Remo turned a bland eye on the computer printout.
"Not interested," he said. "I believe in gold not stock."
"Don't think you can get around me that way," Chiun cautioned.
Remo ignored the old man. "Look," he said to Seymour Botz, "I just wasted a whole day flying to New York to visit a dead man and I've apparently got a night of Grand Ole Opry and angry phone calls to deal with, so why don't we just make this easy for everybody concerned and tell me who's pulling the strings on Raffair."
Botz tensed. "I don't know what you mean," he sniffed.
"Well, first off, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's dirty," Remo suggested. "Otherwise, the office Furby wouldn't be pointing that gun at us."
"He is pointing it at you, not us," Chiun corrected. "People must be instinctively drawn to your negative energy."
Botz spun to Louis DiGrotti. When he saw the gun in his huge hand, his eyes went wide. "What do you think you're doing?" the accountant cried.
"Friggin' reindeer," DiGrotti growled. "If them and the walruses ain't gonna help me do what I wanna do, I'm at least gonna do what I was sent here to do."
With that pronouncement, he squeezed the trigger.
A sound like a sharp thunderclap exploded in the small office. It was followed nearly simultaneously by the meaty thwack of lead against forehead.
As the smoke cleared, Louis the Bear blinked. And frowned.
Remo still stood before Seymour Botz's desk. Behind the desk, Seymour's mouth was open wide. For some reason, a thick maroon dent dotted the center of his forehead.
When the accountant lurched forward onto his blotter, the spray of brain and bone from the back of his blown-out head could be seen decorating the office wall.
"Wha... ?" Louis questioned, unable to wrap his tiny brain around what had just transpired.
A clamping pain on his wrist drew his attention. When he looked down, he found himself staring into the upturned face of the Master of Sinanju. Chiun squeezed, and Louis DiGrotti's hand sprang obediently open. His gun thudded to the floor.
"Tell me, Remo, have you ever met someone who did not shoot at you?" Chiun said blandly as Remo stepped over.
"Never happened till I met you," Remo replied. He turned to DiGrotti. "Okay, spill it, fuzzy. What's the deal with Raffair? And make it snappy before you start shedding all over my pants."
"Raffair?" DiGrotti said, blinking. He was coming out of it. One eye glanced down at his gun. It was lying on the floor near the leg of his desk.
"Okay," Rerno declared. "Let's remove all distractions."
He bent and scooped up Louis's gun, handing it back to the thug.
Louis would have used the handgun on his assailants had something strange not happened to the weapon on the way up from the floor. It had apparently disintegrated.
Woodenly, Louis looked at the fragments of scrap metal in his hand. They rattled. When he looked back up, Remo was slapping a cloud of metal dust from his palms.
"Your teeth are next," Remo said flatly. Feeling true fear for the first time in his life, Louis "The Bear" DiCrrotti offered a wide, agreeable smile. Thinking better of it, he slapped a hand over his mouth protectively.
"Whatever you wanna know, I'll tell you," he promised, his voice muffled by his big furry palm. Remo opened his mouth to speak, but the Master of Sinanju suddenly forced his way in front of his Pupil.
"I have a question," he announced imperiously.
"Chiun, can we get this over with?" Remo griped.
"Silence, hater of beauty," the old Korean snapped. He trained a steely hazel eye on Louis DiGrotti. "You will speak truth, hairy one?" he demanded.
Both hands now clamped over his mouth, DiGrotti nodded. "Uh-huh," he mumbled.
"Then tell my loutish son who has two tin ears how much you enjoy the singing of the lilting siren Wylander."
Behind a faceful of overlapping hands, DiGrotti's brow dropped low. "Wylander?" he asked from between his fingers. "Ain't she dat heifer country star? She's awful, ain't she?"
His guileless eyes stared hopefully down at the old man as he nodded at the truth of his own words. DiGrotti continued nodding even as he saw the faint rustle of fabric at the old man's kimono sleeve. He thought he was nodding even as he felt the sudden pressure against his neck. He was only marginally certain he'd stopped nodding when his head slipped off his shoulders and the floor came racing up to meet him. He hit, rolled, stopped nodding and stopped processing all conscious thought at the exact same moment.
Remo jumped forward even as Chiun's hands were returning to his sides.
"What the hell did you do that for?" he demanded as DiGrotti's headless corpse toppled backward to the floor.
"I was merely saving you from wasting any more precious time," the old man said. "If this shaggy thing would lie about the comely Wylander, he would lie about anything."
He flicked a single droplet of blood from one tapered fingernail before replacing his hands in his kimono sleeves.
"Next time, could you check with me before doing me a favor?" Remo had to take a step back to avoid the widening pool of blood.
"It was not only for you," the Master of Sinanju sniffed. "By insulting the fair Wylander with his words of hate, he offended all of what it means to be truly American. Such a slur could not be allowed to pass unpunished on this most solemn and holy week for your fledgling nation. I was merely doing my patriotic duty."
"Why don't you let me worry about the national honor and you worry about not getting filmed lopping people's heads off," Remo said sourly. "Or didn't you notice that?" He aimed a finger ceilingward.
In the far corner of the room, a single motionless video camera peered out across the office.
"Of course I noticed," the Master of Sinanju replied blandly. "Now go and collect the tape. You may use it as an educational tool when we return to Castle Sinanju. I will be in the car."
With that, the old man spun on one sandaled heel and marched from the building.
Alone, Remo shook his head. "Old buzzard," he muttered.
He ducked into a back room. At the ceiling, the camera wires ran in from the front. When he followed them to a supply shelf, Remo expected to find a VCR.
The wires continued out into a back hallway.
He began to worry when he found that the cable wire ran up a dark stairwell.
Three flights up, the cable snaked out onto the roof. Remo's stomach sank when he saw where it led.
A squat white satellite dish was affixed to the icy roof ledge. Tilted up, it was aimed in a southerly direction. The fat black cable was connected to the back of the dish.
With troubled eyes, Remo looked up at the night sky. The city lights dulled the diamonds of the stars. A cold breeze blew up, tousling his short hair and flapping his chinos. When he spoke, Remo's voice was small.
"Uh-oh," he said to the desolate wind.
Chapter 12
There wasn't even a hint of movement. Maybe a tiny flutter of purple. If you looked hard enough.
Louis "The Bear" DiGrotti was just standing there one minute, hands over his mouth, scared-Louis the Bear actually scared-and the next minute, he was in pieces on the floor.
"Damn, his head just up and drops off," one of the men in the small bedroom said, his gruff voice amazed.
Behind him came a terrified peep. It was the tenth time they'd watched the video, and it still shocked Paul Petito.
"Maybe it was already loose," Mikey "Skunks" Falcone suggested. "Like a tooth."
"Heads don't just come loose," Petito insisted.
"I had a toenail that did once," Mikey Skunks said. "And toenails ain't supposed to come off. Maybe Bear's head's like my toenail."
"No," Petito stated firmly. "That old Chinese guy chopped it off."
On the TV screen for the tenth time that evening, Chiun flicked a dollop of blood from the tip of his index nail.