Sweet Dreams

by Warren Murphy

  “Did you kill Wooley?”

  None of them had and they were all glad because the momentary pain was so excruciating that they would have admitted the murder, they would have confessed to the slaying of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo, even to the ultimate sin of having voted Republican, if that’s what it took to make the pain stop.

  But the pain stopped as quickly as it had come and before they could react the thick-wristed man was out the door.

  Remo was out of leads and he was about to return to Wooley’s cottage where Chiun was waiting, when he ran across a man walking back and forth on the sidewalk, wringing his hands together as if they contained an invisible dishcloth.

  “Oh, my god,” he said. “Oh, my god. What will people think of us? Who’ll ever enroll again at Edgewood? What are we going to do?”

  Norman Belliveau looked skyward as if demanding an immediate reply from God and shouted: “What are we going to do?”

  “Stop acting silly,” Remo said.

  Belliveau postponed his confrontation with God long enough to look down and see Remo.

  “I’m looking for a man in an Army field jacket,” Remo said. “A young man. Steel-rimmed glasses. You see anybody like that?”

  “Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. All over the campus. Making us a laughing stock. Not caring about the sanctity of the educational process.”

  “I don’t think this one’s a student,” Remo said.

  “No. Wait. I saw somebody like that this morning. He asked me for directions to my place to see Patti Shea. He couldn’t be a student if he didn’t know where I lived.”

  “Good thinking,” said Remo. “Where do you live?”

  “Over there,” Norman Belliveau said, pointing. “You’re not a student, are you?”

  “No,” said Remo and he moved away, leaving Norman Belliveau to worry about why all these non-students were on campus.

  The door was unlocked and open and Remo walked right in. The back bedroom door was locked and as Remo pushed against it, he heard a woman’s voice from inside.

  “You’ve come to kill me, haven’t you?”

  “What?” Remo said.

  “Come in. Come in. I’ve been waiting for you.” Patti Shea pulled open the door and stood before Remo. She was dressed in a one-piece black leather swimsuit cut down to her belly button and fastened by black leather thongs tied across the V-front, shoelace style. Her long curved legs were fully visible because the sides of the suit were cut up almost to the waist.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “Where is he?” Remo said.

  “You look like you’d punish me,” she said. She moved back into the room and plopped down on the couch which was covered with wide leather belts, handcuffs, and pieces of rope. She hit herself lightly on the wrist with a black whip, waiting.

  “Well? Wouldn’t you punish me?” she said.

  Remo stared at the rest of the room. It looked like a museum of sado-masochism. Shackles and manacles of all kinds lined the bed and furniture. Stockings and ripped pieces of cloth hung out of half-opened drawers. Silk ties were draped over the doorknob of the closet. Feathers and red rubber balls were strewn on the top of the dresser.

  Remo imagined there were rose thorns lining the shower stall and metal studs on the inside of the closet.

  “I’m looking for a man,” Remo said. “Army jacket, steel-rimmed glasses.”

  “I won’t tell you,” she said. “I won’t. You can just try to beat it out of me.”

  She closed her eyes and threw herself back across the couch with one arm flung out toward the floor, the other, palm up, on her forehead. Her long legs stretched out full-length on the sofa, exposing her entire body to whatever cruel, painful thing this stranger might plan to inflict on her.

  “Listen, freakie,” Remo said. “I don’t have time to play in your dirty little sandbox, so where is he? The one who was here this morning for you.”

  Patti Shea opened one eye and looked at Remo. There was a look in his eyes that ruled out lying.

  “Oh, crap,” she said and sat up. “You’re not going to do anything, are you?” She shook her head, agreeing with herself. Her breasts kept time with her head movements. “You’re looking for T.B. I set this up for him. It relaxes him after a job.”

  “So where is he?”

  “He’ll be here. He’ll be here,” she said. “But we wouldn’t have to waste the time, you know.”

  “Sorry. The Good Ship Lollipop will have to sail without me.”

  “Come on,” she said in exasperation.

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  Remo shook his head.

  “I know. There’s something missing, right? I knew it.”

  She ran to the closet and pulled it open. Remo was right. There was a blanket of studs covering the wall. She leaned down and with her rear aimed directly to Remo’s face, started pulling out whips.

  “Just tell me what you need,” she yelled, as whips and chains flew out of the closet and landed on the floor behind her.

  “Just my hands,” Remo said. “Just my hands.”

  He turned as he heard the front door open, and T.B. Donleavy walked in, his Army field jacket coated with blood, dried specks of brown dotting his glasses and face.

  Patti followed Remo into the living room as Donleavy said, “Who are you?”

  “T.B., this is…what’d you say your name was?” Patti Shea asked Remo.

  “I didn’t say.”

  “This is T.B. Donleavy, thirty-fifth greatest assassin in the world,” Patti said.

  “Thirty-third,” said Donleavy.

  “My name’s Remo. I’m the second greatest, and you’re dead.”

  “Hold on, pal,” Donleavy said. He felt a twinge of fear in his stomach. And the voices were sounding up again. But they were saying something different. What was it?

  Remo turned to Patti. “You people hired him to kill Wooley so his Dreamocizer wouldn’t put you all out of business, right?”

