Wolf's Bane

He wouldn't have described the face as like a man's exactly, even though the thing was wearing overalls and boots. It struck him more as something from a nightmare, spawned by too much pepperoni on his late-night pizza, but Rockwell knew that he wasn't hallucinating. Not if everybody in the audience could see it, too.

Without a weapon close at hand, nowhere to run, Rockwell did the only thing that he could think of, lifting up his Bible in both hands and holding it in front of him to ward off the monster. No one was more surprised than Reverend Rockwell when one long, shaggy arm reached out and swept the book aside, immediately followed by a shoulder slamming square into his chest.

The words that poured from Reverend Rockwell's lips as he began to plummet off the stage and down into the pit bore no resemblance to a prayer.

Chapter 18

Chiun was slightly amused. He was mostly annoyed. These were the worst kind of spectacles, greed cloaked as religion. For some reason, the followers of the carpenter from Galilee had an abundance of gaudy exhibitions such as this. What was most miraculous was that the worshipers came to them and enthusiastically permitted their pockets to be emptied.

But this was as good a place to meet the enemy as any other. Chiun would simply use the crowd to personal advantage when his foes arrived. Remo would probably find himself twiddling his thumbs in the restaurant and fighting the temptation to order some sort of fried cattle entree.

The entertainers on the stage went through their paces. They were all familiar to Chiun from his channel surfing. He wondered if these actors thought there was some sort of supposed secret hypnotic quality that came from referring to the carpenter as "Jay-sus-uh. "

The greed-preachers were experts when it came to flogging simpleminded viewers into a state that was equal parts ecstasy and pain. When they attained that level, crimson-faced and weeping, brandishing their pudgy hands aloft like baseball fans rehearsing a coordinated wave, the salesman at the podium had little difficulty separating them from any cash they carried. Some of them collapsed, while others hopped about and babbled gibberish, like caricatures of small children pretending to speak a foreign language.

Chiun, despite the entertainment, was instantly aware of the first two Cajun gunmen slipping into the auditorium. He left his charges with strict orders to remain exactly where they were, awaiting his return.

Three more assassins were inside the auditorium as Chiun approached the first he had seen. They kept their weapons out of sight, but it was obvious that they were armed, with awkward bulges visible beneath the jackets they would not have worn this night if they had nothing to conceal.

Chiun had no idea if they had been forewarned to watch for a Korean, but he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing in their wasted lifetimes had prepared them to confront a Master of Sinanju. He was standing at the first one's elbow by the time his adversary knew that he was being hunted in the crowd. Too late, the big man with the rubber skull mask tried to draw his weapon, dead before he reached it from a strike no human eye could follow. It was child's play for Chiun to hold him upright, although the dead man's head wobbled as they moved together through the press of worshipers who were compelled to stand against the back wall of the auditorium for lack of seats. Ahead of him, a second gunman-this one with the plastic face and dangling hair of Fabio-glanced over, saw his comrade coming, and began to drift toward him, clearly having failed to spot his targets in the crowd.

When the second gunman came within arm's reach, Chiun reached around the corpse and delivered another lightning strike. Half of Fabio's unyielding countenance imploded. Chiun was now bracing two dead men and looking for a place where he could prop them up together without setting off a stampede and a chorus of screaming.

Then he saw movement on stage, far below. The hulking, hairy man-thing he had last seen at Desire House was charging at the startled minister. As Chiun dropped his pair of corpses, the manlike demon swept away the preacher. One of the wolf-dogs ran on stage with the creature.

The audience erupted into screaming chaos as Chiun homed in on his nearest living enemy with greater speed.

LEON HAD KNOWN they would be entering a crowded room, but the marquee for Mission Mardi Gras meant nothing to him, and he had expected something in the nature of a barn dance, people milling everywhere, instead of wedged in seats and watching while a fat man paced around the stage, a microphone in one hand, black book in the other. Leon didn't know what the occasion was, nor did he give a muskrat's ass. The moment that he cleared the wings and heard the screaming start, he knew exactly what he had to do.

