"Destroyer - 019 - Holy Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

"A piece of me, pops."

"I am no cannibal," said Chiun, and Remo knew that this offer would also be included in tales of AmericaЕ how some not only were cannibals, but some were volunteer dinners. This strangeness did the Master of Sinanju commit to memory.

"Oh, no, not that," said Loretta and made a circle of her left forefinger and thumb and rapidly penetrated and withdrew her right forefinger. "This," she said.

"You have done nothing to deserve me," said Chiun.

"How "bout you, cutie?" she said to Remo, who stood just about six feet tall, with a lean, sinuous body that aroused many women just when he walked in a room. His eyes were dark, deep-set above high cheekbones, and his thin lips creased in a small smile. His wrists were thick.

"I've got to get rid of the body," said Remo, looking at the nude, dead man.

"No, you don't. There's a reward for him. Clete's wanted in three states. You're gonna be famous. Famous."

"See what you did," said Remo, and Chiun turned his head away, above it all.

It was a good thing, thought Remo, that the room was only a meeting place and that none of Chiun's heavy baggage accompanied them.

"Where are you two running to? The television cameras will be here. The reporters too. You'll be famous."

"Yeah, great," said Remo, and they went quickly down the motel hallway with the blonde yelling after them. They moved in such a way that the blonde thought they took off up the road for Texas when they really slipped down into the parched bed of the Rio Hondo and moved upstream along the bleached gravel 200 yards west of the motel, and there they waited and saw policemen and ambulance and newsmen. And on the second day, when a particular gray Chevrolet Nova came up the road, Remo ran out of the river bed and flagged it down.

"A little incident, Smitty," said Remo to the lemony-faced man in his late fifties, heading off any questions about why he was not in the prearranged motel room.

Remo signaled Chiun to follow him to the car, but the Master of Sinanju did not move.

"Will you come on? We've already spent a night in a frigging ditch because of you."

"I would talk to Emperor Smith," said Chiun.

"All right," said Remo sighing. "He'll only talk to you, Smitty."

As Remo watched Smith's gray head disappear into the river bed behind a large brown bush where Chiun sat, he could not help but think of the first time he had seen Smith. Remo had just come to in Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound, so many years before. As it was explained, Remo had been recruited, via a phony electrocution for a framed-up murder, to work for a secret organization, one that would work quietly outside the law to help give the law a better chance to work.

Smith was the man who headed the organization, and, besides Remo and the president of the United States, was the only person who knew it existed. Remo had lived with the secret for years. He was officially dead, and now working for an organization that did not exist. He was its one-man killer arm, and Chiun his trainer.

Remo watched Smith trudge back up the wash.

"He wants an apology," said Smith, who wore a gray suit and white shirt even in Roswell, New Mexico.

"From me?"

"He wants you to take back your racist remarks. And I think you should know we value his skills highly. It was a great service he did making you what you are."

"What was I while all this was going on? An innocent bystander?"

"Just apologize, Remo."

"Go dip a donkey," said Remo.