Timber Line td-42

by Warren Murphy

  Remo laughed.

  "Go ahead and laugh. I know about you Americans, how brutal and unfeeling you are. Go ahead and laugh at this freezing-to-death old man."

  "Little Father," said Remo, "in a furnace you would

  82

  I

  not sweat, and buried in a glacier you would not shiver. Tell the truth. You missed me."

  "Once I had a sore inside my mouth," Chiun said. "I had it for many months. Then one day, it healed and was gone. I tried to touch it with my tongue, but it was not there. So, if I could be said to have missed that sore in my mouth, yes, I suppose I miss you."

  "Come on inside," Remo said.

  "You are not much, but you are all I have," Chiun said in Korean.

  "The apple rots in the shade of its own tree," Remo responded in Korean.

  "Aaaaaa-choooao!"

  The sound came like an explosion from behind them. Remo turned to see Joey Webb standing in her bare feet, legs uncovered, in the doorway to the lodge. Remo could see the tiny white flecks already starting to form on her toes and the goosebumps rising on her inner thighs. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it would be possible to find pleasure there, but the image of the girl's guardian—dour, sour-looking Harold W. Smith, standing over the girl—loomed in his mind like an impassable chastity belt, and the spell of her cold, smooth skin melted away.

  "You'll catch cold if you keep standing there half-naked," Remo said. "Go back inside."

  "I heard you talking to that man," Joey said.

  "So?"

  "You weren't speaking English."

  "You're very perceptive," Remo said.

  Chiun was on his feet and moving past the young woman into the lodge.

  She said to Remo, "What language was that?"

  "Chinese," Remo said.

  „ 83

  "Korean," Chiun said from inside the lodge. "Chinese is a barbaric tongue, fit only for politicians and pig traders. It has no beauty, no style. No poet has ever been able to write anything worthwhile in it. They write thirteen-syllable poems. This is because thirteen syllables is the absolute most anyone can stand without throwing up."

  The three of them were now in the main room of the lodge. Remo closed the door. Joey seemed suddenly aware of the amount of flesh she was showing, because she sat down in a chair and pulled her shirt forward, like a tent, to cover her legs. She looked from Chiun to Remo, then back again.

  "You speak Kopean?" she asked Remo.

  Remedid not answer.

  Chiun said, "No. I speak Korean. Remo grunts replies, usually wrong."

  "Let's get some sleep," Remo said.

  "Not until you tell me just who you are," Joey said. "You owe it to me."

  "Sure. I owe it to you."

  Remo turned toward Chiun, who was warming his hands in front of the fireplace.

  Chiun began to unroll his fiber sleeping mat and spread it in front of the fireplace. Remo was walking toward his bedroom door. He heard the outside door swing open, then bang shut. Dear god, what now? He turned to confront six-foot-six of cold, wet, and angry-to-the-marrow lumberjack standing inside the main room.

  "You," Pierre LaRue bellowed, pointing a thick, hairy index finger at Remo. "You."

  "That's right," Remo said. "I'm me."

  84

  Chiun continued unrolling his mat and smoothing it out. LaRue was in his way.

  Chiun brushed him aside. "Excuse me, please," he said. "I need my sleep."

  LaRue looked down at the tiny figure and said, "Sure. I understand. I help you with that?"

  "No, thank you," Chiun said.

  LaRue started to talk to Remo again, then changed his mind, and squatted down on the floor next to Chiun.

  "Tell me something, old man. Who is this person?"

  "My student," Chiun said. "The burden I bear in life."

  "What is he doing here?"

  "It was ordered by the emperor," Chiun said. He had finished smoothing out the bedroll.

  "Emperor?" LaRue scratched his head. "What emperor?"

  "Emperor- Smith," said Chiun.

  "Who he?" LaRue asked. "What is he emperor of?"

  "The United States, of course. What else would he be emperor of?" Chiun demanded.

  LaRue stood up and shrugged in puzzlement.

  "What's this all about, Pierre?" Joey asked.

  "This man," he said, pointing to Remo, "he put me in a tree. And those two dead people, I think he do it."

