Wolf's Bane

Which meant, in turn, that he couldn't afford to let the final witness get away, no matter where he went to hide. And he couldn't afford to let a freak like Leon Grosvenor take him for a ride.

He needed something in the nature of an update from the wolf man, and he needed it right now. The trouble was that Leon didn't have a telephone or mailing address, living on the bayou like some kind of half-assed sideshow freak, away from other men. Which meant that Merle would have to reach out to him personally, even though he hated the idea.

A damn loup-garou. What next?

REMO HADN'T EXACTLY memorized a lot of Dr. Smith's file on the Cajun Mafia. From what he gathered, they were little different from the traditional crime families that had controlled New Orleans since the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The new breed favored jambalaya over ravioli, and they leaned toward dogfights rather than the ponies, but they still touched all the bases of illicit enterprise. Their specialties were drugs, extortion, prostitution, gambling and a quirky sideline in the smuggling of endangered species for discriminating pet owners. The latter operation had apparently begun with Armand Fortier himself, who doted on exotic birds but now confined himself to watching sparrows in Atlanta when he was allowed outside to exercise.

Remo did have a slip of paper with some names and addresses. Not far from the hotel, on Jackson Avenue, was an operation that masqueraded as a pawnshop, but there was more to Ham's Hock Shop than met the eye. The registered proprietor, a Cajun named Etienne DuBois, was nicknamed "Ham" after his run-in with a wild boar on the bayou back in 1969. Etienne's first shot had failed to drop the monster, and it took him down, goring him repeatedly before he got it in a headlock, drew his twelve-inch bowie knife and cut its throat. Weakened by loss of blood, too badly wounded for the hike back to his skiff, DuBois was stranded for six days, subsisting on raw pork and boar's blood until he was strong enough to travel. He had been "Ham" ever since, to friends and enemies alike, and didn't seem to wind.

His injuries from the abortive hunting trip included some outlandish scarring, which he stubbornly refused to have corrected, and a hobbling walk that put Etienne on disability. The fact that he had never held an honest job before the hog attack didn't prevent the state from compensating him for "loss of wages due to work-related injuries." His patron, Gaetan Fortier, had pulled the necessary strings in Baton Rouge, and when old Gaetan went to his reward, Etienne went right on working for the son, Armand, to show his everlasting gratitude.

Not that Ham's Hock Shop was a terribly demanding gig. He dealt with drunks and losers, mostly, where the terms weren't synonymous. Some junkies, the occasional sneak thief if he had merchandise that Etienne could move with no risk to himself. He was a tightwad, and the shop made money on its own, but it existed equally to serve the Fortier crime family as an outpost in New Orleans, where intelligence could be collected from the streets and funneled to the proper ears. Sometimes, in boozy conversations with selected friends, Etienne compared himself to famous secret agents of the cinema. He had been known to introduce himself as "Bond, Ham Bond," his Cajun accent making Bond sound just enough like "bone" for it to draw obligatory smiles and anemic laughter.

Remo's maxim was that information, by its very nature, flowed both ways. Those who received could also share, if they were so inclined. He just had to incline them. Inclining people was one of the things he did best.

He plunged into the jostling crowd on Tchoupitoulas Street and made his slow way eastward, weaving through the crush of partiers toward Jackson Avenue.

Unlike the carnival in Rio, there were laws forbidding outright nudity at Mardi Gras, but the occasional police he spotted on his trek appeared to be more mellow than your average Southern cop. At Tchoupitoulas and Louisiana Avenue, he saw two spit-and-polish lawmen joshing with a trio of young women dressed in G-strings, fishnet stockings, pasties and stiletto heels. The women also wore headgear resembling fish bowls with antennae, while the cops were wearing leering smiles. Everywhere were women, and men, in painted-on clothing. You had to look closer to realize they were completely naked.

It took him a few brisk minutes of weaving among the revelers to reach the pawnshop. Ham's Hock Shop was open, more from force of habit than with any hope of drawing business from the crowd outside. Some of the revelers paused long enough to press their faces to the windows, ogling saxophones, trombones, guitars, a nice display of ersatz switchblade knives, but no one went inside. Remo was the exception, a cow bell clanking overhead as it was jostled by the swinging door.

"Help you?"

Etienne DuBois was a man of average height who ran to fat. He clutched a sturdy wooden walking stick in his left hand. The leg on that side seemed to have an extra joint, more like an insect's, that encouraged it to wobble every time he took a step. On the right side of his face a long scar like an inchwide lightning bolt zigzagged between the Cajun's jaw line and his eyebrow.

"I'm looking for a loup-garou," Remo said, cutting through the small talk.

Etienne DuBois allowed himself a crooked grin, the pale scar crinkling like rubber.

"You got a better chance a findin' one out there," the Cajun said, and pointed with his free hand toward the street. "Most anything you want will be out there tonight."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Remo said, moving closer to the Cajun, "but I'm looking for the real thing, not a fake."

DuBois's smile did a flip and wound up as a frown. "You're drunk or a crazy one, my friend," he said. "Somebody needs to check you out or something, you go looking for a real-life loup-garou."

"You don't believe in werewolves?"

"Not since I'm old enough to know better," the Cajun said.

"That's funny."

"Funny how?"

"Well, see, the thing is, I was told your boss man had a loup-garou he uses for his special jobs." The frown was gone now, too. Its passing left the Cajun's face deadpan.

"This place you standing in belongs to me," he said. "I got no boss man."

"Well, damn, I must've got it wrong, then. You don't work for Armand Fortier? Or maybe Bettencourt, now that the big guy's in Atlanta?"

"Don't guess I recognize those names."

"Uh-huh. It couldn't be that you sustained brain damage, could it, when that hog was chewing on your head?"

"You best get out a here right now," the Cajun said.

"We haven't finished talking."

"Oh, yeah, we finished," said DuBois. "You just don't know it yet."

He swung the heavy walking stick with force enough to split a watermelon-or a skull-but Remo saw it coming five minutes before it would have hit him. Remo brought up his right arm casually and allowed it to take the impact. The cane snapped and the broken-off piece spun aimlessly across the shop.

"Strike one," he said. "What say we keep talking as I suggested? 'Cause if that's the best you've got..."

DuBois was staring at him, features doubly puckered by the scar and a peculiar frown, still clutching half a cane. The broken end was lighter than the outer layer of wood by several shades, reminding Remo of a tree branch snapped off in a storm.

The scar-faced Cajun did not try to swing his shortened cane a second time. Instead, he jabbed the broken end toward Remo's face, as if to gouge an eye or plug the stranger's mocking mouth.

Remo grasped the wrist behind the cane and twisted, feeling wrist bones snap and dislocate. DuBois gave out a squealing cry of pain that fit his nickname and released the walking stick before he sprawled, headfirst, into a drum set standing in the middle of the floor.

"Strike two," Remo said when the Cajun had retrieved enough of his disjointed wits to understand the spoken word. "You're out on three, so make it good."

DuBois leaned on a cymbal when he tried to rise, but it spun out from under him and dumped him on his backside. Favoring his shattered wrist and crippled leg, he eventually tottered to his feet.

"Who sent you?" he demanded.

Remo answered with a question of his own. "It doesn't really matter, does it? You can talk to me, or you can have the worst night of your life. The last night."

Etienne DuBois was staring at him, gripping his right arm in his left hand while leaning back against a long plate-glass display case filled with cameras, watches, compact radios. The Cajun shot a quick glance toward the windows and the teeming street beyond, but it was hopeless. No one in the Quarter would have rushed to help him on an ordinary day, and Mardi Gras was in full swing, legitimizing aberrant behavior for the next two days.

"These things you ask about," the Cajun said at last, "they get me dead."

"You're dead already, Ham. My way, at least you get a running start."

"Hey, where you learn that kung-fu shit?"

"My father taught me," Remo said. "And if he heard you calling it 'kung fu' even I wouldn't be able to save you. Quit stalling, now. You want to talk or dance?"

"That loup-garou you ask about, I think you don't believe me if I told you."

"Try me out," said Remo. "You may be surprised."

Chapter 10

It was a fluke that Fortier's gorillas ever caught a glimpse of Remo, but a fluke was all it took sometimes. He was emerging from Ham's Hock Shop when he met another caller coming in. The man was five foot two or three, built like a fireplug, with the bullet head to match. He wore a suit so shiny it was almost iridescent, but without a tie. His oily black hair was combed back from his sallow face in a lopsided pompadour. His sideburns would have set the King to spinning in his grave from envy.

Remo brushed on past the sawed-off thug, confirming with a feather touch that he was packing heat. Intent on getting out of there and merging with the crowd, he didn't spare the shop a backward glance until he heard the cow bell clank again and a gruff voice shouted, "Grab that guy!"

He had his adversaries pegged and counted in two seconds flat. Besides the fireplug, now emerging from the shop with murder in his eyes, three others were hanging back, clustered beneath a balcony where a young woman turned her shapely backside to the crowd and proved she was a natural redhead. The three goons heard their comrade shouting, followed his accusing index finger to the spot where Remo stood, and moved as one to cut him off.

The vast, amorphous organism of the crowd engulfed him, sucked him in, reminding Remo of The Blob, with Steve McQueen. This was a different kind of monster, though: more complex, yet more simple-minded, oozing through the Quarter without seeming purpose, fueled by alcohol, randomly shedding cells on every side, absorbing new ones to replace those lost. A man could get lost in a crowd like that and evade his enemies.

Remo didn't want to get lost.

Of course, he'd prefer not getting any revelers shot. Especially all those friendly college coeds. Remo had no idea where he was going, other than away from Ham's Hock Shop and Jackson Avenue. He wouldn't lead the shooters back to his hotel. Remo slipped and slid through the crowd heading westward, leading his pursuers through the crowd, giving them the occasional glimpse to keep up their enthusiasm. His adversaries pushed and bullied their way through the crush of gaudy costumed bodies.

Fireplug had glimpsed the shop in ruins, maybe spotted Etienne DuBois behind the counter sleeping off the nerve pinch Remo gave him when he had run out of useful information.

Remo assumed the goons were Cajun Mafia, soldiers of Armand Fortier and his lieutenant, Bettencourt. They wouldn't relish going home without an explanation for the ruckus at Ham's Hock Shop, and the best thing they could hope for was to bag the culprit, take him with them when they went back to report.

On tiptoes he could make out a surge of motion through the crush, heads bobbing, bodies rippling as the spearhead of pursuit drove past them. It reminded Remo of snake-hunting in tall grass, the way you had to watch for subtle movement in the grass, because your prey remained invisible.

A mounted cop came out of nowhere, surging through the crush, proceeding in the general direction of the goons who hunted Remo. Had he seen them from his higher vantage point and known that something was amiss? Would he chastise them for their rude behavior, shoving through the crowd?

Then the cop veered off course, proceeding toward the distant outskirts of the mob. On that side of the street, a woman who resembled Shelley Winters in a Dolly Parton wig was dancing naked on a balcony, the sight of so much cellulite in motion making Remo vaguely ill. The mounted cop seemed bent on stopping her, an effort that evoked mixed cheers and booing from the audience.

"That's gotta be a felony," Remo muttered, and began moving through the press of bodies again, searching for a place where he could confront the goons without endangering the revelers.

From Ham DuBois he had gleaned a first name, bits and pieces of a story that could still be crap, despite the fact that his informant seemingly believed it. Remo needed more, and he was hoping that the four punks on his tail could add a few more bytes of information.

Remo began negotiating his way through the crush, moving inexorably toward the north side of the street. The human current had already passed Desire House, drawing Remo and his tail toward the terminus of Tchoupitoulas Street at Jefferson Avenue, with Audubon Park just beyond. South of Tchoupitoulas, the Mississippi River snaked its way along the outskirts of the Crescent City, dividing New Orleans proper from the suburbs of Westwego, Harvey, Gretna and Marrero. Narrow side streets had their own block parties going on, no respite from the crowd, and even alleyways were populated with partiers whose costumes mingled 1950s horror movies and sci-fi with all the trappings of a modernday Gay Pride parade.

Ten minutes after leaving Ham's Hock Shop, he found what he was looking for. It wasn't perfect, but he would find nothing better at this end of Tchoupitoulas Street.

A cemetery. How appropriate.

He wormed his way in that direction, left the surging crowd behind him as he broke into a trot.

JEAN CUVIER HAD NEVER made it with a Gypsy, and the more he thought about Aurelia Boldiszar, the more that lapse in judgment struck him as a critical mistake. She had the kind of look he had always liked in women: slim but not emaciated; elegant, even though her clothes were far from stylish; intelligent but quiet, keeping to herself a bit instead of showing off how smart she was.

The women in the past, let's face it, had been mostly bimbos. They were good at what they did, but without the bedroom and the shopping mall they had no purpose in life. With a Gypsy, now-this Gypsy, anyway-he had the feeling that he would be traveling uncharted territory. It excited him to think about it...but, predictably, there was a problem.

When Aurelia looked at him, which wasn't often, it was as if her eyes glazed over and kept on moving, anxious to find something else to focus on. Okay, the Cajun knew he wouldn't pass for Mel Gibson or that younger guy, Matt What's-his-name, but he had never been described as hideous. Some women went for him, some didn't. But none of them had ever told him that they couldn't stand to look at him.

The more he thought about it now, the more it troubled him. A part of his brain told him that his manly honor was at stake, he had to make the Gypsy really see him, but another part was getting worried. Cuvier was wondering if what he saw there, when her eyes glazed over, was in fact revulsion toward him as a man, or maybe something else.

He thought about the stories he had heard about the Gypsies when he was growing up. He had believed them as a child, and still believed enough of them to recommend that Remo seek out the Gypsies for information on the loup-garou. Some of the stuff he'd heard was crazy, while some other parts made sense. Jean Cuvier had never really stopped to dwell on whether Gypsies could predict the future. Tell someone when they were going to die, for instance. Maybe tell them how.

But what if this Aurelia babe could see his fate? Suppose that what she saw, just glancing at him from across the room, was so damn horrible it turned her stomach and she had to look away or lose her dinner right there on the coffee table.

What if she was seeing him dissected and devoured by old loup-garou?

The warmth that he had felt between his legs, watching Aurelia move around the room or simply sit there, paging through a magazine, was gone now. In its place there was tightness, as if his scrotal sack were shriveling to peanut size, attempting to retreat inside his body. Cuvier felt nauseous, dizzy, trying to imagine what the Gypsy's powers had revealed to her about the graphic details of his death.

He crawled back into the bed, tried to sleep but couldn't. He pictured monsters rushing at him from the shadows, tearing into him with fangs and talons, eating him alive. That was the worst part, fearing that the damn thing wouldn't kill him outright, that he would be conscious when it started gobbling his flesh and gnawing on his bones.

After a couple hours of that, he knew that he would have to face the Gypsy, find out what she knew. She might not want to tell him right off, but he had some money squirreled away. If that failed, or the price tag was beyond his reach... Well, he would simply make her tell him. Who was there to stop him? The old Chinaman?

He took it easy getting out of bed, no noise to warn the Gypsy or disturb the old man on the sleeping mat on the floor. Aurelia had the folding cot, had taken it when Remo left. Jean hadn't understood much of their whispered conversation, but he meant to hear the details now and find out what was coming to him, one way or another.

She seemed to be asleep as Cuvier crept to the cot on tiptoe. He stifled a curse as he collided with a corner of the coffee table and a bolt of pain shot from his shin up to his knee, and so on to his skull. He stood there, frozen like a statue, waiting for the pain to subside, afraid to breathe in case the sound had roused Aurelia from her sleep.

But she was still unconscious, with the sheet pulled up across her shoulder, bare skin showing in the dim light from the curtained window.

He knelt beside the bed and woke Aurelia with a hand pressed tight across her mouth. She was prepared to struggle, but the sheet got in the way, and he was leaning down to whisper in her ear by then.

"Relax," he said. "It's only me. We need to have a talk."

She glared at him, dark eyes above his hand, but then she nodded. He drew his hand away reluctantly, still feeling her soft lips against his palm.

"What do you want?"

"I seen you lookin' at me there, a while ago," said Cuvier. "Gypsies can see things, sometime, like what's coming, yes?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"So, what I wanna know is this-what's comin' after me."

"You know the answer," she informed him, "or you wouldn't ask the question."

He felt bright anger flare inside of him. "I don't need riddles from you, I guarantee," he told her, leaning close enough for her to smell the garlic on his breath. Aurelia tried to shrink from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. Her breasts made lumps beneath the sheet and set a faint alarm bell clanging in his head.

"You want to know if you're in trouble," the Gypsy said. "Well, you are. You made this trouble for yourself, and now you can't escape it."

Curiously, it aroused him, listening to her pronounce his death sentence. He couldn't help it. Even as he willed himself to concentrate on business, yet another part of him was thinking what did he have to lose?

"I wanna know what's left," he told her, climbing awkwardly onto the yielding mattress. "You're going to tell me how much time I got."

His left hand settled on her breast, began to knead the pliant flesh through layers of fabric. "How much time?" he said again.

"Not much," she answered, bringing up a knee between his meaty thighs.

The impact stunned him, overwhelmed him with a blast of pain eclipsing anything he could remember from a lifetime of hard knocks. He barely noticed as her right arm freed itself and whipped a rock-hard fist into his face.

The next thing Cuvier remembered, he was lying on the floor beside the bed. Aurelia was kneeling on the mattress, miles above him, cursing him in languages he didn't even recognize. The lights were on, and would have hurt his eyes if there had been a spare nerve left to carry more pain signals to his brain. Too late for that, though, with the piercing agony that clutched his groin.

The little Asian stood over him, regarding Cuvier with an expression that may have been curiosity, amusement or disgust.

"Sleepwalking is very dangerous," Chiun informed him, grinning now.

"You could have helped," Aurelia said.

"You needed no help," the old Korean answered. Next thing Cuvier knew, the wizened little man had picked him up with one hand, gripping the denim fabric of his shirt, and toted him back to the bed. He tossed Jean onto the mattress as if he were slinging a sack of dried beans.

"Sleep now," the scrawny apparition said. "No more chit-chat. No more hanky-panky."

Cuvier felt obligated to respond somehow. He found his voice-it had been hiding somewhere in the neighborhood of his left kidney.

"Hey, Chinaman!"

The little Asian faced the bed again, no longer smiling, and leaned over Cuvier, a slim hand reaching toward the junction of the Cajun's neck and shoulder.

"Too much noise," he said. "Too little brains." The Asian barely touched him, but at once the pain below his waist evaporated, swallowed in the sudden, wrenching agony that gripped his upper body. Cuvier was frozen, powerless to move or even scream, until the lights went out again and blessed darkness carried him away.

THE GROUND ON WHICH New Orleans stands has been so wet, historically, that corpses are entombed above the earth instead of buried in it. Wealthy individuals and families lean toward elaborate vaults and monuments, while those without the surplus cash on hand wind up in simple tombs resembling the foundations of so many narrow toolsheds swept away by tropical storms. The graveyard Remo chose that night was more elaborate than most, and offered countless hiding places.

The goon squad trailing him had the combined IQ of a normal human being. It took them a while to figure out where Remo had got to. "Criminy," he complained, making it easier for the goons by lingering at the curb outside the cemetery gate. Finally one of them spotted him and started bawling at the others, pointing out their quarry. Even then, Remo stalled until the first of them had churned free of the crowd and come toward him. Only then did he continue into the boneyard, merging with the night.

It was no challenge to avoid them. Remo could have led them in and crept around behind them, disappeared while they were hunting him among the tombs and monuments, but that wasn't his plan. The way he saw it, Fate had handed him four chances to improve upon the information he had gained from Etienne DuBois, and he would be a fool to throw that opportunity away.

