"What do we do?" Chuck begged. He was still staring through the narrow sliver of Plexiglas.
The spider seemed to zero in on his voice. The head with its one ghastly eye turned his way.
"Kill it!" Martin yelled.
As soon as he spoke he heard a sharp crack. Twisting in his seat, he found that the bulletproof panel had been shattered. Through it, a single thin leg jutted in from the rear of the armored car.
The leg had impaled Chuck Kaufman through the eye, burrowing deep into brain.
Chuck just hung there, slack jawed. Blood thinned with ocular fluid streamed down his cheek.
And as Martin watched, numb, the first inquisitive rip of the long black leg appeared from Chuck's dead ear.
Martin slammed on the brakes.
The speeding armored car jumped to one side, skipping down the jersey barrier. It screeched and sparked and dug a furrow half a mile long before it finally came to a stop.
Before it had even stopped completely, Martin had popped the door. He fell out of the cab, slamming onto the concrete barrier that divided the two opposite highway lanes.
The fall broke two bones in his arms. Despite the pain, he managed to get up and run...directly into the path of oncoming traffic.
Fortunately for Martin Riley, he didn't feel the impact of the car that struck him. There was a numbness. A sense of lifting, of movement. Then nothing at all.
The force threw Martin back against the concrete barrier over which he'd dropped a moment before. Even as Martin's lifeless body collapsed to the tar, the concrete block against which he'd been thrown shuddered.
On the other side of the barrier, the SecureCo truck pulled back onto the empty highway.
The gouges in its side were gone. As it sped away, the rear door that had been wrenched apart with inhuman force was once more intact.
It raced quietly away from Martin Riley, who in the last minutes before his untimely death finally realized that his daughter's friend had been right all along.
The bogeyman was real.
Chapter 12
When Remo and Chiun returned to their rental car after leaving Santa's Package Store, Remo suddenly noticed the newspapers he'd left in the back.
"Oops, I forgot," he said. "As long as we've got mail to send, might as well kill two birds with one stone."
Grabbing up the pile, he quickly skipped through them. With the sewing-kit scissors he'd bought he snipped a few articles. He stuffed the rest of the newspapers in a rubbish barrel at the side of the road.
He returned to the car, placing the articles on the back seat. From the passenger side the Master of Sinanju stared at him in suspicion as he pulled out into the thin traffic.
"You are up to something," Chiun observed.
"Yep," Remo replied. "I'm up to twenty-seven in a twenty-five zone. Lemme know if you see a cruiser. I hear these Florida cops are a real pain in the ass." Chiun's frown only deepened when he saw Remo's thinly satisfied smile. As they drove, the old Korean tried to sneak a glimpse at the clippings.
Reaching over the seat, Remo snatched up the articles, stuffing them in his pocket.
"This is my hobby, not yours," he warned. "If you want a peek, maybe you could tell me what was so important for you to think about that you couldn't talk to me for a week."
Chiun's face was bland. "I was thinking that you were an idiot," he replied.
"You've thought that for years," Remo pointed out.
"Yes, but I had never devoted the time necessary to delve into the many-layered depths of your idiocy. I was astonished, Remo, to find that in one week I only plumbed the surface. I fear that it is a project that will consume much more than the meager days that remain to me."
"I'll hire a biographer," Remo droned. "And just for the record I don't believe you, and if you keep being nasty I'm never gonna tell you what I'm doing. So there."
"Why should I care what moronic things you do to waste your stupid time?" the old man sniffed. "And perhaps if you kept your dull round eyes on the road and your paws on the wheel you would notice when we are being followed."
Remo had noticed the black van, too.
It had pulled away from the curb with them, trailing them from the liquor store. Remo decided to test to make sure. He slowed. The black van with the tinted windows slowed. He accelerated. The pursuing van kept pace.
"Whoever's driving isn't that inventive," Remo commented. "You'd at least think he'd pretend to not be attached to my bumper."
They were passing an office-supply store that advertised a FedEx pickup. Pulling into the parking lot, he steered around the main building.
The van followed close behind.
Cutting alongside the buildings, Remo stopped in the empty back lot. A storage trailer was backed up to the loading dock. Nearby, trash littered the ground around a green Dumpster. Graffiti adorned the store's rear wall.
Once it cleared the side of the building, the black van picked up speed. It squealed to a stop just as Remo and Chiun were climbing from their car.
Side panel and rear doors sprang open.
When the six men emerged from the dark recesses of the van, it was all Remo could do to keep from laughing out loud.
The men looked like extras from a low budget scifi movie. All were dressed in silvery white jumpsuits. Matching gauntlets and boots covered hands and feet.
From big plastic holsters that were slung low over their waists, the men removed chintzy weapons that could have been manufactured on a Hollywood back lot. The ray guns were covered with blinking plastic knobs and gold stripes. The men aimed the funnelshaped ends at Remo and Chiun.
"Halt!" one of the men commanded. His jumpsuit extended up around his head, forming a silvery skullcap through which peeked his face. Like his companions, a slender microphone stretched out in front of his mouth.
"I wish this dingwipple town would make up its mind," Remo complained to the Master of Sinanju. "Is it trick or treat or deck the halls?"
"Do not ask me," Chiun replied. "I recognize none of this nation's heathen seasons." His narrowed eyes were focused on the ray guns.
Remo had noticed the same thing that had caught the eye of the Master of Sinanju. The blunt end of a very real .45 stuck menacingly from the open end of each plastic gun.
"What were you doing at the liquor store?" the leader asked. A badge on his chest identified him as Major Healy.
"Are you kidding?" Remo asked, his tone flat. "Have you looked around town? With all this Christmas cheer up the yin-yang, drunk's the only way to get through the day."
"Negative," Major Healy said, shaking his head. "That's a nonresponsive answer." His ray gun rose higher. "Why were you there?" he pressed.