His thoughts went back to the evening with his unwilling neighbor, Phyllis. She had not been all that he had thought she would be. Maybe being gagged and bound had inhibited her. But that was in the past too.
He had no need to rape. The women would come willingly, once he had the money. That's the way women were. All women. He thought of his mother who had cheated on his father for years, accusing the senior Wimpler of not being able to provide for her in any decent way.
Often she would come home wearing gifts other men had provided for her and so great was her contempt for her husband that she never even tried to explain the gifts away. Elmo never understood why his father had tolerated it and stayed with her, and when she was dying, he sat at her bedside, holding her hand, the devoted husband to the end.
As he, himself, grew up, Elmo was never treated kindly by women, because he was smaller and
pier. The invisibility paint had changed all that. Women would flock to him and he would use them and humiliate them and then dump them.
He quickly checked his wristwatch, sliding it out from under his long black sleeve. Two minutes till midnight.
Soon.
He saw someone enter the edge of the meadow. Two men. The taller one was thin, dressed in black shirt and chinos. He had dark hair and his eyes were deepset. The man with him was an Oriental, dressed in some kind of yellow kimono. He had seen the two men before. As they stepped into the light, he remembered. He had seen them outside his old house in Brooklyn. They had gone in to question Phyllis. He remembered that the taller one had asked him a lot of questions.
Police? He hadn't asked and the man hadn't volunteered the answer. But what kind of cops wore kimonos? At any rate, they might be dangerous and he'd have to get rid of them before the person he was waiting to meet arrived. That these two men were here, after they had been nosing into Curt's death, meant that they knew more about Elmo Wimpler than was good for them.
He aimed his electronic light oscillator at the nearest of the overhead lights and it sizzled out. Quickly, he zapped another nine lights and the Sheep Meadow was in blackness.
Holding his bush-shaped screen in front of him, he moved through the darkness toward the tv/o men, feeling secure and safe, beyond their reach, beyond
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weaker than most men. He might still be smaller but I the reach of the law.
92 I 93
He heard the tall one say, "Dark," as he sat on a bench.
"Especially for a pale piece of pig's ear who looks only with his eyes and not with his other senses." That made no sense to Wimpler. Stealthily, he moved around behind the two men. He would handle the taller one first.
He removed the compressor from his belt.
"I wonder if our friend is responsible for the doused lights."
"No," said the Oriental. "All the bulbs decided to burn out at the same time."
"They don't make things the way they used to," the taller man said.
"Including disciples and students," the Oriental said. "And bushes."
Bushes? Had Wimpler heard right? But they couldn't have seen him. He must have misunderstood what the small, yellow man had said. And why was he waiting? It was time to remove these two.
He was ten feet behind them, in the blackness. As he cocked the compressor, there was a small hiss as gas from a carbon-dioxide cylinder flooded the drum from which the skull-crusher got its power.
Elmo cocked it and stepped out from behind his cardboard bush and moved stealthily toward the two men. He extended the compressor to accommodate the taller man's head.
As he did, he was startled to see the Oriental's hand, moving through the darkness, reach behind his own head and grasp one of the arms of the compressor.
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How could he have done that? The compressor was just as invisible as he was.
A coincidence, but one the old man would pay for. He would be minus his fingers.
Wimpler pulled the trigger, releasing the trapped compressed air, but the arms of the compressor did not move.
A malfunction.
Impossible.
He pulled the trigger again, but again the arms of the crusher did not work. Then there was a strange ripping sound as the inner workings of the machinery rebelled against not being able to do what they were built to do and they ruptured.
Wimpler dropped the compressor and ran back toward the safety of his ersatz bush. He heard the men stand at the bench, and suddenly he feared that he would not be safe, even behind the bush, even cloaked in invisibility in this blackness.
"That way," he heard the Oriental say.
The two men were coming toward him. He peered out from behind the bush. Then he heard the sound and saw its cause. Fifty yards across the Sheep Meadow, eight men were racing toward them. They were carrying knives. Several of them waved them over their heads.
The taller man and the Oriental turned to look and Elmo scrambled away from behind his bush, running hard, back into the deeper darkness of the night.
When he was fifty yards away, hidden in the shadow of a tree, he turned. What he saw made his blood chill inside his body. The eight men with
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knives had surrounded the Oriental and the American with the hard face.
There was a sudden flurry of activity and then three of the armed men were down and motionless. For some reason, Wimpler knew they were dead, although he had not seen the tall man and the Oriental do anything.
He watched again. The five remaining men moved in, all attacking at the same time. Then two more of them were down. And Wimpler still had not seen the two potential victims move.
The three attackers who remained paused for a moment. This time, Wimpler was sure that the taller man did not move at all. He thought he caught a slight touch of movement on the part of the Oriental, and then three more men were down and the only ones left standing were the Oriental and his companion.
Wimpler didn't wait. He turned and ran as fast as he could deep into the park. He would not stop until he came out the other side.
Those two were far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.
He hated them. For they had, this night, brought back the wimp, even if only for a few moments.
They had destroyed his compressor and worse, his sense of invulnerability.
He thought about it as he ran. It must have been luck. The Oriental could not have seen him. He had not even been looking in Wimpler's direction.
Elmo was still an invisible man, and he would respond as the new Elmo Wimpler.
With hatred and with power.
He hated those two men, the tall-thin one and the
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old Oriental. They would pay for what they had done tonight to mess up his plan. He had two contracts scheduled and now both were gone.
He would devise a new skull-crusher. The two men might even have done him a favor exposing the malfunction in his weapon. But they had not done themselves a favor.
They had done themselves great harm.
They had put themselves at the top of Elmo Wimpler's must-kill list.
He continued running. He had another meeting scheduled.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Chiun looked down at the dead bodies surrounding them. Remo's head was in the air as if sniffing.
He returned to Chiun.
"I know," Chiun said. "He's gone."
"You let him get away," Remo said. "You knew he was there and you let him get away. Didn't you?"
"A terrible error of judgment," Chiun said.
Remo had picked up one of the knives from the eight dead men on the ground. He felt the bone and leather handle. "It doesn't look like an American knife," he said.