The goons who stalked him now were leg breakers and killers, undeserving of sympathy. He heard the four gorillas fanning out. They called to one another in the darkness, sounding nervous, making noise enough to wake the dead around them as they combed the cemetery for their mark. Remo decided it would be a smart move to secure at least one POW first, in case it got too hairy later on, and so, while they were stalking him, he did a little hunting of his own.

As luck would have it, Remo came upon the human fireplug first. Like many small men with tough attitudes, this one had tried to compensate with iron. His weapon was a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle semiautomatic, stainless steel with jet-black plastic grips. He held the massive pistol well in front of him-his first mistake-and swung it in an arc before him, as if it had been a flashlight rather than a gun.

Remo came up behind him and pulled the punch that should have crushed his adversary's skull. The gunner's consciousness winked out as if someone had flicked a light switch, and before he crumpled, Remo plucked the Desert Eagle from his fist and twisted the barrel like a wrung-out washrag.

A quick frisk of his dozing captive turned up knuckle dusters, a blackjack, a switchblade knife.

It was a wonder that the little bastard didn't rattle when he walked. He squashed every weapon. "Sleep tight," he told the fireplug, and went off to find his friends.

The next one was a relatively tall man pushing six feet, with the shoulders of a high-school jock and waistline of a slacker who had lost the taste for exercise. The goon had reached a point where his physique could still go either way, but it was nothing he would have to be concerned about from this night on.

Remo sped up to intercept him, marking where the others were by their insistent jabbering. His chosen target didn't answer them, but as he closed the gap between them, Remo heard the shooter whistling softly to himself, and understood that these tough guys were frightened of the graveyard, more like children than the soldiers they aspired to be.

He passed the shooter, moving swiftly, covered by the night, and ducked behind a minimausoleum that stood directly in his target's path. Someone had placed a small bouquet of flowers on the threshold of the tomb, and Remo stepped around them, noting that the blooms had wilted and were on their way to dropping petals in another day or so.

A moment later the tough guy's pistol nosed around the corner of the mausoleum. It was a snubnosed .38, blue steel, and Remo waited for the arm to follow, using both hands as he grabbed the shooter's wrist and elbow, whipping him around the corner, to his knees.

The wrist bones and the elbow snapped together, but he had a grip on the shooter's throat by then, bottling up the scream.

"You want to live?"

The kneeling gunner tried to nod, eyes bulging with surprise and pain.

"So take a nap."

The death grip shifted slightly, fingers finding the carotid arteries on either side and cutting off the flow of blood to one befuddled brain. The shooter wilted. Remo made scrap of his snubby and another switchblade.

It was a moment's work to dump his latest prize beside the human fireplug, and he went back to the hunt. His third mark was of average height and heavyset, a waddler who compensated for his flab by packing a Colt .45. His wingtip shoes made little squishing noises as he moved among the tombs.

With half the crew already snoozing, Remo had an urge to wrap up the preliminaries and proceed to his interrogation. Waiting in the shadows of another tomb, he jabbed a punch at number three and dropped him in his tracks. As the shooter fell, a reflex action of his muscles triggered off a loud round from the Colt and brought his final sidekick on the run. Remo hadn't planned it that way, but it was okay. The next goon would come to him.

Three goons were plenty, Remo calculated, and he met the fourth man with a palm thrust that took him underneath the chin and broke his neck. The guy was dead before he hit the ground, and Remo crushed two more shooting irons into steel lumps.

Remo gripped a shooter's belt in either hand and hoisted them, moved back in the direction of the tomb where he had stashed the other two. He swung the flaccid bodies as he walked, for all the world resembling a man out for a stroll with two light shopping bags-except that each of these weighed just about two hundred pounds.

He dropped the living gunman near his fellows, propped the dead one up against a nearby tomb, where he would be immediately visible to his companions when they came around. One small adjustment to his posture, and the scene was set.

Reviving his three captives took only fifteen seconds of pinching, probing, slapping. They were slumped together, muttering and shaking heads that throbbed with pain when Remo stepped in front of them and spoke.

"I guess you're wondering," he said for openers, "exactly why I called you all here this evening."

"What's that?" the fireplug asked, addressing no one in particular.

"I'm glad the three of you could join me," Remo said, still smiling. "I'll be your inquisitor this evening. Anyone who wants to live can simply answer all my questions honestly, first time around. There will be penalties for bullshit, bluffing or attempting to walk out before the game is finished. Do we understand the rules?"

"Where's Gabby?" asked the goon who had been carrying the .45.

"Oh, right." Remo pretended that the fourth punk had already slipped his mind. "We played a practice round while you three sleepyheads were snoozing. I'm afraid he lost."

That said, he stepped aside to let them see their friend. At first, the groggy shooters didn't understand what they were seeing, and it took a moment for the details of the scene to register: the late, lamented Gabby sitting with his back against a marble tomb, his head inverted so that he was kissing stone.

"Poor sap thought he was Linda Blair," said Remo. "That's the breaks. Hooray for Hollywood." The other three were staring at him now. The thug in the middle cradled his shattered arm, in too much pain to make a move, while the others were wondering if two-on-one was good enough to let them walk away from this alive.

"You've got two choices," Remo told them. "We can talk or we can fight. So far tonight, you haven't done that well with muscle."

The silence stretched between them, dragging on, until the fireplug spoke at last.

"Okay," he said, "what is it you wanna know?"

Chapter 11

Late Thursday morning, Armand Fortier was notified by Eulus Carroll, one of his least favorite prison guards, that he was favored with a visitor. The Cajun mobster was perplexed, because he hadn't summoned anyone to call on him, and no one he could think of had the balls to come and see him uninvited. Oh, the Feds had come a few times in the early weeks of his imprisonment, mostly to taunt him, hoping they could make some kind of deal now that they had him caged, but they had long since given up.

"Who is it?" he asked Carroll.

"How the hell should I know, shithead?"

Eulus Carroll was six foot eight and weighed at least three hundred pounds, most of it muscle. He was as black as coal, head shaved and took no shit from anybody in the joint. The story was that he had killed two inmates with his bare hands when they made the grave mistake of coming after him with shanks, and while Armand could never verify the tale he had a sneaking hunch that it was true, Carroll hated convicts, which at first blush seemed peculiar for a man who chose to spend his life with prisoners, but story number two involved a budding pro football career, sidelined when Eulus had been run down in a crosswalk by a car thief and escapee from the Fuiton County jail. The doctors told him he would never play again for money, and as soon as he could walk-or so the story went-he had signed on as a corrections officer to get some payback happening. And payback was a bitch.

"You know the drill," Carroll said, and shook the chains in Armand's face for emphasis.

"Yeah, yeah."

Embarrassed by the routine even now, the Cajun raised his arms above his head while Carroll wrapped the belly chain around his waist and locked it at the back. Next came the shackles. Carroll crouched behind him, and while it was tempting for Armand to kick old Eulus in his big black face, it also would have been the next best thing to suicide. The cuffs were last, secured to the belly chain so that Armand could neither scratch his balls nor wipe his nose.

"Let's go."

They had to clear three different checkpoints-double sets of heavy sliding doors controlled by guards secure in bulletproof glass boxes. It was all about security, the Cajun realized, but he believed that part of it was also psychological, reminding every convict in the place that he was under someone else's thumb.

Visitations were strictly controlled in Atlanta, with the main visitors' room patrolled by multiple guards whenever convicts were present, rigid barriers blocking any contact between inmates and their visitors. Aside from that, there were four smaller rooms, as well, where screws weren't supposed to peek or eavesdrop, and these were used for inmate conferences with lawyers and occasionally psychiatrists employed by the defense team on particularly sticky cases.

Fortier was all the more confused when Eulus Carroll led him to the block of private rooms and opened number three. With nothing in the way of explanation, Carroll opened up the door, shoved Fortier across the threshold, closed and locked the door behind him. Glancing back, the Cajun saw his keeper's face framed briefly in the door's small window, double panes of glass with wire mesh in between, before it disappeared.

His visitor was standing in the corner farthest from the door, hands in his trouser pockets, watching Armand with a crooked little smile. If Fortier had ever seen his face before, it didn't stick.

"You've gained some weight," the stranger said. "Must be that starchy prison food."

"Who the fuck are you?" demanded Fortier.

"You want to have a seat?" the stranger asked as if he hadn't heard. "Relax a little while we talk?"

"My mama told me not to talk to strangers," Fortier replied. He made no move toward either of the straight-backed wooden chairs.

"That's fair enough," the visitor replied. "I'll talk, you listen. It'll do you good."

Armand said nothing, but the stranger didn't seem to mind.

"You've got a motion for a retrial coming up in June, before the Seventh Circuit. Some new evidence, your mouthpiece says. Right now, you look to have a fifty-fifty chance of winning that round."

"I feel lucky," Armand told him, never able to resist a timely gloat.

"That wouldn't be because you're weeding out the prosecution witnesses who sent you up, now, would it?"

"You must be an idjit, come in here and ask me that."

"You're right," the stranger said. "There's no point asking questions when we both know what the answers are."

The Cajun felt like telling him that what he knew and what the state could prove were very different things, but he decided not to push his luck. The room was more than likely wired, with tape recorders rolling. This wasn't a privileged conversation, and he didn't want to push his luck.

"You've killed nine people that I know of in the past two months," the stranger said.

"I been right here," said Fortier. "I'm sure the warden will be pleased to verify that fact."

"That's nine plus half a dozen Gypsies who were killed last night."

Armand allowed himself a puzzled frown at that one. For the first time since the stranger started talking, Fortier had drawn a blank. He knew nothing of dead Gypsies, nor was he especially concerned.

"Oh, wait," the stranger said. "You didn't know about the Gypsies, did you? My guess is that Leon was working on his own."

The name set Armand's scalp to prickling, but he couldn't scratch it, even if he had been willing to display surprise-which he was not.

"Who's Leon?" he inquired, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt.

The stranger grinned, a predatory flash of strong white teeth. "You haven't started going senile, have you, Armand? Hey, I know it happens, but you're young yet. Got your whole life still in front of you, if you call this living."

Fortier ignored the taunt and shook his head, in case they had a camera running, in addition to the audio. "This Leon don't mean shit to me," he said. "Don't know him. Don't know anything about no Gypsies."

"I believe you," said the stranger. "Well, the last part, anyway. See, how I figure it, Leon found out one of the Gypsies had a line on him, so he decided what the hell? He didn't know which one it was, so why not take 'em all? Of course, he missed a few. The one he wanted, in particular. Tough luck that sheriff's squad car passing on routine patrol."

Another troop of phantom ants swarmed over Armand's scalp and down his back. He ground his teeth, felt tremors starting in his knees and willed them to be gone.

"You got this guy, how come you come and bother me?"

"Did I say that?" The stranger frowned. "I don't think so. No, see, your wild man got away."

"Ain't none of mine," the Cajun said. Relief coursed through his veins, reviving him as fresh air does a drowning man.

"Or should I say your loup-garou?"

It hit him like a slap across the face, but Armand didn't flinch. At least, he didn't think he had. "You're a crazy fool," he said, and forced a bark of nervous laughter. "Believing old wives' tales like that. You got some garlic in your pocket?"

"That's for vampires," said the stranger. "Trust me. "

"Shee-it. I wouldn't know."

"About the loup-garou? That's strange, you know, because I had a talk with several of your men last night, and they were very helpful."

"Bullshit." It was coming at him much too quickly now. Armand could think of nothing else to say.

"You know Etienne DuBois? Friends call him Ham? I grant you, he's a little on the porky side, but hey, that gives you one more thing in common."

"I don't know no Etienne What's-his-face," Armand replied.

"That's weird, because he sure as hell knows you. In case you're wondering, he gave me Leon's name. Your other four gorillas helped fill in the blanks."

"Bullshit." With less conviction this time. "Ham, gorillas, loup-garou. Sound like you talkin' about some kinda zoo."

"Hey, that's not bad." The stranger grinned. "Too bad for you, these apes could talk. Did you see Congo, by the way? They weren't quite that advanced but they came up with the answers I needed."

The Cajun's mind was reeling; he had no small difficulty keeping the reaction from his face. He knew the pig DuBois, of course. As for the others, if he found out any of his men had spoken to this stranger, any stranger, he would see them dead before the week was out.

"I don't know what you want with me," he said at last. It sounded lame, but he could think of nothing else to say without tipping his hand, in some way admitting guilty knowledge of the crimes this stranger was discussing.

"That's okay," the stranger said. "Mostly, the reason why I'm here is to remind you that there's different kinds of justice, see? Sometimes the system works all right, but other times it gets clogged like a drain, and little bits of crud start floating to the top. See what I'm saying?"

"Can't say that I do."

"Okay, let's put it this way. I'm the plumber. When the drain backs up, I have to ream it out. I don't involve the courts, see what I'm saying?"

"That supposed to be a threat?"

The stranger smiled, stepped forward, reached down with his right hand for a corner of the wooden table. With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched the inch-thick oak and gave a twist, as if it were nothing, and a jagged piece of wood snapped right off in his hand. It left a scalloped wound perhaps two inches wide, as if the father of all termites had been gnawing on the table.

"Call it food for thought," the stranger said, as he advanced and slipped the piece of wood into Fortier's hand. That said, he brushed past the Cajun godfather and rapped his knuckles on the metal door.

"We're done in here," he told the guard outside. Armand Fortier was trembling in his chains when Eulus Carroll came to fetch him back, and he couldn't have said if it was fear or rage. Perhaps some combination of the two.

"Let's go, shithead," the black man ordered.

"Not so fast," said Fortier. "I need to use the telephone."

A PHONE CALL from the joint could only be bad news. First thing, the convicts always had to call collect, since none of them had calling cards inside, and that meant money out of pocket if you took the call. Worse yet, as soon as Bettencourt found out it was Atlanta calling, then he knew it had to be Armand, and Armand never simply called to pass the time of day, much less to share glad tidings. He called to give instructions or to bitch and moan, more often all of the above, the orders springing typically from some complaint that had occurred to him while he was sitting on his ass and killing time.

Still, turning down the call wasn't an option. Bettencourt's houseman was under orders to accept the charges, and he found Merle in the playroom, working on a solitary game of nine ball.

"Boss's on the phone," he said, and wandered off to God knew where.

Merle felt like yelling after him that he was the boss, but it would have been a waste of breath, aside from downright dangerous. Instead, he made a beeline for the nearest telephone and lifted the receiver. "Hey, Armand."

"Hey, Merle."

"Is this line like, you know, safe?"

"How should I know?" Armand snapped at him. "I'm callin' from the damn joint."

"Oh, yeah. What's up?"

"What's up is I just had a visitor," the Cajun godfather replied.

"Who is that?"

"I didn't catch his name, all right?"

That seemed a little odd to Merle, a total stranger showing up to visit at the federal pen and he forgets to give his name, but Bettencourt suspected that wasn't the problem Fortier had called up to discuss. "So, what'd he want?"

"Came by to tell me he been talkin' to some boys down your way," Fortier replied.

"My boys." You could at least have said our boys, Merle thought, but kept it to himself. And said, "Talkin' about what?"

"This thing with Leon," Fortier replied.

"Aw, merde. "

"You see now why I'm callin'?"

"Yeah, I think so. This guy give you Leon's name?"

"Come out with it like it was nothin'," Armand said. "Made like he knew all about that other business, too."

Merle had to puzzle over that one for a moment. Other business? Finally, it came to him that Fortier was making reference to the purge of prosecution witnesses for which Leon had been retained. The knowledge made his flesh crawl uncomfortably. The way he felt right now, his mama would have said someone had walked across his grave. But how the hell could they do that, when he was still alive?

"He say what boys was talkin'?" Bettencourt inquired.

"One name he give me," Armand said. "The pig man."

Pig man. Pig man? Wait, he had it! "Yeah, okay. Who else?"

"I said one name! You got spuds in your ears?" When Merle made no reply, the Cajun godfather continued. "Another thing. Some shit about Leon and Gypsies."

"Gypsies?"

"That's what I said! You got a fuckin' parrot on your shoulder?"

Bettencourt was reaching up to check before he caught himself, "Uh-uh," he said.

"So check this out," said Fortier. "Leon and Gypsies. All I know. And take care of that other thing."

"Okay."

"You keep a lookout for this bastard, Merle, you hear me?"

"Right. "

The line went dead without so much as a goodbye, and Bettencourt returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. Jesus Christ, as if he didn't have enough problems to deal with as it was. Now one of the prosecution witnesses was still out there, and old Armand was nagging him to get the job done. He had started thinking lately that it wouldn't be so bad if Armand lost his damn appeal and had to spend a few more hundred years inside. Like anyone would miss him but his bimbos.

Bettencourt could run the show himself. God knew he had been handling the grunt work long enough, while Armand got the cream and accolades. So much for justice. Now this shit about the Gypsies, and he couldn't even find out what it was supposed to mean, because Armand was worried that the pay phone in the joint might sprout an extra pair of ears.

Leon and Gypsies. What the hell? Of course, the more he thought about it, turned it over in his mind, the more they seemed to go together. Gypsies had that spooky reputation, and old Leon, well, they didn't come much spookier than that.

Merle knew exactly what he had to do, and while he didn't like it one damn bit, there was no viable alternative.

He grabbed the telephone again, but it was dead. Now, what the-? Instantly it came to him. His houseman, who had taken Armand's call, had left the damn extension off the hook. Merle cradled the receiver, biting off an urge to slam it down with crushing force, and reached the playroom's door in three long strides.

"Arno? Arno, you idjit, where you at?"

"What, boss?" Arno emerging from the kitchen with a turkey leg in hand, grease smeared around his lips.

"Would you be kind enough to go hang up the telephone?"

"Okay."

Sweet Jesus. Now Merle had to make the call he had been dreading ever since the Feds sent Armand to Atlanta. There was no way to avoid it any longer.

He was bound to fix himself a meeting with a goddamn loup-garou.

THE ROUND-TRIP To Atlanta took four hours, not including time spent at the prison, picking up and dropping off his rental car and dawdling through the traffic-crowded streets. All things considered, it was well into midafternoon when Remo disembarked at New Orleans International Airport, west of town, and bid a sad farewell to the incessant squalling of the two brats who had occupied the seats behind him. The whole way back, he had been mulling over Fortier's reaction to the bits of information he had dropped. The Cajun boss was hanging in there, had let nothing slip from his side, but the grim expression on his face when Remo mentioned "Leon," although quickly covered by a sneer, had shown that he was stung. The mobster's brain was working overtime when Remo left him, that was obvious, and he would not allow the game to start unraveling if there was anything that he could do to bring it back on course.

Remo was counting on it.

The sooner Fortier demanded swift results of his staff, the quicker Remo would be treated to a one-on-one with his pet loup-garou.

And what would happen then?

Before he left New Orleans, Remo had inquired about the Gypsies and was told that five were dead, two others barely hanging on with life support, six others treated and released for injuries that ranged from broken bones to multiple dog bites. Survivors who were capable of talking told police a pack of wolves had burst into their camp and run amok. Of course, the only wolves known to reside within Louisiana's borders lived in zoos, and so police assumed the Gypsies were mistaken, possibly hysterical. There had been problems in the past with feral dogs-some wild-born, others cast-off pets who joined a roving pack in order to survive. They came in from the bayous now and then, attracted by the city lights and smell of food, reacting viciously if humans tried to run them off.

It was a logical description of events, one that the media could swallow and regurgitate with sidebars about leash laws and the tragedy of heartless bastards who dumped their unwanted pets without a second thought. King Ladislaw, one of the evening's battle-scarred survivors, had spent time enough with the police in several states to know that there was no point in disputing the official version of events. As soon as he was reasonably satisfied as to his daughter's short-term safety, he had packed up the remainder of his tribe and hit the road. Aurelia had her ways of keeping in touch.

