Then it faded away.
Ranger Ricardo Wegman opened his eyes. He was floating in thin air, looking down on the path of ruin created by the tumbling SUV. Then he knew-he was dead. His soul had left his body, which had to still be inside the jeep getting pounded to pulp.
"I'm discorporated!" Wegman gasped.
"You're a dipshit," the skinny guy said. Wegman craned his neck back and down and up, and found that he was in actuality hanging over the sheer mountainside drop. The skinny running man held him by his belt, in one hand.
"What happened?" Wegman asked.
"You drove off the road. Like fifteen seconds ago. Remember-squealing tires, crunching body panels and all that? I pulled you out through the window when your National Park-issue transport went on its gravity-verifying fit."
Wegman looked flabbergasted-then stricken. "You should have let me go with the car!"
"Huh?"
"Go ahead!" he pleaded. "Throw me in! I'll never live down the humiliation!" Wegman didn't even feel the fantastic agony of his shorts and trousers practically splitting his crotch in what had to be a world-record wedgie. All he felt was the disdain that was yet to come. "You don't understand! It was the kind of thing a flatlander would do!"
"It's just a car. So what. You should see some of the stuff I've wrecked. Whole villages and shit."
"Please! End it for me! I'm begging you!" Wegman started twisting and clawing at the iron-hard fist that clung to his trousers, but it was like scratching his fingernails on steel girders. To his mortification, the skinny young man carried him to the shoulder of the road and put him safely on his own two feet.
"If the department of agriculture makes a higher moron classification than Grade A, then you rate it," Remo Williams said. "Listen, just tell everybody you were chasing some guy who was running fifty miles per hour and you got so caught up in it you didn't pay attention to the road."
Ranger Ricardo Wegman gave Remo a disdainful look. "They'll think I'm crazy on top of being stupid. I'd rather be dead."
"Fine. You want to end it, you go ahead. I've got a bus to catch."
Remo ran off. In a matter of seconds Wegman was alone. If it weren't for the obvious signs of the crash, he would have doubted the entire event had really even happened.
Now that the shock was wearing off, he started thinking-who was that guy and how the hell had he managed to pace a jeep at fifty miles per hour anyway?
The enigma was so distracting he entirely forgot about throwing himself off the mountainside before the first emergency vehicle arrived on the scene-and by then it was too late. Killing yourself right there, in front of your peers? It just wasn't done.
Chapter 19
Remo wondered if the fates were aligning against him. Here he was trying to do something good, trying to prove himself, for crying out loud, and he was getting nothing but misery for all his trouble. Chiun throwing a hissy fit, Smitty giving him the third degree and then Ranger Rick driving his car off the hill so Remo had to stop and yank his ass to safety. Only to get a lecture in the strict codes of National Park ranger machismo for his effort.
But the big hill was finally starting to cooperate, and he spotted the tour bus below him on the twisting, curving Blue Ridge Parkway.
"Time for a shortcut," Remo announced to no one and vaulted off the road into the underbrush, slipping soundlessly as a shadow through the bushes and wildflowers that clung to the steep grade. A hundred feet lower the ground leveled out enough to afford purchase to a few deep-rooted trees, and Remo scampered up the trunks into the upper limbs, then vaulted from tree to tree. His hand-sewn Italian loafers, already ruined from the downhill run, landed perfectly every time, supporting him for a second before he was flying on to the next tree. Moments later he landed on the road just a few hundred paces behind the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus, and he caught up at the next curve.
He climbed on the roof and glared at Chiun, who was arranging the fluttering silk of his kimono as if he had not moved from his seat in hours.
"That didn't take long," Remo grumbled.
"It certainly did," Chiun retorted. "The bus has been on the road for nearly twenty minutes."
"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you."
"I, however, am talking about you. Then, lo! what do I see but the Reigning Master of Sinanju flinging himself through the trees like some ungainly combination of Strong Man Jack and Lord Greystoke."
Remo pondered. "Lord Greystoke is Tarzan, right?"
Chiun rolled his eyes and sighed to the crisp blue sky. Remo shrugged. "I give up. Who's Strong Man Jack?"
"Another character from twentieth-century American fiction or folklore or whatever passes for literature in this part of the world." Chiun waved his hand at the sky above, implying that "this part of the world" included the mountains and all the rest of the planet that was west of Pyongyang.
"So you're saying I'm sort of like Jethro Clampett meets George of the Jungle."
"I wouldn't have brought it up at all had I known I would be forced to explain it during the entirety of our downhill journey."
"Just trying to get a handle on the insults that keep getting hurled my way," Remo said.
"Maybe if you had an inkling about the written word, even the florid clutter that passes for literature in the Western world, you would understand what I say and why I say it."
Remo grinned without humor. "Hey, I'm getting smarter already-you just told me my culture is stupid and I'm stupider."
Chiun sniffed. "If the oversize novelty T-shirt fits..."
"Now that we understand each other on that point, let's move on to the next bit of trivia. How'd you get back here so fast? I just got off the phone with Smitty and next thing I know you're back in the saddle. So, what, are you carrying a mobile phone these days that you're not telling me about."
"I would not carry such a device. The waves emanating from them cook the tiny cells of the brain and addle the thoughts." Chiun looked suspicious. "Have you been using one behind my back all these years? It would explain much."
"So what are you doing here? Last I saw you transferred to the eastbound train, bound for Hoboken." Chiun nodded, as if the question was a perfectly reasonable one, and one that he had no intention of answering.
"Well?"
"I am here. Is that not enough?"
"You've got something up your sleeve you don't want to talk about."
"You are mistaken."
"You lie like a rug. Spit it out, Chiun-you realized I was on to something."
"What do you mean? On drugs?"
"The truth. My lead was panning out and you knew it and you came back because you had to be in on it when I solved this mystery."
Chiun, for a moment, looked genuinely surprised. Then he shook his head pityingly. "My son, that is not why I came back."
"Bulldookey. Then why?"
With a reluctant, graceful sweep of his arm the ancient Korean Master waved one hand at the billboard awaiting them on the very boundary of the national park. "There is your answer."
It was a magnificent, tawdry sign that put a blemish on the natural beauty of the mountain scenery the way a slash with garden shears would have blemished the Mona Lisa.