"Called herself Kimberly. Had a mean way with a yellow silk scarf, too."
"And her last name?" Smith asked patiently.
"We never got that personal, Smitty. It's hard to get a complete biography when the target's trying to throttle you."
"She must have had personal identification."
Remo considered. "She did have a purse."
"Please, Remo, we have a dead Iraiti ambassador to explain. I must know who this woman is."
"Was. Dead as a doorknob now. But I'll admit she looks good. Natural, as the embalmers like to say."
"Remo, are you drunk?"
"Smitty," Remo clucked, "you know better than that. Alcohol would upset my delicate constitution. I'd end up on the slab next to poor Kimberly. Of course, a hamburger would do that. So would a hot dog. Even a good one."
"You sound unlike yourself."
"I'm happy, Smith," Remo confessed. "Really happy. I was scared for a while there. Scared because I was going up against something I didn't think I could handle alone. But I did. Kali was putty in my hands. So to speak. Damn. Should have used that line on her. Too late now."
"You are really happy?"
"Really," Remo said, scratching his initials in the pay phone's stainless-steel acoustical shield.
"Even with Chiun dead?"
Silence clogged the wire. Remo put a finishing flourish on the W for "Williams." His open, carefree expression froze, then darkened. Lines appeared. They etched themselves around his mouth, his eyes, his forehead.
"Smith," he said in a small voice, "you know exactly how to rain on my life, don't you, you cold-blooded son of a bitch?"
"That is better," Smith said. "Now I am speaking to the Remo I know."
"Fix this moment in your memory, because it may be the last," Remo warned. "I'm officially off the payroll."
"One last thing, Remo. The woman's identity."
"All right. If it's so important that you'd wreck my good mood, I'll root around in her purse."
"Good. I will remain here." Smith disconnected.
"Bastard," Remo muttered, hanging up the phone.
But by the time he returned to the eighth floor, he was humming.
Remo dug out the hotel key and used it. The door opened to the touch of his fingers. He hummed. The tune was "Born Free."
The moment he stepped across the threshold, the sound trailed away on a puzzled note.
Kimberly lay on the bed just as Remo had left her. Except her hands sat folded under her pyramidlike chest. He hadn't arranged her hands that way.
"What the hell?" Remo muttered.
He hesitated, his ears reaching for any telltale sound.
Somewhere, a heart beat. Remo zeroed in on the sound.
It was coming, he was more than astonished to realize, from the bed.
"Impossible," he blurted. "You're dead."
Remo glided across the rug, his heart beating a little high in his throat. His ebullient mood had evaporated. This was not possble. He had used an infallible technique to shatter her upper vertebrae.
Remo reached for the folded hands, intending to feel for a pulse. One wrist felt cool.
The indrawn breath came quick and sharp, sending the pyramid-sharp chest lifting. The innocent blue eyes snapped open. But they were not blue. They were red. Red from the core of their fiery pupils to the outer white, which was crimson. The orbs looked as if they had been dipped in blood.
"Jesus!" Remo said, jumping back reflexively.
Bending at the waist, the cool thing on the bed began to rise, yellow-nailed hands unfolded like poisonous flowers opening to the sun.
Remo watched them, mesmerized. And while his shocked brain registered the impossible, the corpse came upright.
The head swiveled toward him. It hung off to one side, as if from a neck crick. Her features were milk pale, the yellow eye shadow standing out like mold. The legs shifted to a sitting position.
"If you're auditioning for Exorcist IV," Remo cracked nervously, "you've got my vote."
"want . . . you," she said slowly.
The hands flashed up, reaching for her chest. The nails began tearing at the yellow fabric.
Remo caught them, one hand on each wrist.
"Not so fast," he said, trying to control a mounting fear. "I don't remember promising this dance to the girl with the bloodshot eyes. Why don't you-?"
The quip died in his throat. The wrists struggled in his unshakable grip. They were strong-stronger that human limbs should be. Remo centered his hands and let their opposing force work against itself. The wrists made circles in the air, Remo's hand still tightly attached. Every time they pushed or pulled, Remo carried the kinetic energy to a weak position. The result was a stalemate.
Still, the thing that had been Kimberly persisted, its angry red eyes fixed sightlessly on Remo, head tilted to one side like a blind, curious dog. The cool spidery fingers kept gravitating to its heaving chest.
"You don't take no for an answer, do you?" Remo said, trying to figure out how to let go without exposing himself to danger. Kimberly was no pushover.
The question stopped being important a moment later when a familiar scent insinuated itself into Remo's nostrils like groping gaseous tentacles.
It smelled of dying flowers, musky womanhood, blood, and other impossible-to-separate odors commingled. The stuff slammed into his lungs like cold fire. His brain reeled.
"Oh, no," he croaked. "Kali."