"Why? Is it nicer out there than in here?"
"More room to mop you up in," Tolan said.
"That's good," said Remo. "I'd give you about a sixty-seven on that one."
"You coming outside or do I mop you up in here?"
Remo thought about Rocco Nobile in the next room. If he heard any noise outside, he might be inclined to look out and someone might just notice him. Remo chose not to go outside.
"You'd better do it here," Remo said. "The afternoon air might chill my ping pong muscles."
Tolan growled and charged into the room. He felt something hook his ankles. He looked back as he was falling. It was the Oriental's foot. The old man had tripped him up. He looked at the Oriental. The old man still had the same simpering smile on his face.
Before he had a chance to reach out and grab that little yellow face in his hands and crush it like an egg, he felt himself being lifted up by the seat of his pants. The skinny white guy had him and was swinging him back and forth. Then he let him go and Tolan swung out through the open door onto the sidewalk in front of the motel room. He felt the skin scraping off his hands and knees as he slid. He heard the door slam behind him.
He rolled over and looked up at the door. The door opened again and a ping pong ball came out and landed in front of Mark Tolan's nose.
He heard the white man's voice. "Come back after you have a chance to practice."
He heard the door lock.
When he stood up and dusted himself off, he again heard the infernal tapping of the ping pong balls off the wall. He started for the door again, but stopped when Sam Gregory came out of his room two doors away. Behind him was Al Baker, looking around carefully before stepping outside. The Lizzard, dressed again in woman's clothes, stood lingering in the doorway.
"Come on," Gregory said. "We've got to leave."
Yeah, it would be fun beating up on the guy, Tolan thought. Taking a ping pong paddle and shoving the handle down the skinny guy's throat. But that wasn't nearly as much fun as spraying the Bay City Improvement Association with bullets. The skinny white dude would have to wait. Tolan followed Gregory to the car.
Gregory drove.
"Where we going?" Tolan asked.
"To our safe apartment," Gregory said. "We'll time our move from there."
"You got my guns?" Tolan asked.
"The Lizzard has them in his pocketbook," Gregory said.
"Hey, faggot," Tolan called into the backseat. "Don't go getting them smeared with lipstick."
The last ping pong ball had been smashed when there was another knock on Remo's door ninety minutes later. Remo thought it might be the hard-faced guy coming back. He hoped it was. His muscles ached to hit something more substantial than a ping pong ball.
It was Denise. She held a paper in her hands and she smiled when she saw Remo.
She handed it forward.
"Here it is. Three-sixty-four Barrack Street. A big transvestite rented it two days ago."
Remo took the paper and hugged her.
"Oooooh," she said.
"Come on, Chiun, let's go," Remo said. He thought of Rocco Nobile next door. Maybe he should be in at the finish too.
"You going somewhere?" Denise asked. Disappointment crinkled the corners of her eyes.
"Have to now," Remo said. "But there's plenty of time for us."
He got her into her car and then roused Rocco Nobile who was napping, and together with Chiun they drove back into Bay City, toward Barrack Street, toward the Bay City Improvement Association, toward their long-awaited meeting with The Eraser.
Chapter thirteen
Sam Gregory had titled this one the "Bay City Blast." And he told them, "When we're done here and we've wiped out these Mafia goons, we're going to go across the country. We'll be the stuff legends are made of. Minneapolis Massacre. Birmingham Bloodbath. Tucson Terror. Salinas Slaughter."
"Hey, those are good," said The Baker. "You shoulda been a writer."
"Well, perhaps one day when we're done and we've destroyed the insidious hold of the mob upon our nation," Gregory said.
"Cut the bullshit," Tolan said. "When do we kill somebody?"
As Gregory began to outline his plans, The Lizzard went to his suitcase of clothing. From it he brought out a nun's habit, and after carefully applying makeup that made him look pale and drawn, he began to put it on.
"How do I look?" he asked, spinning around.
"Like a six-and-a-half-foot faggot," said Tolan.
"You look just fine," The Baker said.
"Don't you ever wear man's disguises?" Tolan asked. "Whoever heard of a nun as big as a basketball player?"
"Part of my genius, sur," said The Lizzard. "By the time I walk into that place, I will be so shrunken over that if anyone ever asks, they will remember only a little old nun. The operative word there is 'little.' Such is my genius that I will be absolutely tiny in their memories. Miniscule. Minute."
Gregory looked out the window of the apartment at the Bay City Improvement Association. Its store windows were brightly illuminating the sidewalk in the nighttime darkness.
He told Lizzard, "Now you go over there on some kind of pretext. Tell them anything. Tell them you want to volunteer to help clean up the honky tonks on Barrack Street. But stay there. And when the crooked cops arrive with their gambling money, you come out and give us a sign."
"How do you know they're going to be there tonight?" Baker asked Gregory.
"You told me," Gregory said. "You said this was the night the payoffs were made. Don't you remember?"
"Oh, yeah," said Baker, who had made up the payoff schedule. "This is the squaring away night of the week. That's how the Mafia gambling empire always works. You want me to tell you about it?"
"Later," said Gregory.
"Never," said Tolan.
"All right," Gregory said. "And we'll be watching from up here. When you give us the sign, we'll be over."
After the gaunt man had left the dingy apartment, Tolan said, "I don't trust that faggot."
"You shouldn't call him that, Exterminator," said Gregory. "He's an actor. Dressing up is one of the tools of his trade."
"He likes it too much for it to be just a job," Tolan said. His hands itched to be on a gun, to have people's foreheads down his line of sight, to squeeze and watch them explode away in little fuzzy red chunks. Yeah. He was The Exterminator. Yeah. Legend? Who cared? This beat frying eggs in the diner, that was all he knew.
The three men stood watching from the window as The Lizzard came out of the alley between the tenement buildings, looked around and, when he saw the street was clear, walked across the street to the Improvement Association offices.
"Stoop, you jerk," said Baker.
The Lizzard was walking straight up, all six-feet-five of him. Baker wanted to yell out the window at him. That was what he wanted. But more than that, he wanted to be away from here. He had counted on Gregory being good for a big stake so he could go somewhere and try to gamble up some real money. But Gregory was a little tighter with his money than he had expected. Baker had already forgotten Hawaii and Las Vegas and he had settled down to trying to get to Atlantic City to make his big score. But now, flanked by a madman with a mission on one side and a homicidal maniac on the other, all Al Baker wanted was to get away. With his life.
Just before he reached the far curb, The Lizzard hunched over and then walked slowly to the door of the clubhouse.
Tolan hooted. "Now instead of looking like a six-and-a-half-foot nun," he said, "he looks like a six-and-a-half-foot nun who's all bent over. Where'd you get him?"
"He's doing just fine," Gregory said. His eyes were not on The Lizzard at all. They were on headlines he saw in his mind, huge headlines in huge unnamed papers.