Last Drop td-54

by Warren Murphy

"Guess they knew what they were doing."

  "Trust the Glods, kid," Remo said, and vaulted over the ten-foot-high fence out of the compound.

  From the shadows, a pair of eyes watched. A pair of legs moved slowly toward the two men who remained in the warehouse. A pair of gray-gloved hands raised a Browning Automatic and screwed a large webbed silencer over the barrel.

  Two small pops sounded. Ty and Sloops lay together in a heap, the wounds in their foreheads not bleeding. The eyes on both the corpses stared in the same direction, and the expression in them was one of wonder.

  ?Chapter Seven

  Paul "Pappy" Eisenstein was an optimist. Even though his livelihood had disappeared from under him, he had faith in the future of America. And that future, he firmly believed, lay in the hands of the children inside the hallowed walls of P.S. 109.

  He waited hopefully, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as the final bell sounded inside the old brick building and the fifth and sixth graders whose classrooms were located nearest the entrance poured out, shrieking with their usual jubilation.

  "Hey, Frankie... Frankie," he whispered hoarsely, trying to manage a smile as he shuffled toward a tough-looking twelve-year-old. "Got some good stuff. Panama red. Blow your socks off."

  "Get out," Frankie said loftily. "Marijuana's uncool. Nobody smokes reefer these days."

  "Come on, kid. Just an ounce or two. As a favor, for old times' sake."

  "I'm not running a charity," Frankie said, holding his fists firmly over the fifty-dollar allowance in his pockets.

  "I'll give you a discount," Pappy pleaded. Frankie strutted away. Pappy chased after him. "Hey, how about a referral, huh? You send over a couple of kids, maybe some bozos don't know what's in, what's out, and I'll give you a cut of the action. What do you say, Frankie, huh?"

  The child considered. "Nope," he said with finality, shaking his head. "Nobody's tubular enough to think marijuana's in. Besides, coffee's better. You can mix it with ice cream."

  Pappy played his trump card. "Oh, yeah? Well, you can forget about getting zonked on coffee malteds, because coffee has been recalled. You got that? There ain't no more coffee." He smiled triumphantly.

  Frankie sneered. "There's nothing sadder than an old pusher," he said.

  "Whaddya mean?"

  "I mean you're so out of it, you ought to be put out to pasture, Pappy." He pointed through the wire mesh of the playground fence across to the other side.

  Past the seesaws and spring-mounted ducks were a large cluster of children waving money. In the center of the group was a tall gray-haired lady with glasses.

  "Who's that?" Pappy asked, walking quickly toward the woman.

  "Meet your competition," Frankie said.

  The woman was handing out small glassine envelopes filled with brown powder and exchanging them for five-dollar bills.

  "Is this any good?" one of the children asked.

  "Folger's crystals," the woman said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes crinkled behind her bifocals.

  "You got Maxwell House?" a boy wearing corduroy pants with a bear on the pocket asked knowledgeably. "My brother says Maxwell House is the best."

  "I'll have some next week," the woman promised. "And Hills Brothers, too."

  "Oh, boy!"

  The woman chucked him gently under the chin. "And if you're willing to pay a little more, I've got some special edition A & P Fresh Ground for parties. Dynamite."

  "I'll take some."

  "Me, too," a little voice squeaked as the grandmotherly lady passed out her envelopes.

  Pappy shook his head. "I can't believe it," he said disgustedly. "Selling nickel bags to schoolkids."

  "What do you think you were doing?" Frankie said, sniffing deeply from his envelope of instant coffee and rubbing a little over his gums.

  "I wasn't dealing coffee," Pappy said, indignant.

  "They always say that smoking pot leads to bigger things."

  Pappy looked carefully at the old woman. "Say, you look familiar," he said.

  The gray-haired lady gave Pappy a shove. "Buzz off, turdbreath. This is my territory now."

  "Hey, wait a second. I've been coming here for years. So now, I should let you horn in... in..." The words dried up in his throat. Pappy's eyes stared glassily ahead to a point beyond the old lady and the children— at a black Cadillac Seville rolling slowly down the street. And beyond it, a young man in a T-shirt walking toward him down the sidewalk, a man with brown hair and brown eyes and thick wrists.