  “You got it,” Patti said. “Now let’s get it on.”

  “Too late,” Remo said. “Too late for both of you.”

  Donleavy could understand the voices now. They weren’t saying Kill For Us. They were saying Come To Us.

  “I’m leaving,” Donleavy said, trying not to shout over the volume in his brain.

  From his jacket pocket, Donleavy pulled the hand grenade and with his teeth pulled the pin from it.

  “I’m leaving now. If you’re smart, you won’t try to interfere,” he said. He held the grenade in front of him as if it were a switchblade knife.

  Come To Us. Come To Us.

  The voices were shouting now, thundering inside his head, a rising roaring crescendo of noise that ripped at his brain like hammers. “Stop,” he screamed. “Stop.”

  He tossed the grenade onto the floor toward Remo’s feet and turned to race toward the front door. But the dark-eyed man with thick wrists was there, waiting for him, and T.B. Donleavy felt himself being dragged back into the room, his protesting kicks ineffectual, not even slowing him down and then his mouth was being opened, and he felt the taste of cold metal.

  Remo jammed the grenade deep into Donleavy’s mouth. Donleavy could feel the vibrations atop his tongue as the deadly little bomb’s spring action wore down to explosion time. He tried to scream. But he could not hear himself over the voices, yelling Come To Us. Come To Us.

  And then he heard Remo say, “Here, give your honey a great big kiss,” and he felt his face being pressed against Patti Shea’s, her so usually soft lips turned by tension into strips of sinew, and the madman’s hand was on the back of his head, holding him and Patti Shea together, mouth to mouth, and there was one final scream by the chorus:

  COME TO US.

  And T.B. Donleavy blew up.

  The explosion blasted off the top of his head, but the tough human skull resisted the destruction just long enough for the rest of the blast to be diffused forward, where it blew off Patti S
hea’s face, and downward through Donleavy’s body.

  Remo matched the velocity of the exploding grenade in an outward push he performed after his brain pre-registered the original flash.

  But the blast running down through Donleavy’s body ignited, in a whoosh of fire, a pack of plastic explosive the Irish assassin had strapped around his waist.

  A split-second after the first blast, the gelignite exploded with a muffled thump and Remo, unprepared for that concussion, was tossed across the room and against a wall.

  Before he sank in a great expanse of dark, Remo thought, Now I’ll never get that house.

  And then he thought: That’s the biz, sweetheart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHEN THE BLACK LIMOUSINE ROLLED UP, Chiun was still sitting on the front steps of Dr. Wooley’s house, contemplating the perfidy of an America where one could not find a television set when he needed one.

  There were post office boxes on almost every corner, and who would want to commit anything to paper in this savage land? There were telephone booths everywhere and who would want to speak to an American?

  But let it be something important, like one of the beautiful daytime dramas, and try to find a television set.

  Even the Master of Sinanju was helpless in front of the face of such stupidity. But was that not always the way? Stupidity was invincible, else why had it been the single most significant characteristic of all man’s recorded history?

  Chiun watched as the big man and the Oriental got quickly out of the car and walked toward Wooley’s house. The Oriental was Chinese and Chiun spat into the aspidastras of the garden. Remo would hear about this. Chiun’s air space was being befouled by a Chinese, and the Master of Sinanju did not have a television set upon which to watch his daytime dramas, and where was Remo? Out someplace fooling around. He would hear about this, for certain.

  Vince Marino and Edward Leung stopped in front of Chiun.

  “Is there anyone in there?” Marino said.

  But Chiun did not answer. He had heard something. He rose smoothly to his feet and brushed past the two men, moving quickly toward the back of the black limousine. The sound was familiar.

  Chiun pulled open the back door.

  It was. It was.

  There was a television set built into the back of the front seat. A swarthy man sat in the back of the limousine watching the television which was tuned to a commercial for a driving school that was so good its owner was always pictured riding a bicycle, roller-skating, or skiing, but never behind the wheel of a car.

  “What are you watching?” Chiun said as he slid into the back seat.

  “Who are you?” said Arthur Grassione.

  “The Master of Sinanju,” Chiun replied. “What are you watching?”

  Before Grassione could answer, the commercial faded and the green-tinted set blared forth into the music of The Divorce Game, a show in which newly divorced couples were the contestants and by telling stories of how their partners had mistreated them during marriage tried to win the support of the studio audience. The show had come under attack in its first year when a watch-dog group had claimed many of the contestants were not really divorced, but the show’s producers had pulled through by pointing out that no one had appeared on the show without being divorced within the next ninety days.

  “You are not going to watch this drivel, are you?” Chiun demanded.

  “I never miss it,” Grassione said.

  “Today, miss it,” Chiun said. He nicked out his hand and changed the channel until the familiar organ music theme of The Gathering Clouds filled the back seat of the car, and Chiun sat back contentedly in the Cadillac’s luxurious velour seats to watch.

  “I will explain to you what it is all about,” Chiun said. “You see, there is this doctor…”

  · · ·

  Leen Forth Wooley pulled through the open gate of the boatyard and drove slowly over the rutted road toward the large white yacht in the back.