The fat man was first, turning to face Leon with his face contorted, shock and fear most evident among the jumbled senses flickering behind his eyes. Leon went for him in a rush, ignored the flare of pain from recent wounds as they collided, snarling triumph as the fat man tumbled backward, off the stage, to the unyielding concrete floor below.

Leon couldn't begin to guess how many people there were in the auditorium-it had to be hundreds, possibly a thousand-but he knew that every one of them was staring at him now, some of them pointing, screaming, many scrambling from their seats and making for the nearest exit in a rush. He needed time to find the three he had come looking for, but there would be no time, he realized, as panic seized the audience at large and individuals began to scramble over one another, elbowing their fellows to the side and trampling those who fell.

The bitch streaked past him, bounding off the stage without a moment's hesitation. Leon didn't know where she was going, whether she had spotted their intended quarry. By the time he spun in that direction, tracking her, she had already disappeared into the crowd.

Goddamn it!

Someone came at Leon from the wings directly opposite, another fat man, this one with a badge pinned to his sweaty shirt. Some kind of rent-a-cop retained for the occasion, and he didn't even have a gun. The club he brandished overhead might have intimidated a normal, but Leon didn't give the stick a second thought.

He met the man halfway, his good arm reaching out, lips curled back in a snarl. The fat man blanched and tried to change his mind, but it was too late now. Before he could retreat, Leon had grabbed a handful of his shirt and jerked him forward, lunging at his triple chins with sharp, discolored teeth. The fat man's scream was drowned in gurgling crimson, and his night stick clattered on the stage, rolled toward the footlights, useless and forgotten.

Leon didn't pause to feed, but rather thrust the dead man from him after he had swallowed enough blood to quench his sudden thirst. If he was going to retrieve the moment, find his quarry in the milling, shrieking crowd, he had to get down there among them, on the main floor of the auditorium.

Each moment wasted gave his targets that much time to get away.

Without hesitating, Leon charged the footlights and leaped off into space.

MERLE BETTENCOURT KNEW something had gone wrong the moment he heard screaming from the auditorium. There was no sound of gunshots, so he had to figure that his men had not yet connected with their targets, and that meant something else had roused the audience to screaming panic in the time it took for him to cross six feet of sidewalk and approach the double doors out front.

It wasn't Jesus-screaming. It reminded Bettencourt of what you expect to hear inside a crowded theater if fire broke out.

Entering the smallish lobby of the auditorium, Bettencourt was greeted by a tide of frightened-looking people running in the opposite direction, toward the exit and the street beyond. He ducked behind a concrete pillar, braced himself, then plunged into the crowd, prepared to slug his way upstream if necessary, anything to find out what the hell was going on and what had happened to his crew.

He hadn't drawn his pistol yet, preferred to wait until he had a target or the stampede of humanity required more drastic handling than mere fists and elbows. As it was, Merle took a few knocks going in, but he was gaining ground. He guessed that there were other exits at the rear or to the sides, draining a portion of the crowd. That meant his targets could have wriggled through some other loophole, but he wasn't ready to give up on them just yet. He had to find his shooters first, and try to figure out exactly what was happening.

In fact, he literally stumbled on the first one, several yards inside the main room of the auditorium, where total chaos reigned. Merle caught himself before he went down on his face, and recognized the ape mask Terry Joslin had been wearing to disguise himself. Still, there was something odd...

It took Merle Bettencourt another moment to decipher what was troubling him. His soldier lay facedown, arms splayed as if to clutch the earth, but the ape mask he wore was facing upward, toward the ceiling. Reaching out to prod the rubber with a shaky index finger, Merle could feel his supper coming back as he discovered that the shooter's whole damn head was turned around like something from The Exorcist.

Merle drew his pistol then, stepped back from Terry Joslin's corpse and started looking for his other boys. Where were they, damn it? How could they have missed their targets, even in a zoo like this, when they had been so close behind them and the marks wore no disguises?

The crush was clearing out where Merle stood, and he spotted two more of his boys where they had fallen, not just side by side, but one atop the other, stacked. Benny Foch and Gilles Petiot, he recognized from their respective masks. A skull and a long-haired Fabio, for Christ's sake, stretched out dead together on the concrete floor.

