Death Therapy

by Warren Murphy

  Who was missing?

  He took the list from his pocket and ran his finger down the handwritten lists of names again.

  The list was in alphabetical order. Bannon… Barrett… more names… Dorfwill… more names… F’s… G’s. And a name was missing.

  And Remo knew which one it was.

  He went digging through the red patient folders until he saw the one he wanted and opened it.

  He had only skimmed it before, not even looking, just assuming it was more test papers and more analysis of problems.

  The folder contained that, but it contained more too. Detailed notes of the whole scheme. The secret of the humming. How Lithia had controlled her victims. All in the folder belonging to Lithia Forrester’s partner—or, as it turned out while Remo read it, to her lover and boss. The man who had put together the scheme to sell America.

  Remo pulled the pages from the folder and placed them with the list of 72 names. He refolded them carefully, and again put them into his back pocket. With a swipe of his arm, he knocked the other file folders all over the floor, clearing the desk. He kicked his way through the folders, papers splashing, their contents hopelessly jumbled.

  He walked from behind the desk and paused at the side of the secretary on the couch. She was just coming to and he leaned over her.

  “Just try to be comfortable, honey. Later on, I’ll send someone up to free you. And I hope we get a chance to meet again sometime.” He leaned over and kissed her on the eyelids and then, with his hands, put her to sleep again.

  He had work to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  REMO PAUSED OUTSIDE THE DOOR of the room on the sixth floor, reserved for patients at the Human Awareness Laboratory.

  The other patients’ doors were plain gray with shiny metal handles. These doors were black. Highly polished black doors. A passerby might think the room did not belong to a patient. Perhaps the passerby might be correct.

  Remo paused in front of the door when he heard the periodic thwack, thwack, thwack. The sound was familiar but he could not place it.

  Other patients’ doors had no locks. But these black double doors had a central bolt, the worst kind of lock for a double door. Any grown man, with a little forward pressure, could ease the bolt out of its slot, Remo did it with a snap of his forefinger.

  The doors sprung open. Standing in a very large, plush room was a mountain of nude chocolate, its back to Remo. The head on the mountain spun around with the wheezing of an asthmatic who had exercised too much.

  “Get out of here,” said Dr. Lawrence Garrand, the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. “I’m busy.”

  Garrand stood, his bare brown feet sunk into a plush white polar bear rug, his two dark rolling arms containing an avalanche of flesh, at the end of which were two almost-pointed hands holding darts.

  Garrand did not move his body around because it would take several steps to accomplish. Instead, he kept his head twisted over his sloping shoulders where the cascade of flesh seemed to begin. Large white stretch marks cut his billowing buttocks into a road map. The legs looked like dried lava flows defying the law of gravity, as if the polar bear rug had vomited up the dark mass.

  Yet the face underneath the flesh, the face that turned over the shoulder to glare at Remo, was a delicate, fine face.

  Remo could catch a glint on the flesh of the forehead from a diffused overhead light. Garrand was perspiring. Yet the room was cool and smelled of delicate mint incense. Garrand’s perspiration came apparently from the exertion of his dart throwing.

  “Get out of here,” Garrand wheezed.

  Remo stepped into the room, never feeling so light in his life. Two steps into the room, he saw what Garrand’s target was, what his body had been hiding, like a mountain obscuring a view of a valley.

  There was Lithia Forrester, about a third larger than life size, in full golden color, naked, seated on a purple cushion, one leg folded up in front of her and the other extended full, exposing her to view. Holes punctured the blue eyes and the erogenous zones were perforated with the memory of thousands of darts. Three red feathered darts protruded from her navel.

  All the while, from the portrait, Lithia smiled seductively, the even, white smile of cool confidence and joy.

  Remo looked back to Garrand.

  Around his neck, the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal had hung his asthma spray bulb on a leather strap. A fold of flesh had hidden the leather strap from the back.

