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"I'll buy you one," she said. She waved at the bartender and fished a twenty-dollar bill from her sequined red handbag.

The bartender stood in front of them.

"Usual?" he asked the blonde. She nodded. "And you?" he asked Remo.

"Got any bottled water?" Remo asked.

"No."

"I'll coast with this one," Remo said. The bartender brought back a light tan mixture in a glass, put it in front of the blonde and reached for Remo's money.

"No," Remo said. "She's buying."

"That right, Jonelle?" the bartender said.

"Right, right," the blonde said.

The bartender glared at Remo, then said to the girl, "All right. This one's on the house."

Jonelle put her left hand on her drink and her right hand on Remo's thigh. He took the hand off his thigh and put it back on her own leg.

"How's business?" he asked.

"So-so."

"I would have said this town was the pits for a working girl," Remo said. "Who could afford you?"

"I was hoping you could," Jonelle said.

"Maybe we can work something out," Remo said. He pretended to sip his water and put his left hand onto the base of her neck. Next to the long muscle running down the right side of her neck, he found a bunch of nerves and tapped on them rapidly with his fingertips.

"Ooooooh," she said. "What are you doing?"

"Nice name, Jonelle," he said.

"Not my real name," the girl said. "Ooooooh," she exclaimed again. Her breath was coming faster.

"No?" Remo said. "I'm surprised. You look like a Jonelle I used to know. You were telling me about business."

"Getting better the last few weeks," she said. "More people in town. Maybe the new mayor's got something to do with it."

"The mayor have a piece of you?" Remo asked.

"Ooooooh. I don't know. My boyfriend is kind of close to him."

"For boyfriend, read pimp?" Remo asked.

"Ooooooh. You might say that."

Remo transferred his hand to the left side of her neck. He felt her throat tingle as if she were being massaged with a trickle charge of electricity.

"Who's your boyfriend?" Remo asked.

A heavy hand fell over his hand. Jonelle winced as the hand squeezed. Remo turned to see a large man with bushy red hair and an open-necked sports shirt standing behind them.

"I am," the man said. He tried to squeeze harder with his hand, but he found his hand off the girl's neck and back at his side.

Jonelle got up from the bar and walked quickly away.

"Any more questions?" the pimp asked Remo.

"Yeah," Remo said. "You ever drink this water?"

"What kinda question is that?" the pimp asked.

"Never mind," Remo said. "I'll try something easier. Do you pay off the mayor for protection?"

"I think that's one question too many, pal," the big man said.

"And one answer too few," Remo said. He reached out and took the pimp's right wrist in his left hand and dragged him to the bar. The pain felt like a saw cutting through his flesh and bone and the pimp gasped and allowed himself to be placed on the stool. "That's easy," Remo said in his ear. "Smile. People are watching us."

The pimp looked around and forced an agonized smile toward the other end of the bar. He looked back when Remo tightened the hold on his wrist.

"Question by me: Do you pay the mayor for protection? Answer by you: I think that's one question too many, pal. Now, we try again. Do you pay the mayor for protection?" Remo squeezed to signal the end of the question.

"Yes, yes, yes," the pimp gasped.

"Do all the pimps?"

"If they want to keep operating."

Remo released the man's wrist. "Thank you and good day," he said.

Before leaving the bar, he picked up Jonelle's change and carried it to the booth at the end of the bar where she was sitting. He put a fresh hundred dollar bill on top of it before giving it back to her. She looked at the money, then up at him.

"Some other time?" she said.

"Count on it," Remo said.

Back at his hotel room, Remo called Smith.

"I'm in Bay City," he said.

"And?" Smith asked.

"The mob's coming in," Remo said. "This new mayor, Rocco something, looks like he's giving the town away to the goons."

"I see," Smith said blandly.

Remo was surprised at Smith's lack of reaction.

"Yeah. It looks like he's getting a rake-off on the numbers and he's got a piece of the hooker action in town. And the joint is crawling with guys that look like they belong in a laundry at San Quentin."

"Good," said Smith.

"Good?" Remo said. "What's good? You want me to hit this Rocco what's-his-face?"

"No," Smith said quickly. "No. Don't do that. Leave things alone. You and Chiun should just go on vacation. You've been working hard lately."

"Wait a minute," Remo said. "You're telling us to go on vacation because we've been working hard?"

"Forget I said that," Smith said. "But you might as well go away for a few days until I need you."

"Thank you, Smitty. I'm almost ready to believe you're human."

"Don't get carried away," Smith said. "And going on vacation doesn't mean that you have to try to spend all the government's money in one day."

After Remo hung up, he looked at Chiun, who was staring through the motel window at the large backup of rush hour traffic along the Jersey City highway.

"I don't understand Smitty," Remo said.

"What is to understand? The man is a lunatic. He was always a lunatic," Chiun said. "He wants us to go away?"

"On vacation."

Chiun shook his head. The small white puffs of hair at his temples shook gently.

"No," Chiun said. "That is what he said. But what he wants is for us merely to leave this place."

"I don't need much encouragement," Remo said.

Chiun looked up, his face suddenly exuberant "They say..."

"I know. They say Persia is nice this time of year and the melons are in full bloom or whatever melons are full of. Well, forget it. We're not going to Persia."

"Where are we going?" Chiun asked.

"We're going fishing," Remo said.

"Pfaaaaah," said Chiun.

Chapter four

When other members of his engineering school graduating class went out to build bridges and highways and spaceships, Samuel Arlington Gregory got a job with a handgun designer.

It was a career the twenty-three-year-old Gregory had been pointing toward ever since he had been a little boy and had spent the summers at his grandfather's farm near Buffalo.

Grampa Gregory was a tall man with muscled, sloping shoulders who gave the impression of being built out of tanned weathered leather.

His friends called him Moose and everybody in the small New York town was his friend, because that was the way Grampa Gregory lived his life. He went to church every Sunday and stayed awake. When a neighbor's barn burned down, he was the first to volunteer to help build a new one. He lived by his word and they said in the town that Moose Gregory's handshake could be put into the bank and it'd draw interest.

He was the most middle-American of middle-Americans, except for one idiosyncrasy. He believed that the day was not far off when the Indians who had once owned and inhabited that section of the country would rise up to try to take it back.

"When that day comes, Sammy," he would tell his only grandson, "we've got to be ready. A man's got to defend what's his. You know what I mean?"

"The Indians aren't going to fight with us, Gram-pa," the eight-year-old Samuel Arlington Gregory would say. "There aren't even many Indians left."

Moose shook his head at the small boy. "Don't let them fool you. They're out there." He looked around and leaned close to the boy. "The Mafia's working with them this time. They want the Indians to get it back because they'll be able to take it away from them easier. You know what I mean?"

And young Sam Gregory would nod, even though he wasn't sure what his grandfather meant by the Mafia. The boy had come to hate his summers on the farm. He went because his parents made him go, expecting that it would help build character in the young boy. All summer long, he worked for his keep. He tried to spend as much of that work time as possible around the house helping his grandmother, a warm, cuddly woman whose smell was redolent of biscuits and dumplings and eggs and bacon. His grandfather frightened him with his talk of Indians and the Mafia, and also just because he was a big man in a big man's world. The boy did not take any solace in the knowledge that one day he would be a man and join that man's world. It was his nature to be frightened by the future, just as he was frightened of his grandfather.