When she had spoken with her father, he had told a vital bit of trivia. The attackers had witnessed her leaving. The Romany had, as well, and they assumed she was fleeing, leaving them to their fate. Until the attackers ran off after her. Then the Gypsies had understood that the loups-garous were after her specifically. She had done a brave thing leading them away from the camp, alone and unprotected. And they all agreed it would be the best thing for her to stay away for the time being.

That was when she and Remo decided it would be best if she stuck with them.

Remo was getting his own little merry band of followers. Chiun spent most of his time lost in his own little world of meditation or Spanish-language TV. He was being uncharacteristically aloof, and he wasn't interested in telling Remo why. This was standard behavior for Chiun, who loved to create his little mysteries and impart wisdom by letting Remo learn things for himself. Right now Chiun claimed that he was allowing Remo to immerse himself fully in the role of Reigning Master of Sinanju. As far as Remo could tell, that meant he did all the work while Chiun "meditated" in front of the Mexican soap operas. With Chiun only physically present and with his two new companions, Remo felt like the guy in some bad TV show who wakes up to find himself living with the wrong family.

But between Cuvier and Aurelia, he sure had a full bait bucket.

"The best way I can help my people," Aureiia told Remo, "is to stay with you and see these monsters finally destroyed."

Since Remo was trying to accomplish exactly that, it was hard to turn her down. Come to think of it, it would have been hard to turn her down on anything.

But he knew he couldn't guarantee her safety, because he still didn't know for sure what they were up against. Was there one loup-garau, Leon, and a pack of trained dogs? Or were there several loups-garous?

Was he-or were they-really the product of the mad genius of Judith White? Or was there something different, something less explicable?

Remo frankly didn't have a clue what he was up against, except that Armand Fortier and company were at the root of it, their blood-stained Cajun fingers pulling strings behind the scenes.

With that in mind, he had decided on a visit to Atlanta, no real plan in mind except to meet the Cajun godfather in person, try to shake him up and crank his paranoia up an octave with the news that members of his home team in New Orleans had begun to crack.

Aside from Ham DuBois, in fact, it wasn't strictly true. The three gorillas in the cemetery would have talked, he was convinced, but they were simple button men, the kind of bottom feeders who digested rumors from the street and spit them back in garbled form. They would admit to serving Armand Fortier and "knew" he had a loup-garou on call for "special jobs," but anything beyond that point was garbled nonsense. Remo exhausted their meager store of intelligence and left them there, fresh customers for the New Orleans boneyard.

Which left Remo with his most important unanswered question-how to get to the loup-garou, the one he now knew was named Leon. But nobody really seemed to know how to get to Leon.

Fortier and friends would have no difficulty tracking down the stiffs in the graveyard, but short of scheduling a seance, there was no way to discover what, if anything, they had divulged before they died. With any luck at all, the prospect of informers in the ranks would amplify the innate paranoia that was part of every gangster's personality, alert to treachery from "friends" and relatives around the clock.

The first rule of organized crime had always been, would always be to do unto others before they could do it to you. Armand had come up through the ranks the hard way, killing or subverting those who blocked his path to power, and he knew damn well that others had been waiting in the wings, hoping for him to fall. His prison term had cleared the way for Bettencourt, but now that Fortier was trying for a comeback, with his bid for a new trial, he had to know that some of his old buddies would be just as glad to have him stay exactly where he was.

And maybe, if the Cajun godfather got anxious, if he started pushing hard enough, something would snap. If he began to whistle for his loup-garou...

That's what Remo was hoping for. That someone, anyone would draw out the werewolf. And the sooner the better. Every hour in New Orleans gave the enemy another chance to tag Jean Cuvier, another chance to kill Aurelia Boldiszar. He knew the woman and his witness were secure with Chiun, for now.

It was a dicey business, he decided, when you had a werewolf by the tail.

THE CROWDED STREETS PUT Leon off, disturbed him, conjuring sensations that were almost claustrophobic, but the summons had permitted no denial. If he had refused, as he was first inclined to do, there would be trouble. Exposure, on some level. He and the pack would have to flee their home and find another place to hide, outside the bayou country.

He hated to think of that happening. So he had come into the city, trusting Bettencourt's assurance that the free-for-all of Mardi Gras would mask him better than a physical disguise. No sweat, the go-between had promised him. Boss said just be himself.

And so he was.

Against all odds, he found a parking space two blocks from his appointed rendezvous and wedged the van into it, ramming bumpers fore and aft. If anybody noticed in his absence, they were free to jot down his license number. The plates were stolen and would be discarded once he got back home.

He locked the van and stepped into the maelstrom of activity that swirled around him, checking out the costumes, men on stilts, half-naked women, fireworks going off at random in the crowd, an all-pervasive smell of alcohol, gunpowder, sweat and lust that made him giddy, brought a hot rush of saliva to his mouth. It was the biggest, most frenetic freak show he had ever seen, but as he started for the sidewalk, part of Leon's brain still felt as if a spotlight followed him, some cosmic finger pointing to alert the dipshit normals that he wasn't one of them-that he was real.

As if in answer to his fears, a short man in a diaper stepped into his path, a beer bottle in one hand, giant pacifier in the other.

"Hey, man!" the intoxicated creature said to Leon. "That's some crazy costume. Where'd you find it?"

"It's homemade," the werewolf told him, stepping to one side.

The tipsy "infant" moved to block him. "Awesome," he said. "You got a card? How much did it cost?"

"It's not for sale," said Leon, finally brushing past the stranger, merging with the crowd. His skin was crawling, but another part of him was starting to relax.

Some crazy costume. If they only knew the half of it.

Leon had reviewed an ancient street map, creased and mildewed, prior to starting on his journey. He had memorized street names and landmarks, the historic buildings that were spotted on a map and unlikely to change their names. Thus readied for the challenge, he had no great difficulty finding where he meant to go, but there was still a nagging sense of others staring at him.

But nothing happened, and he made his way into the heart of the French Quarter. He could smell the Mississippi River, not so far away. Its smell was reminiscent of the bayou country, but without the stagnant odor of decay that was so common in the swamp. Now all he had to do was find the intersection and a certain restaurant.

The limousine was parked outside a smallish Cajun restaurant, the engine idling. One of Fortier's leg breakers stood beside the car, the only person visible to Leon who had opted for a business suit in lieu of more exotic garb. The Cajun did a double take as Leon stopped beside the car, and then a window powered down, in back. Someone inside the car spoke to the goon in French, the blacked-out window closed again and Fortier's gorilla held the door for Leon as he climbed into the car.

He settled on a jump seat, facing three more men in stylish suits. One of the younger pair leaned farward, reaching for him, but the Cajun in the middle hauled him back and shook his head.

"Don't be insultin' Leon, now," the oldest of the three men said. "He didn't come here to shoot me, did you, Leon?"

Leon shook his head. It was a stupid question, but he knew it would be rude to say so.

"I'm Merle Bettencourt," the boss man said. "I don't believe we've met before."

The Cajun knew damn well they hadn't met. Leon had only met his boss one time, and that had been enough for both of them. Merle glanced at Leon's shaggy hands, as if considering if they should shake, deciding he would pass.

"I guess you wonderin' why I call this meeting, hey?"

Leon had no response beyond a shrug. The man would tell him what he wanted when he got around to it. These "normal" men weren't always direct in dealings with one another, much less with a creature they regarded as a freak of nature.

"What it is," Merle Bettencourt went on, "is about that last man on the list you were supposed to handle for us."

It sounded like a question, but he didn't think it was, so Leon sat and waited.

"We need to get that job took care of right away, soon as you can," said Bettencourt. "And there's another thing come up just recently. Some guy been askin' around about you, like maybe he was lookin' for you."

Leon knew that, too, but he wouldn't reveal his knowledge to this stranger. He would deal with it in his own way and time.

"You hear me, Leon?" From the pinched expression on his face, Merle Bettencourt couldn't decide if he was puzzled or pissed off by Leon's silence.

"Yeah," the loup-garou replied. There was no reason he could think of to elaborate.

"Okay, then." Bettencourt relaxed a bit, but he was frowning. "Just one other little thing. About these Gypsies, now. What the hell is that about?" Leon considered his reply, took more time than most men would have required, since conversation was a lost art in his world. He knew exactly what he meant to say, but picking words to spell it out required some study.

"Friend of mine told me they askin' questions about my business," Leon said at last. "Which by, I mean your business, too."

One of the Cajun mobster's eyebrows crinkled in surprise. "That so?"

"What I was told."

"Who say that?" Bettencourt inquired.

"This Gypsy. I been knowin' him some time."

"You trust him?"

Leon shrugged at that. "He scared of me. Come told me what he seen."

"And you took care of that?" asked Bettencourt.

"I think so. Shook them up, at least."

"I'm wonderin' if maybe they mixed up with this old boy I told you about," the Cajun mobster said. "They mention him at all?"

"They didn't tell me nothin'," Leon said, as if it should be obvious. "Just scream and bleed is all."

"Uh-huh."

The mobster glanced at his gorillas, left and right, but both of them were staring at the wolf man, fingers on their gun hands twitchy with the urge to draw and fire. Leon imagined he could rip their throats out if they tried.

"Best watch out while you handlin' that job we talk about." said Bettencourt. "See maybe if you can't take out this other guy. Clean up the whole damn thing."

"I'll keep an eye out," Leon said.

"Do that," said Bettencourt. After a brief silence, he said, "I guess that's all."

Leon didn't see the signal, but the limo's door was opened by the outside man, as if on cue. Leon was half out of the car when Bettencourt called after him, "And finish up that job right quick, you hear?"

Outside, the freaks were still in charge. Leon felt more at home with them than he had with the "normals" in the limousine, and he didn't look back to see if they were watching him as he began the walk back to his van.

Chapter 12

"Another expert?" Remo kept his voice down, leaning in toward Cuvier so that Aurelia couldn't hear him from the bathroom, where she had retired to freshen up. "I'm getting tired of these side trips to nowhere."

"Jamie knows all about them loups-garous," the witness answered, sounding peevish. "You just wait and see."

"And you just thought of it?"

"He slipped my mind," said Cuvier, defensively, "with all the shit been goin' on."

"Uh-huh."

Remo glanced back at Chiun and found the Master of Sinanju Emeritus sitting three feet from the television, watching one of Reverend Rockwell's infomercials, piety and politics mixed up into a gumbo that was hard to swallow. Remo wondered what Chiun was gleaning from it, and decided it was better not to ask.

"Where are you going this time?" Chiun inquired when he was halfway to the door.

Remo could feel the angry color in his cheeks as he replied, "I have to see a man about a wolf."

It took him half an hour, winding through the crowded streets on foot, to find the address he was looking for. A block off Charles and up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled like mold or urine. He knocked and waited, knocked again and was about to leave when he heard footsteps on the other side. A little trapdoor opened to reveal one bloodshot eye. "What you want?"

"Jamie Lafite?"

"What you want?" the owner of the eye repeated. "I was sent here by a friend of yours, Jean Cuvier. He figured you could help me find a certain loup-garou."

The small hatch on the peephole slammed shut in a heartbeat, and he heard the tenant fumbling with some half-dozen locks and chains. The door creaked open seconds later, showing half a pallid face and one arm beckoning for Remo to come in. No sooner had he crossed the threshold onto threadbare, mousy-colored carpet than the door was closed again behind him, chains and latches rattling into place.

"You can't just talk about loup-garou like that, where anyone can hear you!"

Christ, he thought, another Cajun. This one seemed to be in his late thirties, but it was impossible to tell with any certainty. He had the waxy pale complexion of a movie vampire, evidence that he was rarely caught outside in daylight, and his long hair was parted in the middle, hanging down on both sides of his face in dusty-looking dreadlocks. He was anemic looking, skinny even by the standards of the modern diet generation.

"Jamie Lafite?"

"That's right. Who sent you here?"

"Jean Cuvier."

The pale man blinked. "Thought he was dead."

"Not yet."

The small apartment looked like something from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It had been weeks, or maybe months, since anyone had dusted, and the furniture had all the charm of cast-off items from a going-out-of-business sale at a Salvation Army thrift shop. All except the coffee table, which appeared to be a coffin, decorated with a pair of mismatched candlesticks. The centerpiece, a plastic human skull, was painted gray to make it seem more natural. "Nice place."

"I did it all myself."

"It shows."

"How you know Jean?" Lafite inquired.

"I'm looking out for him right now," said Remo. "He's in danger."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Remo considered giving him the address for House Beautiful and then decided not to push his luck. "I need to find the people who are after him. The werewolf and his buddies. Got his address?"

"Loup-garou ain't people," said Lafite. "You need to get that notion out of your head right now. But they like us, in some ways. All different, see? Some got more power than others. All the more you know about what you huntin', that one special loup-garou, the better chance you got of killing them."

"I don't know all that much," said Remo, "but I'm told he lives around New Orleans somewhere, and his first name may be Leon."

"Leon!" the pale man exclaimed when he regained a vestige of composure. "Leon Grosvenor, that has to be."

"You know him?"

"I know of him," the scrawny Cajun said. "Ain't nobody really knows a loup-garou, except maybe them he's killed. For Jean's sake, I can tell you this much on the house. Some people say Leon was born with powers of the loup-garou. That make him stronger, see? Not like the ones what have to sing the songs and beg for help. Ol' Leon had it goin' in."

"That's it?"

"They lots of stories go around," Lafite went on. "Some of them contradict the other. One say Leon killed and ate his mama, but another say folks took one look at them and left them on the bayou, sink or swim. Don't make no difference after thirty, forty years, whatever. Thing you gotta remember is that Leon's had a lifetime to find out what he can do." Remo considered that. A lifetime? Leon had always been this way? That didn't fit into the puzzle he was building in his head. "Leon only started working for the local bosses recently," he observed. Lafite got more nervous and his eyes twisted from side to side. "Leon came into his own. Not sure how or why. He offered up his services and did a free job. And he did it real good. That's when he went on the payroll."

"Yeah. So when did this happen?"

Lafite's face made a grimace that was the equivalent of a shrug. "No more than nine months ago. All of a sudden he a star player. This is what I heard."

"So where would I look for Leon?" asked Remo.

"You don't want do that, friend."

"Humor me."

"Most of the stories say he live out past Westwego somewhere, in the bayou country. Way back there, you don't find nothin' man, I guarantee."

WHEN LEON GROSVENOR came back to New Orleans, hours after meeting with Merle Bettencourt. he brought other members of his pack along. The Dodge Ram van was crowded, ripe with feral smells: excitement, tension, lust. As he negotiated teeming streets, he kept an eye out for potential obstacles and danger. Once, a mounted traffic cop bent down to peer at Leon through the driver's window of the van, examined him from less than fifteen feet, then smiled and flashed a cheery thumbs-up gesture. Leon was amazed.

Such fools these normals were.

There was no magic in the fact that he had managed to locate his quarry. Bettencourt's informers on the street had been engaged in canvassing hotels, and one of them had bribed a night-shift bellhop at Desire House to describe any "peculiar" guests. It was the ultimate in long shots during Mardi Gras, when damn near everyone was more or less peculiar, but the bellhop had recalled this group specifically: two white men, an old Chinaman and one extremely pretty girl. The female, dressed in Gypsy clothes, had shown up at Desire House on the same night Leon staged his raid against the Romany encampment outside town.

And so, he knew.

Who would the Gypsy woman run to in New Orleans, when she fled her tribe, but to the man who had come seeking after information about loups-garous? The very man, according to Merle Bettencourt's intelligence, who had prevented Leon from completing his clean sweep of targets on the present contract.

The question, then, was whether he could reach his prey in the hotel without creating so much chaos that police were summoned to the scene while he was still at work. Leon had no fear for himself, but men with guns might kill the other members of his pack, and he had no desire to jeopardize them needlessly.

No problem, he had finally decided. They could do it.

Turning down an alley half a block west of Desire House, Leon snarled and mashed his foot down on the brake pedal. Ten feet in front of him, a six-foot mummy was engaged in sex with what appeared to be a human skeleton. It took a closer look, illuminated by the van's headlights, for Leon to discover that the "skeleton" had small, firm breasts beneath her skintight costume, part of which had been unzipped and disarranged to let the sweating mummy ply his stout Egyptian tool.

The glare of headlights did not seem to faze the frantic fornicators, so Leon leaned on his horn. Two faces-one a skull, the other swathed in gauze-swiveled to face him, and the mummy flashed a bandaged middle finger toward the van., went back to thrusting with an urgency that said he wasn't getting much in all those years he spent beneath the pyramids.

That did it.

Beside Leon, the bitch was growling, anxious to be on about their business. Leon took his right foot off the brake and moved it back to the accelerator.

Gentle pressure on the pedal moving the van forward, inch by inch.

It took a moment for the undead lovers to discover what was happening, the visceral excitement of discovery turned into panic as the van bore down on them. The mummy disengaged, backed off a yard or so, his fleshy member bobbing in the Dodge Ram's high beams as he turned and ran. The living skeleton, for her part, scrambled for the cover of a nearby garbage bin, pale cheeks mooning Leon as she tumbled out of sight amid the trash.

He chased the mummy to an intersection, where the north-south alley met another running east-west at the rear of the hotels and shops on Tchoupitoulas Street. Leon turned right, or east, and wondered how long it would take the bandaged sprinter to decide that he was safe. If he forgot to check his fly before he hit the next main street, the mummy would be in for more exposure than he had originally planned, but who could say? He might just find another willing ghoul to help him with his problem.

Anything was possible at Mardi Gras.

The service entrance to Desire House had a little plaque beside the door for the convenience of deliverymen who lost their way. Leon drove past it, hissing at the bitch to stop her grumbling, and parked the Dodge Ram three doors farther east. The van was wearing stolen plates, but he preferred to take no chances with an eyewitness description, just in case.

The bellhop had informed Merle Bettencourt's gorilla that the foursome Leon sought had occupied a third-floor suite that fronted Tchoupitoulas Street. He had the number-304-and took it as an omen that the digits added up to seven, which was always lucky. He ignored the small voice in his head that asked, Lucky for whom?

The true risk started when he parked the van. From that point on, he and the pack would be exposed, their every move a gamble. There was no one in the alley to oppose them at the moment, but there would be staff members and guests in the hotel, and precious time would pass as he led the pack upstairs, the ruckus starting when he crashed the door to 304 and tore into the people he had come to kill.

Four targets now, instead of one. The witness, he would recognize from photographs. The Gypsy woman and the Chinaman would both be obvious on sight. The only man remaining would be Leon's nemesis, the hunter who was seeking information on the loup-garou.

This night, that one would learn more about the wolf man's power than he ever cared to know.

He left the van unlocked, the youngest male detailed to guard it, brooding in resentment when he realized that he would miss out on the kill. It mollified the youngster slightly that there would be no real time for feeding, but they rarely got the chance to kill four humans at a time, and it was still a treat to savor, if you got the chance.

The bitch was on his heels as Leon stepped out of the vehicle, the other four beside him in a moment. They were silent shadows as they moved along the alley, Leon taking point. From somewhere to their left, the muffled sounds of revelry from Tchoupitoulas Street reminded him that there was still a party going on.

So much the better, then. His pack would join in the festivities and add a little flavor of their own. The taste of blood.

CHIUN'S MOOD HAD GONE from bad to worse since his arrival in New Orleans, but the Master of Sinanju knew he concealed it well, presenting a facade of perfect calm to the pathetic specimens around him.

It was bad enough that he was traveling with strangers, forced to stay in a hotel where noisy drunkards lurched about the halls and made commotion in the street around the clock. The desk clerk had insulted him by staring when they registered. The scrawny dwarf who led them to their so-called suite was more respectful, glancing only twice at Chiun, but he had prattled on incessantly about the "big, big party" that was going on outside.

The hotel was an older building, ill maintained, and while Chiun saw evidence of cleaning in their rooms, the maids were clearly not enthusiastic in their work.

