No Contest

The T-shirt seller found himself tied up. Had he lost consciousness? Because getting his hands knotted up in T-shirts had to have taken five, ten minutes, right? His ankles were bound up, and a second later the whistling man tied his ankles and hands together around the pole of the rug rack. The T-shirt seller dangled like dead game being carried home for dressing.

The rug seller was snarling and growling like the jaguar on his rug, and he danced and dodged around all the activity, and he still couldn’t seem to get his hands on the whistling smart-ass. The smart-ass ignored him, and the rug seller kept seeing his blows and lunges just miss the guy. All at once his snarls became mewling and whimpering, much as he used to imagine the Swedish babe on the other rug mewled and whimpered.

He found himself rolled inside one of his own rugs, but it wasn’t the one with the Swedish girl. He found his face pressed into the face of the Dragon himself, Bruce Lee.

“Consider yourself lucky,” the smart-ass said. “You try that sales pitch on some Koreans I know, and you’d be dead already.”

The rug seller felt the wind pushed out of his lungs when he was draped over the rug rack. He couldn’t see the gagging, limp mechanic flopped over the bar next to him, followed by the unconscious flower seller.

“I thought you had a phone call to make?” Remo said to the astonished proprietor of Happy Go Gas. The fat man struggled to his feet and headed inside, craning his head over his shoulder. He pushed himself into a jog for the first time in years as Remo wheeled the rug rack and lined it up on the proprietor.

The proprietor knew what was going to happen. It was impossible to get the rug rack moving that fast, especially top-heavy with all those bodies, but none of what happened in the past minute was possible.

The fat proprietor yanked open the door and thudded inside and thought he might be safe. Outside, Remo shoved the rug rack.

The rack wobbled but somehow stayed upright. The casters sheered off and the underside sent up a shower of sparks, but the rack never veered off course. It hit the glass minimart doors and plowed through them with a noisy explosion of glass, then slammed into the fat man and kept right on going. The rack didn’t stop until the fat man was shoved through the cooler doors and pinned among racks of soda. The rug rack was still upright. It hadn’t lost even one passenger.

An assistant manager was screaming. The fat proprietor was wriggling the body parts that still worked, pudgy fingers and bulging eyes, when Remo came through the gaping hole.

“This is really going to make you laugh. I just remembered that I do need something.” Remo snatched a small magazine from a rack and slapped a dollar on the counter. Then he left.

Chapter 4

In the passenger seat of the rig Remo was driving was a small man so ancient he should have been in the record books. So aged he shouldn’t have been alive. But he was alive, and kicking.

“You spared them all?” the old man demanded in a squeaky voice.

“Start,” Remo said to the dashboard. “Stut. Stert. Stort. Stump.” He frowned. “Trump?”

The vehicle came to life with a clattering of the massive diesel engine. A bewildering array of lights and displays flashed to life on the dashboard. They reminded Remo of the exterior of a cheesy casino. “They’re just jerks,” Remo said. “You can’t go killing every jerk you run into.”

“I heard what the filthy one said about me,” the ancient man added.

“He was talking about Koreans in general.”

“When one insults one’s heritage, he deserves to be silenced, especially when he insults the superior heritage of the Korean peoples.”

The old man was Korean, and perhaps the Asiatic features helped him appear less old than he was—but there were other factors at work, too.

“It is your heritage, too,” the old Korean said. “You are Korean. You allow yourself to be insulted without reprisal?”

Remo thought the dumb jerks at the gas station had been subjected to plenty of reprisal, but before the old man decided to jog back and murder them himself, Remo handed over the magazine. “Got you something.”

The old man sneered. “TV Guide? Why do you think I should want this?” He flipped it out the open window.

Remo reached for it. Even as he was steering his steamship-size vehicle onto the street he stretched across the old man and caught the flying magazine, which he tucked into a storage console between the front seats.

The old man squinted. Not that he had trouble seeing. It was his suspicious look. “Why do you want this TV Guide, Remo Williams?”

“Eh. You know. Just interested in seeing what kind of programming is being offered these days. Reading about it is less frightening than actually turning on the TV.”

“Hmph.”

The old man lapsed into silence, and being obstinately silent was just one of his many talents.