  "Excuse me, I gotta run," Pappy said, twirling abruptly in the other direction.

  But the man with the thick wrists seemed to move without walking. And before Pappy, running at full speed, reached the corner, he found himself plastered against the playground fence, his forearms and shins woven deftly through the fence.

  "Well, Pappy Eisenstein," Remo said. "Isn't this a surprise."

  "Yeah, a regular barrel of monkeys," Pappy said. "How'd you find me?"

  "Just luck," Remo said, smiling.

  It had been luck. After leaving the warehouse, Remo felt that he was being followed. The same black Cadillac Seville with dark polarized windows had inched behind him for eleven random blocks, passing him only to permit what little traffic there was to go by, then circled the block and trailed him again. When he'd finally gone up to have a talk with the driver, the Seville spurted forward, slowing up only enough to give Remo a chance to catch up.

  It was a game, Remo decided. Some rich old lunatic out for a drive, having fun with the pedestrians. The game had brought a piece of luck for Remo and, seeming to sense that the cat-and-mouse chase was now over, the driver gave up and the Seville turned the corner.

  "I want to talk to you," Remo said. "Don't go away."

  "Very funny. Ha, ha. I'm laughing," Pappy said bitterly, wiggling his feet through the wire fence.

  The children were pointing at Pappy's ridiculous figure and giggling merrily. The old lady batted her eyelashes demurely behind her spectacles.

  "I thank you kindly, sir," she said in a sweet voice. "That degenerate was beginning to bother the little ones, and as you can see, I'm just a helpless old widow..."

  "...Who pushes dope to babies," Remo finished. With hands moving as fast as birds' wings, he grabbed every packet the children had and ripped them to shreds, sending the coffee flying on the breeze. Then, withut stopping, he snatched the roll of five-dollar bills from the old lady and tore that up, too. Finally he dumped the remaining supply of coffee from the woman's handbag and blew the powder out of sight.

  Everyone except Pappy, who wept volubly, was too stunned to react. The old lady was the first to recover. With a disapproving "Tut-tut" she slammed a hairy fist in the direction of Remo's jaw. He caught the fist, flipped the old lady in a 360-degree arc, and yanked off the mass of gray hair. Beneath it was a crew cut.

  "Why, hello, Granny," Remo said.

  "Hector Gomez," Pappy shouted. "I knew it! I knew it! God, you smack pushers'll stoop to anything."

  Hector shrugged.

  The children screamed. They screamed even louder when Remo gave them each a hefty slap across the hindquarters and sent them racing down the street.

  "You're wrecking my trade," Hector said reasonably.

  "That's not all I'm going to wreck." Remo picked the man up by the belt and tossed him effortlessly over the fence into the playground. The pusher landed on one of the spring-based ducks. The fat steel coils contracted under the big man's weight, then sprang upward, pulling him through the air.

  "This I don't have to watch," Pappy said from his position on the fence. "I seen it all before."

  "He's not going to die," Remo said equably. "But he's never going to be in business again, either."

  The splat told Pappy it was all over. Glancing behind him, he caught sight of the man in the granny outfit, who had landed headfirst on the roof of P.S. 109.

  "That's what I thought I'd see," said Pappy, wincing.

  "He's not dead," Remo i
nsisted, brushing the coffee residue off his hands. "If I'd thrown him two or three degrees further in either direction, I'd have killed him, but..."

  Pappy was staring at him with terrified eyes.

  Remo cleared his throat. "Well, that doesn't matter," he said. "I thought you were going straight, Pappy. You promised me."

  "Yeah, I will. I owe you one."

  "You still owe me one from the last time I let you live. Ten years ago, remember?"

  Pappy remembered Remo, all right. As if he could ever forget a killer like that. The biggest collection of drug dealers ever assembled, and Remo had gone through them like a hot knife through butter. Fifteen guys dead in eight seconds. And the guys had had guns. Remo and the old Chinese guy with him had used only their hands.

  Pappy had been no more than a messenger then, a harmless old rummy whom the bosses allowed to be present at the big meetings to go out for ice or broads. And so when the holocaust had come, Remo let Pappy go to warn others in the profession.

  "I tried to get a real job," Pappy pleaded. "But I can't do nothing else. To tell the truth, I ain't even much good at this."