  Remo shook his head. "A tragic accident. They shot themselves, I told you."

  "I be keeping an eye on you," Pierre LaRue told Remo, with a chilly tone in his voice. "Peer LaRue trusts you not a bit."

  "Is that what you came here for?" Joey demanded. "To start a fight?"

  85

  "No. I come to tell you the trees okay. I start the heaters again. More guards up there now."

  Joey stood on tiptoes and kissed the big man on the cheek. He blushed through his cold redness.

  "I don't know what I'd do without you, Pierre," she said.

  "Is nothing," he said. "Is less than nothing. Is another reason I come. Big trouble."

  "What now?" Joey asked

  "Can't anybody schedule anything in the morning?" Remo said. "All I want is some sleep."

  "The Moonten Eyes are here."

  "Oh," said Joey. Her voice did not conceal her disgust.

  "Wait, wait, wait," Remo said. "You sound disgusted, and I don't even know what he said. What are the Moonten Eyes?"

  "The Mountain High Society," Joey said. "One of those ecology groups. They're trying to close down this whole logging camp and forestry operation."

  "Why?" asked Remo.

  "I don't know," Joey said. "They talk about the death screams of trees when they're cut down and how that causes poverty and insanity and crime in the big cities by destroying the ozone or something like that."

  Chiun had lain down on the floor. "If you three wish to talk all night, would you mind stepping outside?" he said.

  "Maybe I better go take a look at these Mountain Highs," Remo said.

  "Why?" said Joey. "You're just a simple treecounter or something. Remember?"

  Remo ignored her.

  86

  "Will you take me to the Mountain Highs?" he asked Pierre.

  Pierre thought for a moment. Then he said, "Sure. Peer cannot be mad long at somebody who stick him on a tree like a target. Sure. We go right now."

  "Wait a minute," Joey said. "I'm coming too. I have to put on some clothes. Peer, go to the cabin next door and get Oscar. He will want to see this too."

  LaRue nodded and went out. " "

  Joey ran into her room and threw on some heavy woolen slacks. She was lacing her thermal boots when she came back into the room.

  A moment later, LaRue broke through the front door again.

  Chiun sighed and said, "I think I'd rather sleep in the woods than in this bus station."

  LaRue said, "Big trouble. Oscar, he gone. And there is blood all over the place."

  87

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LaRue's was an overstatement, Remo thought. There wasn't blood all over the place. It was only on three of the four white-painted walls, on the bed, on one of the chairs, on the nightstand, and one large puddle on the floor. Another chair, one wall, a desk, a chest of drawers, and the ceiling were untouched.

  Chiun and Remo had led Joey and LaRue back into the small log cabin. Joey took one look and ran back to the A-frame to call Stacy at the base camp.

  The Master and his pupil stepped cautiously about the room, looking, careful not to disturb anything, and walking gently so as not to disturb the air currents. LaRue watched from the doorway where he had been told to stay.

  "There is a tale here for the nose," Chiun said.

  "Heavy drinking," Remo agreed, with a nod of his head.

  Joey was back now, and she was standing next to LaRue.

  "Oscar," she said, "has been drinking heavily since Danny died. He kept sa
ying that he was responsible."

  "Was he?" Remo asked.

  "No," Joey said vigorously. "How could he be? But

  89

  he seemed to have this idea that he might have been able to stop it somehow."

  "Did he know something you didn't know?" Remo asked.

  "I don't know," Joey admitted. She looked again at the blood-splattered room and began to cry, long, loud sobs mixed with torrents of tears. Chiun touched her shoulder comfortingly and slowly the tears subsided.

  "Thank you," she said. "I don't do that often."

  Remo was looking at the bed. "Did Brack seem different in any other ways?"

  Joey shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "He always drank too much. He liked to go out and tie one on with Pierre's boys. But lately he's been drinking alone, by himself, just sitting and whistling that damn song."

  "What song?"

  " 'Danny Boy'."

  But Remo wasn't listening. He had turned back to Chiun.

  "Three men, Chiun?"

