He felt her hand on his half-bare bicep. "Please?"
Remo looked at her uptilted face, her half-parted, appealing mouth, and considered changing his mind.
He exhaled a long sigh instead.
Gently Remo disengaged the blond's fingers as the youth came out with the last of the rice.
"You sure must eat a lot of rice," Shariff muttered.
"I do," Remo returned. "And if you're standing there with your hand out for a tip, you're gonna freeze in place and the pigeons are going to redecorate your 'do."
"That's the thanks I get for luggin' your stuff all the way to your damn car!" Shariff snarled.
"If you hadn't come along, pal, I'd have done it myself and been home by now."
"Point taken. I'm going."
"Don't stop till you come to a state line or an ocean," Remo called after him.
As they watched Shariff turn a corner, the blond turned to Remo and said bravely, "Where were we?" She bit her lip, waiting for a reply.
Remo said without a trace of feeling one way or the other, "I was about to drive home with my rice and you were about to inventory your cash register for missing twenties. "
One hand flew to her mouth. "My register! Oh, my God!" She bolted into the store.
When, after a moment, she didn't scream, Remo slid behind the wheel and pulled away from the curb. The car bounced violently as the front tire dropped off the curbstone.
Remo pulled into traffic, his face a frown of unhappiness.
He wasn't sure what bothered him more-walking away from an attractive blond or losing a convenient source of rice.
Either way, Remo could never set foot in that store again. She had seen him perform impossible stunts. That made her a security risk. He couldn't jeopardize her life by becoming friendly. Not here in Rye, New York, where he lived and where his boss and the organization for which he worked was headquartered.
There was no telling what Dr. Harold W. Smith would do if Remo Williams started dating a Rye girl. Probably have her eliminated in the name of national security. Anything was possible.
As Remo left the shopping area, he drove past the car thief, who was grumpily trooping down the street. Remo gave him an angry blast of his horn as he drove past, causing the man to jump. Shariff turned, and upon recognizing Remo, dived for cover. His maimed Mac-10 skittered out from under his pea coat.
And that was another thing. Normally Remo would have killed the thief too. But that might raise a ruckus, and the last thing Remo wanted to do was cause problems in Rye. Smith would probably force him to sell his house and relocate. He had had two decades of relocating. He was settled now. Forever, he hoped.
Once, Remo's aspirations had been simple.
He had been a Newark, New Jersey, beat cop. His dreams were limited to a sergeant's desk, a wife, and a nice suburban house with a white picket fence.
Harold W. Smith had changed that forever. It was Smith, in his capacity as director of CURE, a supersecret government organization that Remo had never heard of then and which virtually no one knew of today, who had engineered a frame so perfect that no one dreamed that Remo Williams, honest foot-slogging Remo Williams, had not killed a certain pusher in a certain alley and dropped his badge beside the body so very long ago.
Remo landed on death row so fast he thought the world had been turned upside down. And that was only the beginning. His life-his true life-began after he'd walked the last mile at Trenton State Prison and sat in an electric chair that sent a jolt through every jumping fiber in his body.
It did not kill him. He woke up later in a place called Folcroft Sanitarium with a new face and a choice so stark he wondered if he had died and gone to some sinister catch-22 hell: Join CURE as its enforcement arm or fry for real.
And although Remo Williams had gotten a second chance in life, his dreams of a wife and family and white picket fence were irretrievably lost.
It had taken most of the twenty years he'd worked for CURE to realize-or accept-it.
Twenty years of training in Sinanju, the fahrvergnugen of martial arts. Twenty years that had taught him to conquer all physical limitations, including absolute mastery of the opposite sex.
Under the tutelege of the Master of Sinanju-the last of a long line of professional assassins going back five millennia-Remo had discovered the thirty-seven steps to bringing a woman to blissful ecstasy. The same knowledge that unlocked the power to hold a car in place despite the best efforts of six sparking cylinders sent out subtle sexual signals that most woman responded to on an instinctive level. And that while Remo simply stood there trying to read rice labels.
The earliest steps could bring a woman to exquisite climax-and leave Remo listening to his bed partner's snores.
This was only another reason why, as the years went on, Remo had stopped bothering. What was in it for him?
Pulling into the driveway of the suburban house he had finally acquired after two decades of anonymously liquidating America's enemies, Remo wore an unhappy expression.
He carried the expression into the kitchen, along with the first two bags of rice, thinking he would gladly trade in part of his abilities for a measure of sexual satisfaction and get back a tiny spark of that old dead dream.
From the other room came the sound of a TV. The Master of Sinanju, enjoying his leisure.
Remo went out to the car, his hurt eyes glancing over to the Tudor-style house next door. The home of Harold W. Smith. It reminded him that this was all Smith's fault.
The thought struck him as he lifted the trunk. He shut it with a metallic slam.
Grimly Remo walked up to Smith's front door and rapped the imitation-brass lion's-head knocker against the door.
The door opened, framing a stoop-shouldered man of advanced years and rimless spectacles. Harold W. Smith looked indecisively in both directions, knuckles tightening on the door. "Remo!"
From behind him, a woman's voice asked, "Harold, who is it?"
That decided Smith. He closed the door behind him.
"Remo! What is this?" His croak was anxious.
"I just have one thing to say to you," Remo told him.
Smith adjusted his glasses. "Yes?"
"This is all your fault."
And with that, Remo turned on his heel and went back to finish carrying rice into his empty home. His supersensitive hearing picked up the frumpy voice of Mrs. Smith asking Harold who had been at her front door.
The answer infuriated Remo: "Just the paper boy, dear."
Remo finished putting the brown rice in the brown-rice cabinet, the white rice in the white-rice cabinet, and the exotic varieties in the others. There were five cabinets over the sink. Four of them were packed with rice in various containers.
With any luck, Remo thought glumy, the supply would last three weeks.
Remo left the kitchen to break the bad news to the Master of Sinanju.