  She parked in front of it and saw Mr. Massello standing on the main deck, smiling down at her. He walked toward the gangplank to come meet her.

  She felt a feeling of relief at finally meeting a friend.

  Leen Forth turned off the car’s motor, and then reached under the dashboard for what appeared to be the car’s stereo tape-player. It snapped loose at both sides, a small plastic box filled with transistors and hand-wired circuits. She clutched the Dreamocizer control box to her breasts and stepped out of the car to meet her father’s friend, Don Salvatore Massello.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  REMO SAW HAPPY CHILDREN LAUGHING, big warm houses and lovely women secretly smiling. But they kept bursting into flame. And what was worse, they didn’t seem to notice. The children kept on laughing, the women smiling.

  Remo woke up. He was sitting on a hot floor in the middle of a roaring inferno. One of his legs was stretched full length and the trousers had been burned through by drops of the explosive gelignite. He pulled the leg up to his other which was bent to his chest.

  The room crackled with flames.

  Outside, the entire fire department of Edgewood University—two men and a truck—had arrived to fight the blaze. They had battled for ten heroic minutes until St. Louis had sent in more equipment and trained firemen, whose technique in fighting fires was a little more sophisticated than pumping in enough water to launch Noah’s Ark. The Edgewood firemen immediately began to drift off to talk to the Edgewood police about the terrible violence on campus.

  Editorial staff members of the Edgewood Quill were at the fire scene, trying to sell copies of their mimeographed special edition on the violence, which reported that although Wooley and Woodward were dead, “there have been no reports thus far of student injuries. All’s well that ends well.”

  The St. Louis Fire Department fought on for five more minutes, then the battalion chief in charge gave up on the house. He ordered his men to just keep it “wetted down” so that embers and sparks could not fly off and imperil any other nearby buildings.

  “Let it burn out,” he said.

  “Suppose someone’s in there,” a fire captain asked.

  “Nobody’s alive in there,” the battalion chief said and went over to buy a copy of the Edgewood Quill to look at until the photographers arrived at which time he would run back to the equipment and help his men haul hose.

  · · ·

  Remo felt the heat blast at his body and the heavy hot air singe his lungs when he breathed.

  He rolled onto his stomach to be closer to the floor and slowed his breathing to reject any smoke that might find its way into his lungs. He raised his body temperature so that he would not feel the heat so intensely.

  He looked around. He was in the center of the room, surrounded by flames. The walls and ceiling were burning, and the carpeted floor and the wood underneath had caught fire and the flames were now marching inexorably across Norman Belliveau’s tweed pile carpet, $7.95 a square yard including installation, toward him.

  He looked for a break in the flames but there was none. He moved himself into a crouch and then did what he thought he would never do. He ran.

  He ran into his own mind. He could feel the flames lapping at his legs, and then in his mind, he moved into a room and he closed the door behind him.

  The heat that singed his legs no longer hurt. He could breathe.

  He thought he heard Chiun’s voice and he yelled, “Get me out of here.”

  “Who are you?” Chiun said.

  “Get me out of here. Save your silly games for later.”

  “If you were a baby I would carry you out,” Chiun’s voice said in that secret room in Remo’s mind. “But you are not a baby. Who are you?”

  “I am Remo Williams,” Remo said.

  “Not good enough,” Chiun said.

  Remo didn’t want this to be hard. He wanted to be human and simple.

  Now he could see Chiun. The ancient Oriental stood in a ceremonial white robe across the room from Remo. “
Who are you?” he repeated. His voice seemed to be filtered through a tunnel because it resounded with echoes.

  “I’m Remo Williams. I’m a Master of Sinanju,” Remo yelled. He felt tears coming from his eyes. They sizzled and disappeared before dropping halfway down his cheeks.

  Chiun’s face grew cold, almost angry. Remo opened his eyes and Chiun’s face vanished. All Remo could see was flames. He closed his eyes again and Chiun’s face demanded, “Yes, but who are you?”

  And, in his mind, Remo stood and said, “I am created Shiva, the Destroyer, death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.”

  “Then walk out,” Chiun said.

  Remo stood and was back in the burning house. The flames engulfed him. The building shuddered, the flames seemed to roar in triumph.

  But it could not match the roar in Remo’s mind, the roar of realization and rebirth.

  He walked forward through the flames, strongly breathing out, willing the flames away from his face and his eyes. It took only a split second to pass through the flames to a window and then roll through the window out onto the grass. He gulped clean fresh air, barely tainted by the smoke from the inferno behind him.

  A fireman saw him come through the window and dropped his hose.

  Remo smiled and waved.

  The fireman said dumbly, “Your back’s on fire.”

  “Thanks, pal,” Remo said, and he spun around, a dervish motion so fast that it created a partial vacuum of thin air around him and the flames on his clothing sucked out and died.

  “Take your time,” Remo told the fireman. “Everyone else in there is dead.”

  Before the fireman could speak, Remo was running off from the house, across the greensward toward Professor Wooley’s home.

  He saw Chiun sitting on the grass in front of Wooley’s house, his feet and legs crossed in the lotus position, his eyes closed, his long-nailed fingers bridged in front of him.