But the television was the worst insult of all.

It was an ancient Motorola, ten years past its prime, with washed-out color and sporadic bursts of static that appeared to coincide with the flush of toilets in adjacent rooms. He could have tolerated poor reception, though, if there had been a reasonable choice of channels. As it was, despite the size and splendor of New Orleans, he could pick up only six. One broadcast constantly in French. French!

When it came dawn to it, New Orleans was far too French.

The holy man was on the television again, his face distorted as he waved a Bible at the camera, calling on his Christian brothers to get out and vote for God's anointed candidate. He spoke of Christian love, but with the sound turned low, his face became a twisted mask of hatred, spewing silent bile from narrow, bloodless lips.

Chiun wondered who would vote for such a man to lead them, and the answer came to him at once: Americans.

New Orleans, Chiun decided, was far too American.

Despite the revels that continued incessantly in the streets, Chiun heard the approaching pack long before they reach the room. He knew that they were not human.

"Get to cover!" he barked. Cuvier and the woman, wrapped in their own thoughts, looked at him bewildered.

"They come!" Chiun said sharply.

The pair of imbeciles scrambled for cover. Chiun heard the rush of flesh and positioned himself in the middle of the room when the door burst inward, dead bolt shattered, pieces of the locking mechanism hurled across the room to scar wallpaper.

A gray wolf lunged into the room, immediately followed by another and another. To Chiun's left, the Gypsy woman screamed again and took off running for the nearest bedroom, with a snarling canine in pursuit. The white man yelped, his wind pipe closing on him, hastily retreating to the balcony, where he would soon be trapped.

A manlike shadow loomed behind the wolf pack, filling up the doorway, but Chiun had no time to examine the intruder. A stocky canine rushed at him, leaping furiously toward his face.

REMO SMELLED TROUBLE, literally, when he walked into the lobby of Desire House. It was too subtle to have been noticed by the few jabbering guests or the night clerk nodding at his post, but Remo caught a whiff of it instantly. It was the smell of animals. Canine. A lot of them.

He took the stairs in lightning leaps and picked up the first sounds of combat when he tore through the landing for the second floor. A woman's scream, a crash of furniture, mixed up with snarling and the snapping of fangs.

Remo reached the third floor a second later. He was at the west end of the hall, perhaps one hundred feet from number 304. In the dim lighting he saw the door to his suite of rooms was open, spilling light into the corridor. The crashing continued but the snarling had turned to animal yelps and whines, and then a hulking man-shape cleared the threshold, followed rapidly by one, two, three sleek canine forms.

Remo never slowed, tearing after the fleeing attackers, but glanced through the open door of 304. The smallish parlor was totaled, furniture upended, stuffing ripped out of the sofa's lacerated cushions, coffee table halved as if by an ax-wielding lunatic. A large dog, charcoal gray, lay stretched out near the center of the room, unmoving, obviously dead.

Jean Cuvier was gaping at him from the balcony, crouched and peering through a small gap in the curtains like a Peeping Tom. Aurelia Boldiszar stood in the doorway to her sleeping room, with Chiun beside her. At their feet, another lifeless canine, this one with more brown than gray to his untidy coat.

The attackers had speed. Animal speed, goaded by blind panic. The man-thing in the lead was faster even than the others.

But not faster than Remo Williams.

The man-thing looked over his shoulder and barked an order. One of the beasts skidded to a haft at the bottom of the stairs and stood his ground, baring his teeth and growling menacingly. He started the growl, anyway, and then realized the human wasn't showing fear. Wasn't even slowing and was coming at him with the speed of an avalanche.

Then the avalanche hit him. The creature barely had time to think about snapping at the human before the human brought a fist down hard on his canine skull, reducing it to jelly.

Remo was back in the lobby. The wolf man got lucky. A couple was coming in at that moment, the doors open wide. If the wolf man and the pack had slowed enough to open a door or even to crash through the glass. Remo would have been upon them.

As it was, he was just inches behind them as they slithered between the entering couple and into the thick of Mardi Gras. Remo made a bounding leap and caught the last of the beasts by the tail. And pulled hard, pulled fast. Between the beast's forward momentum and the strength of the yank, something had to give.

Remo quickly came upon the yowling, wounded beast in a rapidly clearing space in the street. The thing turned to face him.

"Looking for this?" Remo held up the bloody tail. "I think I'll use it to make a hat."

The beast's growl became a leopard screech, and it came at him in a bound that was fast. Very fast. Remo knew in that instant that he was facing no ordinary dog.

That confirmed his suspicions. And it pissed him off.

The dog was airborne and homing in on his throat with fangs like saw blades, but the teeth never connected with living flesh. Remo grabbed and flung the creature, which found itself flying way beyond its planned trajectory.

Up over the soaring crowd and onto the balcony of a hotel room that faced the street. It took Remo less than one second to shot put the beastie, but for a moment he thought it had been too much. The pack was gone.

He continued moving fast, slithering through the masses like some impossibly quick serpent, and his senses fanned out. He struggled to identify the countless sounds around him. Hundreds of human beings with noisy heartbeats and thunderous breathing, not to mention the miasma of intoxicated chatter.

But through it all he heard one unique sound. Panting.

He concentrated in vain to pin down its precise location.

Time to use the old noggin. Not his. Everybody else's.

Remo took a step up, and the step carried him six feet off the ground, where he began running along the heads of the revelers. Without thinking about it, his feet found the correct pressure level of each head of hair they landed on and used it to support him momentarily before he moved to the next.

Nothing to it. As easy as walking on water. From his elevated vantage point it was easy to find the scattered bodies his adversaries left in their wake. The beasts and their werewolf leader were intent on getting away fast and muscling anyone and everyone out of their path. Remo stepped back onto solid earth-in his own wake he left several drunks scratching their heads and wondering what had just brushed over it.

Remo suddenly had the advantage, using the path through the crowd that the werewolf's pack was clearing, which slowed them. In a flash he came alongside the last dog in the pack and gave him an open-handed shove just between the shoulder blades. The beast was crushed into the pavement like a bug under a shoe, his spine a shambles.

The pack was veering into an alley. Remo snatched the next dog by the scruff of the neck and lifted it to shoulder level.

The dog flailed his powerful canine legs and craned this way and that, snapping his powerful jowls. It was all wasted energy. He couldn't reach far enough to sink his great canine fangs into his captor. He was helpless.

Remo didn't even notice his prisoner's struggles. He was too pissed off.

Because the alley was empty. The wolf man was nowhere to be seen.

Then he heard the squeal of tires and he sped off in search of it, into the street and then another alley. He was behind the Desire House.

There were human bodies scattered at the far end of the alley where a vehicle had gone through the crowd. Some of those people looked like they wouldn't be getting up again.

Remo had a new path to follow and sprinted along the trail of victims around another building. Another narrow street.

There had been revelers in the street, but the werewolf's vehicle hadn't even slowed. There had been nowhere for the revelers to run. Remo saw an astronaut and a green alien and a belly dancer, their costumes making a mockery of their crushed and lifeless bodies.

Remo found the werewolf's vehicle a block later, but the werewolf was gone.

There were people dead underneath the van. People were screaming and shouting while only twenty feet away the drunk partyers were oblivious to the horror. A wounded woman wearing a coconut bikini top and a grass skirt was sobbing over a pair of man's legs that were attached to a pelvis that was pinned and flattened under the front tire of the van. Remo smelled the animal odors from the vehicle. He reached out his senses fervently again, and for a moment, through the steady clamor of voices, he thought he heard the canine panting. Then it was gone.

The hula girl started screaming. She was screaming at Remo Williams. "He's one of them! That's one of the dogs!"

Remo had virtually forgotten his prisoner, who was hanging limply in one hand, paws groping weakly at the air.

Remo moved fast into the nearest alley, too fast to be followed.

How many dead? Innocent, stupid party drunks. Just a bunch of people out having a good time, and now how many were dead?

How many of them wouldn't be dead if Remo Williams, Reigning Master of Sinanju, had put a stop to Judith White once and for all? It wasn't as though he hadn't had the opportunities.

The blood of the dead parryers was on his hands. "And you," he said menacingly, swinging the dog underhanded and sending him flopping down the alley, scoring a perfect strike on a collection of overstuffed garbage cans. The beast scrambled to his feet with amazing speed, but his speed wasn't nearly amazing enough.

Remo was on the beast and struck with both hands at his forelegs. The legs didn't just break. They broke off. The dog yowled and frantically tried to make his front stumps work.

"I know what you are," Remo said. "Come on. Show me."

"Ohmigod! What are you doing to that poor dog?" A rotund woman in a great purple paisley muumuu and purple face paint moved to intervene. "Stop it this instant!"

Remo ignored her. His hand snicked at the beast and came back with a bloody ear. "Show me!" The huge purple woman tromped down the alley with an illuminated wand of some sort. "Stop it! Stop torturing that poor animal!"

Remo was in a fury and when he turned on the massive purple blob, she stopped cold. Nothing she had seen in all her years of Mardi Gras prepared her for the eyes that radiated death.

"Oh, yeah? A poor animal?" He took the whining beast off the ground with one hand and slammed him against the brick wall. The blood from the severed front legs flew in twin arcs. "Show us!" Remo raged at the creature.

"Stop! Stop!" the woman sobbed.

"Show us both, you freak!"

The blazing red eyes of the dying beast looked into the black dead eyes of the Destroyer. "Who... you... callin'... freak, freak?" the dog said.

Chapter 13

The bitch howled until the stolen station wagon overflowed with her mournful cry.

"Shut up!" Leon Grosvenor growled.

She howled again, a desolate canine figure collapsed against the door in the passenger seat.

"I said, shut up!" he groused, clawing the air at her.

The bitch responded with a vicious snarl and she chomped at his hand, which he quickly withdrew to the steering wheel.

Leon Grosvenor, the alpha male, had just been subdued by his own bitch.

The other male in the car witnessed the alpha's submission.

The bitch raised her head at the roof of the Toyota and wailed like a lonely graveyard wind.

The male, with a disdainful glare at Leon in the rearview mirror, raised his voice to join her.

The bitch had forgotten how to cry real tears. There had been a time when she could truly weep, but that was before, when she was a normal.

The time of pain had changed everything.

Once she had been human. Then came the time of pain. She still didn't understand what caused it, but the time of pain was hell on Earth. It was agony beyond endurance, and yet she endured. Day after day. Week after week. She never knew how long the pain went on.

The leader was always there during that period, nursing his pack through the agonies of the change. The bitch hated him in the early days, when the pain had just started and she was still mostly normal.

Soon she forgot her reasons for despising him and she learned to love the leader. He brought her fresh meat and water. He stroked her hair as she writhed against her torment. She felt her bond growing with the alpha male.

Her human side and her wolf side both admired his compassion as he cared for his pack during that marathon of suffering that went on night after night, as the moon went from full to new to full again.

Some of them didn't survive. She saw the leader take their clenched and contorted bodies away. But those who survived the time of pain were remade, no longer normal. Now they were these very special beasts, and together they made up a very special pack. The alpha male was accepted as the pack leader without question in those early days. He protected them and fed them and commanded them.

But he protected them no longer. Instead he took them away from the safety of their isolated bayou home and, for reasons none of them could comprehend, he transported them into the open where they were exposed. The feeding was good, but they could feed in the swamp.

They had been discomfited by the danger, but none dared oppose the alpha male.

But now he had brought them death.

The bitch understood death. And she knew that tonight, one of the dead beasts from her pack had been an individual she had known well when she was human.

Back when they had both been human, before the time of pain, before the change, before she had become the alpha male's bitch, she had been a... a wife. That was the word.

There had been a human who had been herman? No, the word was "husband."

She and her husband had come to the bayou, back when they were human. They had come with all the others to sleep in small cloth houses and see the trees and the animals.

The husband had a name when he was a human. He had been Jasper.

The bitch didn't understand why she cared so much about Jasper. She was the alpha male's bitch now. That was simply how it was, after the time of pain. Jasper had become just another member of the pack.

Now Jasper was dead. The inexplicable pain she felt now was almost as bad as the pain of the change. It was also the most human feeling she had known in all those long months since she had stopped being normal.

"YOU MEAN it wasn't even a dog?" Remo asked incredulously.

"It was a wolf," Chiun explained in his singsong voice. "Anyone can tell a wolf from a dog."

"I've seen German shepherds that look a lot like that."

Chiun shook his head. "But this is a wolf. As much as it was anything."

When Remo switched to Korean he got stares from Aurelia Boldiszar, who was standing off to one side of the room silently, her arms folded beneath her breasts. Cuvier was on the threadbare couch trying not to go fetal. "The thing talked to me, Chiun," Remo said.

The old Korean showed surprise. Just for a moment, he froze. It was such a brief reaction that the Romany beauty and the Cajun ugly missed it entirely. "Spoke?"

"I forced it to."

Chiun looked at him questioningly.

"I knew the minute I saw them that they weren't natural dogs. Or wolves or whatever."

"As did I," Chiun said, looking seriously at one of the beasts sprawled dead in the hotel room. "And yet I was not inclined to converse with it."

"I wasn't after some polite chitchat. I was trying to prove something."

"What?" Chiun looked at him.

Remo switched to English without realizing it. "You know goddamn well what. That it was human."

"You kill old loup-garou," Cuvier interjected, "he change back to what he was before."

Remo shook his head morosely. "Don't count on it."

"How could one of these things talk?" Chiun continued in Korean.

"Well, it didn't do it very well, but it was good enough for me to understand," Remo insisted. "They used to be human, Little Father. Anyway, none of them was Leon Grosvenor."

Cuvier stood up fast when he heard the very nonKorean name amid the otherwise unintelligible conversation. "Leon? You didn't tell me Armand got Leon Grosvenor after me."

"You know the guy?" Remo asked.

"I hear some story," said the Cajun, sounding even more depressed. "Reckon I'm dead." He turned to Aurelia Boldiszar.

"That was no man," Aurelia said. "I saw it, felt it. We were in the presence of a devil."

"Well, he ran like one," Remo said.

Chiun made a small, exasperated clucking sound and shook his head.

"What about them other wolves?" Cuvier demanded.

"I took out a few before they slipped off. I don't know how many got away with him."

Another cluck from Chiun.

"Go shove it, Chiun, you couldn't have done any better," Remo griped.

To Cuvier he said, "Get packed."

"What?" Jean Cuvier had gone from frightened to confused, with no real change in his expression.

"Get your things. We're clearing out before the cops get here."

"Cops! Merde!" he blurted, and rushed to pack his suitcase.

Aurelia Boldiszar had come to Remo with nothing but the clothes she wore. She was as ready to bail out, right then, as she would ever be. While the Cajun completed his hasty packing she stood over one of the dead creatures, staring at the lolling tongue and the half-open eyes.

"These weren't ordinary wolves," she said. "They're not werewolves. Still, they may share the werewolf's spirit and commune with him in other ways. They are familiars."

"Like a witch's cat, you mean?"

"Perhaps."

"So you think this is witchcraft, whatever made the werewolf?" Remo asked. "You're saying these are spirit wolves? I told you, they're science experiments. Laboratory freaks."

"You are not listening," she said. "The loup-garou is closer to an animal than normal men. It doesn't matter what created them-he still may commune with others of his kind, draw strength from them."

"Collaborate?"

"Perhaps."

"So, he's the alpha male? Top dog?"

"The others followed him," Aurelia said. "That's all I know."

Cuvier rejoined them then, his heavy suitcase dragging down one shoulder. "Where we going?" he asked.

Remo had formed the answer in his mind already, without knowing it. "Your friend Lafite told me where we can find this thing," he said. He could have added, "more or less," but kept it to himself.

"Where is that?" The Cajun sounded gravely ill at ease.

"Where do you think? We're going on a camping trip," he said.

Remo stripped the blankets off the bed Cuvier had used and quickly wrapped the wolf corpses.

Aurelia asked, "What will you do with those?"

"Present for a friend."

ONLY WHEN THEY WERE safely back on the hermit's land, deep in the swamp with the rest of the wolves, did the leader howl with his pack. His grief was at last allowed to come out, and the sound of it echoed among the cypress trees for miles around.

For almost a year his pack had lived and run and thrived together. None of them had ever been lost, no matter what the dangers. But tonight the tables turned. So many of his brothers cut down, dead, in a matter of just minutes.

What had gone wrong?

The old Asian should have been the first to die, an easy target, but he stood his ground as if the sight of hungry wolves in his hotel room was nothing new. When the little old man struck, it came with speed that Leon's eyes could barely follow, wielding lethal force the wolf man's brain still couldn't comprehend. Within a fraction of a second Leon saw his proud young brother stretched out dead on the floor.

Another of the pack pursued the Gypsy woman as she tried to run away, when the Chinaman had struck again!

Leon couldn't have honestly described the way the old man moved from one point to another, traveling some twenty feet to intercept the second wolf before it reached the woman. Another flurry of the old man's fists-or was it feet?-and Leon saw a second brother crumple lifeless on the hotel carpet. It was then that Leon knew fear.

Before Leon could react to the old man, his warning instinct shrilled and he knew help was coming for the old Asian-someone else who carried death in bloodstained hands. Leon's nerve broke.

He retreated, knowing that the bitch would blame him-possibly the others, too-and that they would be right.

He led his brothers and the bitch in a coward's retreat-and they were struck down like cowards by a foe even more lethal than the Chinaman. Leon had caught a glimpse of the horror and still couldn't believe what he had seen. The younger man with the dead eyes had ripped the tail right off one of his brothers, then had launched the wolf into the side of the building. With one hand. And had done it with enough force to shatter the beast.

He and his brothers bullied their way through the crowd, but the mass of normals slowed them down. The one with the dead eyes caught up in seconds. Another wolf dead from a single blow to the spine. Another wolf snatched up by the scruff of the neck like a housecat!

That was when a lucky break in the crowd allowed Leon to streak back to the van. He was already blinded by his own tears, which blurred the shapes of the people that got in the way of his vehicle. He simply drove through them and remembered feeling the thump of bodies bouncing off the van. Screams followed in his wake, but all Leon could think of was that his brothers were dead.

Another crowd. He didn't even try to slow. Just let the van slam into the mass of costumed humans and come to a stop-then he and his companions emerged and fled through the city of horrors.

He had taken fully half the pack with him on this trip, and now there were just two wolves remaining-the bitch and the guard wolf he had left with the van during the hotel incursion.

It took the pathetic trio twenty minutes more to find another vehicle, because most Mardi Gras participants were roaming aimlessly on foot. At last they came upon a normal in a Toyota Tercel station wagon, just emerging from an all-night liquor store. He had a paper bag in one hand, a twelve-pack in the other, and he never knew what hit him, dying on his feet before he had a chance to be afraid.

They were too frightened to feed. They scrambled into the car and raced back to the bayou to mourn. Those were his brothers-dead!

More than that-those wolves were his children. He had created them.

THE WOMAN WHO CAMPED on the Hermit's land, who called herself Thena, had asked Leon to come visit her laboratory on wheels.

Leon liked Thena. She didn't flinch from him. She had something of the animal in her, too. He had begun thinking that maybe, somehow, he and the woman...

Was such a thing totally out of the question? He, Leon, the loup-garou, the killer and hunter, was shocked when he entered the laboratory. Thena had been busy collecting animals of all shapes and sizes from the bayou, and parts of them littered the interior of the laboratory. Many parts were stored in glass laboratory freezers. Other parts were chewed to the bone and tossed in plastic bins or simply scattered on the floor and the counter.

That was when the woman, Thena, made him the offer he couldn't refuse. With one simple sip of a solution, she could make him into a true hunter-a genuine, more-than-human loup-garou.

Leon accepted the offer without hesitation. Thena laughed delightedly, showing her strong white teeth, and then she made him something to drink.

