Timber Line td-42

by Warren Murphy

  But who? Who had used the tape recorder to lure hún from the A-frame last night before putting it to the torch?

  Who had killed Danny O'Farrell and Brack?

  Last.night, when the A-frame went ablaze, Pierre LaRue had said instantly that it was the work of the Mountain Highs. After all they had tried to set the for-

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  est ablaze earlier in the night. But, Remo felt, somehow killing would not be their style. And who was to say that it wasn't LaRue or Roger Stacy who were behind the killings?

  So many questions and so few answers.

  Remo walked back to Alpha Camp. He decided he had to start somewhere, and the Mountain Highs were as good a place as anywhere else.

  He reached the log cabin just as Joey and Chiun were stepping outside.

  "We're going to look at the copa-ibas," she said. "Chiun has an idea."

  Remo leaned close and whispered, "He has an idea that this is a Korean tree that you people stole from his country. Be careful."

  Joey just nodded and smiled. "There was a phone call for you," she said.

  "Who?"

  "No message. But it sounded like . . . well, like Dr. Smith."

  "Thanks," Remo said. "Do you know where the Mountain Highs camp out?"

  Joey pointed to the direction of the main road and told him he could find their camp about three miles from the main office of Tulsa Torrent.

  "You going there?" she said.

  "Maybe," said Remo. "Have to start looking somewhere."

  "Be careful," she said.

  "I'm always careful."

  It wasn't really a town. It was just a small widening in the road as it passed through the California hills, and there was a gas station and a small grocery store. Be-

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  hind these roadside structures a few hundred yards down the road, Remo could see the tents that belonged to the Mountain High Society.

  He stopped in at the grocery store and dialed Smith's 800 area-code number.

  Smith picked up the telephone in his darkened office at Folcroft Sanitarium.

  "You called?" Remo said.

  "Have you found out anything?"

  "Nothing yet," Remo said.

  "I heard of the trouble last night."

  "Yeah," Remo said. "We've had nothing but trouble. Joey's all right, though."

  "She is no more important than anyone else involved in this matter," Smith said sternly. "Do not let personal considerations ..."

  "You're a cold-assed fish," Remo said. "You helped raise the kid."

  "I know," Smith said.

  There was an awkward pause and Remo said, "Have you found out who those two guys were who tried to burn down the copa-ibas last night?"

  "No," Smith said. "No information has been received yet in Washington."

  "Damn local police," Remo said. "They were supposed to get the prints out right away, to try to identify them."

  "I will keep my eyes open," Smith said. "Anything else?"

  "Yes," Remo said. "A tape recorder. You think you could trace it from a serial number?"

  "Perhaps. What is the number?"

  Remo read him a long nine-digit number, written on the back of a matchbook.

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  "Whoever owns that recorder is involved," Remo said.

  "I will try to run it down," Smith said. "Anything else you need?"

  "You might run the Mountain High Society through your computers. I don't know if they're involved or not, but they're certainly all over this joint."

  "Fine," Smith said. 'TU check."

  "Oh, and one last thing," Remo said.

  "What is that?"

  "Smile. Remember this is the first day of the rest of your life."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Smith said as he hung up.

  For a gang of a hundred, the Mountain Highs had a small encampment, Remo thought as he approached it on foot.

  There was a large trailer home set in back of the clearing. Scattered around the grounds in front of it were a half-dozen high-walled tents, which could sleep no more than four each.

  Remo remembered all the designer jeans and snow-suits he had seen last night at the protest rally and decided that the majority of the Mountain Highs had chosen to forego the wilderness and sleep in hotel rooms in the nearby town. But he was interested in only one of them.

  He found her sitting in the trailer, on a sofa, drinking a martini with olives. Music played from a large wall-hung stereo. Through the back windows of the trailer, the sun was turning orange as it moved down toward the horizon.

  She looked up as Remo came through the front door

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  without bothering to knock. When she saw who it was, she smiled.