  "Save the sob story."

  "All right, already," Pappy said, giving up. "So poke out my eyeballs. You want dope, you got the wrong guy."

  "I don't want dope. I want a connection to Colombia," Remo said. "Pot smugglers do business in Colombia, I hear."

  "You still got the wrong guy. Me, I'm a marijuana dealer. The last of a dying breed. Nobody's flying to Colombia for pot anymore. You want to get into Colombia without a passport, that's who you see." He pointed to Gomez on the school roof. "Only he's in no condition to talk now, smartass." Pappy straightened out his threadbare coat.

  "What's he go to Colombia for?" Remo asked.

  Pappy rolled his eyes. "For coffee, man. You blind or something? The kids all are stoned on heroin au lait. It's in the coffee. Don't ask me how it gets there, I don't know heroin from hamhocks, but that's what the smart pushers are running these days. Coffee."

  "But coffee was just recalled today," Remo said. "Up to now, it was legal."

  "You think these guys are idiots? The big dealers, the fat men with their Lincolns, the Mafia types with the warehouses full of horse— they're losing their shirts, just like me. We're out in the cold because we didn't see what was coming. Thought somebody would always be buying pot or straight heroin. But the smart guys, the independents, they see everybody getting zoned out on coffee, and what do they think?" Pappy tapped his forehead, "I'll tell you what they think. They think, hey, this stuffs too good to be legal. So naturally, it ain't going to be legal for long, get it?"

  Remo nodded.

  "So last week they start making their own runs into Colombia for the coffee. Hector and his men was going to take off tonight, only you screwed that up good. Unless you want to take his place."

  "Maybe," Remo said. "How'd you know about Hector's operation?"

  Pappy shrugged. "I found out things here and there. They work out of a DC-3 from Endley Airport. Hector's job is to bribe the Colombian government official at the other end. Ten thousand bucks. I was going to put it to Hector that he should cut me in, and I was going to spill the beans on him to Johnny Arcadi, only I guess you wrecked that angle, too."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Pappy gave him a withering look. "Oh, you haven't heard? Well, excuse me, but Johnny Arcadi's dead."

  "What?"

  "Surprise, surprise."

  "When?"

  "Yesterday sometime. You ought to know. You killed him. Along with Amfat Hassam."

  Remo was stunned. "Hassam, too?" he said softly.

  "Yeah," Pappy said, his face grim. "Hassam. And his wife. And all them dancing girls he had hanging around. It was on the news. Listen," he said, putting his arm around Remo's shoulder. "I know it's none of my business how you get your rocks off, but maybe you been working too hard, you know? I mean, all them dames..."

  "I didn't kill them," Remo said in a daze. Then he looked up into Pappy's face, realized he'd already said too much, and pushed him away.

  Pappy held up his hands. "Okay, okay, I'm not saying nothing." He sounded scared. "I only told you about Hector so's you'd know I was on your side." His upheld hands were shaking violently. "I thought then maybe you wouldn't kill me, too. Huh? Whaddya say, pal?"

  Remo stared at him. Dead. All dead. All the targets he'd spared, and a lot more besides. How? Who?

  Pappy Eisenstein was trembling. In his eyes was the look of a man who'd been cornered by a beast. "Get out of here," Remo said.

  Pappy backed shakily down the sidewalk.

  At a pay phone near the school, Remo punched through the long routing code to Folcroft Sanitarium. He hit the buttons so hard the whole unit threatened to come off the wall.

  "Yes?" Smith's voice at the other end of the line was grim.

  "What's going on?" Remo said.

  The reply was agitated and sharp. "I'd like to ask you the same question. There was simply no reason ... Well, what's done is done. I'll expect a full accounting for this after the assignment is over."

  Remo hardly heard him. He kept seeing Pappy Eisenstein's eyes in front of him, frightened eyes that regarded him as a killer who couldn't help killing.

  But he didn't kill them, he couldn't have...

  He heard his own voice speaking, sounding hollow and faraway. "How'd they die?"

  "The police reports list cause of death as single gunshot wounds to the head in all cases."

  "All of them? Arcadi, Hassam?" He gritted his teeth. "The women, too?"

