"Ten percent?" said Jeter.
"Cash. No checks."
"Can we get a receipt?" Jeter and Devin asked in unison, their incomplete business courses coming into play.
"No," said Nicky Kix in a bored voice.
Dejectedly Jeter and Devin led Nicky Kix and his muscular entourage to their joint office, pushing aside plush Terrapin toys, edging past Terrapin arcade video games and cardboard movie-lobby standees.
Jeter cleared a cardboard box containing breakfast-a pepper-and-onion pizza-from a chair so Nicky Kix could sit down.
"I'll stand," said Nicky Kix, eyeing the stained seat warily. He snapped his fingers impatiently. "Now, pony up. I ain't got all day."
In fact, Nicky Kix Stivaletta was destined not to have more than a minute and thirteen seconds remaining in his entire life.
He got an inkling of this when the office door suddenly banged open, upsetting a three-foot-tall plush Aramis doll.
Nicky's bodyguards whirled, hands going into coats, fingers wrapping around hard steel pistol grips.
Webbed three-fingered hands beat them to the draw.
One pair simply swept in for Sal (Toe Biter) Bugliosi's unprotected ears. He heard a thunderclap that kept his eardrums ringing until three days after his embalming. The air pressure scrambled his brain in its skull cavity and opened every fissure in the protective bone.
The other Terrapin-his purple mask and short stature marked him as Porthos-employed a high kick to break Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga's pelvis like a soda cracker.
Pauli let go of his half-drawn pistol and grabbed his crotch, which was leaking all manner of body fluids, and tried to claw his lower body back into an erect position.
But his legs simply bent at ankles and knees and he made a messy moist pile where he had stood.
"Aramis!" blurted Jeter.
"Porthos?" gulped Devin.
"Bullshit," snarled Nicky Kix as he drew down on the advancing Terrapins with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun he whipped out from under his coat.
He hauled back on one trigger.
The blast riddled Aramis. Unfortunately for Nicky Kix, it was the plush Aramis in a corner. It also cracked the arcade game screen and made a cheap plastic Terrapin alarm clock jangle discordantly.
Porthos was wide open, however. Nicky sent a blast of buckshot toward his sappy face.
The blast, however, made a kind of black spiral galaxy pattern in the dropped fiberboard ceiling.
Nicky Kix looked up. He saw the peppery hits. He looked down, where he noticed a green three-fingered hand holding his smoking shotgun barrels at an upward angle.
He was thinking: Where have I seen this shit before? when the shotgun was taken away from him rather harshly, and returned, stock-first, into his abdomen.
Nicky Kix said "Oof" and doubled over, still on his feet.
A spongy green hand grabbed him by his Brylereemed hair and led him over to a microwave parked on a corner table.
"In you go," said a casual male voice.
Nicky thought that he sounded nothing like the real Aramis. He also thought that he was in no danger. Sure, his head was in a microwave oven. But everybody knew they wouldn't work unless the door was closed. And this couldn't happen as long as his neck was in the way.
The male voice asked, "Care to do the honors, Little Father?"
"Normally I do not sully my hands with machines," said a strangely familiar squeaky voice, "but this one is guilty of cruelty to reptiles."
Then came the funny noises. Bangings and crunchings. A piece of the oven wall pierced Nicky Kix's unshaven cheek and he realized that the oven was being compacted. He couldn't imagine how. A steel shard embedded itself in his forehead next. His ears were mashed against the sides of his head. The noises wouldn't stop, and when Nicky reached out for the microwave to pull his head loose, it felt like he had got hold of a crashed sputnik.
"I'd say he's about ready, wouldn't you?" the guy said.
"Let us see if the device still functions," said the squeaky voice.
Despite his predicament, Nicky Kix managed a raucous laugh.
"You guys ain't shit, you know that? It'll never work. There's a contact in the door that has to touch another contact to complete the circuit."
"Thanks for reminding me."
He heard the scrape of a mangled timer dial and the tenative toiling of the timer mechanism itself. Then a sound like a coin dropping into a cigarette-machine slot.
Then Nicky Kix enjoyed the exquisite agony of having every water molecule in his cranium boil under an intense microwave bombardment.
He came erect as if impelled by a cattle prod.
He was dead before a three-fingered greenish hand slam-dunked the compacted microwave, Nicky's head and body following, into a trash barrel, incidentally yanking the plug from the socket.
"I thought those things wouldn't work unless the door was shut," said Jeter Baird, eyeing the dead body partially stuffed into a small Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapin kiddie wastebaket.
"They will if you rip the contact off the door and jam it into the other contact," said the tall green figure of Aramis.
"Who are you guys?" asked Devin.
"You know how some people have guardian angels?" Aramis asked.
"Yeah."
"You two have guardian Terrapins. Congratulations."
This made perfect sense to Jeter and Devin, who had grown up on a steady diet of comic books.
"How can we ever repay you?" asked a relieved Jeter.
"You are allowed to tip," said the squeaky voice of Porthos.
"Don't listen to him," said Aramis. "We work for free. You won't be bothered again."
"Although we do not guarantee untipped work," Porthos added darkly.
Jeter and Devin hastily brought out their wallets and gave all their personal cash to their guardian Terrapin, Porthos.
"Pass," said Aramis when they offered him a plush D'Artagnan doll. "Just do us all a favor. Don't mention this to anyone."
"Not even our mothers?" asked Devin.
"Of course you should inform your mothers," said the squeaky-voiced Porthos. "One always tells one's mother of good fortune."
After the pair had gone, Devin turned to Jeter.
"You don't suppose it's true . . . "
"If you think about it," said Jeter, "we have been having an unusual streak of luck since this whole thing started."
For the rest of their days Jeter and Devin were never again visited by the guardian Terrapins. But they did discover the Hong Kong actors who usually played Aramis and Porthos. They were snoring, in full costume, in the back of the extortionists' car. They were unable to explain how they got there, nor why Aramis woke up wearing Porthos' head and vice versa.
Chapter 29
Dr. Harold W. Smith was attempting to do three things at once and was on the verge of succeeding.
He was monitoring the LANSCII file as distant defeated fingers wiped clean the "TERRAPIN SKIM" heading. He was attempting to take his Zantac, a prescription ulcer medicine, and he was listening to Remo's brief report through the blue contact telephone.
"Reptiles everywhere can snuggle in their shells in safety tonight," Remo was saying dryly.
"Er, yes."
"What's next?" Remo wondered.
The office intercom buzzed. Reflexively Smith reached for the switch, inadvertently spilling his medicine.
Suppressing his annoyance, he said, "Excuse me," as he depressed the switch while attempting to swallow a hot splash of stomach acid that had leapt up his esophagus.
"Yes?" Smith said sourly.
His secretary said, "The transfer patient has arrived, Dr. Smith. "
"Excellent. Thank you."
Smith returned to the blue phone. "Remo. Please ask Master Chiun to return to Folcroft."
"What about me?"
"I want you to go to New York City."
"What's down there? Besides muggers?"