That left three to do the job, if they were still alive. Merle didn't know if he could get to them in time, if they were even still inside the auditorium, but he couldn't cut and run, no matter how he longed to do exactly that. Rank had its privileges, but they were balanced by responsibilities.

He started toward the nearest aisle that led between the rows of seats, down toward the pit and stage, sidestepping as an old man charged directly at him, wild-eyed, running for his life. More panicked Christians followed, jostling Merle, unmindful of the automatic pistol in his hand. He slashed at one of them, a farmer type, opened his cheek and sent the damned hick reeling off into an empty row of seats, where he collapsed.

Merle was suddenly alert to a snarling sound that emanated from his left. He turned in that direction, toward the stage, and found himself confronted with a canine apparition from his wildest nightmares.

It was larger than a German shepherd, smaller than a Dane, with blood smeared on its muzzle and its matted, tangled coat. Bright eyes regarded Bettencourt as nothing more than food, lips curled back from a set of yellow fangs streaked crimson from a recent taste of flesh and blood. Behind the monster, he saw bodies scattered-two, three, four of them, all missing pieces of their throats and faces, crimson spilling from their wounds onto the sloping floor.

"You wanna piece of me?" the Cajun mobster challenged, but his voice cracked and he felt his bladder straining toward release.

The wolf-thing snarled again, in answer to his question, gliding forward with a click-click-click of claws on concrete, picking up its pace. Merle tried to raise his pistol, but it seemed to weigh a ton all of a sudden, and he knew he was too late as the demented hound from hell sprang toward his throat.

AURELIA BOLDISZAR was worried. There had been no warning this time that the loup-garou was coming, and she wondered if her powers might be failing her, perhaps disoriented by her feelings for the man called Remo. Or maybe she had been distracted by the fear of being shot by those who hunted her contemptible companion, the crude Jean Cuvier.

Whatever the excuse she chose, this time the wolf man had surprised her absolutely. She hadn't been listening attentively to Reverend Rockwell, but rather feeling out the crowd, wondering what had distracted their Korean baby-sitter and where he had gone off to after warning them to keep their seats. When the crowd started screaming, scrambling from their seats in panic, she turned once more to face the stage.

And saw a nightmare in the flesh.

It had been dark the first time, in the Gypsy camp, and she was fleeing for her life at the hotel on Tchoupitoulas Street when he had come for her the second time, but she saw every detail of the monster now. He was indeed a wolf in human form, the denim overalls and boots he wore looking ridiculous with hairy shoulders, chest and arms exposed. And then there was the face-the hideously distended muzzle and the snarling fangs.

By the time the monster rushed at Reverend Rockwell and swept him off the stage, Cuvier was on his feet and shoving toward the nearest aisle, elbowing frightened Christians left and right. She caught him by the shirttail, yelling at him, "Wait! Chiun told us to stay here!"

Rounding on her furiously, Cuvier spit back, "You stay here, then! Be damn dog food, all I care. I'm gettin' out while gettin's good!"

She followed him unwillingly, as much in fear of staying where she was as from a need to see that he was safe. She had distrusted Cuvier on sight, despised him since he made his clumsy move on her, back at Desire House, but if Remo wanted him alive, she was prepared to help the Cajun stay that way. Aurelia only hoped it wouldn't cost her life.

She slipped in behind him as he started bulling through the crowd. One thing about the Cajun, she decided: he made a fair human battering ram. It made no difference if the individuals who blocked his way were men, women or children-he shoved them to the side to save himself.

Twice in their stampede toward the street, Aurelia paused to help one of the people Cuvier had toppled in his rush. The first one was a little girl, no more than six or seven years of age; the other was a woman old enough to be his grandmother, who may have tipped the scales at ninety pounds if she had weighed in with her cane and orthopedic shoes. Aurelia mumbled vain apologies but kept moving in the Cajun's slipstream.

They were within sight of the lobby doors, and there was still no sign of Chiun, when suddenly Aurelia glimpsed a door off to her left. It stood in shadow, with no Exit sign above it, and incredibly, it seemed that no one in the crowd had spied it yet. Once more, she grabbed at Cuvier's loose shirttail. "What now?" he snapped.

