The leader twirled his nunchakus, making his companion on the right step back a pace to keep from getting swatted on the jaw. The members of his gang maintained respectful silence as he whipped the nunchakus through a short routine and caught the loose end underneath one arm.
"Enter the Dragon, right?" Remo asked. "Hey, I loved that movie, too. I must have seen it half a dozen times. I think I've even got the video at home. If I could make one observation, though... Your stance, I mean, well, it appears to me you're sort of leaning to the left, and-
"You're a ninja, right? Some kind of expert, because you saw a movie?"
"A ninja? Oh, my goodness gracious, no! But, then again, it doesn't always take an expert to detect the weakness in an amateur's approach. Sometimes, I mean, the errors are just quite obvious."
The hostess and the manager were staring at him now, clearly expecting Remo to be mobbed at any moment. He ignored them, focused on the nunchaku man, believing that the others wouldn't make a move until their leader gave the order.
"More tact," the Chinese hoodlum said, "is what you need. It's like you said, that mouth of yours. Besides-" he nodded toward the scowling manager "-old Grandpa here could use an object lesson. He's too brave for his own good these days. That's not a healthy way to be, you know? He doesn't care enough about himself, his building, his employees. Maybe he still cares about his customers. You think?"
"I'm sure I wouldn't know," Remo said.
"Well, hey," the young man told him with a smile, "let's check it out."
He had rehearsed the move; that much was obvious: Remo could almost see him posing with his 'chuks before a full-length mirror, maybe in the nude, and smiling at his trim reflection as he worked on different angles of attack. It didn't hurt to practice that way every now and then, but a person could overdo it, just like anything in life. Some mirror fighters focused so much on technique, the way they looked to others when they struck a pose, that they lost sight of basics. They forgot that fighting in real life had more to do with raw survival than with looking good. A handsome corpse was still stone dead, no matter how his hair was styled.
He gave another flourish of his nunchakus, letting out a "Yaoweeee" kind of sound he had to have borrowed from the late Bruce Lee. It warbled through two octaves, rising to a sharp soprano pitch before it ended with a startled-sounding "Oof!" The next move was apparently supposed to startle his victim, take him by surprise, but Remo Williams saw the windup coming from a mile away.
The self-styled tough guy whipped the nunchakus left to right from his perspective, counting on the backhand to connect with Remo's skull and take him down with one blow.
Remo hardly seemed to move, yet he ducked backward far enough to let the nunchakus whisper past his face with a quarter of an inch to spare. Before the young man had a chance to register his miss, process the information and react accordingly, Remo was gliding forward, still moving faster than the human eye could follow, one hand floating out in front of him to find his attacker's jaw.
Reach out and touch someone.
Remo pulled the punch, but the strike still carried force enough to shatter bone. One moment, Remo's enemy was snarling at him, showing gritted teeth; the next, his lower jaw had shifted two inches to the right. The change was accompanied by a sickly ripping sound, and a handful of his pearly whites exploded from between slack lips and pattered on the vinyl floor.
Remo was back in place and gaping at the young man as he fell. "Oh, no!" he said to no one in particular. "Did I do that?"
It took a moment for the other six punks to recover, and the next rush came from Remo's left. The grinner with the long bone-handled switchblade in his hand knew enough to hold the knife well back, against his right hip, while his left hand pawed the air in front of him. He was ducking, weaving as he came toward Remo, muttering some vulgar malediction in Chinese.
Remo half turned to face him, raising empty hands as if to placate his assailant. "Hey, wait a second here," he said, still clinging to his character. "I didn't mean-"
Remo brushed the empty hand aside as the other hand made the thrust that was designed to disembowel him. Remo wasn't in the mood to be disemboweled. He smacked the knife hand up, hard. The knife rocketed skyward, the hand broke and the blade man bonked himself in the head with his own forearm with such magnificent force he knocked himself out.
The impact left him stretched out on the floor, face-down, his right arm showing jagged angles that were never planned by Mother Nature. The unnatural speed of the movement of his arm had also shredded every tendon and ligament from the shoulder on down.
"My favorite Moe move," Remo explained. The five remaining hoodlums had already seen what happened to their buddies when they tried to take the round-eyes one on one. Accordingly, the next rush was a two-man effort, more knives coming at him from the left and right.
Remo reversed his stance at the last moment, with a simple pivot on his toes, and saw the glimmer of the knife slide past his face as his right elbow rose to meet the youngster's rushing face. He was rewarded with a satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage, the cutter's nose and cheek imploding, impact robbing him of consciousness while sheer momentum kept him moving.
"Oops! Sorry!" Remo yelped as he gave the little punk an extra nudge and sent the limp form into his other adversary's path. "Coming through!" he warned.
