"Move your ass, goddamn it!"
Beasley made it to his back door, fumbled with the dead-bolt lock in darkness, still afraid to show a light. He got it on the second try, but the damn door still wouldn't open, and he finally remembered the primary lock, a little button on the knob he had to press before the knob would turn.
Outside, the night was dark and still. The grass was cool beneath his feet, and Beasley cursed the haste that had permitted him to leave the house without his slippers.
Another crash from the Francisco house drew him toward the fence that marked the boundary between the two adjoining properties. He still had no idea of what he meant to do, unarmed and barefoot, barely dressed, but he would think of something when the time came. If he couldn't help his odd, standoffish neighbors, maybe he could catch a glimpse of the intruders and describe them to police. Sure, that was it. A simple witness didn't really have to get involved. Not like the wacky heroes who went charging into burning houses, dragging out unconscious strangers through the smoke and flames.
He reached the fence and stood on tiptoe in the soft earth of a flower bed. A rosebush snagged one leg of his pajamas, but he managed to ignore it, straining for a clear view of the house next door. From where he stood, he had the back door covered, with the steps that led down to a concrete walk around the east side of the structure. Everything was just like Beasley's house, the carbon-copy layout anyway, that readily identified tract housing from the early 1960s. Unlike Beasley, though, the neighbors wasted little time on sprucing up the yard. They cut the grass back twice a month and that was it. No pets that he could see, no flowers, no rock garden. Nothing.
He was staring at the back door when it suddenly flew open and he had the clear view of the prowlers that he had been hoping for. Too clear, in fact, and Beasley instantly regretted wishing for a glimpse of the intruders.
Who was ever going to believe him now?
The dogs were bad enough, big shaggy mongrels, six or seven of them racing silently across the open yard, but Beasley had no time to wonder what a pack of mutts was doing there. His full attention focused on the man who followed them outside. Scratch that.
He would admit, in subsequent interrogations by police, that he mistook the prowler for a human at first glance. The prowler had two arms and two legs and wore some kind of clothing, maybe denim, but the outward similarity to humankind stopped there.
Beasley had seen the creature's face and hands, all shaggy, sprouting long, coarse hair, like something from an old Lon Chaney movie. He couldn't be sure if the hair was brown or black, and didn't really give a damn. One glimpse had been enough to last a lifetime when the creature went down on its haunches, raised its head and howled at the moon.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo, and he really didn't want to get involved, but somehow fate always found him. All he had wanted was a bowl of rice, for crying out loud.
But before the bowl was half-empty he was called to duty. Defender of the downtrodden. Protector of the innocent. Smiter of evil. Was smiter a word? Whatever the hell, it was obvious he'd made a bad choice in restaurants.
It had turned out to be that kind of day, and it wasn't even noon.
He was en route to Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, when it occurred to him that he was hungry.
Remo started looking for a restaurant in Larchmont, shunning drive-ins with their greasy burgers, "extracrunchy" chicken parts and hot dogs drenched in chili that resembled something from the dysentery ward. He found the Happy Noodle, a decent-looking Chinese place on a side street near the heart of town.
A very pretty Chinese hostess took him to a seat. A male server brought hot tea in a ceramic pot and steamed rice. Remo was chewing away-it took a lot of chewing if you did it right-when trouble walked in off the street.
He counted seven of them, Chinese punks whose taste in clothing ran to leather coats or denim jackets with the sleeves cut off, tight slacks and high-gloss shoes with pointy toes. They all wore sunglasses, despite the dim light in the restaurant, and combed their hair straight back, like Dracula-Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. Most of them sported chunky rings that would do wicked damage in a brawl-assuming they made contact.
Remo watched the hostess move to greet the new arrivals, saw the nervous jitter in her walk as she approached them. The apparent leader met her with a smile, said something in Chinese, then shook his head at her response. The smile winked out, and he was pointing toward the back, in the direction of the kitchen, snapping orders that the slim young woman hastened to obey.