  The old Oriental nodded.

  Pierre LaRue asked, "How you know that?"

  "The smells," Chiun said. "Different people smell different. There are three smells in here." He sniffed the air inside the room again, then looked toward Remo.

  "There might have been a fourth," he said. "If so, the fourth only watched. It is a bad smell. It is like . . ." and he spoke a word in Korean.

  "What is that?" Joey asked Remo.

  "It means a pigsty," Remo said.

  "Or a Japanese house of pleasure, which is the same thing," Chiun said.

  90

  The old man bent over the largest puddle of blood, dipped his fingertip in it, brought the finger to his nose, and sniffed deeply. He did the same thing with the stains on the rumpled bed.

  "The blood on the bed is your friend's," he told Joey.

  "Oh dear."

  "But the big puddle is not Ms. It is someone else's," Chiun said.

  "Again, how you know?" Pierre said.

  "The man who bled on the bed, his blood stinks with alcohol. The blood on the floor stinks only with the smell of the red meat that all you white people eat. That is how I know." .

  Remo said, "I'm going to look outside to see if I can find anything."

  He told LaRue to stay in the doorway until Remo found what he was looking for. It took him three circuits around the log cabin, each slightly wider than the one preceding it, before he caught the smell of the blood. There were two different scents: one was meaty and clean; the other was meaty and alcoholic, a mix resembling some suburban notion of gourmet cooking: Drop a hunk of frozen burger in a quart of ninety-eight-cent burgundy, and boil until the wine is a thick scum and the meat is black.

  Remo calme back to the cabin door and called for LaRue to join him.

  "That direction," he whispered.

  "Okay," LaRue roared.

  "Pierre," Remo said. "Let's try this time not to sound like a runaway freight train. Try being quiet. Maybe we can sneak up on them."

  "Sure thing," LaRue roared again.

  91

  r

  Remo winced. It was almost as if the big lummox were trying to warn somebody off, he thought.

  They started off across the snow at a trot, but both found it difficult going. Pierre kept slipping knee-deep through the occasional crust into drifts, and Remo had to concentrate on not just running along the top of the soft snow, but allowing himself to sink in a few inches.

  The scents wafting through the unerringly air led Remo almost two miles through the woods. Then he and LaRue went downhill to an abandoned fire road and along it for several hundred yards before coming to a stop at a small cabin.

  "What's this place?" Remo asked the big Frenchman.

  "A supply cabin," he answered. "Peer put it up himself."

  "Talk soft," Remo said. "You circle around the back."

  Pierre was about to bellow okay, when he saw Re-mo's eyes and suddenly envisioned hanging the rest of the night in a tree. Instead, he just nodded.

  Remo went in the front door. The cabin had been occupied within only the past few hours, but it was now empty.

  Out back, Pierre had found tire tracks.

  Remo looked at them.

  "A bus," he said.

  LaRue agreed. They set off along the fire road again, following the bus tracks. The snow had been plowed and the men were able to move at full speed, which meant that LaRue kept falling behind. After two miles, Remo stopped.

  "What?" asked the puffing LaRue.

  92

  "Off to the side," Remo said. "I heard something." "We go see." LaRue heard the noise for the first time himself and ran off to the side of the road.

  A man lay there in a small hollow formed by the tangle of some tree roots. Or there was most of a man lying there. Someone had carved a fair-sized hunk out of his belly and he had lost much blood.

  "Mon Dieu," LaRue said. "I know this man. He work for Peer. He one top-notch lumberjack."

  Remo and LaRue bent over the man, whose eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the night sky.

  With a spastic burst of energy, the dying man reached up and grabbed Remo by the sleeves of his T-shirt and tried to raise himself from the ground. Blood bubbled from his mouth, choking him. Remo raised the man to a sitting position. The man strained to talk. Remo leaned over and closer to his bloody mouth. The man mumbled something and then died. Remo laid him back down.

  Pierre LaRue made the sign of the cross over the body.

  "He one helluva good lumberjack," he said. "What he say to you?"

  "Nothing," Remo said.

