"You make me sound illiterate," Remo protested.
"Your scrawl is hideous. It is an abomination made worse by the unbeautiful Roman characters you choose to use and the despicable hodgepodge of a language you employ. You must learn to make graceful hangul characters in order to keep the chronicles of Sinanju history."
"I'm not gonna be keeping the books in Korean, Little Father. I'll keep them in English."
Chiun turned his head sharply at Remo. "What are you saying? You absolutely will not allow mankind's most important historical record to be sullied with the use of English! It is unthinkable!"
"But that's how it is," Remo said firmly.
"I will not allow it! The writing of the Sinanju Masters has always been in Korean dialects."
"Yeah, well, up until a few years ago the Masters were always Korean. That's changed, too. Now I'm the Reigning Master, and I'm not Korean, mostly."
"The blood of the Sinanju Masters flows in your veins."
"True. But every Master before me was born in Sinanju and grew up speaking Korean and I wasn't. I was born in America and I grew up reading and writing American."
The large and garish Rock Hard bar and hotel came into view. It was past two in the morning, but the lights were blazing and the music was thumping from inside loud enough to rattle the dashboard of the rental car. Crowds seethed in the streets and on the sidewalk. "Lively place," Remo commented.
A human being crashed through one of the glass doors, moving fast, moving backward, and his feet never touched the ground until he crumpled in a broken heap.
"Getting less lively every second, though," Remo added, pulling to the curb.
VIRGIL "VIRGIN KILLER" Miller liked the way the body sounded when he hoisted it into the doors. The doors cracked and the body made breaking noises, too, and then made more breaking noises when it landed. At some point during his brief flight the victim had stopped being alive.
Served him right!
Virgin Killer didn't dwell on the fact that he really didn't have a reason for hating these people. Him and Bork and all the guys, the Road Sharks, they was finally doing what needed doing.
He spotted a weasel in a light blue sport jacket.
"You!" Miller's meaty hand shot out and intercepted the man as he bolted for the exit. Virgin Killer spun Mr. Blue Sport Coat, and the man's spine met the steel support beam between the front doors. Miller grabbed him again just before he fell.
"You make me wanna puke!"
"I don't even know who you are," his prisoner stammered.
"But I know you! Coming in here in your prissy clothes like some fairy boy! I hate you all!"
Virgin Killer Miller turned on the interior of the bar, carrying Mr. Blue Sport Coat over his head. "You hear me, you people! I hate you like I hate my own mother!" He hurled his victim into a lounge area, breaking tables, chairs and bones.
A large crowd of patrons was trapped in the middle of the Rock Hard Cafe. Miller and the other bikers were blocking the doors and the rear emergency exits. Virgin Killer had lots of choices.
"Well, look at all these fancy clothes," he snarled. "You people must spend a lot of money to make yourselves look so fine. You sure are a bunch of prissy-assed bitches and pretty boys."
Miller grabbed one young man by the shirt collar. He went limp with terror. "You know I can't stand pretty boys. I want to do things that'll make them look really ugly. And hey! You're about the prettiest of them all."
"Well, it sure isn't you I'm going to see on next month's GQ," said somebody just behind Virgin Killer Miller. Miller could have sworn there was nobody there a second ago.
Then a hand with unnaturally thick wrists came from behind him and clamped onto Miller's forearm. Miller released his hold on the pretty boy because he couldn't help it. Over his shoulder he saw that the thick wrists belonged to a skinny guy with dark eyes.
Miller put all his considerable body mass into an explosive roundhouse punch with his free fist, but somehow he missed. Miller's weight carried him in a circle, and he found himself facing the same direction he had started in. His head gyrated wildly, but now he was alone. Could he have possibly hallucinated abut a skinny guy with thick wrists?
Something blurred at him from very nearby. Miller's last thought was, Oh, there's the skinny guy now.
DON "FORK" BORK, leader of the Nashville Road Sharks, couldn't believe what he was seeing when the shrimpy little guy did some sort of a judo jab that sent Virgil into a sudden spin. Virgin Killer Miller was a massive slab of meat that should have taken hydraulics and diesel power to manipulate.
Then the shrimpy guy who did the judo trick vanished, reappeared out of nowhere and poked Virgin Killer in the face. Not a two-finger Moe-poke to the eyeballs, but a one-finger stab at the forehead. A red blossom appeared an Virgil's forehead. Virgil rolled his eyes up at the gaping hole, then collapsed without a sound.
Fork wouldn't have thought it possible to get more angry than he already was. The Road Sharks had been so filled with their righteous indignation that Fork postponed their plans for the night. That liquor store and its gook owner would be there for the taking tomorrow. The Rock Hard was an insult that needed to be avenged now. Every man and woman in the place was an enemy of every Road Shark.
And now one of those men had just killed Fork's blood brother.
"You'll pay for that, sonny," he growled.
Remo Williams found himself on the receiving end of a real-estate broker who had been reduced to a mess of wild limbs in a thousand-dollar suit. The real-estate broker made a noise like a siren, which ended in a question mark when he was intercepted with amazing gentleness.
Remo put the guy in the expensive suit on his feet. "Well, don't just stand there," Remo said, waving at the door.
The man sped off. Fork Bork bellowed and came at Remo, and Remo moved to intercept. Fork never saw him coming.
What Fork saw was his own arms leaving, one in either direction. The blood was leaving his body, too, in gushes. That couldn't be good.
As sneering bikers closed in on Remo from all directions, he grabbed Fork about the beer belly and twisted the armless one into a spin. His impromptu sprinkler sent blood splattering in a perfect circle in all directions. Bikers slipped and slid until they collided in a messy jumble around the legs of their friend without the upper extremities, who collapsed atop the pile, his eyes fixed and open.
Amid the confusion and shouts, one of the bikers rose out of the tangle of bodies. And he just kept rising and rising until he stood at seven feet six inches.
"Cripes," Remo observed, now standing outside the mess. "The beer-and-cigarettes lifestyle agrees with you."
"You. You will die."
"Not before he trains his replacement," Chiun announced, emerging from the darkness with a pair of bodies skidding across the floor before him. His nimble feet seemed to reach out here and there to nudge the bodies and guide them in the direction he wished them to go.
"Souvenirs?" Remo asked.
"Did you not say we need to get information from the rabble before they are rendered into rubble?" Chiun bent over the battered bodies and asked in his most polite singsong, "Which is the leader?"
The bodies stirred. One of them raised a quivering finger at the armless corpse. "Him. Fork."
"And Virgin Killer." The dying man pointed at the one with the head puncture.
"Fork and Virgin Killer?" Remo asked incredulously.
"Good work, Remo." Chiun sighed. "I see you've managed to kill just two hoodlums thus far and one of them happens to be the one we needed to keep alive."
"Give me a break," Remo answered. "Hey, you." He snapped his fingers over Chiun's bodies. "Who's next in the line of command?"