She took a small glass laboratory bottle from one of the little refrigerators-the one with the label 942 Solution-and poured the contents into a paper cup. "Just drink," she said.

So Leon drank.

"What's the matter?" she asked as he sat heavily down on one of the folding chairs.

"It hurts," he said.

She looked confused. "Bad?"

"Not too bad."

But it lasted a long time. Hours. And he felt sore for weeks afterward. His face and his arms. His very bones hurt. He didn't know it that night, but his bones were changing. Lengthening.

But that night he became a true loup-garou. He and the woman hunted together, and she was delighted with his new strength and speed.

"My wonderful wolf man!" she exclaimed happily when he emerged from the water with a struggling gator draped over one shoulder.

Together they feasted on the gator, still weakly struggling as they tore it apart with their talons and teeth. Thena, he found, might look entirely normal, but she could kill and devour prey like a tigress.

On the way home, she told him to kill the hermit. Then the bayou would be all theirs.

"It already is," Leon argued. "He'll let us do as we please."

"I can't allow him to know what has occurred," Thena said with a heartless shrug.

Leon Grosvenor wanted very much to please her. But kill the old hermit, the only father he had ever known? "Never," he declared.

"You will do as I command!" Thena snapped, suddenly furious.

"Not that," Leon responded. They argued, but Leon stood his ground.

Thena became very quiet the rest of the way home.

THEY PARTED COMPANY that night with short words, and Leon waited in the woods a few hundred paces from the RV laboratory, then realized she might smell him. He moved into the nearest body of water, a stagnant pool of murk, and sank almost completely.

Near dawn he heard the woman emerge from the laboratory and scamper off into the bayou.

When Leon entered the laboratory, he found her notes. "Canis lupus 942 standard dilution too potent. Subject improved to dangerous extremes. Physical traits outstanding but diminished obedience and enhanced self-control characteristics make subordination of subject inadequate."

There was much more that Leon couldn't understand. Latin phrases, something about genetics, but the phrase "termination of subject" caught his eye.

What angered him the most was that she had never liked him. She had just used him. For a damn experiment. And now she was planning to kill him. Leon had thought that he had finally found companionship-someone like him. But every word she said was a lie.

Then Leon got a brilliant idea.

He would make himself some companions.

HE LEFT THE LABORATORY With a specially insulated pouch filled with glass bottles from the little refrigerator. Dry ice packs fitted inside to keep the bottles cold.

Heading for the hermit's cabin, he smelled the blood a half mile away. He found Thena squatting on the sagging porch with a chunk of red, bloody meat in her mouth.

"Join me," she called from the porch.

Leon stood in the trees, great sorrow over the loss of the hermit competing with a savage desire to join the feast. The blood scent called him like a siren song.

Then he saw Thena freeze, her eyes locking on the insulated pack. She knew at once, of course, what Leon had done.

"Give that to me." Her voice was cold and commanding.

"Never."

"Give it to me now!"

Compelled by his need to obey this strange woman, and burning with desire to sink his teeth into the fresh, warm kill, Leon did the hardest thing he had ever done.

He left.

Because to stay, he knew, would somehow mean his death.

The woman came after him.

Leon ran, and he was faster than she was. He laughed at her from the distance. "I am stronger than you are!" he taunted.

He left her behind in the night, running miles into the bayou. Cautiously he returned in the daylight to find Thena and her mobile laboratory were gone. He had scared her off.

The hermit was no longer so attractive a meal. He was cold and growing sour, but Leon filled his belly anyway and put the remains in the water where the gators would dispose of it. Then Leon went looking for campers.

He knew of a university field camp where the grad students spent their weekends taking samples of the water and plants and bugs. They made measurements of the depth of the bayou, set up no-kill traps, set up nets with lights to trap night insects. It all looked pointless to Leon.

Somehow, he liked the idea of using these brainy types for what he had in mind.

He found their camp deserted in mid-morning. A collapsible five-gallon water jug was in the shade. Leon emptied it.

The bottles in the insulated pack were a little different from what he remembered, but the label still said 942. He poured every last drop of the stuff into the water jug.

The students returned, dirty and hot from a morning of toiling in the swamp. There were more of them than he had expected. Mostly men in their midtwenties. Two older men were addressed by the others as "Professor." One beautiful young woman stayed close by the side of a strong, bright-eyed young man.

One by one they began to help themselves to the water. It took fifteen minutes before the first one fell to the ground, screaming in agony. Soon they were all stricken, on the earth writhing and moaning, racked with monstrous pain.

Leon ran through the bayou this way and that, whimpering and whining in panic. By the time he returned to the camp the old men were already dead, their bodies locked in tight, contorted balls. The others were helpless in their agony-or unconscious from the pain.

It had not been like this for him! There was some pain. He still hurt, in fact. But nothing like this! Only then did he bother to consider the labels on the bottles he had emptied into the water jug. They said 942, just like the bottle he had drunk from in Thena's laboratory. But his bottle had said "solution." What did that mean? Why would the word "solution" be on a bottle?

Then he remembered what the word "solution" might mean in that context. What he had consumed was a diluted solution of the 942. And what he had put in the campers water jug was plain, pure 942. Full strength.

What would undiluted 942 do to them? Would it kill them all, like the old men?

Over the next few weeks, a couple more of them did die. The rest of them were in such constant agony that they certainly wished they were dead.

Leon carried them to the hermit's shack, two pain-wracked bodies at a time. Soon the tiny structure was filled with moaning human worms too intoxicated with misery to even get to their feet.

Those who died were fed to the gators.

The screaming really started when their bones began to push through their skin. That was about the second week. There would be blood and thrashing and finally merciful unconsciousness. The wound would close in a matter of hours, but soon another bone would penetrate to the outside world.

The screaming never stopped. Leon thought he was going as insane as the students. He fed them with all the fresh meat he could find. He bathed them with buckets of swamp water to wash away the blood and their own waste.

It was only in the third week that he began to see clearly what was happening. The students were changing, just as he had changed, but they were changing faster and they were changing completely. They were becoming true wolves.

The bitch was the first to be done with it, six weeks after the metamorphosis commenced. She was a real wolf now. She went to her still-prostrate lover, gave him a sniff and then walked unsteadily to Leon.

She licked his foot.

The next day, she went into the bayou with him and they hunted together for less than an hour. She was exhausted and invigorated when she came back with her hare, and she devoured it in front of the others.

Over the next several days, they all began to find their strength. The hunting parties became larger. And then one day the entire group of transformed creatures left the stench-filled hermit's shack all together.

They were a wolf pack.

And Leon was the alpha wolf. And the bitch was his bitch. Life was good.

He had been happy then, and he foresaw a long lifetime of hunting and running with his pack.

But less than a year later, much of his pack was dead, and the others no longer looked at him with the adoration and obeisance he was accustomed to.

Revenge would be sweet, but more importantly revenge was absolutely necessary if he intended to regain the trust of the pack.

The Chinaman would have to die. So, too, the woman who had managed to elude them at Desire House, the malicious Gypsy witch. And especially the younger man who ran faster than a wolf and killed with a touch.

He and the Chinaman were of a kind, but what that kind was Leon Grosvenor did not know. One thing for sure. Those two weren't normals.

REMO STOPPED at the first gas station outside town. It was a huge, brightly lit complex with something like eighteen gas pumps. Several of them were being used by rowdy partyers who shouted and whooped as they gassed up.

He found the pay phone at the far side of the parking lot and leaned on the one button. Somehow this connected him to Folcroft Sanitarium and the offices of CURE.

"Lucky Dollar Store and Incense Emporium," said a voice in heavily accented English.

Remo looked at the phone. Looked at the keypad. Had he accidentally held down the wrong button? "Hello?" the voice said.

"Hello?"

"Is Harold home?" Remo asked.

"Remo, it's about time," Harold W. Smith said suddenly.

"What's with the hired help who answered the phone?" Remo demanded.

"That's a new automated system for weeding out undesirable calls," Smith explained quickly. "Believe it or not, there are people out there who have nothing better to do than see what happens if they hold down their 1 button. The system will let you through as soon as you speak and it recognizes your voiceprint. Now give me your report."

"Fine, thanks," Remo complained. "The report is I just spent my evening chasing wolves around N' awlins."

"Yes, we've been getting the reports of several wolf attacks in the French Quarter," Smith said. "Also about the attack on the Romany camp. I spoke with Master Chiun about that earlier. I wish you would have phoned more quickly, Remo. Master Chiun is not, er, precise when it comes to details."

"Yeah, well, I was busy." Remo quickly ran down the events that had occurred since arriving in New Orleans. He ended by describing his questioning of the last wolf.

"You questioned it?" Smith asked dubiously.

"I tortured it, if you must know," Remo said.

"And?" Smith asked noncommittally.

"It talked."

"It talked?"

"Yeah."

"The wolf talked?"

"Read my effing lips. It effing talked, Smitty. The thing used to be human. Dr. White's really outdone herself this time."

"Remo," Dr. Smith said quietly, "I agree that Judith White achieved some shocking physiological changes in her subjects. But to make a man into a wolf-it seems unlikely."

"Figure it out for yourself," Remo said. "I've got one of the chatterboxes in the trunk of the rental. Test him out. You're gonna find all kinds of DNA or genetic material or whatever little buggies people normally have that wolves don't."

"Is it-"

"Dead as a doornail, and it'll be getting ripe by morning. Have somebody come pick it up." Remo gave Smith the location in Westwego he expected to be leaving the car and described his plans for moving into the bayou-and forcing Leon Grosvenor into the open.

"All right." Smith sighed heavily. "It'll take some doing, but I'll have it picked up and sent to a private lab for testing. When will you be able to report in again?"

"First phone booth I find in the bayou," Remo said.

"How will you get the test results?" Smith asked. "They could be revealing as to the nature of these creatures."

"I know their nature, and it ain't natural," Remo said. "My objective is to make them dead. Except Leon. Him I want to ask questions and then make dead."

"You still think he'll give you a lead on Judith White?" Smith asked.

Remo felt grim and he said, "No. But it can't hurt to ask. Can't hurt me, anyway. Now, Leon, it's gonna hurt."

"YOU SURE about this, Reverend?"

"Course I'm sure," the portly televangelist told Jeremiah Smeal. "It's perfect, son. I know exactly what I'm doin'. Just you wait and see."

The Reverend Rockwell could sympathize with Smeal's misgivings, staring at the empty auditorium and hearing all that whoop-to-do outside. As far as he could figure out, no one had ever tried to stage a mass revival in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, much less right smack-dab in the middle of the French Quarter, but that was what appealed to Rockwell. He would be the first, which meant he would be noticed. That meant free publicity!

The campaign TV spots were eating up his money faster than he had expected, and he didn't like those rumors that the IRS was gearing up to scrutinize his books at JBN. Rockwell had a team of born-again accountants handling the money side of things, with strict instructions not to leave a paper trail, but there was always something for a bloodhound to latch on to if you let him sniff around for very long.

Rockwell's temporary answer to the two-fold problem, ready cash and federal scrutiny, was Mission Mardi Gras, two nights of hellfire and damnation-with an option for a third night, if the crowds were large enough-that would replenish empty coffers and supply him with a whole new audience. The program would be run in its entirety on JBN, of course, but local TV news had also been alerted to stand by for something big from Reverend Rockwell.

The auditorium was one block south of Charles, near Audubon Park. It wasn't huge compared to some of the New Orleans theaters and concert halls, but Rockwell had chosen it both for its proximity to the French Quarter and for the nightly rental rate, which he found very reasonable.

And with any luck at all, there would be news cameras on hand to catch the show.

As if in answer to his thoughts, Smeal said, "You think they'll come?"

Rockwell didn't have to ask who they were. News people with minicams. The sacred talking heads. "They'll come," the televangelist replied. "God told me so."

That wasn't strictly true, of course. The scheme had come to him while he was on the toilet, battling the chronic constipation that had plagued him ever since he tossed his halo in the ring to run for governor. Rockwell had been straining like a modern Jacob wrestling with the angel and refusing to give up before he got his blessing, when it hit him. First, the flood gates opened down below, and then a light went on upstairs: a Mardi Gras revival! Free airtime!

He would present the greatest story ever told to fans and new recruits alike, while just outside the door old Satan staged his biggest party of the year.

He scanned the silent auditorium, imagining a crowd that spilled into the aisles, all swaying, chanting, lifting hands to Jesus, opening their wallets, purses, cracking piggy banks.

"I want this whole place SRO tomorrow night," the reverend told his flunky.

"SRO?"

"Standing room only," Rockwell explained, and offered up a silent prayer for patience in the face of rank stupidity. "I don't care if you have to drag them off the street in costume," he continued. "Better yet, I want a few of them in costume. Maybe half a dozen."

"Right," Smeal said. "What for?"

"To show the power of the word," Rockwell said, remembering that patience was a virtue of the saints. "Poor sinners out there drinkin', fornicatin' in the streets, dressed up like demons out of hell itself, but even they find Jesus in New Orleans. Even they receive his message. Even they are saved."

He fell into the singsong pattern of his TV sermons automatically, from force of habit. "Even they can testify to Christ's redeeming glory. Everyone out there in television land will feel the power of His message."

"Amen!" enthused Jeremiah Smeal. The Reverend Rock was on a roll.

"YOU SURE about this, Elmo?" Maynard Grymsdyke sounded dubious.

"Hell, yes, I'm sure," Breen said. "The polls tell me we're twenty points ahead of that ol' son of a bitch in New Orleans, nearly twenty-five statewide. Besides, it's Mardi Gras."

"I still think-"

Elmo frowned and raised an open hand to silence Grymsdyke. "Just this once," he said, "don't think."

"But Elmo-"

"Son, I been in Louisiana politics for almost forty years," Breen said. "One thing I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is how to get things done. I don't know how they play the game where you come from, but here in Louisiana, money greases the machine. This weekend, I'll be spending time with three of our top five supporters in the state."

It would have been all five, but two of them were sadly "unavailable"-one shacked up with his latest teenage girlfriend, while the other had a sit-down with a group of silent partners in Miami. Breen would catch them in another week or two.

"I understand, sir. But a hunting trip? I mean, it's not-"

"Politically correct?" Breen finished for him. "Jesus, Maynard, why don't you wake up and smell the coffee for a change? You think the folks who matter give a damn about all that shit down here?"

"So, you'll be out of touch all weekend," Maynard said, deciding it was useless to protest further.

"We'll be out of touch," the would-be governor corrected him. "You're going with us, Maynard."

Grymsdyke shook his head fervently. "The campaign! I've got a thousand things..."

Breen smiled. "None of that, now. It'll do you good to meet the boys, get out and breathe some fresh air for a change, instead of all this air pollution shit. I got an extra 12-gauge you can use. Who knows, you may get lucky. Make a man out of you yet."

Grymsdyke flushed, insulted and uncomfortable with the plan, but he knew better than to argue. "I swing by for you in the limo," Breen said. "Make it half-past four, so we aren't late to meet the others."

"Half-past 4:00 a.m." Grymsdyke's enthusiasm knew no bounds.

"And where is it we're going, once again?"

"Out to the bayou country, Maynard. Down below Westwego. It's a different world, believe me. You'll see things you never seen before, I guarantee."

Chapter 14

The bayou country of Louisiana bears no great resemblance to Florida's Everglades. The Glades are mostly open to the sky, the water rarely more than five or six feet deep. Louisiana's bayous, by comparison, are dark and dreary places, sheltered by the looming cypress trees and mangroves that were old before the first conquistadors arrived with swords and muskets to "convert" the natives and turn them into slaves. Some of the swamp country has yielded, through the intervening centuries, retreating from the swarm of men and their machines, but much remains intact, still waiting for the men to drop their guard.

Remo thought the whole place smelled, well, swampy.

Their vessel followed Highway 90 to Westwego, on the fringe of bayou country. Most of the Louisiana coastline was consumed by swampland, dark and dangerous, with scattered settlements of fishermen and bankrupt shrimpers.

"I thought you said this tub was new," Remo complained.

Jean Cuvier peered back at Remo from beneath the long bill of a faded baseball cap. He seemed at home behind the wheel of the small rented cabin cruiser.

"I don't recollect saying she was new," the Cajun said. "New boat in these parts, I don't reckon you can find at any price. This baby gets us where we need to go, I guarantee."

That was another thing. It had seemed curious to Remo that the Cajun's "old friend" in Westwego didn't bat an eye when Cuvier showed up in such strange company, after a year in hiding from the mob, and asked to rent a boat. It smelled like a setup, and while Cuvier was wise enough to lie about their destination, Remo guessed that it wouldn't take much detective work for his good buddy at the rental dock to find out where they went and pass the word along. The swamp was full of eyes. Remo and Cuvier still had to get a fix on Leon Grosvenor's lair before they even knew where they were going, much less how long it would take.

"You're taking quite a chance," said Remo, "checking in with your old pals like this. What makes you think they won't sell you out to Bettencourt, or try to pick up the bounty themselves?"

"Truth is, this is my only chance," said Cuvier. "If you don't get Leon before he gets to me, I'm good as dead. These other folks ain't family now. They know all about my beef with Armand, but I reckon they hear Leon's in it, too. That will keep them off, I'm pretty sure."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Dead's dead," the Cajun said. "I just as soon get shot as be ate by old loup-garou."

"And if these folks are scared of Leon," Remo pressed, "what makes you think they'll tell us where to find him?"

"That's called 'heads I win and tails you lose,'" Cuvier said. "They figure Leon's looking for us and they sent us out there, they be doing him a favor. Make it easier for him to kill us, like. Now, if we get lucky and ol' Leon bite the bullet, they still come out clean. No loup-garou around to hassle them no more."

"Good thinking, I guess," Remo said doubtfully.

"You sell these bayou people short," said Cuvier, "you make a big mistake, I guarantee."

Their next stop was a mile or so inside the bayou proper. They had been traveling southwestward from the rental dock. Remo wondered if Cuvier had any idea where they were and where they were going.

Their pit stop didn't seem to be a settlement. No houses were visible, nothing, in fact, except a kind of general store that stood up on stilts above the water. A wooden dock protruded from the front porch of the store, and Remo tied off the cabin cruiser as Cuvier prepared to go ashore.

"Want company?" he asked.

"I best do this myself," the Cajun said.

It was another gamble, putting Cuvier within reach of the locals. Remo was still uncertain whether they would try to kill him or if Cuvier was working some weird angle of his own. But his reading of the Cajun told him Cuvier was doing everything within his power to survive.

Three men were lounging on the shaded front porch of the store. Remo thought they looked like extras from Deliverance or Southern Comfort, or maybe Soggy Bottom USA. Each was in faded denim overalls, two were barefoot, one without a shirt to hide his scrawny chest and shoulders. Thankfully there didn't seem to be a banjo in the house.

He leaned against the cabin cruiser's rail and eavesdropped as the three men greeted Cuvier without apparent animosity. One of the locals cocked his head toward Chiun, sitting the forward deck, and made a reference to "the Chinaman old enough to be the first emperor of China." They had no way of knowing Chiun could hear every word they said perfectly.

"No killing," Remo pleaded under his breath as the porch-sitters chortled at their tremendous wit. Chiun could also hear Remo, but the old Master of Sinanju ignored all of them.

A damn good thing, thought Remo, after their near miss with trouble in Westwego. Cuvier's old friend had smiled at Chiun and cranked the volume up a notch, apparently believing it would help the old man understand what he was saying. More specifically, the redneck said that he had never rented to Vietnamese before, although he heard they did some righteous shrimping on the Gulf, and he didn't believe in holding folks responsible for what had happened in the war.

Chiun had been examining the combination rental shop and bait shack with the keen eye of a demolition engineer-preparing to dismantle it by hand, one sagging timber at a time-when Remo managed to dissuade him.