  "All but one. A twenty-three-year-old woman named Sandra Hess. A dancer."

  "Sandy," Remo said, remembering the pretty blonde with the bright eyes.

  "She's in a coma. She's not expected to come out of it, so at least there won't be a witness."

  "A wit... God, you cold bastard, you think I did it, don't you."

  "Hassam's four bodyguards are dead, too, and the butler," Smith went on mechanically. "And two men at the Port Henry warehouse. A man named Tyrone Bates and the manager, a Mr. Sloops."

  "Sloops?" Remo whispered. "He didn't know anything."

  "Neither did the women at Hassam's," Smith said coldly. "Remo, do you mean to tell me that you know nothing about these killings?"

  Remo forced himself to breathe deeply. "I'm only going to say this once," he said. "I didn't kill any of those people. Not one. Is that clear?"

  Smith took a long time answering. "Yes," he said at last. "I don't believe you would find it necessary to simulate gunshot wounds. It wouldn't be logical."

  Remo tried to collect his thoughts. "Two things," he said. "I'm going to need ten thousand dollars."

  Smith exhaled. "I'll wire it to you. What else?"

  "Do you have any data on a George Brown with the North American Coffee Company in Saxonburg, Indiana?"

  The Folcroft computers whirred. "That doesn't compute as a whole," Smith said. "But I'll examine the elements. Why?"

  Remo told him about the man who had sold the coffee to the Port Henry warehouse without bothering to collect the payment, and about the plantation in Peruvina.

  "That may fit in somewhere," Smith said. "But the fact remains that everyone you've come in contact with is dead. Have there been attempts on your life?"

  "No," Remo said, bewildered.

  "Then whoever the killer is wants you alive, and everyone around you dead."

  "Everyone... Pappy."

  "What did you say?" Smith asked.

  A dial tone answered him.

  Eight blocks away, Pappy ducked into the crumbling doorway of an abandoned building and waited. Even though the air was warm and he was wearing an overcoat, he felt cold. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, held it shakily to his lips, and lit it. He puffed furiously, looking to the right and then the left. When at last the familiar black Cadillac Seville pulled up close to the curb in front of him, he breathed a sigh of relief and ground the cigarette on the si
dewalk with his shoe.

  "Thought you'd never get here," Pappy said, the sweat popping from his brow. "That guy nearly had me."

  The hands inside the gray leather gloves smoothed over one another, as if caressing themselves. "He's going to the airport?"

  Pappy nodded. "Everything went just like you said. Except for Hector Gomez. Who'd think he'd show up?"

  "I did," the figure in black said.

  The gloved hand slid inside the lightweight black coat.

  "Five grand," Pappy reminded his contact. "You said you'd give me five grand to get him to the airport."

  "You were going to run away."

  "I got scared," Pappy said, swallowing. "I mean, the guy's some kind of nut, killing everybody right and left. I just got scared for a second. Wouldn't you?"

  "Me? No."

  Out of the coat slid a .38 Browning with a silencer.

  Pappy's eyes widened. "You ..."

  "Good-bye, Pappy."

  And before Pappy could scream, the left side of his face blew into fragments.

  A mob of horrified onlookers was crowded around an ambulance. Several feet away, two men in white were lifting a stretcher covered with a white sheet soaked in blood.

  Remo threaded his way through the crowd to the stretcher and threw back the sheet. Someone gasped. A man standing nearby threw up violently onto the crowd. Pappy's features were mangled beyond recognition.

  "Hey, you, get away," the ambulance attendant commanded, shoving Reno's arm away. "You know this guy or something? Maybe you'd better make a statement to the police."

  "No... No," Remo said, backing away.

  "Freaking ghoul," the attendant said, covering Pappy's remains with the sheet.

  Remo walked away toward the airport. Pappy, too. They were all dead, every one.

  But why? And a bigger question: why had Remo been left alone?

  Only one thing was certain. Someone, someone who thought nothing of murder, was on to him. How far did that knowledge go? To Chiun? To Smith? To CURE itself?

  He made one more phone call outside the airport.

  "Chiun, you can be mad at me later. Just get to Folcroft and stay with Smitty until I get back to you."

  "Is the Emperor's life in danger?"

  "I don't know. But stick with him. I'm scared."