"Can't wait," Remo muttered insincerely. He'd be glad when this bus-top ride was done with, though. He had hoped to solve the problem on the highway when he put a stop to the picture taker. The bus had actually come to a halt, and Remo had planned to simply take a stroll among the occupants until he literally sniffed out the guilty party. Somebody inside was going to have a sharp smell like fishy poison clinging to him or her, and that man or woman would have some serious explaining to do.
Then they took off again.
The bus stopped for fuel at a truck stop, but security was high. Nobody got on or off. A gathering of local law-enforcement officials was on hand for added security.
"Why do we sit here doing nothing?" Chiun demanded. They were waiting in the trees a hundred yards behind the truck stop. "Let us simply enter the traveling palace and gather up the guilty parties."
"'Cause there's maybe thirty parties that ain't guilty, and some of them will end up dead."
"You imply that I would slaughter innocent civilians indiscriminately? I am an assassin, not a berserker."
"Yeah. Maybe. But I'm more worried about Agents Anal and Retentive. They've got that shoot-first, file-a-report-later approach to security work. Not to mention that half the staff is probably armed and incompetent."
"Why should that worry us?" Chiun scoffed.
"Come on, Little Father, you know it's not me and you I'm worried about. It's everybody else inside this Playboy Mansion on wheels. There's no way we can protect the whole entourage if the bullets start flying."
"Pah!" Chiun scowled and observed the refueling of the bus and the patrols of the local law enforcement with disdain.
Then, without warning, he vanished.
Remo Williams was the only witness as the Tennessee Highway Patrol Special Response Unit entirely failed to detect the intruder in their midst. They never realized that the very thing they were looking for-a highly suspicious individual-slipped through their perimeter on his way to the truck-stop store. They would have been especially chagrined if they had known he returned a minute later and passed through their midst without their ever noticing him or his brilliant kimono.
"Remo, see what I have!"
"If I know you, Chiun, it's Slim Jims and a Vanilla Coke."
Chiun tried to frown, but he was too excited. What he pulled from the sleeves of his kimono was an inch-thick stack of glossy travel brochures. His eyes sparkled with boyish glee. He felt inclined to share his enthusiasm as they retook their rooftop seats and continued their drive.
"The town of Pigeon Fudge is a veritable country music paradise."
"Who says?" Remo demanded.
"I do, after reading the words in this handbill."
"I wouldn't believe everything I read."
"Remo, it is as if they transformed an entire Southern town into a wonderful magic kingdom. Mollywood is only one corner of this city of delights-there are hundreds of attractions, each more exciting than the next."
"Chiun, you've already got a lifetime pass to Disney World, and when's the last time you used it?"
"Ah, but this is different, Remo. I have learned to love the heartfelt ballads of the South."
"Wylander Jugg's, anyway."
"Jugg. And my tastes are not so limited as you would believe. Look!"
Remo turned to face into the wind and found the bus coming up on the exit for Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee, where the sign promised Mollywood Is Just the Beginning of the Wonders You'll See.
Next to the sign was Molly Pardon herself, re-created as a forty-foot fiberglass automaton. Her upper torso moved from side to side, allowing the nylon ropes of hair to flop this way, then that. Some developer's marketing inspiration had resulted in the Molly-bot getting a genuine red flannel shirt, which was tucked into her disproportionately narrow waist and left entirely unbuttoned. Remo happened to glance over at the exact moment the giant robotic country music star tipped to one side in a strategically programmed manner that allowed her shirt to flap open and provide arriving vacationers a voyeuristic glimpse inside.
"Well, you sure wouldn't get to see nipples as big as beer kegs at the Magic Kingdom," Remo observed.
Chiun sniffed. "It is a cheap display. Perhaps Molly Pardon does not possess the same sincerity as the beauteous Wylander Jugg."
"Yeah, but Wylander doesn't have jugs nearly as bodacious as Molly Pardon."
"We can only hope this monstrosity does not represent what we will find throughout Pigeon Fudge." Remo didn't have time to answer when they merged from the exit ramp onto the thoroughfare that headed directly into the heart of town.
Chapter 22
Remo Williams had seen it all-or thought he had. The long years as the chief enforcement arm of CURE had exposed him to things too bizarre to be explained by science, too incredible to be chalked up to the supernatural. Now, with that wealth of experience under his belt, the Reigning Master of Sinanju was a tough guy to amaze.
But right at that minute he was pretty much stupefied. Even his mentor and trainer, the illustrious Chiun, with his decades of life experience and a breadth of wisdom handed down from all the past Masters, had never seen anything quite like Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee.
Remo observed, "Like it or not, I've heard every Wylander Jugg song that ever was, and not one of them is about dinosaurs."
"For once your feeble mind remembers truthfully. The soulful Wylander does not sing about dinosaurs," Chiun replied.
"Does Molly Pardon?"
"No. She has no dinosaur songs."
The bus stopped at a traffic light near a strip mall with a cigarette store, a pizza place and a purple velociraptor. "So how come that's the fourth dinosaur we've seen so far?"
The next block was dominated by a miniature golf center crowded with people who putted fluorescent orange and pink golf balls through a tropical rain forest. The trees and rocks were plastic. The robotic hippos, elephants and monkeys guffawed, trumpeted and screeched at the players. On the final hole they watched a young boy putt his ball into the hole, which brought an automatronic tyrannosaurus out from the plastic green ferns. The thunder lizard bent at the waist, made a roar like an air horn, stood erect again and slid back into the ferns.
There was a stegosaurus in an enclosed playground at the fast-food restaurant next door. Then came a candy shop with a triceratops holding a giant lollipop in its beaklike mouth.
"I thought this place was about country music," Remo said.
"I, too," Chiun replied. "And what sort of a dinosaur is that?"
Remo blinked and craned his neck at the eight-story pink monstrosity that loomed up out in front of a sprawling hotel. "Flamingosaurus, I guess."
From the beak of the flamingo dangled a twenty-foot sign made to look like driftwood with artificially fading white paint that read Jimmy Jack Jordan's Theater And Water Park.
"Hey, that's one of the guys you listen to," Remo said.
"Absolutely not," Chiun responded as the bus carried them past Jimmy Jack Jordan's complex of low-rise hotel wings with fake thatched roofs.
"Yeah, that one Wylander duet. 'Where the Bayou Meets the Gulf' or something like that."
"You are mistaken," Chiun announced. The water slides were painted brown to simulate logs, and the swimming pools were surrounded with aluminum palm trees.
"No way I'm wrong about this one, Chiun. Thanks to you I know that ugly croaker's repertoire backward and forward."
"And yet you are wrong," Chiun insisted.
Remo wasn't listening. "Holy crap-look at that!" It was a Paul Bunyan figure, complete with blue ox, standing knee-deep in a forest of trees. The entire construction was made of steel-reinforced concrete, and Paul himself was more than fifty feet high. Remo watched a glass elevator rise up and disappear into Paul's gigantic crotch. "It's a hotel."