  "I was expecting you," she said.

  "I know," said Remo. He watched as Cicely Winston-Alright stood and stretched herself. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and skin-tight slacks.

  She showed him a lot of teeth in a milk-white face. "Can I give you something? Anything?"

  "Everything," Remo said and waited for her to put down her martini glass, before lifting her in his arms and carrying her over to the waiting bed.

  There were thirty-seven steps in bringing a woman to total sexual ecstasy, and Remo had learned them many years before, back when he had been normal and sex had been a pleasure and not just another technique to learn perfectly or face Chiun's wrath.

  But only once before had Remo ever found a woman who could manage to outlast step thirteen, even though Chiun regularly insisted that all Korean women progressed through each of the preliminary thirty-six steps before enjoying—if that was a strong enough word— the mind-numbing, soul-shattering release of the final, thirty-seventh step. Remo had seen women of Chiun's village, though, and he suspected that carrying off the thirty-seven steps might be the only way for a man to stay awake during the act.

  But Cicely Winston-Alright was something else_ Remo was up to step twenty-two. He had thought he could break down the woman's reserve, that knot of hardness that kept her mid-section stiff and unyielding, but he might as well have been making love to a log.

  He moved to step twenty-three. Cicely smiled at him. Step twenty-four, and she allowed that it was nice.

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  It was only at step twenty-seven when she began to react. She started moaning, alternating short, biting screams with the tearful crying of his name and insistent demands for more.

  Remo gave her more. He had gotten her halfway through step twenty-eight when she gulped two large drafts of air and tensed her body.

  It was the right time, Remo decided. He smiled and lowered his face to her ear. "Who's doing the killings at the Tulsa Torrent Camp?"

  "Oh, Remo, darling," she said softly. "You're a wonderful lover. Really wonderful."

  "Thanks," he said. She shouldn't have been able to do that. She should have been putty in his hands, ready to answer anything he asked.

  Step twenty-nine. Another smile, another approach toward her ear, another question.

  "What is the Association?" he asked.

  "It hasn't been this good in years," she said. "Not since him." She waved vaguely in the direction of a box on top of her small night table.

  "The Association," Remo repeated.

  "Must we talk now?" she said. "Can you do some more of that stuff with the back of the left knee?"

  "No," said Remo. "Definitely not. That was step eighteen and I'm up to step twenty-nine. If I go back to step eighteen, I'll have to start up all over again from there. I might be here all night."

  "Would that be so bad?"

  "Not if we had something to talk about," Remo said. "Like the Association. Who's the Association? What is it?"

  "It's our national group to preserve the environment," she said. "Keep going."

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  Step thirty.

  "Then why would they want to kill anybody?" Remo asked.

  "Kill? Them? Remo, stop it. They can't even fuck. How can they kill?"

  "Well,
who's doing all the killing down at the Tulsa Torrent project?"

  "Got me," Cicely Winston-Alright said.

  "What a waste of time," Remo said. He pulled back from the woman.

  "Remo," she said, "would you do me a favor?"

  "A small one," Remo said.

  "Take me outside and do it in the snow, under the trees. I love doing it amid nature. It feels so good, so natural. Please."

  "I guess so," Remo said.

  "I like trees," she said. "They're so ... so ... symbolic," she said.

  "Terrific," he said. Thirty steps wasted and he hadn't found anything out, and this woman was still as stiff from hip to knee as she had been when he had first seen her.

  He lifted her up and carried her out the back door of the trailer. He dumped her roughly on the ground. For the first time she squealed, and it was an honest squeal of passion.

  "Just jump on me and bang away," she said. "Forget technique."

  Remo followed her instructions, landing on her roughly, pushing her arms far apart, pinning them down with his strong hands, pressing hard enough to bruise her creamy skin, and inside ten seconds the woman melted, trembling and quaking, shuddering with the intense release of passion.