  Garrand’s eyes followed Remo as Remo moved into the room, and just the movement of his head set his body quivering. His breasts were larded with white streaks like an over-boiled hot dog just before splitting. Fat fought fat for space fore and aft on his arms. His nipples were bigger than Lithia’s.

  He squeezed his asthma bulb into his mouth, squirting his bronchial tubes with adrenalin.

  “I thought I told you to get out of here,” he said.

  “I heard you,” Remo said.

  Garrand shrugged, a very slight shrug that made his flesh ripple. He dropped the spray back onto his rolling stomach, and turned his head again toward Lithia’s picture.

  Garrand raised a dart to precise eye level with his right hand. The left hand still held two more. With a flick of his fingers, Garrand let loose a dart as he announced:

  “Left breast.”

  The dart thwacked in just over the aureole around Lithia Forrester’s nipple.

  “Right nipple,” Garrand said and powerfully, almost invisibly with no curve in its trajectory, another dart flashed across the eight-foot distance and buried itself, quivering in the turgid right nipple of Lithia Forrester.

  “Mons veneris,” Garrand said, and the third dart flashed on too, punching its way into the triangular patch of golden hair on the portrait

  Garrand reached down to a wooden dart box and took out three more darts. “You haven’t told me why you busted in here.”

  “The game’s over, Garrand.”

  “So the bitch talked.”

  “No, she didn’t, if that’s any consolation to you. She died without saying a word.”

  “Good for her. I knew the honkey bitch was good for something. Right eye,” he said and buried a dart into the sparkling blue eye of Lithia Forrester.

  “Mouth,” he called, and another dart hit its mark with a thwack.

  “Why, Garrand?” Remo asked. “Just because of a traffic arrest in Jersey City?”

  “Vagina,” Garrand called and buried another dart in the exposed private parts of Lithia Forrester. “Not just because of a traffic arrest, Donaldson. Just because your country is rotten. It deserves what it gets. And I deserve whatever I can get for it. Call it back-dues to my people.” He was wheezing now from the exertion of talking so long.

  “Your people?” Remo said. “What about your people whose lives would be ruined if your scheme worked?”

  “That’s the tough luck associated with being a house nigger,” Garrand said. “Listen. As long as you’re there, give me more darts will you. On that table. In the box.”

  Remo had reached a waist-high white table with a marble top, an exquisite piece of furniture that went with the exquisite room, mostly furnished in white. On the table top was a black box, the size of a loaf of bread, with layer after layer of darts in it, like bombs in a storage hanger. Remo grabbed three by their heavy metal points. The feathers were trimmed and true. The points sharp. The wooden bodies were weighted, about a fifth of an ounce heavier than competition darts.

  He handed the darts to Garrand who accepted them. Then Remo stepped back, eight feet away from Garrand.

  “Left thumb,” Garrand said, and flew a dart into Lithia Forrester’s left thumb.

  “Whose idea was it?” Remo asked. “Yours or hers?”

  “Mine, of course. She didn’t have brains enough to think of it.” He turned now, shuffling and labored, to face Remo. “But I saw the possibilities as soon as I came here for therapy and saw all the go
vernment personnel here. I thought right away of the kind of power she could have over them. She could get them to do anything.”

  “How’d you get her to do it?” Remo asked.

  “You might not believe it, Donaldson, but she loved me.”

  “So you used drugs and post-hypnotic suggestion?”

  “To simplify it for you, yes. Plus Lithia’s peddling her ass. That helped. Men were just fascinated by her body. A little of her twiff and they’d do anything,” Garrand said imperiously. He was lecturing now. “I never could understand it myself. She just wasn’t that good.”

  “I thought you couldn’t get someone to act against their will under hypnosis,” Remo said.

  “A typical piece of comic-book stupidity,” Garrand said. “First you convince them that what they’re doing is the right thing to do. That colonel, for instance. He thought you were a Russian spy. And General Dorfwill. He wasn’t bombing St. Louis; he was bombing Peking in retaliation for a sneak attack. And Admiral Crust? Why shouldn’t he destroy the Statue of Liberty, particularly since he knew it was the hideout for a band of anarchists about to blow up our country? That’s how it’s done, Mr. Donaldson.”

