“Right. One time, I think—if it was even him. I couldn’t swear.”
“Okay, forget it.”
“Are they dead?” she asked.
“I hope so.”
The ID wasn’t important, anyway. From Chiun, he knew the three goons had been summoned on the basis of a call from the motel proprietor. That meant five bodies to get rid of in a hurry, but at least Chiun had switched the feeble neon sign out front to read NO VACANCY. From what Remo had seen already, they weren’t exactly in the midst of tourist season, but the sign should fend off any late-night travelers who happened by while he was cleaning up.
He could expect no help from Chiun in that regard, of course. The Master of Sinanju didn’t mind a workout every now and then, if he couldn’t avoid it, but he drew the line at housekeeping. He had already found another program on the tube—-some goofy show about a group of friends who shared a large apartment and spent all their on-screen time discussing sex—and Remo had already given up on rousing him to help.
“My nerves,” Chiun muttered vaguely, in response to Remo’s first and last entreaty for a helping hand.
It was a hopeless case.
“You may as well relax awhile and watch TV,” he said to Joy.
“Relax? Is that supposed to be a joke? You’ve got three dead men in your bathtub!”
“Not for long. They’re checking out.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“It gets easier,” he told her, stepping out to look for someplace where the bodies would be safe.
And found the motel’s ice machine.
It had a spacious bin—enough for several hundred pounds of ice cubes, Remo estimated—but the unit was unplugged. No point in wasting power, if you had no guests in residence—or none that you expected to survive the night. He found the socket, snapped the three-pronged plug in place and went back to his room to fetch the meat.
It took three trips, because he didn’t want an extra body stretched out on the pavement, just in case an unexpected visitor should pull in from the highway. Two more trips for Raynard and Matilda, wedging them inside the bin before he closed the metal trap.
The first few ice cubes had already tumbled into place, on top of them, as Remo finished up his chore.
Chiun had managed to extract a name and number from Raynard, the proprietor, along with the admission that he had received a hundred dollars monthly for the past five years, with no requirement other than a warning if suspicious strangers stopped at the motel and asked about Ideal Maternity.
In the beginning, it had probably seemed like a good idea. And it was too late to reconsider now.
The name was Garton, almost certainly an alias. The number was long-distance, somewhere in the neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Remo dialed it from the motel office, after taking care of Raynard and Matilda, just in case there was an automatic tracer on the other end.
The distant telephone rang half a dozen times before a man’s voice answered. “Yes?”
“Put Garton on.”
“Who’s calling?”
Remo hesitated, listening to tension crackle on the line. He stretched it out, deliberately not answering.
“Who is this? How’d you get this number?”
Remo smiled and cradled the receiver. It was petty, almost childish, but he pictured someone sweating in Kentucky, wondering what kind of damage they had suffered to their cover without even knowing it. The number could be changed in no time flat, but Smith could trace it anyway, despite a disconnect. And in the meantime, Remo still had work to do.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said, as he reentered their room.
“Thank God.” The mere announcement brought some color back to Joy’s young face.
“My program,” Chiun protested, eyes still fastened on the TV screen.
“You’ll have to catch the reruns, Little Father,” Remo. said. “We can’t afford to stay here any longer.”
“Stay, go,” muttered Chiun. “Is there no respite for the aged and infirm?”
‘I’ll ask them if we meet some,” Remo said. “We have to go now.”
Running well does not mean running far, in every case. New Albany was only fifteen miles away, but it was in a different county, large enough to offer Remo a selection of motels. With distance, change of jurisdiction and potential lag time on discovery of corpses at the Dogwood Inn, he reckoned they should have the best part of a day, at least, before the heat came down.
By that time, Remo hoped, his work in Indiana would be done.
He stopped once, on the way; to use a public telephone in Lanesville. Smith picked up on the first ring. He promised to investigate the Garton alias and see what he could learn about the phone number in Louisville. The casualties in Dogwood were of no concern to Smith, a strictly local problem that would not reflect on CURE. Three minutes saw the briefing done, and Remo drove until he found a motel called the Singing Pines.
Joy Patton joined him while he checked in—to make it look more natural. She was a trifle pale, but the old man behind the registration counter didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were locked on to her sweater like a smart bomb’s sensors homing on their target, even when he spoke. It was the first time Remo could remember watching someone have a conversation with a woman’s breasts.
“Old creep!” Joy muttered as they left the motel office. “Did you see him staring at me?”
Remo shrugged. “At least he’s got good taste.”
She broke into an unexpected smile. “You think so?”
“What I think,” he told her, “is we need to talk.” Their conversation had been brief and rudimentary as Remo drove her from Ideal Maternity back to the Dogwood Inn, and after cleaning up that mess, he had been busy watching out for stalkers on the drive from Dogwood to New Albany. At this point, Remo knew the lady’s name, together with the fact that she was willing to risk life and limb in an escape from Dr. Radcliff’s “home.” The rest of it was still a blank, but Remo knew she must have more to say. The strange behavior he had witnessed at Ideal Maternity, along with Joy’s determination to escape, told him it was no ordinary home for unwed mothers.
The room had HBO, and Chiun soon found an action film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was sitting on the floor and arguing with someone on the TV screen when Remo sat Joy down and started to debrief her.
“Look,” she said before he got a fair start on the questions, “I am really whipped, okay? It’s been the strangest day I can remember, and I need some rest.”
“Some answers, first,” he said. “I have to know what’s going on in Dogwood, at the home.”
“You mean the baby bunker?” Joy surprised him with her vehemence. “Call that a home, I guess you’d think San Quentin was a theme park.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she said, then added, “in November.”
“Seventeen,” said Remo. “You’re from California?”
“How’d you know? My accent?”
Remo smiled and shook his head. “Most people, when they want to name a prison, mention Leavenworth or Attica. Old-timers go for Alcatraz. A California girl would know about San Quentin.”
“So, I guess you’re Sherlock Holmes.”
“Not quite. I try to pay attention.”
“I see that.”
“So, fill me in about the baby bunker.”
“Look,” she said, a grim expression on her face, “I’d rather just forget about the whole damn thing, if that’s all right.”
“Too late for that; I’d say.”
“You mean the kid?” She hesitated, and a trace of color came back to her face. “It really isn’t mine, you know.”
“How’s that?” he asked.
“You really don’t know what they’re up to, do you?”
Remo frowned. “I understood it was an unwed-mothers home.”