Remo was surprised at Chiun's tolerance, but it was just a matter of time until some lippy local yokels encountered the casual wrath of the Master of Sinanju.

"Do you think they'll help?"

He had sensed Aurelia arrive at his elbow, and it wasn't a bad sensation at all. She was close enough to touch, if either one of them was so inclined.

"He seems to think so. I'm reserving judgment."

"I think you will find what you are looking for," Aurelia said.

"And what about yourself?" he asked.

"I must be done with this before I can rejoin my people," she replied.

"That's it?"

Aurelia frowned at him and said, "What else?" He was distracted from the question by the sound of Cuvier returning, boot heels clomping on the wooden pier. The cabin cruiser shuddered as the Cajun landed aboard.

"So, what's the word?" asked Remo.

"Word is," Cuvier replied, "we got ourselves a loup-garou."

MERLE BETTENCOURT was feeling more uneasy by the minute as the day wore on. He kept expecting one of those collect calls from Atlanta, and he didn't have a clue what he would tell Armand about the previous night's screwup on Tchoupitoulas Street.

Armand ought to take the blame himself. He insisted they have old Leon and his bowwows handle it, as much because Leon already had the contract, cash up front, as from Armand's desire to see his enemies destroyed by something from Friday Night Fright Theater.

Instead of good news in the paper this morning, Bettencourt was looking at a report of several wolves that had been killed on Tchoupitoulas Street and several dead and wounded Mardi Gras revelers.

The night clerk at Desire House told reporters and police that he had three guests missing in the wake of what appeared to be some weird, destructive prank. The police were interested in the absent strangers-two white men and "one old Chinaman," the night clerk said-in an effort to clear up the matter of the wolves. No mention of Jean Cuvier by name. The white men had been registered as Remo Gillman and Alex Holland, the Chinaman as Kim Ho Sun.

Damn comedians.

Merle's fury, generated by the first reports from Tchoupitoulas Street, had settled down enough that he could think straight and focus on his problem rather than his rage.

Leon had to go. That much was obvious, and Bettencourt no longer cared what Armand thought about his so-called loup-garou. The hairy bastard was a menace, flubbing vital contracts, leaving dead wolves as his calling card. Merle didn't intend to let the cops take Leon, wouldn't see the wolf man turn and rat him out, as others had betrayed Armand.

Before he took off on a wolf hunt, though, there was another problem to deal with. In the past two hours there had been three phone calls to his office, each describing a peculiar foursome headed for the bayou country southwest of New Orleans. Two white men, some kind of Oriental and a woman dressed in Gypsy clothes. Merle didn't know what that was all about, but he recalled Leon's recent hassle with the Gypsies near Westwego and assumed the woman was now mixed up with Cuvier and his bodyguards somehow.

The foursome had acquired a boat, and they were well into the back country by now. His spotters had them moving roughly south-southwest. Even though they traveled on the water, it would be no great challenge for a team of swamp-bred Cajuns to track them. Nip their little half-assed expedition in the bud.

Merle had already picked the shooters he would use, the same boys he should have sent the previous night to Tchoupitoulas Street. A six-man team was overkill, no doubt about it, but he wanted no more screwups, nothing to make Armand think he couldn't handle it. If this petition for a new trial made the grade, and Armand walked because the feds were suddenly bereft of witnesses, Merle knew he would be set for life.

Leon was history. He simply didn't know it yet. That shaggy freak had seen his last full moon.

THE HUNTING PARTY was assembled on a private dock on the outskirts of Westwego. Four limousines had come and gone, depositing their passengers and cargo: backpacks and camping gear from L.L. Bean, long guns in hand-tooled leather cases from Abercrombie ur of the six men standing on the dock wore tailored camouflage, including long-billed caps, and heavy boots designed for rugged wear. Each of the four wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, carried long survival knives and shiny semiauto-matic pistols, either on the hip or slung under one arm. They smoked cigars and laughed politely at one another's jokes.

The last two members of the team stood out. One was the guide, a wiry swamp rat with a patch over the empty socket where his left eye used to be and a two-day growth of beard. Decked out in rumpled Army-surplus fatigue pants, he stood apart and waited for the others to complete their socializing. Every now and then he spit a stream of brown tobacco juice into the water, wiping his lips with his sleeve.

Then there was Maynard Grymsdyke, in denim shirt and jeans, a jacket he would have to shed once daylight started heating up the swamp and a pair of brand-new hiking boots that hurt his feet. It seemed impossible that he could already have blisters, but his heels were killing him, and he had only walked a few steps, first from his apartment to the limo, then to the dock.

It was damn chilly in the predawn darkness. The cold mist rolling off the bayou dampened Maynard's spirits-as if he needed any help in that department. He was sleepy, cold and generally miserable, revolted by the prospect of the next two days with this miserable company.

The tallest of Breen's guests was Marshall Dillon. "No relation," he was quick to tell each new acquaintance before miming a fast draw for some nonexistent movie camera. Dillon was the founder, president and CEO of Petro-Gas Conglomerates, which dominated oil and natural gas leases from Port Arthur, Texas, to Biloxi, Mississippi. At fifty-six, Dillon had indulged himself along life's highway, and his six-foot-four frame wasn't quite tall enough to stretch three hundred pounds and make it look like muscle. When the oilman laughed he had a tendency to spray saliva, but he was so filthy rich that no one seemed to mind... at least, until his back was turned and he was out of earshot.

Hubert Murphy was a huge name in the Southern banking world, but reputation didn't reflect size. A veritable dwarf to Dillon's giant, Murphy might have been five-three in cowboy boots, and everything about him seemed a trifle underweight, except the small paunch that he had developed from good living and a lack of daily exercise. Murphy wore steel-rimmed bifocals that made his eyes appear to shrink or bulge each time he moved his head. His politics, well known to Maynard Grymsdyke, placed him somewhere to the right of Heinrich Himnnler when it came to taxes and social welfare.

The last of Breen's supporters to accept his weekend invitation was a portly man of average size named Victor Charles. He made his home in Baton Rouge, where he could keep an eye on the state government from day to day, and his most striking feature was a total lack of striking features. Grymsdyke guessed that Victor Charles was closer to the fifty mark than forty, but he could as easily have pegged the guess at thirty-five or sixty. Charles had that kind of face, ageless and bland, the next best thing to nondescript, but there was nothing commonplace about his bank accounts. His first few million had been made in cotton, then he branched out into big-time shrimping in the Gulf. A year or two back his politics became more extreme, to the ongoing concern of his allies. When shrimp prices plummeted forty percent due to a surge in overseas imports of cheap farm-raised shrimp, Charles went on a rampage. Almost single-handedly he funded a slew of illegal-dumping lawsuits against several Asian governments, which made him a hero to scores of bankrupt bayou shrimpers. Truth was, he cared a lot less about their livelihood than about getting even with the foreigners who kept interfering with his country.

Grymsdyke wouldn't have chosen these three as companions for a two-day bayou killing spree, but he was wise enough to know that Breen's safari had no more to do with hunting than it did with acid rain or women's rights. Elmo was bent on strengthening his bonds with three men who could help him buy the statehouse in November, making sure they understood that he was on their side. Before the hunting trip was over, Grymsdyke had no doubt that new deals would be struck, with cash exchanged for promises that Breen could only keep if he was governor. It was the way things worked in politics, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and Grymsdyke had no personal objections to the game.

Their shifty-looking guide, answering to Jethro, no last name, expelled another stream of murky fluid from between pursed lips and checked the eastern sky, where gray dawn had begun to show itself.

"We best be going," he said, and moved off toward the cabin cruiser they had rented.

Sweet Sixteen was stenciled on the stern, but Maynard Grymsdyke would have bet that twenty years or more had passed since this tub had its sixteenth birthday party. It was still afloat, and that was something, but he was relieved that they wouldn't be putting out to sea, where sudden squalls blew up from nowhere and the depths were full of sharks. If Sweet Sixteen went down, he'd find himself in quiet, brackish water filled with alligators, water moccasins and leeches.

What a break.

"You ready, Maynard?" Elmo asked him, putting on a crooked smile he never showed the TV cameras.

"Yes, sir," said Grymsdyke. Adding to himself, As ready as I'll ever be.

LUKE SEVERIN HAD BRIEFED his team while they were checking out their hardware, stripping automatic weapons down and reassembling them with practiced ease, loading the magazines, a couple of them sharpening long knives for close-up work. They heard him without seeming to, absorbed the sparse details and gave them back almost verbatim when he quizzed them.

The boss had filled him in on how important this job was, both parts of it. First up, they were supposed to find four people-one of them a rat who had rolled over for the Feds and sent Armand to prison. They were somewhere in bayou country southwest of Westwego. Once those four had been taken care of, Severin's crew was ordered to proceed and take out Leon Grosvenor.

It was the second part that troubled Luke the most. If anyone had asked, he would have said that he was no more superstitious than his fellow Cajuns, less so than his daddy or his granddaddy before him. Lounging in a comfy booth at Cooter's, in the Quarter, sipping bourbon on the rocks, Luke might have said that he didn't believe in loups-garous. It was another story, though, when you were out in the bayou, shaded from the sun by looming trees and veils of Spanish moss, the smell of death and rot filling your nostrils.

In the bayou country, Luke may well have said that anything was possible. But he would never have admitted he was scared.

They had sufficient firepower to do the job, God knew. Two M-16s, three Uzis and a 12-gauge shotgun with extended magazine that held nine rounds. In addition to the long guns, each man had at least one pistol. Florus carried twin .45s in double shoulder holsters. Little Remy set the record for their hunting party, with a Glock slung underneath one arm, a sleek Beretta on his right hip and a Colt .380 Mustang tucked into his boot.

No silver bullets, but Luke didn't think they would need any. Put enough rounds into some guy-any guy-and he'd go down, werewolf or not.

"Don't like this much," Jesper said, moving up beside him at the cabin cruiser's starboard rail. They had been chugging over stagnant water for the best part of an hour, scenery scarcely altered by the passage of their boat or time. For all Luke knew, they had been traveling in endless circles.

"What's to like?" he asked Jesper. "We do a job, go on home, get paid."

"I reckon you know exactly what I'm talkin' about," Jesper replied.

"Leon?"

Jesper brought up one hand to cross himself, an awkward gesture that revealed a lack of practice during recent years. "Damn foolish sendin' us to kill ol' Leon. How we supposed to kill a loup-garou?"

"First thing," Luke said, "you best forget them fairy stories. Keep your powder dry and hit what you be aiming at."

Jesper wasn't convinced. "My grandpa try to kill a loup-garou one time, before I was born. Got right up close and let him have both barrels. Damn thing mauled him anyhow, got clean away. Grandpa weren't good for much of nothing after that."

Luke was almighty tempted to suggest that Jesper's grandfather had belted too much moonshine, maybe sneaked up on a panther in the swamp and missed his shot before the damn thing turned on him, but he wasn't about to start an argument with Jesper when he needed every man behind him, giving 110 percent.

"Do like I told you," Luke instructed. "When we got him, take good aim and just keep shootin' till he don't get up no more. That's all you gotta do."

"I surely hope you right."

I hope so, too, Luke thought.

A NERVOUS CAJUN BROUGHT the word to Leon shortly after noon. The bitch was first to smell him coming, and she was in no mood to take prisoners, but Leon warned her off and listened to the man. The Cajun got his regular twenty dollars and left unmolested-he was the closest thing Leon had to a telephone and Leon needed him.

Four people were coming for him, looking for him on his own home ground. One of them was the witness he had failed to kill in two attempts. The sawed-off Chinaman was with him, and the Gypsy woman. Plus another man, the one who had pursued him like a demon through the streets of the Quarter and killed more of his dogs.

It seemed impossible to Leon that the outsiders would find his lair. That meant he would be forced to scour the swamp himself and run them down, but that was fine.

He needed to do something, and damn quick, before the surviving members of his pack began to think he was completely ineffectual. Their trust had already been shaken, and one of the older males was casting little sidelong glances back and forth, between the bitch and Leon, trying to decide if it was time to make a challenge to be leader of the pack.

Just try it, Leon thought. He wasn't done yet, no matter how it looked.

But he was getting there. Another failure like the one on Tchoupitoulas Street, and he would have no pack to lead. It wouldn't even matter if they trusted him at that point, since they'd all be dead.

He missed his brothers who had died on the abortive mission to Desire House. He would find the ones responsible and punish them, share their destruction with the pack.

But not share too much. He wanted the pack to see him bring down the hunters. A show of force such as that would put to rest any ambitions the other males had to take him down and assume the leadership of the pack.

He was top dog around here, and he was going to prove it.

He was looking forward to taking out the white hunter, but especially the little Oriental.

It had been years since Leon ate Chinese.

Chapter 15

Darkness didn't descend upon the bayou country by degrees, but rather closed in like massive velvet curtains drawn across the sky. If you were sailing open water, stars were sometimes visible between the treetops. But on what passed for dry land in the swamp, the canopy blocked any but the most persistent moonbeams, cloaking all in blackness more akin to midnight at the bottom of a coal mine than to any forest glade. A campfire drove back some of the shadows, but at the same time attracted swarms of insects.

Remo was sitting back from the circle of the fire, leaving Jean Cuvier to curse and swat mosquitoes as they settled on his skin. When the Cajun noticed that none of the insects were pestering Remo he tried sitting back from the fire, too. It didn't make a difference.

"They just don't like how I taste, I guess," Remo said.

Chiun had opted to remain aboard the cabin cruiser, tethered to a mangrove root some fifty yards downstream. His explanation-that a night of sleeping on the sodden ground was "detrimental to these ancient bones"-fooled Remo not at all. He knew about the Casio handheld TV the Korean carried, and decided from the angry tone of Chiun's voice, audible across the water, that reception in the swamp was nothing to write home about.

He heard Aurelia coming up behind him, and was pleased to note that she avoided making excess noise. An average man wouldn't have heard her footsteps on the spongy ground and would have been surprised.

"Watch out for snakes," he said before she had a chance to speak.

"I've never been afraid of animals," she told him. "Want some company?"

"Suits me."

She stood beside him, touching-close, and he could smell her in the darkness. Not perfume-she hadn't worn any since they had met-but an enticing, healthy woman smell. He wondered if a loup-garou could track her by that scent alone, or if he needed footprints for a guide.

"You're not afraid, either," she said.

"Not yet."

"Do you believe we'll find him?"

"One way or another," Remo said. "He may find us. It all comes out the same."

"You're pretty confident." Her own voice seemed to harbor doubt.

"We beat him once," he said. "He lost some of his little pets last time."

"I have been wondering," Aurelia said, "how much of that was luck, and how much skill."

He didn't answer her. The silence stretched between them for a while, before the Gypsy spoke again.

"This is a little strange," she said, "don't you agree?"

"Which part? The werewolf, or his working for the Cajun mafia?"

"Our hunting him like this," she said. "I mean, we really don't know where we're going, do we? All he has to do is lie back like a spider, waiting for us. Make a move when it's to his advantage, and he has us where he wants us."

"That's assuming he's still here, or ever was," said Remo.

"Oh, he's here, all right." There was a tremor in Aurelia's voice. "I feel him. Not on top of us, just yet, but getting near."

"You could have stayed back in New Orleans," he reminded her, "or gone to find your people."

"And what good would that do? If he wants me, there's no place for me to hide. It's cost my family too much already."

Remo said nothing.

"You blame yourself for that?"

He looked at her. In the blackness of the night his pupils dilated to an extraordinary degree, allowing him to see with catlike clarity where the Romany woman could only see his shadow. She thought the darkness hid her expression, and so allowed her interest, and her simmering passion for him to show on her face.

"You think," she continued, "that by coming to me, you led the loup-garou to me. Which makes you responsible for the deaths."

Remo shook his head. "I could have stopped this long before that, and I didn't. That's why I'm responsible for your dead."

She was surprised. "You could have stopped the wolf man before this?"

"I could have stopped the woman who made him into what he is. She was a scientist. She tampered with genetics. She somehow put animal DNA in the blender and came up with a secret potion to turn people into whatever she wanted them to be."

The Romany woman considered this for a moment. "You mock me," she asked gently, "when you try to tell me that this thing of magic and spirit is instead just a freak of science."

"Hey, I was being the victim here, not you. Remember, poor, guilty Remo?"

She was waiting for an answer.

"I'm not mocking you, Aurelia. What I told you is true. I failed to stop this woman twice before. She is what made Leon Grosvenor into an honest-to-God werewolf. But that is not to say I don't believe what you say. That you can feel his evil. That you can feel his presence approaching us. I've seen all kinds of creepy junk hanging out with the wacky old Korean."

In the distance, in a voice too soft for Aurelia to hear, Chiun said, "I heard that!"

Remo heard something else far away, too. Aurelia started to speak, and he shushed her with a finger pressed against her lips.

The sound that reached his ears stood out from the noises he had grown accustomed to since nightfall in the swamp. Aside from the unearthly call of birds, the whir of bats in flight, the splashing sounds of turtles, leaping fish or gliding alligators, there was...something else.

When Remo spoke again, it was a whisper. "Are you any good at climbing trees?"

She answered him in kind. "I do all right. What is it?"

"We've got company," he said. From the sound of things, the camp was practically surrounded.

"Leon?" There was something close to panic in Aurelia's voice, although she tried to hide it.

"We'll see," he said, and jerked a thumb in the direction of the nearest sturdy tree. "Just get upstairs, and don't come down until I call you or the sun comes up and you can see to get away, whichever happens first."

Aurelia abruptly experienced levitation. It took her a moment to realize that it was Remo lifting her by the waist as if she were weightless, and she found herself eye-to-eye with a branch that had been above her head.

"Where are you going?" she whispered as she scrambled onto the cypress branch.

"I'm putting out the welcome mat," Remo said.

THE PACK HAD a trail now, picked up at the water's edge, almost by accident, and followed over marshy ground. Leon could thank the bitch for taking them directly to the camp.

He used hand signs to send the bitch and her brothers on their separate ways, encircling the campsite. They had the critical advantage of surprise.

Leon hadn't gone hunting in this sector of the swamp for months, and he reflected that the normals had to have taken bad advice if they were searching for him here. It was a fluke that he had found them when they were so far off track, a touch of destiny perhaps, a signal that his run of miserable luck had changed.

Leon didn't care if they had guns, grenades and body armor. They were his, and they couldn't escape him. They had made one fatal error too many, coming to his own backyard in search of trouble, and he meant to help them find it one last time.

The crackling fire was closer now. His first sight of the men was a lone shadow figure, squatting near the fire, hands stretched out toward the flames for warmth.

The others should be in their places now, he thought, and started moving in a more direct line toward the fire.

Pausing in the midnight shadows of the tree line, less than twenty paces from the fire that had been kindled in a forest clearing, Leon threw his head back, breathing in the scent of his intended prey, mouth watering.

The wild, bone-chilling howl erupted from his throat, almost without a conscious thought. It warped and warbled through the tall dark trees and brought the startled humans lurching to their feet. Too late.

Leon was snarling like a wild thing as he broke from cover, running in a crouch, and charged the fire.

CHIUN HAD EMERGED from the boat of his own accord, sensing the presence in the woods almost in the same instant as Remo. A moment later Remo heard the first gunshot echo from the cabin cruiser downstream and he glanced back just in time to see a rag-doll figure vaulting backward through the air, head over heels, to strike the nearest mangrove like a sack of dirty laundry and slide down the trunk to vanish underwater with a muffled splash.

Remo knew without taking in the too-large size of the recently deceased that it wasn't the old Korean. One of their uninvited guests had made his way aboard the boat and learned the hard way that Chiun could take care of himself.