"This way!" she urged him, pointing toward the other door.

"We at the lobby," he reminded her. "It's this way to the street."

"And anyone who's looking for you knows it," she replied. "They'll be expecting you, but suit yourself. I'm going out this way."

With that, she turned her back and heard the Cajun cursing, screwing up the nerve to follow her. She glanced back once, to make sure he was coming, and it cost her, as she stumbled over someone's prostrate body, stretched out on the floor.

Aurelia caught herself, face inches from a leering vampire mask. It was an incomplete, almost pathetic costume, worn as it had been with a sport shirt, windbreaker, denim jeans. Not that it mattered to the man behind the mask what other people thought, since he was clearly dead or dying, his head cocked at an impossible angle, fresh blood leaking from one ear she could see.

Aurelia was recovering her balance, scrambling to her feet, when she saw the shiny automatic pistol tucked inside the dead man's belt. She grabbed it without thinking twice-he wouldn't need it now. She identified the make and made sure she had the safety off.

There was a great deal more to being Gypsy than just reading tea leaves, after all.

Jean Cuvier was past her, almost to the exit, as Aurelia scrambled to her feet. The bastard would have left her, she was sure of it, but he wouldn't get rid of her so easily. In fact, if he had any plans for ditching Remo and Chiun, she now had means to stop him and make sure he didn't slip away.

She was perhaps ten feet behind the Cajun when he reached the door and threw his weight against it.

Nothing. With a curse, he seized the knob and shook it, shouldering the metal door again.

"Try pulling," she suggested.

"Merde!" He pulled, without result. The door held fast.

"They can't do this!" he raged, and pointed at a message stenciled on the flat gray steel that barred their way: This Door Must Be Unlocked At All Times During Business Hours. "Jesus, man! They breakin' they own rules."

Aurelia thought about blasting the lock with her liberated pistol, as Cuvier started back to the lobby, then froze.

"Shee-it!" the Cajun blurted.

Before him stood a wolf-dog like the ones that had attacked her family's camp and the hotel suite. This one was smeared with blood, its muzzle gleaming crimson. Dark eyes shifted constantly between Aurelia and the Cajun, watching both of them at once, deciding which of them it should kill first.

Aurelia wondered if she ought to fire, risk missing, maybe hitting someone in the crowd still shoving, milling at the lobby exit. It was a long time since she had actually fired a gun, and if she didn't score a vital hit with her first shot.

The beast made the decision for her, yelping furiously as it sprang to tear the Cajun's throat. Aurelia raised her gun and fired once while the wolf was in midair, then saw its jaws clamp onto Cuvier's right arm, raised to protect his face. The two of them went down together, thrashing, with the animal on top.

Recovered from the first explosion of the pistol, fired by reflex more than anything, Aurelia Boldiszar lunged forward as the wolf-dog sank its fangs into Cuvier's arm and shook him as a terrier might shake a rat. The Cajun was screaming, his face flecked with blood, raw panic in his bulging eyes.

Aurelia dared not risk a head shot first, for fear of hitting Cuvier by accident. Instead, she moved to skin-touch range and fired two rapid shots into the creature's rib cage. The explosive impact blew her living target sideways, spraying blood from ugly blow holes, its fangs releasing the Cajun's arm.

Mortally wounded but still primed to fight, the savage canine turned on Aurelia, lunged for her on wobbly legs, jaws gaping. When the beast was three feet from her outstretched hand, she fired twice more into its gaping maw, slamming it backward like a tumbling sack of rags:

"Get up," Aurelia said to Cuvier when she could find her voice. "We're getting out of here."

REMO KNEW he had been suckered when a mob of screaming Christians started pouring through the front doors of the auditorium. Nothing in the preacher's repertoire would prompt such a reaction, even if he passed the plate three times instead of two. And then there were gunshots audible in the crowd noise.

No one had even sniffed around Justine's while he stood waiting on the sidewalk. Somehow, the enemy had zeroed in on Cuvier and Aurelia Boldiszar in the auditorium with Chiun, and now the racket from across the street told him that death had found them there.

