Look, look, look, funny Remo. He was losing control.
Look, look, Remo, look at the beautiful lady walking through the door. Look at the white nylon gown she's wearing that you can see through.
Look at the soft swelling of the highrise breasts, look at the smooth round outlines of her body, silhouetted against the hall light. Look at the long tan legs. Look how she smiles at you, Remo. The lovely lady likes you, Remo. She will make you feel all better. Remo wanted to feel all better. He smiled.
Lynette leaned over him in the bed. "I will make you feel better," she said.
Remo kept smiling, because it hurt to stop. "Make me feel better. Want to feel better. Arms hurt."
"Where do they hurt, Remo?" Lynette asked. "Here?" She touched his left shoulder through the strand of muscles in the front and Remo groaned with the pain.
"Or here?"
She touched his right shoulder with her fingertips and pressed and Remo screamed.
"Hurt. Hurt," he shouted.
"There, there. Lynette will make you feel better," she said.
Remo opened his eyes narrowly. The tall blonde woman he had made a widow was standing next to the bed, and then with a smooth practiced swoop she was lifting her negligee over her head.
She held it in her fingertips at arm's length, her eyes seemingly fastened to his by wires, and then she dropped the negligee into a soft fluttery mound on the floor.
She moved closer to Remo, ran fingers down his cheeks, trailed them down his neck, and then pulled the blanket down from his unclad body.
No, he wanted to say. No. No sex. Don't feel well. No sex.
But Lynette Bardwell was moving her fingers all over his body now, and he found that if he concentrated on something other than his shoulders, the pain was not so severe, so he concentrated on that part of the body that Lynette was concentrating on and then Remo was ready. Lynette smiled and moved up onto the bed and was over him and then on him and then surrounding him, swallowing him with her body.
She knelt over Remo looking down at him and her face was smiling but there was no mirth in the showing of her teeth, which looked as if they were about to bite, and there was a glitter in her eyes, a kind of merciless sparkle, and she began to move her body and it helped, it helped, it helped if he moved his a little, and he stopped thinking of his shoulders and thought only of himself and Lynette and their junction.
He wanted to move his hands up to her, to reach her body, but he could not. His hands and arms were straight at his side, pinned there by her thighs straddling him, but he still had some movement in his fingers and he used them to touch the insides of her thighs where there were large clusters of nerves, very delicately throbbing.
His fingers brought her to life. Her eyes opened wider and she began moving on him faster, wilder, and it was better, better than the pain in his arms, and he wasn't thinking of the pain anymore. The pain had come from two people who had tried to disable him before killing him, and the next blow would be someone coming after one of his legs, but he couldn't, he wouldn't think about that now.
Lynette was sitting up straight, and she threw her head back and laughed, a loud rolling laugh, and then she looked down at him, and for the first time Remo focused on her eyes and saw the meaning in them, and she let her body fall forward, her head toward his face, but she caught herself with her two hands, slamming them against his shoulders, like an athlete doing pushups.
The pain shot through his body and Remo screamed. And she twisted her arm muscles and the hard heels of her hands ground into his shoulder joints. She laughed again and leaned her face close to his.
He felt his face was wet. She was crying? No, he was crying, crying in pain.
"You killed my husband," she said. It was not a question.
"And you killed Wetherby," she said. She twisted her hands again into his shoulders.
Hurt. Hurt. Have to get away.
"But they damaged you. And I'm going to damage you worse. And the little bit that's going to be left of you will go to Nuihc. In a bag."
Nuihc? She knew. Lynette was the third kamikaze. The third shot was hers. Did she know that Nuihc planned for her to die? That Remo was supposed to kill her? But he couldn't kill her. He couldn't move.
"You know Nuihc?" Remo gasped.
"I serve Nuihc," she corrected. "Hawley was a fool. Wetherby was a brute. But Nuihc is a man. He loves me. He said the best blow in Scotland was mine. I was the best."
She continued moving the lower half of her body up and down, using Remo as an instrument for her pleasure and his pain, and all he could do was keep his fingers going inside her thighs.
"Mr. Winch is a man," she said.
He felt her voice soften and her muscles begin to tense, then relax, in an unconscious rhythm she could not control.
"The kind of man you might have been. Ohhh. Ohhhh."
She was bucking on Remo now like a bareback cowboy on a crazed horse. He was pinned and powerless and in pain from her hands on his shoulders. She screamed a heavy gasping scream of pleasure and said "Oh, Nuihc, Nuihc," and when she stopped, she said, "You could have been a man, too. If you had lived."
And then her creamed wet body moved up off Remo and he could feel the blessed relief of her small fists withdrawing from the points of pain on his shoulders and he could open his eyes again. He saw her standing on the bed, looking down at his body below her bare legs, and he saw her curl her left leg up under her, standing as if she were a flamingo, and then she drew the other leg up, too, and her body crashed down, armed at the long rope of muscle in the front of his right thigh, and even before she landed, Remo could sense what the excruciating pain would be like, and then her body hit, and it seemed to land in slow motion. First there was the touch of contact, then pressure, then pain as her weight and skill tore open the long lifting muscle of the thigh.
"First you," she yelled, "and after you, the old man."
Purely by reflex, purely by training, purely by instinct, knowing it meant nothing because he was going to die, Remo rolled his left leg toward the far wall, so the knee was pointing outward, then with all the effort and strength he had left, he rolled the knee back inward toward his own right leg, toward Lynette Bardwell, who knelt on his right leg, her face exultant with the glow of victory, and he drove the knee across his own body and heard the crack as it found her temple bone.
Lynette still smiled. She looked at Remo, smiling, and then, for just a brief second, the smile turned into a look of pain, and in that moment Remo knew that she suddenly suspected that Nuihc, whom she thought loved her, had guessed that she would die here, and then she could no longer worry about things like that because her thin temple bones were driven into her brain by the force of Remo's driving knee, and the smile and the look of pain both withered, like a time-lapse photo study of a flower's life and death, and Lynette fell forward onto Remo's chest and died.
He felt the warm sticky ooze from her head drip onto his chest. It felt warm. Warm. And warm was good and he wanted to be warm, so he didn't have chills. And the pain in both shoulders and the pain in his right thigh all hurt, and he closed his eyes and decided it would be nice to sleep.
And if he died that would be nice, too, because then he would always be warm. And he wouldn't hurt anymore.
CHAPTER TEN
Remo woke.
He had slept to forget something, and now he remembered it. The pain in his shoulders and arms.
And there was something wrong with his legs.
A weight was on them. He looked down toward his legs, but he couldn't see them. Right under his chin, grinning up at him, was the wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bloodied head of Lynette Bardwell.
Remo remembered.
"Hi, toots," he said. "Read any good karate books lately?"
Carefully, Remo slid his left leg out from under the woman, then with his left leg he pushed her. Her body rolled down from his right leg onto the bed, then slipped onto the floor where it hit with a brittle, cold thump.
Remo swung his body around, extended his legs to the floor, stood up, and collapsed onto the gray tweed rug as his right leg buckled under him.
And just that much effort brought back the pain, like a toothache that seems to have been cured by a night's sleep, but starts throbbing before you get out of bed.