The gunshot from the boat may not have been a scheduled signal, but it had the same effect. Streams of automatic fire swept the bayou camp, converging from no less than five distinct points of origin, the bullets drilling cookware, sleeping bags, exploding into showers of embers when they hit the fire itself. He recognized the sounds of SMGs and automatic rifles but they were all just bullets, and bullets were swords were arrows were rocks. All just something sent in your direction in a big hurry with the intent of hurting you. You dealt with them-if you were Sinanju-in the same way. You got out of the way.

But there was no sign of Cuvier, and Remo couldn't tell if he was down, somewhere beyond the fire, or trapped inside one of the bullet-riddled sleeping bags. In either case, it was too late to help him now.

THE WEIRD, UNEARTHLY howling shattered Maynard Grymsdyke's fragile grasp on slumber. He had turned in early, physically exhausted by the first day of their so-called hunting trip, afraid to even think how he would feel the following day, when they actually had to leave the Sweet Sixteen behind and travel overland. The punishing humidity and heat, blood-hungry insects, Grymsdyke's lifelong fear of snakes and spiders, all combined to make him dread the sunrise.

And all for what?

Breen and his cronies could have held their meeting in an air-conditioned office, ironed the details out within an hour or two at most, but here they were, intent on some pathetic macho bonding ritual that made them look like primal idiots.

And I'm the biggest idiot of all, Maynard thought. I'm the one who knew it was a frigging waste of time and tagged along with Elmo anyway, to kiss his ass and keep my job.

Grymsdyke dozed off to visions of himself confronting Elmo Breen in righteous indignation, saying all the things that he would never have the nerve to say in waking life. When he was wakened by the howling, Maynard needed several heartbeats to remember where he was and how he got there, why he felt both frightened and empowered by his dream.

As for the howling, now, it called up one emotion only.

Terror.

A massive shape burst from the tree line, moving toward the campfire and its ring of startled million-aires. Manlike in form, the howling creature was fantastic in detail, a nightmare come to life that hurdled Maynard's sleeping bag as if he weren't there. He told himself that much of what he thought he'd seen had been a mere trick of the lighting, flames and shadows playing head games, but his bowels weren't buying it.

Over by the campfire, men were scrambling to their feet and screaming, shouting curses, while the man-thing fell upon them, baying harshly with what had to be a set of leather lungs. As Grymsdyke struggled from his sleeping bag and made it to all fours, he realized that the intruder who had leaped across his prostrate body hadn't come alone. Off to his left, beyond the fire, he had a fleeting glimpse of Marshall Dillon grappling with what seemed to be some kind of savage mongrel dog. The snarling beast had locked its jaws on Dillon's arm and seemed intent on dragging him to earth, no matter how the oil-and-gas man wept and pleaded for his life.

A shotgun blast ripped through the wild, chaotic sounds of combat, drawing Grymsdyke's full attention to the right. There, Elmo Breen had somehow reached his weapon and was standing with the customized Benelli Montefeltro Super 90 braced against his hip, smoke curling from the muzzle. There was madness in the politician's eyes, and Maynard knew his boss was not so much frightened as he was thrilled.

Away behind the would-be governor, he caught a glimpse of Jethro in retreat, high-stepping toward the water and the relative security that he would find aboard the cabin cruiser. Maynard didn't know if he would make it, didn't really care, but Jethro's flight was all it took to cut through the hysterical paralysis that held him captive, freeing him to run.

He didn't know where he was going, much less whether he had any chance at all of getting there, but Grymsdyke knew he had to do something before the howling man-thing and his pack of killer canines finished off the other, more demanding targets and went looking for an easy kill.

There was an instant, watching Hubert Murphy lifted high above the man-thing's head and dashed to earth, when Maynard felt that something snapped inside him, and before he knew it, he was running with the campfire at his back, no destination fixed in mind. He wasn't headed toward the Sweet Sixteen, but there was still a chance to find it, work back through the reeds and grass along the shore, if he could only find the water first.

Maynard hit the bayou running, went down like an anchor, sucking water as the scummy surface closed above his head.

Chapter 16

The first shot startled Leon, even though he knew the normals might have guns, but it wasn't enough to slow him.

He lived to kill, seize normal flesh and rip it into pieces with his taloned fingers, taste the fresh blood of his enemies. A part of Leon's mind told him that something had gone wrong-he saw no Chinaman in camp, no Gypsy woman, and there seemed to be too many men-but it was too late to consider his decision now. The battle had been joined, and there was nothing for it but to charge ahead and finish off the job-or die in the attempt.

A tall man, six foot four or five, was closest to the charging loup-garou. He held a hand-tooled gun case, yanking at the zipper, which was giving him some difficulty, keeping him from joining in the gunfire that tore through the camp. Leon leaped through the campfire's licking flames and came to grips with his first target, swept the leather case and useless gun aside. The fingers of his left hand gripped the old man's throat and bottled up a scream, his right hand clamping tightly on the normal's genitals. It felt like nothing to him when he jerked the gasping scarecrow off his feet and hoisted him to arm's length overhead. With yet another howl, he slammed the man to earth and straddled him, face lunging toward his throat.

The next shot scored, but not on Leon. As he raised his bloodstained face, one of his brothers catapulted through the air and struck the ground unmoving, less than thirty feet away. Off to his left, another male had grabbed one of the normals by an arm and shook him wickedly, with strength enough to separate the shoulder joint. The man was squealing like a sow even before he lost his footing and went down. The gray male instantly released his grip and tore a mouthful from the screaming mortal's face.

Leon craned his neck and found the bitch. She stood astride a dead man's chest, her muzzle buried in the scarlet fountain of his throat. He saw the normal with the firearm, and another breaking for the trees behind him, running for his life without a thought for those he left behind.

The normal with the shotgun hadn't seen him yet, or else was choosing not to credit what he saw. Instead of bringing Leon under fire, he raised the semiautomatic shotgun to his shoulder, sighting another male and squeezing off a blast.

More of his pack were dying!

The roar that burst from Leon's throat was primal fury amplified. He crossed the ground between the gunman and himself in loping strides, long arms outstretched as if his hairy hands could stop a buckshot charge from opening his chest.

It didn't matter now that he had clearly led his pack against a group of total strangers, led two more of them to violent deaths. The only thing that mattered was revenge, while there was time for him to strike a killing blow.

He saw the shotgun's muzzle pivoting to meet him, looking like a cannon at close range. He didn't know if there was time to reach his enemy before the gun went off, but he could try.

The blast was like thunder, and he heard the angry swarm of hornets hurtling past him, some of them on target, biting deep into his flesh. He howled and launched into a headlong dive, directly toward the gunman.

THE SHOOTER WAS awfully confused right about now.

What he was firing was an automatic rifle and that meant it automatically sent bullets flying at the target in very rapid succession. The man on the receiving end of all those bullets usually hid, ran away, something like that. Also, the guy on the sending end of those bullets usually didn't miss a close target. The shooter had fired automatic rifles lots and lots of times and knew those facts to be true.

So what was happening now was just plain wrong. The shooter's victim wasn't hiding or running from the automatic-weapons fire. He was, well, dancing around the bullets if what the gunner saw was right. There would be maybe a little shift this way and a little jig that way and the guy never ever got tagged by a single one of the damn bullets!

And the guy was coming right for him.

And the guy didn't have any gun of his own to shoot back with. Not a knife. Not even a cypress branch to use as a club.

The shooter was still trying to make sense of it all when Remo Williams stopped in front of him. "It's empty. "

Remo nodded at the shooter's trigger finger, still working the gun uselessly.

Oh, the gunner realized, he's right. No more bullets.

Then Remo grabbed the sizzling hot gun barrel. The gunner held on, thinking the guy was going to try to take it out of his hands. Instead, Remo propelled the gun at the gunner.

It slammed into him. Hard. All the internal parts between the bottom of his rib cage and the top of his pelvic bone turned into just so much mush. The gunner felt it happen.

Those, the gunner thought, were really important internal parts.

But that was the last thing he ever thought about, flopping down, gore flowing from his mouth.

One down-two counting the intruder who had tangled with Chiun aboard the boat-and Remo counted four more automatics still unloading on the camp.

The second shooter, fifty feet beyond the first, had an Uzi submachine gun. He had emptied one magazine, and Remo sprinted at him as he was reloading. He slashed hard and fast with his fingernails as the gunner half turned.

Then the gunner's vision momentarily went haywire. He was spinning through the air in an impossible way, and when he fell to the ground he saw, a few feet away, his own headless body falling to the ground in the darkness.

The gunner knew he had been decapitated and his only thought-before his thoughts ceased altogether-was that his attacker had to have had a really big knife.

Three guns still raked the camp with automatic fire, as if the men behind them were on automatic pilot, bent on firing endlessly until they got an order to desist.

Remo's third quarry had a Ruger Mini-14 rifle with a folding stock, a bandolier of spare clips slung across his chest. Instead of hosing down the camp at random, he was squeezing off short, measured bursts, aiming at first one sleeping bag and then another, keeping up his pinpoint fire despite the fact that all the bags were plainly riddled, tufts of cotton stuffing floating in the air around the campfire like exotic insects. From the smile etched on his face, Remo decided that the rifleman enjoyed his work.

Again Remo didn't bother approaching from the sniper's blind side. He just came in too fast for the sniper to do anything about it. The shooter started to turn his gun at the newcomer. When Remo jabbed rigid fingers under the shooter's rib cage, the move was too quick for the shooter's eye to follow. But the concussive, channeled force brought death as swift and sure as any point-blank gunshot to the head.

The next-to-last assailant had another stubby submachine gun. Moving up behind the tall man like a silent shadow, Remo clapped his hands over his assailant's ears with stunning force. The shooter's body shivered through a brief convulsion, then slumped forward.

One more to go.

By this time, Remo's last target had to know that there was something wrong. The other guns that had been pouring fire into the camp were silent now, the absence of their multiple staccato thunder plainly obvious. The final shooter had ceased firing, as well, attempting to discover what had happened to his friends.

Metallic clicking sounds told Remo that the gunner was reloading, just in case he had to make a fight of it. After that, it was the simple sound of breathing that betrayed his quarry.

At last, when he could stand no more silence, the shooter began calling out to his companions. "Remy? Florus? Where you at, goddamn it! Harry? Claude?"

The gunner started running, crashing through the ferns and undergrowth like a stampeding water buffalo. Conveniently, he was coming straight at him. Remo gave him a nice quick punch without even needing to move from where he stood. The gunner's head caved in, and he fell right over.

LOUISIANA'S WOULD-BE governor had gone stark raving crazy, and the hell of it was that he knew it. Elmo Breen was on the razor's edge of laughing at his own insanity, prevented only by the fact that he was trying to remain alive.

It was the first time in his fifty-something years on Earth that Breen had suffered from hallucinations, drunk or sober. And it could only be a wild hallucination, after all. A wolf man, for Christ's sake! According to the hallucination, the wolf man had hoisted Marshall Dillon overhead and dropped him like a sack of laundry, as dead as hell when he hit the ground.

As for the wild dogs or coyotes or whatever the hell they were, one of them had Hubert Murphy by the arm, attack-dog style, and yet another was attacking Victor Charles.

Breen saw three-fifths of his campaign support fund being ripped to bloody shreds before his eyes, and there was only one thing for a Southern boy to do in such distressing circumstances, even when he knew the whole damn thing was an illusion conjured up by a disordered mind or tainted booze.

He grabbed his thousand-dollar shotgun and proceeded to give battle as his great-great-granddaddy had done at Shiloh.

Breen turned his weapon on the nearest of the wolf-dogs, aiming for a rib shot, so the buckshot pellets wouldn't spread and injure Victor when he fired.

The big Benelli shotgun kicked against his shoulder, but he held it steady, dead on target, grinning triumphantly as his first round tore into its shaggy, snarling target with the force of an express train. It was almost comical, the way the mutt went down, rolled over once, then lay still.

He swiveled toward the wolf-dog that was mauling Hubert Murphy. The dog rushed in and took a bite from Hubert's face, retreating with a hefty portion of his fat cheek clutched between its teeth.

Breen knocked it sprawling with another shotgun blast.

His ears were ringing with the gunfire, but it didn't keep the howling out. Breen swung back to face the hulking man-thing lunging in his direction, wild-eyed, lips drawn back from huge yellow teeth, nostrils flaring in a face that looked like something off a Halloween mask. No time to aim the 12-gauge this time, and he jerked the trigger. Breen got lucky, saw his charging nemesis lurch sideways, thrown off stride, as pellets tore into its arm and side. Still it wasn't a killing shot, and when he tried to fire again, the shotgun's hammer snapped against an empty chamber.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

Breen dropped the 12-gauge, reaching for the stainless-steel Colt Double Eagle on his hip. The special tie-down holster he had purchased for this outing had a flap secured with Velcro, slowing his draw enough that he had barely reached the .45 before his freakish adversary hit him with a flying tackle, slammed the breath out of his lungs and drove him back against a nearby tree.

It was impossible for Breen to catalog the bolts of pain exploding through his body. A kaleidoscope of colored lights spun on the inside of his eyelids when his skull collided with the tree trunk. Lower down, it felt as if his spine had snapped, but that couldn't be right, or else he wouldn't feel the brittle agony that emanated from a hard knee's point of impact with his testicles. If that weren't enough, he sensed he was drowning, tried to draw a breath and found the burning muscles of his diaphragm unwilling to cooperate.

The shaggy man-thing took a backward step, then lunged again, one heavy shoulder slamming into Elmo's chest. Breen felt a couple of his ribs go, snapped like chopsticks, and a pain beyond pain as the jagged ends lanced deep into a lung. Whatever hope he had of drawing breath was canceled in a heartbeat, and the would-be governor saw darkness opening around him like a ghastly flower blooming.

Through the darkness came his frightful enemy, hands that resembled something from an ape-man costume reaching toward his face. Before they found him, Breen had time to wonder how a figment of his own imagination had acquired such rotten breath.

CHIUN WAS STANDING by the fire, his hands in his kimono sleeves. "Have you finished?" he asked, merely curious.

"Yes."

"You could thank me for lending you assistance," Chiun suggested.

"Huh? What? You took out one guy and then let me take care of the rest of them."

"It is your job to do so. You, not I, are the Reigning Master of Sinanju," Chiun explained reasonably. "It is you who are charged with carrying out the edicts of the Emperor. However, since I was in close proximity to that one at the boat, I thought I would lend you my assistance."

"Yeah, well, thanks a whole lot."

Chiun beamed. "You are welcome."

"All done?"

Aurelia Boldiszar jumped down from her hidden perch, rejoining them. If she had seen Remo disposing of their enemies, it didn't seem to bother her unduly, though her face was solemn as she scanned the camp. "Did they hurt Jean? Where'd he go?"

"I smell him that way," Chiun said with a slight tilt of his head.

The Cajun's voice reached out from the surrounding darkness. "Is it safe to come out?"

"Yeah, come on," Remo said.

"I had to tap a kidney," said the sheepish-looking Cajun as he stepped into the firelight. "Barely found myself a place, before all hell broke loose."

There was a dark stain on his blue jeans, and Cuvier attempted to conceal it with one hand.

Remo retrieved the lifeless gunners and lined up their bodies near the fire, then asked the Cajun, "Friends of yours?"

"No way," said Cuvier. "I recognize some of them, though. That's Florus Pinchot on the far end. Next to him, Claude Something, I don't know his last name. That one-" he pointed to the next-tolast body in line "-he Remy Arridano. Them be Armand's boys."

"No werewolf," Remo said. "Surprised?"

"Shee-it, man," Cuvier replied, "I got surprises comin' ever time I wake up still alive."

THE BAYOU WATER TASTED foul, and Maynard Grymsdyke came up spouting like a porpoise, gasping for fresh air. He thrashed his arms to stay afloat, the closest he had come in years to swimming, but his feet couldn't make contact with the bottom. Once again, his head slipped underwater, and he fought back to the surface with a desperate strength he didn't know that he possessed.

That strength wouldn't last long, in any case. His wild dash from the camp into the water had covered not more than fifty yards, but Grymsdyke felt as if he had been sprinting all-out for a mile. His heart was pounding, hammering against his ribs, and even with his head above the brackish water Maynard found it difficult to catch his breath.

Somehow Grymsdyke turned himself around and faced back toward the bank. Tall grass and reeds combined with darkness to obscure his vision of the camp, but Grymsdyke stared into the night regardless, more than half expecting some demented nightmare to come crashing through the undergrowth where he had lately passed. He tried to listen, too, but his own splashing in the water made the effort futile.

Christ, what was that in the camp?

The wolf-dogs were no mystery to Grymsdyke. They were something he would have expected to inhabit bayou country, one more reason why sane men should stay in town. The first creature, however, had been something else.

No matter how he tried, Grymsdyke couldn't persuade himself that he had conjured up the man-thing out of nightmares. He most desperately wanted it to be a man-even a man who roamed the swamp with vicious feral dogs, attacking other men-but he had glimpsed its face, and one glimpse was enough.

Whatever it had been, despite the fact that it was wearing denim overalls and big, mud-clotted boots, Grymsdyke knew it wasn't human. Not with those long arms and burly shoulders covered by the same dark, matted hair that sprouted from the creature's head and face. And that mouth. That distended, tooth-filled maw...

Grim silence descended on the swamp-or rather, the expected night sounds returned, after their rude disruption by the sounds of mortal combat. There were no more gunshots from the campsite, and the angry snarling sounds had also ceased. Maynard was terrified to think what that had to mean.

Grymsdyke lost track of time before he drifted very far. For all he knew, he could have floated thus for hours, or it could have been brief moments. He was slipping in and out of consciousness until he woke with water burning in his throat and sinuses. Blinking scum out of his eyes, he saw a log, nearly submerged, floating directly toward him, shining where an errant beam of moonlight found rough bark. Grymsdyke beheld salvation, thrashing toward the log, intent on climbing aboard and allowing it to carry him wherever it might go.

He was within arm's reach before he realized this log was moving steadily against the current, driven by some power of its own. Too late, he saw the alligator's glinting eyes, tried to reverse directions, swallowing foul water as he tried to call for help.

Only the reptile heard him, opening its trapdoor of a mouth to swallow Maynard Grymsdyke's helpless scream.

Chapter 17

Merle Bettencourt was eating shrimp cocktail and chasing it with chilled chablis when Ansel Rousseau showed up at his elbow with a cell phone in his hand. A green light on the telephone was blinking, signaling an open line.

"What?" Bettencourt demanded.

"Some guy say he gotta talk to you," said Ansel. "Say it's about some huntin' party on the bayou." Bettencourt set down his wineglass, careful not to tip it, startled and unnerved to find his fingers trembling. "What's his name?"

"Won't say." Ansel shrugged. "Guy tells me you be pissed if I don't pass him on. Want I should hang him up?"

The Cajun mobster thought about it, wished the question were as simple as it sounded. Only six men were supposed to know about his little bayou hunting party-those involved as trigger men-and any one of them who felt a need to call him would have given up his name. It made no sense, but he could say the same of so much else that had been happening the past few days.

"Gimme," he said, and took the telephone from Ansel, waiting for the other man to leave and close the door behind him. Then, into the cell phone's mouthpiece, he said, "Yeah, who's this?"

"You wouldn't recognize my name," a very average voice replied. "I'm calling for Jean Cuvier."

"Don't rightly recollect that name," Bettencourt replied eventually.

"That's funny," the stranger said. "He sure recognized the boys you sent to waste him. Most of them, at least. You want them back, I'll tell you where to send the garbage truck."

That's all I need, thought Bettencourt. Admit to knowledge of attempted murder on an open line and get myself shipped to Atlanta for conspiracy. No, thank you very much.

"I don't know where you got this number," Bettencourt replied, as cool as he could manage in the circumstances, "but there must be some mistake. Sounds like you need to talk to the police."

That was a nice touch, Bettencourt decided, smiling to himself. He was about to disconnect, but then he heard the stranger speaking almost casually, as if he didn't care if Merle was listening or not.