Remo sped across the street, avoiding the sluggish traffic and finding a path through the panicking crowd.

Inside the auditorium it was a battlefield. Remo saw the first body as he cleared the threshold from the lobby, entering the main room of the auditorium. A gunman with an E.T. mask lay stretched out on the floor, the fingers of his right hand curled around a weapon he had never found the time to use. No blood was showing, but Remo didn't have to guess about the cause of death.

Off to his left, some thirty feet away, Chiun was finishing the last two members of the Cajun hit team. Remo might have reached the scene in time to help the Master of Sinanju, but no help was necessary. Chiun demolished his hulking adversaries with sublime economy of motion. Both of them were down and dead as Remo turned to scan the auditorium, ignoring scattered bodies and the walking wounded, searching for Aurelia and Jean Cuvier.

The howling told him where they were.

Remo slipped around a corner and down a narrow passageway that led him to an exit on the north side of the auditorium. Aurelia and his witness huddled back against the door, not using it for some reason, a bulky figure looming over them and snarling like a rabid dog.

This wasn't another of the Cajun shooters in a Halloween mask. The creature had a hairy back and shoulders, dark fur covering a power lifter's arms, long blackened talons at the tips of clutching fingers.

About time, Remo thought, and whistled like a man calling his dog. "Hey, Bigfoot! Someone forget to lock the cages at the zoo, or what?"

The loup-garou swiveled to face him, dark eyes blazing in a countenance as shaggy as the creature's arms and shoulders. The snout was distended just enough to be unnatural. The eyes were animal eyes. Dark, thin lips curled back from yellow fangs, as crooked and rotten as a long neglected picket fence.

"No orthodontists back in Transylvania, I guess."

The wolf man snarled at him, then spoke. "You wanna die before these two, it make no never mine to me."

"Use caution, my son. He is more than the others." It was Chiun who spoke, several feet behind him.

Remo nodded just barely in understanding. He sidestepped to see Aurelia, standing firm with both hands clutched around a semiautomatic pistol with the slide locked open. Empty. Cuvier was crouched behind her, fingers clawing at the concrete wall as if he longed to tunnel through it and escape.

"I hear you talking, Leon," Remo told the wolf man, pleased to see the savage eyes blink in surprise. "Is talking all you do? Or do you save the muscle for the ladies?"

The loup-garou sprang at Remo, arms outstretched to seize his throat. There was no planning to the move, and precious little skill, but there was animal speed and agility that shouldn't have been present in a brute that was six foot five or six and way better than two hundred pounds.

Remo had battled the mutated, half-animal creature created by Judith White, and he knew their capabilities.

Leon was better. Leon was faster.

Leon came at him like a bolt of hairy lightning. Remo watched him come and waited until the final instant, then stepped to the side and struck with his right hand, fingers rigid, hooking solidly into the wolf man's side.

Leon reacted with inhuman speed, twisting in midflight to dodge the blow. But he couldn't avoid it. Remo felt ribs snap on impact, heard the grunt of pain and saw his adversary stagger as he regained his feet. The loup-garou pivoted to face his enemy, returning to the fight with greater caution, snarling as he came.

Remo dropped and spun, lashing out at Leon's right knee with a kick and heard it snap. The wolf man clawed at the empty air where Remo had been, then yelped in pain and flung himself down, hoping to trap his adversary beneath him.

Remo was gone.

The wolf man pushed up off the floor, craning his head to find where his enemy had gotten to.

Remo was coming at him from behind, and he planted a palm on the wolf man's back. Leon Grosvenor was slammed to the floor with such force he felt as if a concrete wall had come down on him.

"Okay, dog-face boy," Remo said. "Time to talk."

The wolf man struggled weakly for a moment, dazed. "Fu-!"

Remo pushed harder. The wolf man's entire rib cage compressed, his lungs being squeezed into a smaller space as his ribs creaked like the timbers of an overloaded pirate ship of old.

"Speak, Fido," Remo commanded.

Leon wheezed and struggled. "It was Armand Fortier. Merle Bettencourt. Them's the ones that hired me."