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  She lay still under him, her shoulders trembling slightly against the snow.

  "That was marvelous," she said.

  "Why didn't you tell me'you liked rough stuff?" he said. "I could have saved a lot of time."

  "I like rough stuff. Save time."

  So they did it again. And again.

  The third time, Remo asked her again: "Who's behind the killings?"

  "I don't know," she said. • "What's the Association?"

  "Ecology group. Pays our bills."

  "Swell," Remo growled. He stood up and-looked down at her. "You better get inside before you catch, cold."

  She nodded. "Will you come and keep me warm again?"

  "Absolutely," he said. "On June 17th, I'm free from eight till nine in the morning."

  "I'll wait," she said, as Remo crunched off through the snow, leaving her lying on the ground.

  Cicely Winston-Alright went back into her trailer and closed the door behind her, then leaned up against it. God, she thought, at last a man . . . someone who wasn't put off by her money or her beauty and wasn't afraid just to take her like an animal in the woods. She could feel a shiver down her back. She was still throbbing down there, for the first time in years. Only one other man had ever ... it was just like in the movies ... like the books she sneaked out of her mother's closet . . .

  She sighed and wondered if Remo had left yet. She

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  ran to the front window of the trailer and looked out into the clearing, but he had gone.

  She smiled and ran her ringers over her body. He would be back, she thought. She would make sure that he came back. If only men knew that she wanted them to be men, that she wanted them to take her, to force her, to bend her to their will, to hurt her. Why didn't men ever realize?

  She walked to her bed and put on a flimsy black peignoir. Then she heard a sound in her kitchen, at the other end of the trailer behind a thin plywood door.

  It was short, dark, and pretty Ararat Carpathian. God, how she hated Armenians, she thought. Not that she knew that many. In fact, Carpathian was the only one she knew, but she hated him enough to make up for all the rest. If they could only find some way of boiling down those people, she thought, America could solve its oil problems by breeding Armenians.

  She smiled at him and let her gown slip open slightly, making sure he got a good view of her front, then slowly pulled it closed.

  "Why, Ari," she said. "How nice to see you."

  "I've been waiting quite a while," Carpathian said. "But you were busy."

  "Oh, you noticed," she said. "Yes. Quite busy."

  "Your friend seemed to want to talk," Carpathian said.

  "Men always do," she said. She busied herself at the stove, making a cup of hot chocolate. She did not offer him any. When she turned to come and join him at the kitchen table, she noticed for the first time that he had a lumberjack's double-bladed axe leaning up against the wall behind his seat.

  "Well, what is on your mind, Ari?" she asked.

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  I

  "Tonight's demonstration," he said.

  "Ah, yes. The demonstration. We seem to live and die by our demonstrations, don't we, Ari?"

  She noticed him smirking under the thin Une of his mustache.

  "You could say that, Cicely," he said.

  She wondered why he was carrying that axe around.

  "Our people are beginning to feel uneasy," Ari said. "After last night's fiasco and with the press watching, they're losing their enthusiasm for tonight."

  "Go make a speech. That'll whip them up."

  "No. They need more than that," he said.

  Mrs. Winston-Alright shook her head from side to side.

  "Well, go give them something more. You can't expect me to do everything, can you?"

  "This is something only you can give them," Ari said. He shifted in his chair and she saw his hand move for the handle of the axe.

  "Oh? What is that?" she said, sipping her chocolate. Maybe he wanted to rape her, maybe this poor insignificant little twerp had always longed for her body; maybe his manners and his deference and his courtliness hadn't worked and now he had decided to take her by force to satisfy his lust. She felt herself going wet again. She wouldn't fight. No woman was ever hurt by a good rape.

  "Go ahead," she said. "I won't resist."

  "You won't?" he said. "You know what's on my mind?

  "Yes, you savage Armenian beast. You've come to rape me. Well, go ahead. Although what that's got to do with tonight's demonstration, I'll never know."