Remo assumed the older man who came to meet the punks had to be the Happy Noodle's manager, perhaps the owner. Remo didn't completely comprehend what was said, but he got the gist. Wherever they were found, established Chinese businessmen were often victimized by hoodlum gangs and forced to pay protection.
None of my business, Remo thought, and turned back to his meal. The loaded chopsticks were poised midway between his plate and mouth when he was forcibly distracted by the sound of knuckles striking flesh and a cry of pain. The hostess rushed to assist the fallen manager and yelled at the punks who loomed above him. There was nothing complimentary about her comments, and Remo saw the leader of the gang slap her hard across the face.
Remo, swearing under his breath, went to join the party. On his right, one member of the gang saw Remo coming, nudged the punk next to him with an elbow, and it went along the line that way until the leader had him spotted, turning just his head to face the new arrival. He was smiling still, his eyes invisible behind the shades he wore, and Remo didn't care. It made no difference what the young man looked like with his glasses off. The eyes were helpful sometimes in a fight, but these punks weren't even a challenge. Rather, it would be a test of his patience and forbearance not to kill them when the first one made his move.
He came on slow and guileless, verging onto stupid, as the youngsters would expect a do-gooder white man to behave. They had grown up intimidating elders, picking out their targets based on fear or weakness. Thus far, the technique had served them well.
"Excuse me." He addressed the cringing hostess, seeming to ignore the young men ranged in front of him, likewise the restaurant's proprietor. "I'm finished, miss. If I could get my check now, please...?"
"Hey, man," the leader of the seven said to him, "does any one of us look like your damn waiter?" Remo made a show of studying their faces and their clothing.
"Gosh, no," he said at last. "My waiter didn't have a quart of oil in his hair, and there didn't seem to be a problem with his eyes. His clothes were nicer, as I recall. His shoes weren't greaser retro from the 1960s and he didn't use that cheap cologne. In fact, you ought to ask him for some pointers on style. I'm sure he-"
"Shut up!"
The young Chinese thug was livid, anger darkening his sallow cheeks. He stared at Remo from behind his shades, while the others muttered among themselves and fidgeted. A couple of them slipped hands inside their leather jackets.
"You got a big mouth for a round-eye," said the leader of the gang.
"You know, that's just what my wife says," Remo replied. "Somebody asks a question, I just fire back with the first thing that comes to mind. By which I mean God's honest truth, you understand. It gets me into trouble sometimes, I'm the first one to admit, but what the hey, that's life. Your hair, for instance. Now, I hope it didn't hurt your feelings when I said-"
"You wanna die, man?" the leader asked him.
"Well, it's not as if I have a choice, now, is it? Certainly, like anybody else, I hope to live as long as possible, but let's not kid ourselves, okay? I mean-"
"I'm asking if you wanna die today."
"Oh, well, that's different, isn't it? When you get down to the specifics of it-"
Remo heard the switchblade open with a snap before he saw it, glinting on his left. The farthest hoodlum from him was the first to draw a weapon, but the others quickly followed suit. He checked the hardware, counting off three knives, one cutthroat r
azor, one blackjack, one pair of knuckle dusters and a pair of plastic nunchakus. They might as well have armed themselves with some of the restaurant's signature noodles.
The leader twirled his nunchakus, making his companion on the right step back a pace to keep from getting swatted on the jaw. The members of his gang maintained respectful silence as he whipped the nunchakus through a short routine and caught the loose end underneath one arm.
"Enter the Dragon, right?" Remo asked. "Hey, I loved that movie, too. I must have seen it half a dozen times. I think I've even got the video at home. If I could make one observation, though... Your stance, I mean, well, it appears to me you're sort of leaning to the left, and-
"You're a ninja, right? Some kind of expert, because you saw a movie?"
"A ninja? Oh, my goodness gracious, no! But, then again, it doesn't always take an expert to detect the weakness in an amateur's approach. Sometimes, I mean, the errors are just quite obvious."
