A red whoosh of flame darted out of the car. Pellets kicked up dirt around Remo and Chiun's feet.
"Hey, fella, careful," said Remo. "Somebody could get hurt." He turned around to see if anyone had paid attention to the shotgun blast. The third man was now standing behind him, a .45 in his hand.
"In the car."
"In the car?" said Remo. "Right, in the car."
The third man went over Remo's head and landed atop the other two hulks in the front seat. But Remo did not notice that because he saw two sheriff's deputies approaching him.
"Oh, oh," said Remo. "Let's get out of here. Get in the car, Chiun."
"You too?" said Chiun.
"Please, Chiun, get in the car."
"As long as you say please. Remembering that we are coequal partners."
"Right, right," said Remo.
Chiun was in the back seat of the Eldorado and Remo behind the wheel. The sheriff's deputies, he could see through the window, were closer now, starting to walk faster in the manner of police who aren't sure anything wrong has been done but by God they don't want anybody to go leaving the scene of the crime.
Remo chucked one of the groggy squirming bodies into the backseat.
"No," said Chiun firmly. "I will not have them back here."
"Why me, God?" said Remo. He shoved the remaining quarter-ton of flesh against the passenger's door, put the car in gear, and drove off. For a moment, in his rearview mirror, he could see the sheriff's men looking at him driving away, only slightly interested. Then his view was blocked as the body from the backseat was reinserted by Chiun into the front.
He drove out along a dirty road that crisscrossed through cornfields, feeling pretty good. The last Mojave demonstration by Fielding had lost much of its frontpage space to the violence at the demonstration site; this time he had prevented that. It was the least one could do for a man who was going to save the world from hunger and starvation.
The man in the Palm Beach hat was the first to regain control of himself. Surprisingly, he found his gun still in his hand and he fought his way out of the mass of arms and legs and pointed the automatic at Remo. "Okay, bright eyes, now pull over to the side and stop."
"Chiun," said Remo.
"No," said Chiun. "I will not soil my hands with anyone who defames the good name of Rad Rex, brilliant star of As the Planet Revolves."
"C'mon, Chiun, act right," Remo said.
"No."
"This isn't the one who said anything about Rad Rex," lied Remo.
"Well, you can't blame me for making such a mistake. Everybody knows all you whites look alike. But…"
The man with the .45, past whom the bickering had drifted, never had an opportunity to witness its outcome. Before he could move, before he could speak again to warn this skinny punk at the wheel to pull over, there was a slight pain in his head. It never felt like more than the irritation of a mosquito's sting and he never felt anything again as Chiun's iron index finger went through his temple into his brain.
The man dropped back onto the pile of bodies.
"You lied, Remo," said Chiun. "I could tell he was the one of the evil mouth, because his head is empty."
"Never trust a white man. Particularly a coequal partner."
"Yes," said Chiun. "But as long as I am at it-" He leaned over the back of the front seat and while Remo drove, sent the other two men to join their companion, then sat back in his seat contentedly.
Remo waited until he had gotten out of sight of the demonstration area, then parked the car under a tree. He left the motor running.
"C'mon, Chiun, we'd better get back. There just might be more back there, with Fielding as their target."
"There are no more," said Chiun.
"You can't be sure. Somehow, they made us as Fielding's bodyguards or something. Probably they think if they got rid of us, they get a clear shot at Fielding."
"There are no more," Chiun insisted. "And why would anyone attempt to harm Fielding?"
"Chiun, I don't know," said Remo. "Maybe they're trying to get the secret of Fielding's miracle grains. Steal the formulas and sell them. There are evil people in the world, you know."
"Remember you said that… partner," said Chiun.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The last time Johnny Deuce had looked forward with anticipation to the six o'clock news had been when the United States Senate was investigating organized crime and he'd had a chance to laugh at his old friends.
They had come on in a parade. People he had given advice to, people he had tried to straighten out, but for all the new clothes and even though they didn't carry weapons anymore and even though they had all wrapped themselves up in corporate blankets, they still had the old Mustache Pete mentality. So they wound up providing six o'clock news fodder for America while Johnny Deuce was home in his living room, trying to keep his wife's hand away from him and laughing aloud.
But this time the news was no laughing matter, not because of what was on it but because of what wasn't on it. There was a long glowing story of the Fielding demonstration in Ohio. A made-up newcaster came on in a shot taken next to the freshly planted field and talked glowingly about the great benefits to mankind from the miracle grains. He was an Ohio-based newsman and in a burst of parochial pride, he pointed out that today's planting had been a marked change from the one in the Mojave that had been sullied by still-unexplained violence.
Johnny Deuce stopped listening when the newscaster began to blather about America living up to its responsibilities to provide sustenance for the world.
He heard the weather forecast call for bad weather and then he sat in his small room thinking and it was only when the eleven o'clock news came on that he rose himself from his reverie and focused his attention again on the screen.
But there was just the same newscast. No reports of violence, no reports of Fielding's bodyguards being killed, and as he listened Johnny Deuce wasted no time coming to a truthful conclusion. The three men who had been sent to do in the hard-faced white man and the old Oriental were dead.
If they had succeeded, their work would have been on the news. That was the deductive evidence; the inductive evidence was that they had not called and Johnny Deuce had told them they had better call by seven p.m., no later, or they would have their balls filled with sand.
He let the sound of the rest of the newscast drone on as he lapsed immediately back into the rest state of the last five hours, sitting languidly while his brain whirred along, formulating his plans, setting up his attack, and this time in his mind making sure it would work.
He was satisfied and convinced and he snapped out of it just long enough to catch the end of the newscast. The weatherman was on. He was a thin man with a mustache and a half-a-bag on. The forecast was still for rain.
CHAPTER NINE
At the same time Johnny Deussio was thinking, Remo was bringing his mighty intellect to bear upon much the same problem: killing.
Who could want Fielding's formula so badly that they would try to get it by first disposing of Remo and Chiun? Since the magic Wondergrains were virtually going to be given away, who would gain by stealing their secret?
Despite the accumulated mass of scar tissue and raw knuckles that he and Chiun had been running into, Remo's instincts told him that it was not a mob venture. The mob had other things to worry about besides farming. Loan-sharking was quite profitable enough; so was prostitution, drugs, gambling, and politics, the usual kinds of crime in America.
No. Not the mob. Remo decided that some foreign power was behind the violence that seemed to dog Fielding's steps.
His first suspicion was India, but Chiun scoffed at that suggestion when Remo made it.