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  "Actually, nothing," he said coldly. "And that's not what's on my mind."

  "It isn't?" Without realizing it, she had slipped down in her chair, and now Cicely Winston-Alright sat up straight again. She looked at him with a dowager empress's commanding eye.

  "What then do our people need tonight?" she said, trying to get her mind back to business.

  "I've talked to our backers at the Association," Ararat Carpathian said. "They agree with me. Totally."

  "Agree with what?"

  "That we need a martyr."

  "A what?" she asked.

  "We need a martyr. We need someone to be the victim of a gory, grisly murder—a particularly horrible, bloody thing that we can blame on the people of Tulsa Torrent. That'll bring out the marchers."

  She sighed. "I suppose so, if that's what the Association thinks."

  "I'm glad you feel that way."

  Carpathian picked up the double-bladed axe and set it on the table.

  "That's what I got this for, Cicely."

  "I see," she said, and shuddered visibly.

  "It should be most effective for our purposes," he said softly.

  "I suppose so. But I hate to look at it." It was funny, she thought; she had never realized how much the little man's eyes looked like a cobra's. They were almost hypnotizing.

  Ari stood up and took the axe in hand, almost as if he were about to chop a log.

  "That thing gives me the creeps," she said.

  "It won't for long."

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  "Have you picked your victim yet?" she asked. She looked in his eyes. His eyes held her. She had her answer without his saying a word. She wanted to scream but couldn't.

  Finally, he answered her. "Yes, Cicely. I have." It took him ten chops to get exactly'the effect he wanted.

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  The moon was high in the sky when Remo came back across the snow to Alpha Camp. There was a large mound of snow where the A-frame building had been, and the air still carried the faint aroma of burnt wood, an aroma faintly redolent to Remo of his childhood days in Newark when he and some friends would start a fire in a vacant lot, then throw i
n raw potatoes to char them black. The burnt potato skins gave off that woody smell.

  Remo was thinking of Cicely Winston-Alright as he walked past the mound that had been the A-frame, when suddenly he felt a pair of strong arms surround him, and a heavy weight bear him to the ground.

  "Gotcha, you bet," he heard the French-accented voice roar in his ear.

  "Goddammit, Pierre, it's me," he said. Remo had a mouthful of snow. He felt the big weight get off his back, then a strong hand pulled him to his feet.

  "Peer sorry," the big man told Remo. "But you sneak across the snow like an Indian, and Peer think it somebody coming back to make trouble."

  "All right," Remo said. "No harm done." He realized how much Sinanju had become a part of him.. He

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  had not been .sneaking back to camp; he had just been strolling. But his stroll today was a soundless, ghostlike movement, beyond the ability of an ordinary man. He was glad that Pierre LaRue was alert.

  The two men went inside the log cabin bunkhouse. Chiun and Joey Webb were sitting on a couch. Chiun was sipping daintily from a cup of tea. Joey's hands held a big tea mug, and from time to time she took a big gulp from it. The fireplace gave off the only light and heat in the room, and the young woman seemed to be vacillating between moving closer to it and pulling away from it. Pierre went to a corner and sat his big body down in an old rocking chair. A cat that had been hiding under the chair scurried out into a dark corner.

  Looking at Joey, Remo thought about how much the girl had gone through in the last few weeks and how close to the edge of breaking she must be.

  Joey looked up at Remo as he stepped into the jagged circle of light thrown off by the fire.

  She smiled a hello to him, and he nodded back.

  "Everything all right down with the copa-ibas?" he asked.

  She said something in answer, but Remo didn't hear it.

  He had turned to face the fireplace and let his mind go out to embrace the flames. For the next two minutes, he thought of nothing but his breathing and the rhythm of his blood as it coursed through his body.

  When he came back from his rhythm fix, he saw Joey standing next to the fireplace. An old-fashioned standing hook was set into one sfde of it, and suspended from the hook was an equally old-fashioned teapot.