  “And the song?”

  “That was my idea, too,” Garrand said, smiling, his teeth pearled in the ground coffee brownness of his face. “You’ve got to be careful when you use trigger words to set a person off. You can’t pick a word that someone’s liable to hear in conversation. It could set them off before you were ready. When you think about it, not many people are likely to use super-kale-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious in conversation.”

  “A lovely plan,” Remo said. “I respect you for it. Now I need to know where the bidding will be held.”

  Garrand smiled and ignored the question. “One thing puzzles me, Donaldson. I had everything worked out. All except you. This government isn’t that good that one of our sources shouldn’t have a line on you. It’s like all of a sudden there was an organization that did not exist. But it existed. And so did you. Now, if you wish to live, if you wish these darts not to enter your eyes or your temples or wherever I wish, you can tell me where you came from.”

  Remo laughed. “You lose,” he said. He saw his laughter grate Dr. Garrand like a rasp and then the two pointy hands flicked and the darts were at him in that flat trajectory, across the eight feet of room, but Remo’s head did not move. His eyes, toward which the darts flew, did not blink. Remo’s hands flashed up in front of his face and his hands caught the darts by the points, between thumb and index finger; hands receiving the thrust of the killer weights, wrists like spring locks accepting the force and holding short, just short of the eyes.

  Garrand’s mouth opened. His eyes widened. He looked toward the box of darts on the table and querulously reached forward a hand. But suddenly his hand was pinned to the table as Remo pierced it with one of the darts. “Right thumb,” Remo said. He still held the other dart in his right hand.

  For the first time in years, Garrand became physical. He ripped his hand loose from the dart, tearing the flesh, and lumbered toward Remo. And for the first time in years, he felt his legs going high above him, above his head, and he was up at the diffused lighting, then at the walls, and than his head was buried in the polar bear rug, and there was that arrogant white face between his bare feet, and Lawrence Garrand was upside down, his head pressed painfully into the rug. He had scarcely seen the man move. And it was becoming hard to breathe.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” said the leering face between his feet. “Where’s the auction?”

  Garrand breathed in and tried to breathe out. It was getting more difficult. The blood was pouring into his head and his chocolate skin was taking on a blood-gorged purple color. He fought to exhale. His chest pressed down into his chin. A strand of polar-bear hair caught in his eye and burned.

  “Where’s the auction?” that white face insisted, then began to press down on Garrand’s legs, forcing them into his waist, and Garrand finally blurted out, “Villebrook Equity Associates. New York. Tomorrow.” He was exhausted from the effort.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” Remo said. “Time to go bye-bye.”

  “You can’t kill me,” Garrand insisted. “I’m the foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. I deserve to live.”

  “Sure. So did Clovis Porter. General Dorfwill. A lot of others.”

  “Call the police then,” Garrand gasped. “You can’t kill me. If I were white, you wouldn’t kill me.”

  “I’d kill you in any color, sweetheart.” Remo looked down along Garrand’s wet brown body and his eyes met those of the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. Remo extended the remaining dart out over Garrand’s face with his right hand. “External jugular,” he called, then dropped the dart. It buried itself into the flesh alongside Garrand’s throat and a thin purple spurt of blood fountained out of his neck as the blood pressure was momentarily relieved by the pierced vein. Remo dropped Garrand heavily to the floor. Before Remo turned off his breath forever, Garrand managed to gasp something muffled by the fat folds of his cheeks and chin. Later, Remo would think that what he said was “I knew it wouldn’t work. You people… ”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  WHEN REMO RETURNED TO HIS ROOM, Chiun was sitting rigidly in the lotus position, staring at the television.

  Remo opened his mouth to speak and Chiun raised a hand for silence.

