The Arms of Kali PDF
Preview The Arms of Kali
The Destroyer The Arms of Kali Created by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. PINNACLE BOOKS are published by Windsor Publishing Corp. 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Copyright (c) by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. Chapter One He wouldn’t take a tip for helping her home from the airport. No, not even a nice frosted piece of yellow cake or even a cup of tea from the old woman. All he wanted was to put a pale yellow cloth around her neck, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He also wouldn’t stop tightening it. The Chicago police found her body in the morning. Her bags had not been un- packed. A homicide detective thought he recognized a pattern he had seen be- fore, and he thought he had read about another death like that in Omaha: a trav- eler found strangled to death with the luggage still packed. The detective checked with the FBI clearinghouse in Washington to see if this might be some sort of pattern. “The dead woman had a ticket with just Folks Airlines?” asked the FBI voice from Washington. “Yes, she did.” “She met someone on the plane? A nice young person, perhaps?” “We don’t know that yet,” the detective said. “You will soon enough,” the FBI voice answered. “So there is an M.O.,” said the detective, referring to a repetitive crime pattern. “Like a clock ticking,” replied the FBI agent. “A national pattern? Or just here?” “National. She was the hundred and third.” “A hundred and three people strangled?” asked the detective. His voice rose in horror as he imagined that old woman back in her picked-clean apartment, her purse open, her furniture rifled. More than a hundred, just like that? Impossible, he thought. “But this one was also robbed,” he said. “So were all hundred and three others,” the FBI agent said. Number 104. Albert Birnbaum was in seventh heaven. He had found someone who was not only willing to listen to the problems of selling retail hardware but was actually enthralled. His late wife, Ethel, may she rest in peace, used to say: “Al, nobody cares about the markup on a three-quarter-inch screw.” “That markup gave you Miami Beach every year for two weeks during the win- ter, and-“ “And the ranch house in Garfield Heights and the educations for the children and those charge accounts. I’ve heard it, but nobody else wants to hear it. Not even once do they want to hear it. Albert, precious, sweetheart, loved one, a three- quarter-inch screw lacks glamour.” Unfortunately, she did not live to see the day that she would be proved wrong. Because Albert Birnbaum had found a young woman, a beautiful young thing with pink cheeks and yellow hair and innocent blue eyes, and a little shiksa nose and she was fascinated about hardware markup. Truly fascinated. Albert had thought for a moment that she might be after his body. But he knew his body, and what he knew about it was that no one as good-looking as this lovely young thing would have to listen to hardware stories to get it, if she even wanted it in the first place already. She had the adjacent seat on the just Folks Airlines flight to Dallas. She had asked him if he were comfortable. He had said he was, considering that this was an economy fare. For a reduced rate, he said, it was a wonderful flight. However, she could keep the sandwich and candy bar they had tried to hand out at lunch. “Cheap planes serve cheap food and it’ll rot your stomach.” “Isn’t that ever so?” she said. “You really have such a philosophy of life. Even something like a flight, Mr. Birnbaum, you turn into an object lesson of compar- ative values.” “Listen, I don’t need big words,” he said. “Life is life, right?” “So well put, Mr. Birnbaum. That’s just what I mean. Life is life. It has majesty. It rings.” “You’re putting me on,” said Al Birnbaum. The seat was pinching his hips. But the way he looked at it, everything but a first-class seat pinched his hips nowa- days. And he wasn’t going to pay five hundred dollars extra not to get a pinched hip. He didn’t mention this. The girl couldn’t see the few extra pounds he was carrying around, as long as he was sitting down, so why mention it, right? And as pretty as she was, she was allowed to exaggerate a little bit -about his philos- ophy of life being so wonderful. But when he talked hardware and she really listened, Al Birnbaum realized he had found someone who would not lie. You did not keep those big blue eyes transfixed on the speaker, without honestly caring, not when you were able to say: “You mean a little three-quarter-inch screw is the backbone of hardware-store profits? The ones I used to apologize for, buying just a few and wasting the clerk’s time? Those screws?” she said. “Those screws, those nails, those washers,” Al Birnbaum said. “They’re the gold of hardware. A sixty-maybe sixty-five-percent markup on every one of them, and next year they won’t go out of style or be replaced, but the price’ll go up. The screw and the nail are the backbone of the business.” “Not the big appliance? That’s not your big moneymaker?” “God should never have invented them,” said Al Birnbaum. “You take some six- hundred-dollar-ticket item, they see a scratch on it, they don’t want it. Back it goes. You put one out for display, kiss it good-bye, you sell it for junk. Then you’ve got your markup. How you going to compete with a discount store? I saw a convection oven at a discount house selling for fifty-seven cents over what I purchased it for wholesale.” “My God,” gasped the girl, clutching her breast. “Fifty-seven cents,” said Al Birnbaum. “On a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-ticket