The hostess and the manager were staring at him now, clearly expecting Remo to be mobbed at any moment. He ignored them, focused on the nunchaku man, believing that the others wouldn't make a move until their leader gave the order.
"More tact," the Chinese hoodlum said, "is what you need. It's like you said, that mouth of yours. Besides-" he nodded toward the scowling manager "-old Grandpa here could use an object lesson. He's too brave for his own good these days. That's not a healthy way to be, you know? He doesn't care enough about himself, his building, his employees. Maybe he still cares about his customers. You think?"
"I'm sure I wouldn't know," Remo said.
"Well, hey," the young man told him with a smile, "let's check it out."
He had rehearsed the move; that much was obvious: Remo could almost see him posing with his 'chuks before a full-length mirror, maybe in the nude, and smiling at his trim reflection as he worked on different angles of attack. It didn't hurt to practice that way every now and then, but a person could overdo it, just like anything in life. Some mirror fighters focused so much on technique, the way they looked to others when they struck a pose, that they lost sight of basics. They forgot that fighting in real life had more to do with raw survival than with looking good. A handsome corpse was still stone dead, no matter how his hair was styled.
He gave another flourish of his nunchakus, letting out a "Yaoweeee" kind of sound he had to have borrowed from the late Bruce Lee. It warbled through two octaves, rising to a sharp soprano pitch before it ended with a startled-sounding "Oof!" The next move was apparently supposed to startle his victim, take him by surprise, but Remo Williams saw the windup coming from a mile away.
The self-styled tough guy whipped the nunchakus left to right from his perspective, counting on the backhand to connect with Remo's skull and take him down with one blow.
Remo hardly seemed to move, yet he ducked backward far enough to let the nunchakus whisper past his face with a quarter of an inch to spare. Before the young man had a chance to register his miss, process the information and react accordingly, Remo was gliding forward, still moving faster than the human eye could follow, one hand floating out in front of him to find his attacker's jaw.
Reach out and touch someone.
Remo pulled the punch, but the strike still carried force enough to shatter bone. One moment, Remo's enemy was snarling at him, showing gritted teeth; the next, his lower jaw had shifted two inches to the right. The change was accompanied by a sickly ripping sound, and a handful of his pearly whites exploded from between slack lips and pattered on the vinyl floor.
Remo was back in place and gaping at the young man as he fell. "Oh, no!" he said to no one in particular. "Did I do that?"
It took a moment for the other six punks to recover, and the next rush came from Remo's left. The grinner with the long bone-handled switchblade in his hand knew enough to hold the knife well back, against his right hip, while his left hand pawed the air in front of him. He was ducking, weaving as he came toward Remo, muttering some vulgar malediction in Chinese.
Remo half turned to face him, raising empty hands as if to placate his assailant. "Hey, wait a second here," he said, still clinging to his character. "I didn't mean-"
Remo brushed the empty hand aside as the other hand made the thrust that was designed to disembowel him. Remo wasn't in the mood to be disemboweled. He smacked the knife hand up, hard. The knife rocketed skyward, the hand broke and the blade man bonked himself in the head with his own forearm with such magnificent force he knocked himself out.
The impact left him stretched out on the floor, face-down, his right arm showing jagged angles that were never planned by Mother Nature. The unnatural speed of the movement of his arm had also shredded every tendon and ligament from the shoulder on down.
"My favorite Moe move," Remo explained. The five remaining hoodlums had already seen what happened to their buddies when they tried to take the round-eyes one on one. Accordingly, the next rush was a two-man effort, more knives coming at him from the left and right.
Remo reversed his stance at the last moment, with a simple pivot on his toes, and saw the glimmer of the knife slide past his face as his right elbow rose to meet the youngster's rushing face. He was rewarded with a satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage, the cutter's nose and cheek imploding, impact robbing him of consciousness while sheer momentum kept him moving.
"Oops! Sorry!" Remo yelped as he gave the little punk an extra nudge and sent the limp form into his other adversary's path. "Coming through!" he warned.
