"No, you lose," said Remo.
Chiun opened his eyes in shock. "You lie," he said. He looked at the nickel, half on the red, half on white. "You cheated me," he said.
"What's worse," said Remo, "you have to give back all the prizes."
"Never. Never will I part with my goldfish."
"All except the goldfish," said Remo. He gave the operator back the prizes he and Joleen held. The operator happily put them back on the shelf. Remo still held the goldfish bowl.
"You cheated," said Chiun, surprisingly even-voiced. "Tell me the truth. You cheated, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because we don't need all that junk."
"I agree. You may need your arms free." Chiun's eyes were narrowed, and he seemed to be sniffing the air. "What's wrong?" asked Remo. "Nothing," said Chiun, "yet. Don't drop the goldfish."
When he saw the young white man holding the prizes and the elderly Oriental leaning over the nickel toss game, Ferdinand De Chef Hunt knew. He knew that these were his targets. He felt a strange sensation in his throat, a lump of flesh that would not go up or down. It was a new feeling: Was it the feeling that generations of DC Chefs had felt when they were on the prowl?
While they played, Hunt stopped at a booth across the way. He paid a quarter and was handed three baseballs. He had to knock six wooden bottles from the top of a barrel. Hunt backed off and tossed the first ball underhand. The operator smiled. Like a fairy, he thought. The ball hit the center bottom bottle, knocked all bottles to the top of the barrel. The ball skidded around, bumping against bottles, and knocking all of them off onto the ground.
The operator stopped smiling when Hunt did the same thing with his second ball. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the two targets and the girl in the pink sari moving away. He tossed the third ball softly toward the concession stand operator.
"Your prizes," the operator said.
"Keep them," said Hunt, following the three at a stroller's pace.
He let them get twenty yards ahead of him. They were heavy into conversation, but he knew they had not realized that he was following them.
In fact, the conversation was, from Chiun's standpoint, much more important.
"I only had four rides," Chiun said. "You promised me five."
"You said if I let you ride the boat, you wouldn't ask for the fifth ride."
"I don't remember saying that," said Chiun. "And I remember everything I say. Why would I say I would be satisfied with four rides when you promised me five? Can you think of a reason I would say that?"
"I give up," said Remo.
"Good," said Chiun. "There's the ride I want to go on." He pointed ahead of them toward "The Flying Bucket," then leaned to Joleen. "You can ride with me. Remo will pay for it."
"Anything you say," said Remo wearily. With Chiun leading the way, the three walked into a narrow corridor between concession booths, toward "The Flying Bucket," a Ferris wheel type of ride in which riders sat in a plastic bucket, attached to an overhead wheel by two steel cables.
As they turned the corner, Hunt lost sight of them. He walked faster toward the corridor they had entered.
Just then, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to look into a red-fatted angry face. Behind it stood four other equally red, equally angry faces.
"Here he is, boys," said Elton Snowy. "Here's the kidnapper now. Where's my daughter?"
Hunt recognized the man as the driver of the black car that had followed him from Divine Bliss headquarters. He shrugged. "I don't know what you're talking about. You must have the wrong man."
"Don't lather me with that, sonny," said Snowy. He grabbed Hunt's arm tightly. The other three men moved up, also grabbing Hunt, and quickly they pushed him between tents into a surprisingly quiet grassy area, deserted of people, yet only a dozen feet from the main midway.
"I don't know anything about your daughter, sir," said Hunt again. He would not spend too much time here; he did not want to lose track of his targets.
"Boys, what do you say we work him over to loosen his tongue?" said Snowy.
The four men lunged into Hunt and bore him to the ground with their weight.
Two were on his legs, and two more on his arms, pressing them down into the mushy turf.
"Now we make the sumbitch talk," said Snowy.
The fingers of Hunt's left hand snaked out and curled around one of the triangular metal stakes used to anchor a tent rope. With his fingertips he plucked it from the ground and curled it into his palm. He felt his face being slapped from side to side.
"Talk, you kidnapping bastard. What you doing at that Blissy Mission? Where's my little girl?"
Hunt's right fingers scratched at the ground. He came up with a handful of dirt and a rock the size of a grape. He let the dirt trickle through his fingers.
"It's all a mistake. I don't even know your daughter."
Snowy, who had been holding down Hunt's left arm, while slapping him, now released the arm with a cry of rage and sprung with both hands toward Hunt's throat to strangle the truth from him.
His arm freed, Hunt whizzed the tent peg through the air, catapulting it with just a flip of the wrist.
"Aaargh," came a scream from behind Snowy. He turned to look. The man anchoring Hunt's left leg had a tent peg driven deep into his right bicep. It seemed as if an artery had been severed. Blood stained the man's white short-sleeved shirt and pulsed out of the wound with each heartbeat. Horrified, the man grasped his right arm with his left hand and staggered to his feet.
At almost the same instant, the grape-sized stone curled off Hunt's fingertips. It whistled through the air, then struck the left eye of the man holding Hunt's right leg. The man shouted and fell back heavily, both hands clutching his face.
Snowy, confused, then angry, turned back and plunged downward with both hands toward Hunt's neck. But both legs and the left arm of the intended victim were now free. He rolled his body to the right. Snowy's hands drove into the dirt. At the same moment, Hunt again filled his right hand with dirt and flipped it upward into the face of the man still holding onto his right arm. The man coughed and gagged and released his grip, and Hunt rolled to the right, curled his legs up and flipped up into a standing position.
The bleeding man was in a state of shock. The man hit by the stone still knelt, both hands over his face. The third man was still trying to cough the dirt from his lungs. Snowy knelt on the ground as if terrorizing an invisible victim. But the victim was behind him, and now he put a foot against Snowy's butt and pushed. Hard. Snowy sprawled face forward into the earth.
"Last time," said Hunt. "I don't know your daughter. If you ever bother me again, you won't live to tell about it."
He brushed himself off and walked away, hoping that his intended victims had not escaped him. Behind him, Elton Snowy looked at Hunt's back, groped in his mind for something to shout, something to say that could show the frustration and rage he felt at that moment. His lips moved. Mentally, he rejected words without knowing he did. Then finally he spoke, more of a hiss than a shout: "Nigger lover."
Ferdinand De Chef Hunt heard the words behind him and laughed.
"Whee," said Chiun.
"Whee," said the pretty blond girl with him.
And "wheeze" went the twin cables holding up their fiberglass bucket as it slowly turned upward on the converted Ferris wheel superstructure.
"Let us spin the bucket," said Chiun, his eyes alight in merry excitement.
"Let us not spin the bucket," said the girl. "They do not allow us to spin the bucket."
"That is not nice of Mr. Disney," said Chiun. "Why does he have this nice bucket and not allow people to spin it?"
"I don't know," said the girl. "There is a sign down there that says do not spin the bucket."