug trade, then his numbers business. Next is him, but let him wait."
Baker saw Remo look in the Association headquarters. He saw the thin man's fist clench. Remo turned and ran across the street toward them. His face was twisted with anger.
"We better get out of here," Baker said.
"I think you're right," Gregory said.
"Let's shoot it out with him," Tolan said.
"Later," said Gregory. "We'll get him on our terms."
The four men went through a back window and down the fire escape. Their rented car had been parked in a vacant lot behind the old tenement building.
When Remo kicked in the apartment door, they were gone. He looked out the back window and saw only the taillights of the car pulling around a building and into the street.
"Damn," he said. "Damn."
Back at the Association headquarters, Chiun handed Remo three broken pencils.
"I thought you would want these," he said.
Chapter fourteen
It was on the TV eleven o'clock news.
The three major New York channels carried brief pieces on the killings. They described how Mayor Rocco Nobile, making his usual nightly visit to the club, had come on the scene only seconds after the shootings.
"It was two young juveniles," the stations quoted Nobile as saying. "I ran after them, but they were too fast for me and they got away." He described them as Hispanic youths, perhaps five-foot-six or -seven, wearing yellow nylon windbreakers. He pledged an all-out police effort to apprehend the perpetrators.
There was no mention of the erasers dropped at the scene and nothing to tie in the shootings with the fire near the waterfront the day before.
Sam Gregory and his three cohorts watched the news together. Gregory reacted in cold and fury.
"What do you have to do to get on the TV news?" he wondered aloud.
"Kill the mayor," said Tolan. But his mind wasn't on killing the mayor. It was on the nutcase with the ping pong balls. His hands still hurt where he had hit the sidewalk in front of the nutcase's room, and Tolan owed him one. If the man was associated with Mayor Nobile, so much the better. Maybe he was a Mafia bodyguard. He had dark hair and eyes. He might be Italian. Yeah, Mafia. He was sure of it. Yeah. Tolan looked around the room at Baker, still sweating and nervous. At Lizzard, who had changed out of his nun's habit. At Gregory, who kept drumming his fingers on the table top.
"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.
"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.