Remo felt the stall. There was still a massive ripple of strength alive in the wolf man's body, and Remo knew Leon was talking while he got his wits together. But talking was necessary.

"I don't give a fur coat for those two losers," he said. "It's you I'm interested in."

"Me?" Leon grunted.

"More precisely, your maker. How did you get this way?"

"I was born this way, you stupid son of a-" There was a nerve in the neck. People had it. Leon probably had it, too. Remo felt around.

Leon howled.

"Yep. You got it," Remo said. Then he released the nerve. "Now, listen to me, you stupid piece of dog shit, and listen good. I want straight answers from you, and I want them fast. Because good answers is all you've got right now that makes you worth keeping alive."

"I'll talk," the wolf man moaned, long and low. Remo pressed Leon Grosvenor a little harder into the floor, just as a reminder. Leon grunted. Remo wanted to keep pushing. He wanted to do things to Leon Grosvenor that would make a werewolf killing look tame. And for a moment the Reigning Master of Sinanju was surprised at the depths of his rage. "Who made you, dog?"

"A woman," Leon said. "She came to the bayou."

"And?"

"She asked me if I wanted to be a real loup-garou. She gave me something to drink."

"What did she look like?"

Leon described the woman.

Remo glanced at Chiun, who stood impassively watching. Chiun nodded and asked, "What about her arm, mongrel?"

Leon turned his head in surprise. "Her arm?" Then some sort of understanding opened on his face. "Her arm. It was smooth. It had skin like a baby's arm."

Remo breathed. There was the evidence. That was the kind of unusual detail that proved it. Judith White had lost her arm when she first encountered Remo. But by the time they had met the last time, she had managed to grow it back. The skin on the new arm was pink and new. "Even Smitty can't deny it was Dr. Judy."

Chiun nodded.

"How many others did she make?" Remo demanded.

"I made them. She ran away. I was too strong and she became afraid."

"How many?"

Remo knew the question wouldn't be answered when his hand detected the surge of impulses in the wolf man's muscles. Leon twisted violently to free himself-and Remo let him do it. One taloned claw slashed at him and Remo slapped it aside, shattering the bones. The other hand groped for him, weak and wounded, and Remo squeezed it into pulp.

The wolf man howled with rage and pain, and his eyes flashed to the left and right.

The wolf man's sanity had fled him.

He rose to his knees without warning, with the power of the insane, the speed of an unnatural creature and the adrenaline rush of a dying lunatic. His teeth gnashed at Remo's throat with dizzying speed.

Remo met the face full of fangs with his own fist, thrusting his hand into the wolf man's maw. The jaw full of fangs disintegrated. The back of his shaggy neck exploded.

Then Remo extracted the arm fast. But not fast enough to keep it from getting covered in blood and gore.

The loup-garou of Louisiana wavered. He was still alive and gagging on his own teeth and blood. He struggled, amazingly, to get to his feet. Remo sneered. "Forget about it. You can't even bite my legs off."

Angry breath wheezed out of the werewolf's bloody throat.

"You gonna huff and puff and blow my house in?" Remo demanded. "Not this house, Leon." He struck hard and fast, his palm crushing the wolf man's skull with his palm, and Leon collapsed like a ton of bricks.

Incredibly, he was still alive, still moving weakly.

"No wonder Dr. Judy was scared of this guy," Remo said, "Whatever she gave him, it was kick ass."

Then the gurgle of death rattled out of the throat of the beast-man. The great, hairy brute went limp. "Is he really dead?" It was Aurelia, without her pistol, stepping tentatively in Remo's direction.

Remo nodded. "He's dead. And too ugly even for a rug."

Chapter 19

"Hey, Big Crawdaddy."

Armand Fortier awoke in a panic. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. There was someone in his cell!

"Be cool, Armand. I just need to talk to you for a little old minute."

Now he saw the shape of the man. It sure the hell wasn't the big black guard. It was-

The hand was removed from his mouth. "Keep it down now, will you?"

"You're the one who came to visit me last week!" Armand accused.

"Oooo, eee. I guarantee that's me," said the Reigning Master of Sinanju.

"How did you get in here?"

