Remo did not answer.
Chiun said, "No. I speak Korean. Remo grunts replies, usually wrong."
"Let's get some sleep," Remo said.
"Not until you tell me just who you are," Joey said. "You owe it to me."
"Sure. I owe it to you."
Remo turned toward Chiun, who was warming his hands in front of the fireplace.
Chiun began to unroll his fiber sleeping mat and spread it in front of the fireplace. Remo was walking toward his bedroom door. He heard the outside door swing open, then bang shut. Dear god, what now? He turned to confront six-foot-six of cold, wet, and angry-to-the-marrow lumberjack standing inside the main room.
"You," Pierre LaRue bellowed, pointing a thick, hairy index finger at Remo. "You."
"That's right," Remo said. "I'm me."
Chiun continued unrolling his mat and smoothing it out. LaRue was in his way.
Chiun brushed him aside. "Excuse me, please," he said. "I need my sleep."
LaRue looked down at the tiny figure and said, "Sure. I understand. I help you with that?"
"No, thank you," Chiun said.
LaRue started to talk to Remo again, then changed his mind, and squatted down on the floor next to Chiun.
"Tell me something, old man. Who is this person?"
"My student," Chiun said. "The burden I bear in life."
"What is he doing here?"
"It was ordered by the emperor," Chiun said. He had finished smoothing out the bedroll.
"Emperor?" LaRue scratched his head. "What emperor?"
"Emperor Smith," said Chiun.
"Who he?" LaRue asked. "What is he emperor of?"
"The United States, of course. What else would he be emperor of?" Chiun demanded.
LaRue stood up and shrugged in puzzlement.
"What's this all about, Pierre?" Joey asked.
"This man," he said, pointing to Remo, "he put me in a tree. And those two dead people, I think he do it."
Remo shook his head. "A tragic accident. They shot themselves, I told you."
"I be keeping an eye on you," Pierre LaRue told Remo, with a chilly tone in his voice. "Peer LaRue trusts you not a bit."
"Is that what you came here for?" Joey demanded. "To start a fight?"
"No. I come to tell you the trees okay. I start the heaters again. More guards up there now."
Joey stood on tiptoes and kissed the big man on the cheek. He blushed through his cold redness.
"I don't know what I'd do without you, Pierre," she said.
"Is nothing," he said. "Is less than nothing. Is another reason I come. Big trouble."
"What now?" Joey asked
"Can't anybody schedule anything in the morning?" Remo said. "All I want is some sleep."
"The Moonten Eyes are here."
"Oh," said Joey. Her voice did not conceal her disgust.
"Wait, wait, wait," Remo said. "You sound disgusted, and I don't even know what he said. What are the Moonten Eyes?"
"The Mountain High Society," Joey said. "One of those ecology groups. They're trying to close down this whole logging camp and forestry operation."
"Why?" asked Remo.
"I don't know," Joey said. "They talk about the death screams of trees when they're cut down and how that causes poverty and insanity and crime in the big cities by destroying the ozone or something like that."
Chiun had lain down on the floor. "If you three wish to talk all night, would you mind stepping outside?" he said.
"Maybe I better go take a look at these Mountain Highs," Remo said.
"Why?" said Joey. "You're just a simple treecounter or something. Remember?"
Remo ignored her.
"Will you take me to the Mountain Highs?" he asked Pierre.
Pierre thought for a moment. Then he said, "Sure. Peer cannot be mad long at somebody who stick him on a tree like a target. Sure. We go right now."
"Wait a minute," Joey said. "I'm coming too. I have to put on some clothes. Peer, go to the cabin next door and get Oscar. He will want to see this too."
LaRue nodded and went out.
Joey ran into her room and threw on some heavy woolen slacks. She was lacing her thermal boots when she came back into the room.
A moment later, LaRue broke through the front door again.
Chiun sighed and said, "I think I'd rather sleep in the woods than in this bus station."
LaRue said, "Big trouble. Oscar, he gone. And there is blood all over the place."
Chapter Eight
LaRue's was an overstatement, Remo thought. There wasn't blood all over the place. It was only on three of the four white-painted walls, on the bed, on one of the chairs, on the nightstand, and one large puddle on the floor. Another chair, one wall, a desk, a chest of drawers, and the ceiling were untouched.
Chiun and Remo had led Joey and LaRue back into the small log cabin. Joey took one look and ran back to the A-frame to call Stacy at the base camp.
The Master and his pupil stepped cautiously about the room, looking, careful not to disturb anything, and walking gently so as not to disturb the air currents. LaRue watched from the doorway where he had been told to stay.
"There is a tale here for the nose," Chiun said.
"Heavy drinking," Remo agreed, with a nod of his head.
Joey was back now, and she was standing next to LaRue.
"Oscar," she said, "has been drinking heavily since Danny died. He kept saying that he was responsible."
"Was he?" Remo asked.
"No," Joey said vigorously. "How could he be? But he seemed to have this idea that he might have been able to stop it somehow."
"Did he know something you didn't know?" Remo asked.
"I don't know," Joey admitted. She looked again at the blood-splattered room and began to cry, long, loud sobs mixed with torrents of tears. Chiun touched her shoulder comfortingly and slowly the tears subsided.
"Thank you," she said. "I don't do that often."
Remo was looking at the bed. "Did Brack seem different in any other ways?"
Joey shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "He always drank too much. He liked to go out and tie one on with Pierre's boys. But lately he's been drinking alone, by himself, just sitting and whistling that damn song."
"What song?"
" 'Danny Boy'."
But Remo wasn't listening. He had turned back to Chiun.
"Three men, Chiun?"
The old Oriental nodded.
Pierre LaRue asked, "How you know that?"
"The smells," Chiun said. "Different people smell different. There are three smells in here." He sniffed the air inside the room again, then looked toward Remo.
"There might have been a fourth," he said. "If so, the fourth only watched. It is a bad smell. It is like..." and he spoke a word in Korean.
"What is that?" Joey asked Remo.
"It means a pigsty," Remo said.
"Or a Japanese house of pleasure, which is the same thing," Chiun said.
The old man bent over the largest puddle of blood, dipped his fingertip in it, brought the finger to his nose, and sniffed deeply. He did the same thing with the stains on the rumpled bed.
"The blood on the bed is your friend's," he told Joey.
"Oh dear."
"But the big puddle is not his. It is someone else's," Chiun said.
"Again, how you know?" Pierre said.
"The man who bled on the bed, his blood stinks with alcohol. The blood on the floor stinks only with the smell of the red meat that all you white people eat. That is how I know."
Remo said, "I'm going to look outside to see if I can find anything."
He told LaRue to stay in the doorway until Remo found what he was looking for. It took him three circuits around the log cabin, each slightly wider than the one preceding it, before he caught the smell of the blood. There were two different scents: one was meaty and clean; the other was meaty and alcoholic, a mix resembling some suburban notion of gourmet cooking: Drop a hunk of frozen burger in a quart of ninety-eight-cent burgundy, and boil until the wine is a thick scum and the meat is black.