  "Nothing? He say something. I hear him say something. What he say?"

  "Nothing that made any sense," Remo said. "Some sort of poem."

  "Recite it. Maybe Peer know it. I know lots poems."

  "He said, 'Trees are free. Free the trees.' "

  "Moonten Eyes," LaRue said.

  "The Mountain Highs?" Remo said. "Why them?"

  "That, is their motto," LaRue said. "They always

  93

  screaming that when they march on our land. They scream and yell 'Trees are free, free the trees,' over and over."

  "And they're here," Remo said. "You told me that."

  LaRue nodded.

  "Where are they?" asked Remo. "How do we get to them?"

  "This road. It goes up to the copa-ibas and then cuts off to the main entrance. The Moonten Eyes are there," LaRue said.

  Remo was already moving off along the road at a brisk run.

  "Wait for me," LaRue called. "I got score to settle with dem Moonten Eyes. This was one damn good lumberjack."

  94

  CHAPTER NENE

  t

  The Mountain High Society was prepared for anything from a border war to a briss. They had come a hundred strong in buses with a supporting network of trucks to carry their camping gear and field kitchens. In private cars came the persons of the media: some male, some female, and some none of the above.

  The Mountain Highers were the first to disembus. Among them were a few left over hippies and back-to-the-earth types from the sixties and early seventies. A few more were trying to effect a working-class appearance by dressing in cast-off clothing they had found in thrift shops in Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades.

  Most, though, had come for the occasion dressed in spiffy little snow outfits by Halston and St. Laurent and Anne Klein. The media was instantly recognizable; its fashions running to rumpled raincoats and ties that unwittingly advertised Burger King ketchup.

  Remo wormed his way through a tangle of reporters and camerapersons and sidled up to a tall, dark man with short razor-cut hair and dark sunglasses on, despite the fact it was after midnight.

  "Who's in charge here?" Remo said.

  "Are you speaking to me?" the'newsman asked.

  "No," said Remo. "Actually, I was just checking to

  96

  see if my vocal cords still worked. Of course, I was
talking to you. Who's in charge here?"

  The newsman raised one hand to the corner of his dark glasses and with the pinkie of his right hand extending defiantly into the air, slid his glasses halfway down his nose so he could peer at Remo over the tops of the frames.

  "Do you know who I am?" he demanded to know. "I thought you were somebody smart enough to tell me who's in charge here, but maybe I was wrong." "Really?" said the newsman. "Let's try again," said Remo. "I'll ask you who's in charge, you tell me, I say thank you, and I'll walk away. Okay?"

  The newsman was silent.

  Remo shook his head. He touched the newsman lightly in the center of his solar plexus. The man started to hiccup then began hicking harder and harder until he fell to the ground in a shivering spasm. Another newsman came running up. "Hey, you," he said to Remo. "I saw all that. You can't just come in here and do things like that. You can't just mess with the press and get away with it." "Who's in charge here?" Remo said. The newsman looked at Remo, then down at the other newsman rolling around on the ground, holding his hiccupping stomach, and said, "Over there. Honest. Over there. I've got a cat and canary at home, and I'm all they got. Over there." He kept pointing toward the front of the bus. "It's Cicely Winston-Alright. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright of the San Francisco Winstons and the Dayton Alrights."

  The media man was pointing at a defiantly feminine woman in her early thirties, one who looked as if she

  97

  had been sculpted by a straight Michelangelo inspired by the best parts of Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Joan Collins. She was dressed in a flame-colored nylon snowsuit that had obviously been designed to show off each one of her many curves. Her hair was jet black, her skin rivaled the snow for whiteness, and her eyes were as blue as an afternoon mountain sky.

  She was standing in the front of the bus, waving people about as if she were a general, and as Remo walked toward her, he noticed something strange in her motions. It took him several steps to realize what it was. From two inches below her waist to four inches above her knees, her body was as stiff as if she were a wood-and-plaster mannequin. The center spot of the whole region was suffer still. She gave him the impression of being a rusted spring, unused, unusable, but perhaps ready to unwind violently if the right rust spots were scraped away.