"That doesn't matter. I just wanted to tell you that I came to wrap up some loose ends," Remo Williams explained.

"What loose ends?" Armand Fortier looked around wildly for some sort of an explanation. Sure enough, he was in his cell, in the middle of the night, just where he thought he was. The door to his cell was closed. The penitentiary was silent and lit only by the nighttime lights. Everything was as expected, except for the man in the cell with him.

"You see," the stranger was telling him, "I killed old Leon the loup-garou."

Fortier glared at him. "You killed Leon?"

"But one of Leon's pups took out old Merle before I got there."

"Merle's dead?"

"Also, about ten of your guys bought it tonight."

"No way-!"

Armand Fortier found himself paralyzed. The stranger was holding him by the neck.

"I asked you to be quiet, now, didn't I, Big Crawdaddy," Remo said. "Let me ask you this. I just snuck into a federal penitentiary in the middle of the night. Why would I lie to you about the other stuff?"

Fortier's eyes were wild.

"It's true. I guarantee." Fortier tried to nod, but he couldn't.

"There are a few loose ends, though," Remo explained in a reasonable, quiet voice. "A few wolves running around in the bayou. I don't know if we'll ever find them all. And then there's you. You, I knew right where to find."

Fortier was confused.

"Got to tie up those loose ends," Remo Williams said.

Then he did. Literally.

Chapter 20

The sour face of Dr. Harold W. Smith was more pinched than usual.

"You didn't have to knot him up like that."

"Yes, I did," Remo answered.

"He was still alive when they found him, you know," Smith added. "Paralyzed and mute, but conscious. They said his legs and arm bones had been broken in dozens of places."

"Had to do that," Remo said reasonably. "Had to make him all floppy in order to make the knots. You know, the little fox goes through the hole?"

Dr. Smith sighed. Chiun stood impassively at the corner of the desk. Mark Howard, in the other chair, added, "Fortier died while they were trying to untie him."

"Shame," Remo said, and found some interesting bird droppings on Smith's window to look at. "They left him like that. I suppose the coroner will have a go at undoing him," Smith said.

"They should leave him in his present state," Chiun observed. "He would fit most conveniently in a garbage sack."

Remo smiled while Smith ignored the remark. "Louisiana state police are working on another case, involving several wealthy sportsmen who were found dead in the bayou country, shortly after your encounter with the so-called werewolf. One of them turned out to be a candidate for governor, an Elmo Breen. The others were presumably his friends, perhaps contributors to his campaign. One member of the party-Breen's campaign manager, in fact-is still missing. The party's hunting guide survived and told authorities that 'wild dogs' had attacked the camp. I would assume they'll try to pin the tragedy on Leon Grosvenor, whether he was involved or not."

"Feds see any wolves in the area?" Remo asked.

"No," Mark Howard answered. "Did you?"

"Not so much as moldy dog biscuit or a mis placed chew toy," Remo said. "We managed to convince some of the locals to take us to the hermit's shack this morning and the wolves had been gone for hours. They knew their pals weren't coming back, and they knew it wasn't safe to stick around."

"Any idea where they went?" Howard asked. "They covered their tracks."

Smith said, "Excuse me?"

"They sought to confuse the trail, 0 Emperor," Chiun said in a pleasant singsong. "They used every trick to obfuscate and erase the evidence of their passing."

"Surely they didn't consciously try to obliterate their trail?" Smith said.

"They were people, Smitty," Remo said. "Just deal with it, would you? They talked. That means they could think."

"I suppose so," Smith said.

"We followed the path out of the bayou to a state highway," Remo reported.

"Remo lost the trail at a service station," Chiun announced casually.

"We both lost it," Remo said. "They hitched a ride. They must have stowed away on some truck. It was three, four hours before we reached the spot. Where they went from there? West. Maybe." He shrugged. "What about the others at the big Godfest?"

Smith looked down at his hidden computer screen. "Aside from Grosvenor and the several gunmen who arrived with Bettencourt, three persons are reported dead, with seventeen injured in various degrees."

"Reverend Rockhead?" Remo asked.