item.” The girl was close to tears hearing that. Al Birnbaum had found a wonderful young woman and his only problem was that he didn’t know a young man good enough for her. Which he told her. “Oh, Mr. Birnbaum, you’re too kind.” “No. You’re a very special young lady. I’m only sorry I’m not young enough.” “Mr. Birnbaum, you’re just the sweetest man I have ever met.” “C’mon,” said Al Birnbaum. “Don’t give me that.” But it was nice to think about. Later on, when the girl had trouble getting her own baggage, Al Birnbaum of- fered to step in. Al Birnbaum wasn’t going to leave a decent young girl stranded. He wouldn’t leave someone he didn’t like stranded, so why should he leave this young girl who didn’t even have a way to get into Dallas to visit her fiance? He hailed the cab. He rode in with her. He even said he would like to meet her boyfriend. “I wish you would. I know you’ll just love him, Mr. Birnbaum. He’s thinking of going into hardware too, and he could use advice from someone experienced.” “Tell him for me, it’s a hard business but an honest one.” “Oh, you should tell him. You know so much more about it.” “He’s got to watch out for buying now. American tools are getting killed by Ko- rea and Taiwan.” “Please, not me. You tell him. You just can’t buy experience like yours.” “Oh, you can buy it,” said Al Birnbaum. “It just won’t be any good.” He liked that. Her boyfriend lived in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods and the apartment had virtually no furniture. He wondered how he might be able to offer them some help in getting a decent place to live. But he had to be careful. You didn’t just barge in on a nice young couple like this and insult them by offering to help with the rent. He sat on a simple wooden box under a bare light bulb, smelling old coffee grounds and a mustiness as if the place hadn’t been cleaned in a year or two. Then he remembered that the door hadn’t required a key. This was an abandoned apartment. They had no place to live. He decided he would have to help them. He heard a creaking of footsteps behind him and he turned to see another clean- cut young man with a yellow handkerchief that he held by each end, spinning it into a pale yellow rope. “Excuse me,” the young man said. “Can I get this around your neck?” “Wha-” Al Birnbaum started to say. He felt hands grab his legs, pulling him off the box, while other hands grabbed his right wrist. It was the girl. She had thrown her entire body on his right hand, and his left was pinned behind him and the ropelike pale yellow handkerchief was around his throat. The handkerchief tightened. At first it just hurt, like something cutting into his neck, and he thought: I can handle this for a while. He tried to twist away, but they seemed to twist with him. At his first try for air, that helpless try to breathe, he gave a violent lunge and when no air would come into his body, he felt a searing, desperate lust for just one breath. For mercy’s sake, one breath. Give him one breath and he would give them anything. They were chanting. He was dying and they were chanting. Strange sounds. Un- English sounds. Maybe he was too far gone to understand words? Already that far gone? Darkness, darkness in the room, darkness in his skull, darkness in his convuls- ing, air-desperate body. And he heard very English words. “She loves it.” And then, strangely, in the darkness, the deep darkness, there was no need for air, just a great peace upon him with much light, and there was Ethel waiting for him and somehow he knew that now, at this time, she would never tell him he bored her with talk about hardware. Never again would she be bored. She was so happy to see him. Then he heard a voice, far off somewhere, and it was a promise: “They will not get away with this, these players with the gods of death.” But he didn’t care now in this place of light. He didn’t even have to tell anyone about hardware. He had forever to be absolutely happy. Chapter Two His name was Remo and they had not given him the right breathing equipment. They were going to kill him. He realized it even before the diving boat pulled out from the Flamingo Hotel in Bonaire, a flat jewel of an island in the Nether- lands Antilles. During the winter, Americans and Europeans came here to escape the cold and dive in the turquoise waters and watch the fish of the Caribbean reefs as the fish watched back. Tourism had been quite profitable to the island, and then someone wanted more profit. So Bonaire became a pumping station in the cocaine pipeline into the United States, and there was so much money, people would kill to protect it. Lo- cal police had disappeared, Dutch investigators from Amsterdam had disap- peared, but when American assistance personnel disappeared, America told the Antillean government that the United States would take care of it in another way. Then nothing seemed to happen. No American investigators came down. No in- telligence agents came down. And no one in America seemed to know what on earth America had promised. All anyone knew was that it would be taken care of. A highly placed American assured the Bonaire governor who was his friend: “I’ve seen things like this happen before. Usually with the CIA, but sometimes with the FBI or the Secret Service. It’s usually something at crisis level and nothing seems to work. Then somebody says: Stop everything, forget it. It will be taken care of.” “And then what happens?” asked the Bonaire governor, his voice a stew of Dutch and English accents on a stock base of African dialects. “It really gets taken care of.” “By whom?” “I don’t know.”
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