He didn't answer. Remo waved a hand in front of Smith's face. He didn't blink. Then slowly, his arm dropped and his coffee spilled in little rivulets down the side of his trousers.
"Smitty!"
With a muffled sound, Smith careened backwards and lay unconscious on the floor.
Remo scooped him up in his arms. "It's got Smitty, too," he said. He listened to Smith's heart. "I think he's okay. We've got to get him home."
He put Smith in a taxi, gave the driver a roll of hundred-dollar bills, and sent the cab off to upstate New York.
"What now?" Chiun said in the light of a street lamp.
"We'll start in Miami."
"I thought you were not going to work again."
"I said I wasn't going to kill."
They traveled to the airport in silence. Why, Remo wondered, would anyone want to drug the entire population of the United States? Whatever the reason, Remo had the sickening feeling that things had just started.
?Chapter Three
The city of Miami was like a ghost town. Except for the constant wail of ambulances in the distance and an unusual number of derelicts, the city seemed to be deserted.
Remo walked purposefully past the palm trees lining the wide boulevard. A restriction banning all but emergency vehicles from the roads lent the empty streets an air of spaciousness.
He knew where he was going. Skirting the main routes, he turned into a series of alleyways in the northwest section of town. At the far end of a dead-end street hung a filthy shingle reading "Shoes Repaired" above a dingy storefront. Through the window Remo could see a counter tended by a laconic, murderous-looking fellow.
If Remo remembered correctly, there was a false wall at the back of the shop that opened to a warehouse filled, intermittently, with large shipments of heroin.
CURE's computers had flushed out the warehouse some months before, and Remo himself had been inside to verify the stash, but had left it untouched. Harold Smith preferred to leave big drug busts to the FBI, so Remo's climactic moment had come with an anonymous call pinpointing the location of the warehouse. The place had been raided and the heroin seized, but the Feds didn't wait to check the facts about who was in charge, and ended up arresting some minor cog in the drug wheel with no more information than the average street pusher.
The real operator, Johnny Arcadi, had taken appropriate precautions at the time and was securely and visibly out of town during the raid, speaking at an electrical contractor's convention in Detroit. Arcadi was left clean, as usual.
The Feds watched him for a while, but with so many underlings working for him, Arcadi was never in the shoe repair shop anymore. Most of the Feds concurred that Arcadi had moved to a new location. Harold Smith knew he hadn't, but Arcadi was small potatoes to CURE.
Smith waited, hoping that when Arcadi led him to the next rung on the ladder, surely a man untouchable by the democratic laws of the United States, he would send in Remo. To finish both jobs in a way the Constitution did not permit but, the only way that would work. Remo decided that the time had come.
The shoemaker in the shop was sitting on a high stool, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.
"Whaddya want," he said.
"Johnny Arcadi. Your boss."
"Never heard of him," the shoemaker, whose only calluses were on his trigger finger, said. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and slowly lowered his arm behind the counter. "Who wants to know?"
"My name's Remo. And I wouldn't pick up that gun if I were you."
"What gun?" the shoemaker drawled. From an almost imperceptible twitch of the man's right shoulder Remo knew that the man's fingers were wrapping around a weapon.
Shifting his position slightly, Remo kicked a hole in the front of the counter with the bottom of his foot. The gun spun into the air in three pieces, and with the same movement the shoemaker slammed shoulders first into the back wall. It yielded under his weight. Then Remo was over the counter and through the hole and into the warehouse, and the shoemaker was hanging off Remo's right hand by his nose.
"Now do you remember who Arcadi is?" Remo asked pleasantly.
The shoemaker made motions with his tongue. The only sound that issued from him was a kind of squealing grunt.
"That mean yes?"
"Ga. Yuh."
"Give him a call. Tell him I want to talk to him. Here. In five minutes."
"Gla," the man said. Remo set him down. "You a cop?"
"No."
"Then why do you want Arcadi?"
Remo extended two fingers toward the man and pressed a place on his neck that convinced the man that further explanations were unnecessary. "He's in his car," the shoemaker said. He lifted the phone and dialed, his eyes glued to Remo's hands. "Johnny? I think you better come down here. Some guy named Remo. Says he's not a cop. He wants you should come here in five minutes. Yeah... Sorry, boss. Okay." He hung up. "He says you should go stick your pecker in a ravioli machine." He held out his two hands, palms forward, in defense. "You said call, I called. Mr. Arcadi's with a lady. He ain't coming." A bubble of a laugh escaped from his lips. "At least not now."
"He'll be here," Remo said.
"Uh-uh. That five-minute stuff, that was no good, not with Johnny Arcadi. Like he ain't used to taking orders from nobody, you know what I mean?"
"I said he'll be here." Remo glanced at the clock on the wall of the shoemaker's shop. Fifty-eight seconds had elapsed.
"How do you know he'll come?" the shoemaker persisted.
"Say I've got ESP," Remo said.
"Yeah, but if he don't come, what then? Then you murder me, right? Like maybe you think that's going to make Johnny Arcadi die of sadness or something." He expelled a little puff of air. "It just don't work that way, you know. Like you'll kill me, and he won't give a good flying crap, you know?"
"I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to kill anybody."
The man rubbed the spot on his neck that moments before had sent him into spasms of agony. "Okay. You remember that. But he ain't coming."
"He's coming."
Outside there was a skid of tires and a splintering of glass. Then the rotund form of Johnny Arcadi flew through the hole in the wall.
"I told you he was coming," Remo said.
"Johnny." The shoemaker's eyes shone with relief. "You cared. You really cared. Hey, I ain't going to forget this, boss, honest."
"Cram it," Arcadi moaned, rubbing his bald head where he had landed on the cement flooring. Through the hole in the wall walked a slight figure with wispy white hair bobbing over a yellow satin robe.
"Greetings," Chiun said.