  Only seconds later, organ music up and over, Chiun leaned forward and turned off the television.

  “Good afternoon, little father,” Remo said. “Have you had a pleasant day?”

  “Relatively, my son, although I must admit I weary of telling that blighted mass of womanhood that she is indeed loved. And you?”

  “Very productive. We must leave now.”

  “Our work is finished?” Chiun asked.

  “Our work here is finished. We have other tasks to perform elsewhere.”

  “I will be ready to leave in moments,” Chiun said.

  He was and Remo realized that his uncharacteristic haste was fueled by his desire to get back to their Washington hotel room and recover his TV taping machine to record the shows he was now missing.

  But they stopped at the hotel only long enough to pay their bill and for Remo to slip the bell captain $100 to ship their luggage to a non-existent address in Avon-by-the-Sea on the Jersey shore. And then they were back in their rented convertible on their way to Dulles Airport outside Washington.

  Chiun grumbled all the way at the idiocy of leaving a perfectly good television recorder behind and finally extracted a promise from Remo that he could buy another in New York that night.

  And later that night, after they checked into a midtown Manhattan hotel, Chiun insisted upon Remo’s giving him $500 so he could buy one, which he did, along with five new robes, a pocket knife and a whistle. The latter two were to protect himself on New York’s crime-ridden streets, he explained.

  They both rose early the next morning and Chiun worked with Remo on his balance and rhythm, setting out strings of drinking glasses across the floor and having Remo race across the tops of them, barefooted, at increasing speeds.

  Remo felt good. He could taste the end of this assignment. After he showered and shaved, he dressed, reluctantly donning the polka dot tie he had brought with him. If he was going to take part in the bidding for America, he should look the part, he told his image in the mirror. He buttoned his new double-breasted dark blue suit.

  Before leaving, he entrusted Lithia Forrester’s lists with Chiun, telling him: “Until you hear from me guard these with your life.”

  Chiun was deep in his morning meditation and only grunted, but that meant he understood. The lists lay on the floor in front of Chiun where Remo had placed them as Remo went out of their room.

  In a men’s store off the lobby, Remo bought a conservative regimental striped tie and dropped the other into an ash-bucket near the desk.

  In the telephone book, he looked up the address and number of
Villebrook Equity Associates then dialed.

  A woman’s voice answered and Remo told her he was an investor who wanted someone to propose a tax shelter for him. Could he make an appointment to see someone right away?

  “Not today, sir, I’m afraid. Our offices will be closed from noon until 3 p.m. I could make you an appointment for tomorrow.”

  “That’s a strange way to run a business,” Remo said.

  “Well, frankly, sir, the building is a little run down and we are having an exterminator in.”

  “And there’ll be no one there at all?” Remo asked.

  “Only Mr. Bogeste, our treasurer and founder. But he’ll be keeping an eye on the exterminator. He won’t be able to see anyone.”

  “Okay,” Remo said. “Thank you. I’ll call tomorrow.”

  He hung up the phone. That was it. Right after noon, with all the workers out of the office, the bidding would be held. He hoped they had room for one more.

  · · ·

  Remo was in the eighth floor hall outside the offices of Villebrook Equity Associates shortly after noon when a dozen workers poured out from the glass doors, delighted at the prospect of a three-hour lunch, paid for by the company.

  Behind them, a young, athletic-looking man with long black hair cast a quizzical glance at Remo, then closed and locked the door from the inside.

  The crowd of workers took the elevator down, but Remo hung around the elevator door, as if waiting for an empty car. Minutes later, he heard a phone ring down the hall. It stopped ringing abruptly, and then, after no more than 60 seconds, another door down the hall opened and eight men walked down the hallway toward Remo. He pressed impatiently on the elevator button, but glanced at the men as they passed. It looked like a United Nations caucus, Remo thought, the men almost carrying on their faces the flags of their native countries. Did he look as American as they looked foreign, Remo wondered.