"Rockwell," Smith said. "He broke his left leg, hip and collarbone when he fell off the stage, but he's been quoted as insisting that it won't inhibit his campaign for governor. I understand he's also in negotiation for a TV movie of the week. Something about a modern exorcist who casts out demons." Remo had to smile at that. He had already seen the footage of Leon's attack on Reverend Rockwell. It had been aired on all the networks and repeatedly on CNN. The later broadcasts had been censored, but the early clips had captured Rockwell's exclamation as he vaulted off the stage, wailing for "Jesus H. Christ."

Then his amusement dissipated like vapor. "We're not finished," he declared.

Smith sighed and sat up a little straighter, hands lifting from the glass top of his desk where he had been operating the hidden computer keys. "We've found nothing more that will lead us to Judith White," he said.

"The FBI combed the land where her mobile laboratory was parked," Mark Howard said. "They found a few very old traces that she had been there, but nothing useful. The evidence of her presence definitely predates the events at the water plant."

"Definitely?" Remo demanded. "Definitely."

"Leon Grosvenor, from what you've told us, seems like an experiment that almost got out of control," Smith said. "If what he told you is correct, then she was afraid of what she had made. He was too strong. Stronger than she was. Maybe it had something to do with the purity of the genetic material."

"The files on all CURE's old encounters with Judith White show she used complex genetic mixtures on her subjects," Mark Howard explained. "Tests from the animal corpse you obtained in Louisiana show it is genetically pure by her standards. Genetic signatures from just two species could be positively identified in the blood Homo sapiens and canis lupus baileyi. Human and Mexican Gray Wolf, a subspecies of the North American Gray Wolf." He looked at Remo. "Maybe the bayou wolves were headed way west. Canis lupus baileyi lives in the Southwestern deserts."

Dr. Smith added reluctantly, "The forensics report on Leon Grosvenor show that there were marked physiological changes, including signs of skeletal mutation, with bone-stress signatures indicative of extremely rapid growth."

"So if Leon changed partially, then with a bigger dose of Dr. Judy's stuff-you change somebody almost entirely," Remo pressed.

Smith looked very uncomfortable with the concept. "Yes," he admitted. "It appears so."

Remo stood abruptly. Chiun looked at him worriedly. Mark Howard and Harold Smith followed his agitated floor pacing.

"We gotta find that bitch," Remo declared.

"Why?"

It wasn't Smith or Howard. It was Chiun who asked the question.

"What do you mean, why?" Remo demanded. "Look what she's capable of!"

"Remo," said Mark Howard, "you are not responsible for what she does."

"How would you know?"

"You're going to get in trouble taking this too personally," Howard insisted.

"When I want your advice-"

"When I want to give you my advice I'll give it, goddamn it!" Howard said. "Would you just listen for a change!"

Remo stopped pacing. "Okay, Junior. I'll listen."

Howard looked flustered. "Well, I was done, actually."

THE DAY WAS BRIGHT and unseasonably warm outside. They left the windows down as they drove out of Folcroft.

Remo thought about Aurelia Boldiszar, back with her people now, picking up her life where it had been so rudely interrupted. She had suggested, at their parting, that she would be willing to remain with Remo for a while. The offer was appealing, but he said no. Aurelia seemed to take it well, and she had left him at the airport with a kiss Remo would not forget.

Chiun had been silent in the passenger seat for a long while, staring straight ahead, before he finally said, "Why?"

"Why what?" Remo asked.

"Why we gotta find that bitch?"

"Huh? Oh," Remo said, realizing Chiun was using his own words. Remo opened his mouth to answer. But he didn't.

He was remembering the pronouncement of Aurelia Boldiszar. She was a freaking Gypsy. She was a crystal-ball gazer, for Christ's sake, but she had not been lying.

I see the swirling darkness and chaos of your life. I see your fathers and your daughters and your sons, battling one another....

She had seen it in her mind's eye. She believed it was a true vision of Remo's future. But was it? What the hell could it mean?

And why was Remo Williams convinced it had something to do with Dr. Judith frigging White? They drove in silence for a while. The sun was brilliant. The day was dark.

"My son?" Chiun said finally.

"Yes, Little Father?" Remo answered respectfully.

"Why?"