Chiun did. Remo's right foot rested on the ground. It was barefoot. His Italian loafer was missing.
A moment later, it dropped from the sky to catch the waiting bee unawares.
The open mouth of the shoe enveloped the bee. Bee and shoe hit the ground. Reacting with perfect timing, Remo's fist jammed the shoe into the ground. There came a satisfying crunch.
"Got the little bugger!" he crowed.
Recovering his shoe, Remo shook it out. A thoroughly mashed bumblebee fell out. After it hit the dirt, it didn't twitch. Not once. Its wings relaxed open in death.
Grinning, Remo restored his shoe to his foot. Facing the Master of Sinanju, he said, "I'm learning."
"Have you forgotten the wrath of the Bee-Master?"
"I'm more interested in talking to the Bee-Master himself."
With that, Remo went around to the front door and lifted his fist as if to knock. His knuckles traveled a short way. When they struck the door, it traveled a longer way.
Right off its hinges and across the living room.
Remo went in after it, calling out, "The jig's up, Wurmlinger."
A toilet flushed. And a cracked voice asked, "Who is there?"
"You remember us."
A door fell open with a creak, and around the corner of the door, Helwig X. Wurmlinger peered. He blinked his magnified tea-colored eyes slowly. He was very pale.
"What are you two doing here?" he demanded.
"We just snuffed your superbee. He gave you up first. You might as well come clean."
Chiun had slipped into the room, too, to take a position beside his pupil. "Yes. Your perfidy is known."
"Perfidy? I have committed no perfidy," Wurmlinger said.
"The bee told us everything," Remo bluffed.
"Bee. What bee? How could a bee tell you anything?"
"It talked." Remo folded his arms before him as if to signal that he would listen to no BS to the contrary.
Helwig X. Wurmlinger looked back at Remo as if Remo were mad. "You are mad," he said.
"P.O.'ed is closer to the truth," said Remo, who shot across the room and dragged Wurmlinger into the living room by the collar of his white smock.
"Unhand me!" he complained.
Remo frisked him by patting his pockets. He frisked pretty hard. Wurmlinger went, "Ouch... yeow," and made other noises of pain.
When Remo was finished, he marched Wurmlinger into the spiderweb-motif bedroom.
"The bee that talked said he worked for the Bee-Master," Remo was saying. "Name ring a bell with you?"
"Yes."
Remo shoved Wurmlinger's face to the wall where a yellowed poster hung over the bed, featuring a grim face enveloped in an electronic helmet. It looked like the head of a chromium bee with crimson compound eyes.
"Explain this."
"That is my poster of Bee-Master," Helwig Wurmlinger said.
"It's a poster of yourself. I don't know how or why you did it, but you've bred a bee you can control with an electronic helmet."
"Are you insane? The Bee-Master is only a comic-book character. He doesn't exist."
"Then why do you have his poster over your bed?"
"Er I-"
"Your hesitation betrays you," Chiun intoned, bringing his long, deadly nails up before Wurmlinger's long, nervous face.
"Go ahead," said Remo.
"This is very embarrassing."
"Not as embarrassing as having your head squeezed off your neck..."
Just then, the air filled with the growing metallic sound of a million angry insects.
"There is that sound again," Wurmlinger gasped.
"What sound?"
"The sound that killed all those men."
"Uh-oh," said Remo, looking to the window.
Chapter 36
"Here. Hold this guy," Remo said as the high, angry sound grew louder, and Chiun accepted Helwig Wurmlinger's neck from Remo's grasp.
Moving to the detached front door, Remo lifted it and rushed it back to the doorway. The hinges were ripped loose, so he couldn't rehang it. Instead, he set it tightly in the door frame and leaned against it with his shoulder.
"I think we're okay," he called out.
The sound grew in volume and insistence.