The two young gangsters came together with a jolting impact, one a flaccid scarecrow. Remo heard a muffled grunt and saw the second attacker's blade slide home above the tumbling rag doll's hip. It shouldn't be a mortal wound, if Remo wrapped up his engagement in the next few minutes and the manager could summon an ambulance, but there was bright blood on the fourth man's knife as he and his comrade toppled to the floor.
"That has got to hurt," Remo commented.
The young man with the knuckle dusters seemed to have forgotten he was wearing them, or maybe he was simply frightened by the thought of closing to within arm's length of this most startling round-eyes. Whatever the excuse, he aimed a looping kick at Remo's face instead of striking with his fists. As with his leader, noise appeared to help the kicker with his move, a high-pitched yipping sound that may have been designed to psych out his adversary.
Remo registered the high kick as a rush of air before he turned to face it. Ducking back as the pointy shoe rushed toward his face, he caught the heel between his thumb and index finger, lifting as he pivoted, the kicker's other foot swept off the ground by leverage and centrifugal force. The knuck man's skull collided with the floor and he went limp, another flesh-and-floor-tile speed bump on the battlefield of life.
And that left two.
"You guys suck," Remo commented.
The young man with the blackjack should have moved while Remo was demolishing his buddy, but he hesitated, checking out the odds and angles. "Seriously. The Drunken Masters are better than you. The Crippled Masters are better than you. David Carradine is better than you and he's like eighty years old. You even make Jean-Claude Van Damme look talented."
"Shut up, Cauc!" His attitude told Remo that he longed to cut and run, but there was still his reputation to consider, and a witness who would tell the world if he showed yellow in a pinch. The razor man, meanwhile, was standing back and shooting glances toward the exit, measuring the distance, wondering if he could make it to the street.
"I hate to say this," Remo said regretfully, "but you know who you guys remind me of?" He winced and stage-whispered, "Steven Seagal."
That did it. A blend of rage and stubborn pride propelled the sap man forward, swinging wildly with his leather-shrouded weapon. Remo ducked beneath a reckless swing and poked a few stiff fingers up into the young man's solar plexus. He could easily have stopped the beating heart inside that rib cage, maybe ripped it out and placed it in the hoodlum's hand, but he was satisfied to drive the wind out of his adversary's lungs and spray the remnants of his breakfast on the nearest wall.
The sap man staggered, went down on one knee and lost his weapon as he clutched his burning abdomen. Still conscious, there was nothing he could do to help himself as Remo stepped in close and tapped him at the junction of his skull and spine, obliterating awareness. The slump became a sprawl, the punk collapsing on his side.
When Remo turned to face the razor man, his final standing target met him with a show of teeth that could have passed for either a smile or a grimace. He had grabbed the hostess and was holding her in front of him with one arm wrapped around her upper body while his free hand held the open razor to her throat.
"I'll cut her, man!" he said.
"That wouldn't be the smartest thing you've ever done," said Remo.
"Oh, yeah? Why not?"
"Because your friends are still alive. They came at me, and I gave them a break. You cut the girl-" he frowned and shook his head "-no breaks for you."
"She'll still be dead," the razor man retorted. "Maybe she can be my prom date when I get to hell."
"Did anybody mention killing you?" asked Remo. "Hey, not me. I couldn't bring myself to let you off that easy, kid. I'd have to break your legs in six or seven places each, the same thing with your arms. The spine's a little trickier, but I know how it's done. A simple twist, not too much pressure.
You're a basket case before you know it, paralyzed from the neck down, but still in constant pain. Can't scratch your nose or wipe your ass, but that's all right. You'll have a nurse to do it for you. Hell, the tricks the doctors know these days, you ought to live another sixty years, at least. I might drop in to visit you and celebrate our anniversary, make sure those pain receptors keep on functioning. Sound good to you?"
"You're fulla shit!"
"So call my bluff if you're feeling lucky, punk," said Remo. "Go ahead. Go for it. Make my day. One thing, though-make sure it's what you really want to do, because you'll wind up paying for it for a long damn time."
The hoodlum thought about it. To be fair, thinking was probably not something he did often. He certainly didn't do it well, and at this moment he made one of his least successful thinking attempts ever.
He decided to cut.
Remo saw the slight whitening of his knife hand and the smallest change in the indentation of the hostess's skin at the moment the pressure of the blade increased.
Remo moved. Fast. Faster than the kid would have thought possible, even though he'd seen the round-eyes do some pretty amazing stuff in the past minute or so.
But that was all nothing compared to what happened now. Remo moved in and took the razor out of the punk's hand-before the pressure was sufficient to slice into the flesh of the poor hostess.
Then Remo took the hostess away, as well.