“No, it’s not that simple,” Remo answered, almost smiling at the notion of reanimating corpses as a simple project. “Bringing Hardy back somehow would give him one assassin maybe, but it wouldn’t give him three. On top of that, they’re so much younger. Hardy would be pushing seventy by now.”
“Age does not preclude a man from living an active life,” the ancient Master of Sinanju said.
“It does if he was pumped full of cyanide in ’65.”
“So the answer to this riddle is something else. Something to which you know the answer already,” said Chiun. “I see it written on your face.”
Remo smiled. “Let’s say I have a hunch, okay? If it proves out, we’ve got a major problem on our hands.”
“You have a problem. I am merely a tagger-along. You admitted as much to Smith. I will sit by and wait for your shrewd detective’s brain to solve this fiendish puzzle.”
“Your confidence is overwhelming,” Remo said aridly.
“I am confident only in your ability to make a nincompoop of yourself when you indulge Smith’s idiotic whims. He even expressed worry over me. Me. Do not deny it.”
“Smith was concerned—” Remo began.
“About everything and anything.” Chiun filled in the blanks. “He is a nitwit. What is this cluck-cluck clan?”
“It’s like a social club for the discriminating psychopath. They dress up like refugees from a linen closet and run around terrorizing people who don’t pass their color test. We’ve met their kind a couple of times before.”
“I tend to forget the most distasteful elements of this land,” Chiun said.
“Selective amnesia,” Remo said. “Anyway, I think Smith would appreciate it if you kept a low profile.”
“I will eliminate no more of them than absolutely necessary,” Chiun assured him with a frosty smile.
“Seems fair.” Remo could almost find it in his heart to pity any skinhead, redneck, Ku Klux clown who tried to push the wizened old Korean around. Almost.
“We’d better pack,” he said.
“I am done already,” Chiun informed him, marching for the door. “Take care not to scratch my trunk or I will remand you to the custody of the backward cluck-clucks.”
“Maybe I should have just left him home,” Remo sighed to the empty room.
Chapter 9
Harrison County, Indiana, is named for the president Hoosiers sent to Washington in 1889. His term in office was mostly distinguished by the admission of six new states, but he remains a local hero in the state that still congratulates itself on giving birth to one John Herbert Dillinger. The county seat is Corydon, on Highway 62. Ten miles to the south is Dogwood, a tiny town of fewer than one thousand year-round residents.
The nearest airport, Remo had discovered, was in Louisville, Kentucky, on the wrong side of the river. Flying to the closest strip in Indiana proper would have meant a stop in Evansville, some eighty miles due west, and spending two more hours on the road to reach their destination. Coming out of Louisville, the trip was more like thirty miles.
No contest.
Chiun got all the normal looks, and then some, in the terminal at Louisville. He spoke to no one, let Remo do all the talking at the Avis counter, and it was a challenge trying to decipher his impression of the rubberneckers who kept gawking at him. Sometimes Remo thought the old Korean took it as his due, assuming they were awestruck by the Master of Sinanju; other times he caught Chiun glaring back and was convinced that shortly some gaping fool would find himself on the receiving end of an uncomfortable lesson in respect.
A Chrysler Concorde waited for them in the Avis parking lot, and Highway 64 took them across the river to New Albany, best known in recent years for the sadistic murder of a junior high-school student by a gang of teenage girls whose motive was a curious amalgam of black magic, homosexuality and simple boredom.
The world is collapsing around all our ears, thought Remo as he picked up Highway 62.
The highway branched off nine miles east of Corydon, a narrow strip of two-lane blacktop veering south. New Middleton was there and gone almost before he knew it, catching State Road 337 for the short run into Dogwood.
The town lived up to its name, the nearby woods ablaze with flowers, pink and white. A fair percentage of the homes they passed along the way were built from logs, some obviously new, while others looked as if they could have been around when Daniel Boone was fighting Indians and redcoats in the neighborhood.
Chiun absorbed the rustic atmosphere without commenting on it, watching as they passed a horse-drawn carriage, followed closely by a pair of shaggy thugs on Harley-Davidsons. Most of the vehicles Remo saw were pickups and four-wheelers, with a visible minority of old sedans, the bodies rusting out from long exposure to the salt laid down on snowy winter roads.
The Dogwood Inn reminded Remo of the Bates Motel, except there was no mansion looming on a hill behind the simple L-shaped structure with its twenty rooms all facing toward the highway. If the motel parking lot was any indicator, they had twenty vacancies to choose from. Tourist business in the tiny town was obviously no great shakes, despite the painted sign out front that promised free TV and telephones in every room.
Predictably it was the one and only place in town with rooms to rent. Remo considered getting straight to business, and to hell with staying overnight, but he would still need someplace for Chiun to stay while he was checking out the target. There were two restaurants in town—a drive-in that reminded him of something from American Graffiti, plus a little mom-and-pop that specialized in family dining—but he couldn’t see the Master of Sinanju killing time in either one. It could have been amusing, Remo thought, to watch Chiun order rice, and then demolish the establishment if someone gave him any lip, but this was not a pleasure cruise.
He had to scope the target out, and something told him that it would be wise to wait for nightfall. That meant moving in and sitting tight until the proper moment, insulating Chiun from any contact with the local yokels that could spark a minor riot.
Although in a small place like this they were more noticeable, there was one advantage: Chiun looked too “irregular” for anyone to consider them as investigators of anything—especially a home for unwed mothers owned and operated by a doctor who was bound to rank among the wealthiest and most respected men in town.
It could be worse, Remo told himself. I could’ve brought the circus with me, maybe rode an elephant down Main Street, with a marching band and fireworks. Get some acrobats and clowns in funny little cars.
Step one was leaving Chiun outside when he went in to register. The motel manager was five foot six or seven, skinny as a rail, with ancient pockmarks from a killer case of acne on his sunken cheeks. His hair was almost gone on top, and he attempted to conceal the fact by combing what he had across the barren wasteland of his scalp, from left to right. His wife wore hot-pink curlers and at least two hundred pounds of excess flab that dangled from her arms like the voluminous sleeves of a choir robe.
Jack Spratt, thought Remo, swallowing a smile as he signed in and paid for two nights in advance, a double room.
“Wife with you?” asked the missus, wobbling dangerously on tiptoes for a glimpse of Remo’s car outside.
“No, ma’am.”
“Your girlfriend?” Scarface asked.
“Just passing through on business.”
“Hmph. An’ what would that be?”
Remo left the question hanging, finished filling out the registration card and slid it back across the counter with a ballpoint pen that advertised a nearby funeral home. He thought of Norman Bates again, decided Scarface couldn’t pull it off, and wondered for a moment if the Dogwood Inn was so depressing that its guests were prone to thoughts of suicide.