The two young gangsters came together with a jolting impact, one a flaccid scarecrow. Remo heard a muffled grunt and saw the second attacker's blade slide home above the tumbling rag doll's hip. It shouldn't be a mortal wound, if Remo wrapped up his engagement in the next few minutes and the manager could summon an ambulance, but there was bright blood on the fourth man's knife as he and his comrade toppled to the floor.
"That has got to hurt," Remo commented.
The young man with the knuckle dusters seemed to have forgotten he was wearing them, or maybe he was simply frightened by the thought of closing to within arm's length of this most startling round-eyes. Whatever the excuse, he aimed a looping kick at Remo's face instead of striking with his fists. As with his leader, noise appeared to help the kicker with his move, a high-pitched yipping sound that may have been designed to psych out his adversary.
Remo registered the high kick as a rush of air before he turned to face it. Ducking back as the pointy shoe rushed toward his face, he caught the heel between his thumb and index finger, lifting as he pivoted, the kicker's other foot swept off the ground by leverage and centrifugal force. The knuck man's skull collided with the floor and he went limp, another flesh-and-floor-tile speed bump on the battlefield of life.
And that left two.
"You guys suck," Remo commented.
The young man with the blackjack should have moved while Remo was demolishing his buddy, but he hesitated, checking out the odds and angles. "Seriously. The Drunken Masters are better than you. The Crippled Masters are better than you. David Carradine is better than you and he's like eighty years old. You even make Jean-Claude Van Damme look talented."
"Shut up, Cauc!" His attitude told Remo that he longed to cut and run, but there was still his reputation to consider, and a witness who would tell the world if he showed yellow in a pinch. The razor man, meanwhile, was standing back and shooting glances toward the exit, measuring the distance, wondering if he could make it to the street.
"I hate to say this," Remo said regretfully, "but you know who you guys remind me of?" He winced and stage-whispered, "Steven Seagal."
That did it. A blend of rage and stubborn pride propelled the sap man forward, swinging wildly with his leather-shrouded weapon. Remo ducked beneath a reckless swing and poked a few stiff fingers up into the young man's solar plexus. He could easily have stopped the beating heart inside that rib cage, maybe ripped it out and placed it in the hoodlum's hand, but he was satisfied to drive the
wind out of his adversary's lungs and spray the remnants of his breakfast on the nearest wall.
The sap man staggered, went down on one knee and lost his weapon as he clutched his burning abdomen. Still conscious, there was nothing he could do to help himself as Remo stepped in close and tapped him at the junction of his skull and spine, obliterating awareness. The slump became a sprawl, the punk collapsing on his side.
When Remo turned to face the razor man, his final standing target met him with a show of teeth that could have passed for either a smile or a grimace. He had grabbed the hostess and was holding her in front of him with one arm wrapped around her upper body while his free hand held the open razor to her throat.
"I'll cut her, man!" he said.
"That wouldn't be the smartest thing you've ever done," said Remo.
"Oh, yeah? Why not?"
"Because your friends are still alive. They came at me, and I gave them a break. You cut the girl-" he frowned and shook his head "-no breaks for you."
"She'll still be dead," the razor man retorted. "Maybe she can be my prom date when I get to hell."
"Did anybody mention killing you?" asked Remo. "Hey, not me. I couldn't bring myself to let you off that easy, kid. I'd have to break your legs in six or seven places each, the same thing with your arms. The spine's a little trickier, but I know how it's done. A simple twist, not too much pressure.
You're a basket case before you know it, paralyzed from the neck down, but still in constant pain. Can't scratch your nose or wipe your ass, but that's all right. You'll have a nurse to do it for you. Hell, the tricks the doctors know these days, you ought to live another sixty years, at least. I might drop in to visit you and celebrate our anniversary, make sure those pain receptors keep on functioning. Sound good to you?"
"You're fulla shit!"
"So call my bluff if you're feeling lucky, punk," said Remo. "Go ahead. Go for it. Make my day. One thing, though-make sure it's what you really want to do, because you'll wind up paying for it for a long damn time."
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