As he tapped, Remo drew Cynthia to the light switch. He nudged it with an elbow, without breaking the building rhythm of his manipulations.
In the light, Cynthia looked up into Remo's dark, obsidianchip eyes. There was no anger there. No hate. Just a kind of wondrous fear that caused her pink lips to part. She ran a deeper pink tongue over her lips, moistening them further.
"They call this the thirty-seven steps to bliss," Remo explained in a low, earthy growl. "How do you like it so far?" "Oh," said Cynthia, as if impaled on a delicious pin. Her eyes went from Remo's cruel face to her wrist as if trying to fathom how this ordinary man could reduce her to squirming helplessness with only one intermittently tapping finger. "I don't understand," she said in a surprise-twisted voice. "What are you doing to me?"
"Let's start with your name."
"Kimberly. It's Kimberly," Kimberly said, panting a little. She squeezed down as if cramping. Her thick eyebrows gathered together, forcing her innocent blue eyes into narrow slits of bright cerulean:
"Good start. This, by the way, is only step one."
Kimberly's eyes popped open. "It is?"
Remo's smile was arch. "Honest. Would I kid a blond that had just tried to throttle me in the dark?"
"I don't . . . know."
"I wouldn't. It's such a rare experience. So, tell me. Why'd you waste the Iraiti ambassador?"
"She told me to."
"She?"
'Kali."
"Spell that."
"K-a-l-i."
"Damn," Remo muttered to himself. It was true. Now he would have to take this to the bitter end.
"Take me to Kali," he said harshly.
"I only take offerings to Kali."
Remo tapped once more, then stopped. "No introduction, no happy finger action," he warned.
"Please! It hurts when you stop."
"But it will feel so good when I start up. So what's it gonna be? Do I finish the job or do I leave you here to play with yourself? It won't be half as much fun. Trust me on that."
"Finish me!" Kimberly pleaded. "I'll do it! Just finish me!"
"For a pro," Remo said, bringing his finger to bear again, "you're not very collected about this stuff."
"This is my first time," Kimberly gulped. Her eyes were worried and inward-looking.
"That's a laugh. Is that what you told the Iraiti ambassador?"
Kimberly was no longer listening. She rested one steadying hand on Remo's hard bicep. The other, trapped in Remo's immovable fist, squeezed harder and harder as her eyes squeezed tighter and tighter. The tapping finger continued to strike the sensitive point she had never suspected existed there. A tear leaked out of one eye as her pretty face gathered together, reddening, twisting, apprehensive.
"Something's happening!" Kimberly cried sharply.
The shudder started in her face. It rippled down her neck and convulsed her entire body. Her breasts seemed to actually throb. Remo had never seen breasts throb before.
"Oh Oh Oh Oh . . . uuuuhhh," she cried, uncoiling like an old spring from a sofa. She swayed this way and that. Then all the life seemed to escape her body.
Remo caught her.
"If you give as good as you get, you're probably worth every dime," he said, carrying her to the bed. He set her down, noticing that her chest seemed almost an inch bigger than it had before. The damn thing looked like it was trying to strain free of her dress front.
Kimberly lay on the bed, zoned out, as Remo checked the room. The closet and bathroom were both empty. There were no personal items. It was a setup room.
"Where is she?" Remo asked.
"I will never betray her," Kimberly said softly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Remo collected her purse from the rug. He went through it. Deep inside, he found a brass key. It was stamped with the hotel's crest and a room number two floors down.
"Never mind," he said, tossing the purse on a bureau. "I think I can handle it from here."
Remo drifted over to the bed and, with two fingers, closed Kimberly's dreamy eyes. Then he took her trembling chin in hand.
"You're going to kill me." It was a realization, not a question.
"That's the biz, sweetheart," he said, breaking her neck with a quick sideways twist. When he removed his hand, Remo saw no mark. Chiun would have been proud.
He left the room in silence, thinking that maybe this wouldn't be so difficult after all.
The key fitted the lock on Room 606, two floors down.
Remo paused, his heart rising in his chest. He wasn't sure what to expect. Another idol? A portrait? Kali in the flesh?
Whatever, he knew he would have to hit hard and fast, if he wanted to survive. Remo placed an ear to the door. He heard no organic noises. No breathing or heartbeat. No gurgling of bowels.
He turned the key.
The door eased inward. In the harsh hallway light, Remo caught a flash of maroon drapes. He pushed the door open some more.
The light caught something white and spidery, with too many upraised arms.
Remo hit the light switch, plunging into the room. He flashed for the white outline. One hand out and open, he drove for its vulnerable neck.
Too late, he realized his mistake. His stiffened fingers made contact. The outline shattered into repeating images. The white thing was a mirror reflection.
"Damn!" Remo whirled in place, dropping to a protective crouch, as he zeroed in on the white many-armed thing.
It squatted on a dresser, pale legs crossed, three faces-one looking out, the other two facing east and west-fixed in identical malevolent expressions. The eyes were closed, however. A necklace of flat skulls draped over its pendulous breasts.
Without hesitating, Remo floated up to it. He detected no odor. The last time, it was the hellish scent that had gotten him. There had been no odor clinging to the girl. And this statue was equally sterile.
It was clay, Remo saw. It possessed four normal arms, but other, smaller limbs stuck out from different points in its torso. These lesser limbs were thin and withered.
Remo would dismember the gruesome thing first, he decided.
As if the thought had triggered something deep within the clay idol, its eyelids snapped open. The gash of a mouth writhed in a silent snarl like a Claymation illusion, and a cloying sickly-sweet scent billowed toward him. And the familiar, dreaded waves of psychic force pushed toward him.
Remo struck. A slashing hand slipped through the shoulder area, cleaving two arms and bending others. The clay was soft, Remo found. It would be easy.
Remo drove a fist to the head. He knocked the triple face half off its neck. It gave like soft separating excrement.
The hands came to life. Remo batted them back. Somehow animated, they were still but moist clay. He slapped them back without effort. Clay hands flew from clay wrists. Clay nails raked his face, leaving only slimy whitish trails and clay crumbs.
"Must be the heat," Remo mocked. "You're positively melting."
The psychic waves abated, the dreaded scent grew no stronger. An unhearable voice screamed in defeat.
Grinning with relief, Remo plunged his fingers into the thing's thick white torso. On the floor, the triptych of faces howled in silent protest as Remo kneaded the clay out of shape. His steely fingers constricted. Clay oozed out from between them. He flung clods of the heavy stuff in all directions. Some of it stuck to the walls. The clay make gushy noises as Remo pulled and pushed and separated the heavy white stuff, reducing the ornate body of the thing to a lump of heavy inactive matter.
When he was done, Remo looked around the room. A clay hand was quivering on its back. Remo nudged it with a toe. It flopped over and, finding its fingers, began to scuttle away.
Laughing, Remo brought his foot down on it. The fingers spread out and died.