"If that's the way you want it, fine," he said. "Thing is, Jean wondered if you could get together, maybe work this whole thing out before somebody else gets hurt. But since you never heard of him-" The Cajun's mind was racing, one thought stumbling on another, but he knew it would be madness to admit a link to Cuvier or the hunters in the swamp.

"Can't say I have," he said, "but I could ask around with my people, for the hell of it."

"No, never mind," the stranger said. "I should have gone to the police first thing, as you suggested. They can check out the bodies, see who they worked for, whether they had-"

"But let's suppose one of my people recognized this name ...what was it?"

"Cuvier." The stranger paused and spelled it for him. "First name Jean."

"Where would a person get in touch?" asked Bettencourt, heart stuttering against his ribs.

"Go south of Charles," the stranger said. "You've got an auditorium near Audubon Park, some kind of church revival going on. Across the street, you'll find a little Cajun restaurant, Justine's. The man you don't know will be there at half-past five o'clock."

The line went dead, and Bettencourt switched off the cell phone. He had other calls to make, but not on that instrument. He would reach out for Leon, get the hairy son of a bitch cracking on the job he should have finished long ago. And just in case the loup-garou was losing it, Merle would have backup waiting to complete the contract, maybe take out the wolf man while they were at it, to prevent him squealing later, if he got his leg caught in a trap.

Merle wouldn't lead the team himself, of course; that would be risky. But he would be in the neighborhood, by pure coincidence, to watch the play go down. It would be more fun than the prize fights scheduled out of Vegas that night, running live on HBO.

He set the cell phone beside his plate and called for Ansel, waiting for the fat man to appear. "Yeah, boss?"

"Give me a telephone, a real one this time, and be quick about it, hear?"

LEON WAS SICK of driving to New Orleans. Normally, he made the trek no more than three, four times a year, but this would be his second time within as many days. In his condition-wounded, hurting, weak from loss of blood, still grieving for the brothers he had lost-Leon was in a mood to scorn the summons from Merle Bettencourt, except for one small item.

Vengeance.

Leon hungered for it, had convinced himself that he couldn't survive without inflicting catastrophic payback on his nameless enemies. Without revenge, he was persuaded now, his bloody, aching wounds would never heal. The thought had seemed ridiculous at first, even to Leon, but he had been raised with magic, this and that kind, to imagine that he knew it all.

His wounds weren't as bad as they had first appeared to be, but they still pained him, and he was feeling somewhat light-headed from loss of blood. He had a shotgun pellet in his shoulder, burrowed deep into the flesh, no damage to the bones, apparently, since he could use his arm. Another piece of lead had grazed his biceps, left an ugly, oozing furrow, with flesh and fur peeled back and dangling until he had ripped it free. He didn't know how many pellets from the shotgun blast were buried in his side, but guessed there had to be two or three at least. Again, they had struck nothing vital.

There was no pack with him this time. They were shunning him. Leon had tried to leave the bitch behind, as well, but she was having none of that. The two of them would finish it together, but he didn't know what to expect from her once they had settled with their enemies. He was unfit to lead-that much was obvious-and Leon didn't know if she would stay with him when he was expelled from the pack.

No. He knew. She would stay with the pack. She would gravitate to the new alpha male.

Leon pushed that away and turned to business. He wondered how Merle Bettencourt had traced the enemy so quickly, and it bothered Leon that the Cajun mobster was directing him again. The first tip, sending Leon to Desire House, had been disastrous, and he had never seen his hated adversaries in the swamp, could not have sworn that they were even there. Now, Bettencourt said they were back in the French Quarter, hanging out around some Cajun restaurant.

Leon decided he would have to kill the mobster if his tip proved wrong this time. Three strikes, you're out, he told himself. It would be difficult, of course, but not impossible. A man-or loup-garou-who didn't care if he survived was the most formidable enemy on Earth.

The part about the restaurant made Leon smell an ambush. How could Bettencourt know where his enemies were having supper? And, more to the point, if he did know, why would he summon Leon for the job when he could easily have sent some guns along? It was a fact that Leon owed one body on his contract, but with all that had been going on, it seemed to him that Bettencourt would have preferred to trust his own.

Unless, of course, he planned to kill two birds with the same stone.

He had dispensed with the disguise, since there was still a final night of Mardi Gras ahead, permitting him to travel more or less at will, without the mummy wrappings. It was dark out, sidewalks crowded with a host of drunken revelers whose costumes made the wolf man's normal look seem positively tame. Raw wounds or no, Leon knew he would fit in with the herd and pass unnoticed through their ranks-at least until he found his prey and started raising hell.

He cruised past Justine's, saw no familiar faces from Desire House or the Cajun syndicate, but he was still ahead of schedule. Anyway, Merle Bettencourt could have a hundred gunners on the street disguised for Mardi Gras, and Leon wouldn't pick them out until they pulled their guns and started blasting.

Never mind.

He hadn't come this far, the need for vengeance churning in his gut, to simply turn around and go back home. He needed blood, and wouldn't rest until he tasted someone's, be it Cajun, Yankee, Chinaman or Gypsy witch.

Directly opposite Justine's, an auditorium's marquee displayed a sign for Mission Mardi Gras in foot-high letters. Underneath that cryptic legend hung the name of Reverend Marvin Rockwell. A line of folks waited outside the auditorium to get in, their Sunday-best clothes marking them as a distinct and visible minority in the riotous throng.

Leon dismissed them from his mind. He had no interest in religion, and damn little in the world of men, which had excluded him from birth and thereby canceled any debts he might have owed to a "polite" society. To Leon, all the festive crowd meant was potential cover when he made his move. He found a place to drop the station wagon two blocks from his destination, parked the stolen car and waited for the bitch to make her exit, locked it up and pocketed the keys. Leon couldn't predict if he would ever pass this way again, but just in case, he didn't want to find a bunch of alcoholic elves or gargoyles sprawled out in his vehicle when he was running for his life.

"Let's go," he told the bitch, and felt her walking close beside him as he moved into the crowd.

"I DON'T NEED any preachin', thank you all the same," Jean Cuvier protested.

"I didn't say you had to sign up," Remo replied. "It's handy, and you'll blend in with the crowd instead of standing out like a sore thumb. I think it's safe to say your old friend Bettencourt won't have a hit team working the revival."

"They aren't after me," Aurelia said. "Why should I go?"

"Because the wolf man is," Remo reminded her. "That's how you wound up here, if I recall correctly. If things get nasty, I don't need any excess baggage."

"Thank you very much." Her tone was stiff.

"Don't mention it. You'll stay with Chiun and do exactly what he says, exactly when he says it. Understand? Survival means cooperation. Don't start making up new rules to suit yourself. A deviation from the plan could get you killed."

"Ain't been to Sunday school since I was six or seven," Cuvier complained. "Feels downright odd, you wanna know the truth."

"I mean to save your life," said Remo. "You can think about your soul some other time."

It was still entirely possible, he realized, that Bettencourt would keep his men away from the restaurant. Remo hadn't been assigned to trash the Cajun Mafia per se, but Remo wasn't shy about using his own initiative if it wasn't too much of a bother.

Chiun was miffed, of course. He wished to accompany Remo to meet the enemy. He wanted to see the wolf man in the flesh. Mostly he didn't wish to take the servile position of bodyguard.

He made one last snipe about the issue. "You want me to go mingle with the carpenter's rabble while you hog the glory," he accused Remo.

"Aren't you supposed to be meditating?" Remo asked. "You can go do that if you'd rather. But I'm Reigning Master, and I'm the one who's supposed to be doing all the work. You made that clear enough. So I'm gonna go to the restaurant. You can protect the civilians or go find a nice spot for your butt mat."

Chiun huffed and argued no further, which was as good as acquiescence, but Remo could tell the old Master was already planning some payback. Aurelia stared at Remo for a moment, as if memorizing details of a face she wouldn't see again. "Follow me," Chiun ordered. When Cuvier hesitated, Chiun took him by the elbow in his gentle fingers. The Cajun yelped.

A moment later, they were gone, merged with the gaudy foot traffic beyond the alley's mouth.

YOU HAD TO GET UP pretty early in the morning to surprise Merle Bettencourt. He hadn't risen from the lousy shrimp boats, climbing through the family ranks as runner, strong-arm, pimp and captain, to command the syndicate in Armand's absence, without picking up some tricks along the way.

If you received an invitation to a sit-down, for example, and your gut told you it was a trap, you didn't automatically decline. Instead, you took precautions-showed up early, scouted out the territory, checked for indicators that you ought to stay at home, or maybe show up with your own gorillas and reverse the gimmick, turn the whole damn thing around.

He could have sent a spotter to perform that function, but instead had chosen to take care of it himself. You want a job done right, his daddy used to tell him, don't give it to someone else. His old man had been sober that day, for a change, and Merle had listened to him. Every now and then, the scrawny bastard got one right.

His rooftop perch gave Bettencourt a clear view of Justine's, across the street and south of where he stood, together with the auditorium directly opposite. The street was crawling with a motley crowd of party-goers sporting costumes that ranged from simple dominoes to weird full-body suits that turned them into movie monsters, cowboys, clowns or men from Mars. It was like Halloween down there, except it was adults, not kids, and they were after booze or sex, not penny candy.

The binoculars brought everything up close and personal, gave him a ringside seat to a colossal freak show. Bettencourt had no idea what kind of masks his men were wearing and he didn't care, as long as they were armed and ready, their team leader standing by his walkie-talkie for the signal to attack. He knew their general positions, staking out Justine's without being too obvious about it. They were all professionals, and he would trust them to perform as such.

Unless they blew it, in which case he meant to have their balls for cuff links, boiled and bronzed. The problem with his plan-a huge one, Bettencourt admitted to himself-was that it only worked if Cuvier showed up as Cuvier, revealed his face to let Merle get a fix on him and tell the gunners where to strike. As far as Bettencourt could guess, the odds were sixty-forty, anyway, in favor of some kind of setup, meaning Cuvier was nowhere near Justine's, but there were federal marshals, local cops-whatever-staking out the restaurant to bust whomever Bettencourt sent in to make the tag. Another possibility was that the rat would show, but in disguise like everybody else, in which case he could pass within arm's length of Bettencourt and not be recognized. All things considered, it was a pathetic long shot, but the last, best hope he had of nailing Cuvier and opening the road for Armand Fortier's appeal.

He had been concentrating on the sidewalk near the restaurant for half an hour, maybe longer, when he took a break and swept his glasses slowly to the right, across the crowded street. He scanned the made-up faces, traffic creeping down the center stripe while geeks of all descriptions spilled over the sidewalk, milling in the street. It crossed his mind to look for Leon, but he spotted two werewolves no more than twenty feet apart and quickly gave it up. Another long shot.

If the hairy freak decided to show up, would he have any better luck at picking Cuvier out of the crowd? Would Leon sniff him out, like some bizarre and ghastly bird dog from The Twilight Zone? What powers did the bastard really have, beyond the strength of his broad shoulders and thick arms?

Merle Bettencourt was so caught up in thinking of his troubles that he almost missed his target, standing right there on the street before him, no disguise. The rat was just emerging from an alleyway, perhaps a block south of the auditorium where Jesus people had been trooping in to hear the word. Cuvier was followed by a woman dressed in clothing that resembled Gypsy garb.

Screw it.

Bettencourt followed the mismatched pair with his glasses, making sure that there was no mistake. You would've thought that Cuvier had sense enough to grow a beard or mustache, anyway, some effort to disguise himself while he was wandering around the very heart of Armand's territory, but there was no accounting for stupidity. If Cuvier had been half-smart, he never would have testified against his boss man in the first place.

Bettencourt kept watching, waiting, for the pair to veer right, across the street, head for Justine's, but they kept walking north until they reached the Holy Roller crowd and got in line. The line was moving swiftly now, and Cuvier and his lady friend were at the front door of the auditorium before Merle got the walkie-talkie unhooked from his belt and brought it to his lips.

"Brunelle, you there?"

"Here, boss," the leader of his hit team answered.

"They're across the street," Bettencourt said, "going in the auditorium right now. He's with a Gypsy woman and I think-I think maybe I saw the Chinaman. Maybe not."

"We're on it."

Merle stowed the two-way radio and watched Cuvier and the Gypsy a moment more, until they disappeared inside the auditorium. He could have sworn he saw the little old Chinaman, just for a second. But he didn't see him again.

Merle put down the glasses and retrieved the latex mask rolled up in his pocket. Bill Clinton, looking swollen and red-nosed with cartoon hair. Merle slipped it on and double-timed in the direction of the service stairs.

There would be no harm watching while his soldiers did their thing, if only from a distance. He could verify the kill himself and be on hand to help if anything went wrong.

But it had better not go wrong, Merle told himself. It damn well better not.

LEON WAS TALLER than three-quarters of the other people in the crowd, excluding those who had arrived on stilts, and so he had spied his targets even as Merle Bettencourt was spotting them from farther up the street. The wolf man recognized all three of them, the stoolie from his photos and the Gypsy woman and the little Asian man, who moved through the crowd with such fluidity and speed that even the wolf man's sharp eyes had trouble keeping up with him. Leon felt his blood begin to simmer, hackles rising, as his lips curled back from yellow teeth.

The bitch couldn't have spotted them, as short as she was, but she picked up on his tension, the excitement thrumming in his veins, and gave a little whimper that became a snarl. A tall transvestite dolled up like Reba McEntire retreated from the growling wolf and wobbled on his comical stiletto heels.

"Ooo, keep that beast away fom me," the person of transgendered persuasion cautioned in a hoarse falsetto.

Leon's right hand lashed out, dark fingers snagging in the neckline of the he-she's party dress, and ripped the garment to its owner's waist. Pink rubber falsies hit the sidewalk like two balls of Silly Putty, bounding off in opposite directions through the teeming crowd.

"Oh, my babies!" squealed the she-male, diving for his disembodied left tit in a move that cleared the way for Leon and the bitch to pass beyond arm's reach.

Leon was tracking all the while, saw his three targets get in line outside the auditorium whose marquee wore the brand of Mission Mardi Gras. He watched them disappear inside and cursed his luck, surmising that the ushers on the door wouldn't admit a loup-garou, much less his canine date, to hear the Reverend Marvin Rockwell speak. Leon could lay them out in seconds flat, of course, but the effort would attract whatever passed for muscle at a Holy Roller outing, and his quarry could escape while he was dealing with the hired help.

There had to be a better way.

He saw the alley coming up, between a deli and the auditorium, and steered the bitch in that direction, shoving through the crowd. Another werewolf was about to take offense, until he got a look at Leon and his painted cheeks immediately crinkled with a smile.

"Hey, brother," the bogus wolf man said, "us lycanthropes should stick together. Put her there!" He groped for Leon's hand, too shocked to scream as Leon crushed his fingers in a grip of steel and left him kneeling on the sidewalk, retching through his pain.

The alley wasn't quite deserted, but the figure sprawled across their line of march was already unconscious. Leon stepped across the scrawny legs and heard the tick-tack-tick of claws on pavement as the bitch kept pace. In other circumstances, she would almost certainly have paused to taste the wino, but her blood was up. She felt the call to vengeance and would let nothing distract her from that quest.

Leon hadn't devised a plan yet, but the auditorium would have a back door, and if it was locked ...well, he would take one problem at a time.

In fact, the back door to the auditorium was standing open when he got there, with a sixty-something man leaning next to it, in shirt and tie, smoking a cigarette.

"My gracious, brother," said the old man, smiling at Leon's approach, "you look a-"

Leon snapped his neck and flung him into the garbage bin some twenty feet down the alleyway. The man was gone in seconds, and no one had been there to see where he went.

"Now," Leon told the bitch, "we going have some fun tonight!"

THERE IS a GOOD DEAL more to saving souls than many people realized. Most thought it boiled down to a rousing hellfire sermon followed by an altar call, and then the sheep came forward to surrender. That was part of it, all right, but Reverend Rockwell had learned his trade from masters of their craft, the planning and the details that went into it.

Making salvation pay.

There were a million different things to think about, from the selection of a meeting place to lighting, sound effects, emergency precautions, all the rules imposed by zoning boards and fire inspectors.

Once you had picked the place, there was a whole new list of details to arrange, from musical selections to the proper shills, if you were healing for the cameras. It wouldn't do to hire some yokel who would make it look too easy-or, conversely, one so drunk that he was unable to leap up from his wheelchair and begin to dance on cue.

Most critical of all, however, any preacher worth his salt planned for passing the collection plate-or bucket, as the case may be. The Reverend Rockwell preferred a shiny metal pail to the traditional collection plate for two good reasons. First, it held more cash, its very size encouraging his faithful audience to dig deep and give until the bucket didn't seem so empty anymore. And second, since the pail was made of metal and produced a ringing clang when coins were dropped inside, the first couple dozen contributors were encouraged to give folding money, thus sparing themselves the embarrassment of looking-or sounding-like cheapskates. That got the ball rolling each time, and those who saw a wad of greenbacks in the bucket when it came to them were more inclined to give in kind.

Psychology was a marvelous gift from God.

So far this evening, everything had gone like clockwork. Music for the first half hour, from a cheap piano and a choir donated-naturally-by the pastor of the Ninth Street Free Will Apostolic Church. They weren't half-bad, at that: more like three-quarters, with a couple of alleged sopranos in the ranks who couldn't hit high C if they were using antiaircraft guns.

Oh, well, Rockwell told himself, it wasn't quality that counted so much in revival meetings as the quantity. More people meant more money, and more souls to trail the first few shills when Rockwell made his special altar call. Same thing at healing ceremonies, only more of them were apt to be in wheelchairs, pushing walkers, maybe hobbling down the aisle like Quasimodo. Reverend Rockwell would "heal" them all, with just a prayer and a light touch. Next night, same thing, his press gang making sure that no one hired the same street people two nights in a row.

Show business was a gas.

This night, the well-oiled, finely tuned machine was running like a Swiss watch. The choir had done its thing and shuffled off the stage, immediately followed by Rockwell's sidekick, Jerry Pratt. Jerry could milk an audience of cash the way an expert snake handler milked vipers. Only Rockwell himself was better at it, which explained why he took personal charge of the untraditional second collection, made concurrently with his dramatic altar call.

Reverend Rockwell was pleased with the crowd, noting that the auditorium was SRO, with only a handful of the spectators in costume, and all of those except a giant Tweety Bird had doffed their headgear in a gesture of respect. Rockwell made no effort to convince himself that he had won them over yet; in truth, he didn't even care. The whole point of his Mission Mardi Gras was getting on the tube, grabbing some airtime that that hell-bound sinner Elmo Breen could not begin to emulate. A few months down the road, when individuals were lined up at the polls and they began to think about what really mattered-family values, sacred principles, the right to life-they would remember Reverend Rockwell as Christ's own candidate.

This night, in keeping with the holiday, he had a hellfire message for the crowd, straight out of the Book of Revelation, strong enough to make the diehard drunkards in the audience take notice.

"The final days are coming!" he proclaimed, his bull voice amplified by the acoustics and sound system of the auditorium. Without missing a beat, he shifted to scripture, leaving the faithful to decide which words were his and which were God's.

"'Before the throne,'" cried Reverend Rockwell, "'there was a sea of glass like unto crystal, and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.'"

There was a stirring in the audience, a couple of the women gasping, while a tall man pointed toward the stage. Rockwell wasn't used to that particular reaction, but he made the most of it, leaning forward with his full weight on the podium, shouting directly at those brothers and sisters in the front row.

"'And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast was like a calf,'" he bellowed, "'and and the third beast had a face like a man, and-'"

Christ, the whole front row was screaming now, some of them bolting from their seats and making for the nearest aisle. Distracted, Reverend Rockwell wheeled to his left, faced toward the wings and saw a most ungodly apparition rushing toward him, long legs eating up the stage.