Never Say Die

Chapter 12

“So, have you ever seen these guys before?”

Joy Patton, standing in the bathroom doorway, blinked at Remo, then went back to staring at the bodies in the bathtub. She was looking slightly green around the gills, but Remo thought she handled it all right, considering the circumstances.

“Maybe that one,” Joy said, pointing to the one on top. “It’s hard to say for sure. He looks familiar in a way, but then again, I haven’t seen that many purple faces lately.”

There was nothing he could do about the color, after Chiun had smashed the shooter’s larynx, cutting off the flow of oxygen and leaving him to strangle.

“You’d have seen him at the home?” he prodded.

“Right. One time, I think—if it was even him. I couldn’t swear.”

“Okay, forget it.”

“Are they dead?” she asked.

“I hope so.”

The ID wasn’t important, anyway. From Chiun, he knew the three goons had been summoned on the basis of a call from the motel proprietor. That meant five bodies to get rid of in a hurry, but at least Chiun had switched the feeble neon sign out front to read NO VACANCY. From what Remo had seen already, they weren’t exactly in the midst of tourist season, but the sign should fend off any late-night travelers who happened by while he was cleaning up.

He could expect no help from Chiun in that regard, of course. The Master of Sinanju didn’t mind a workout every now and then, if he couldn’t avoid it, but he drew the line at housekeeping. He had already found another program on the tube—-some goofy show about a group of friends who shared a large apartment and spent all their on-screen time discussing sex—and Remo had already given up on rousing him to help.

“My nerves,” Chiun muttered vaguely, in response to Remo’s first and last entreaty for a helping hand.

It was a hopeless case.

“You may as well relax awhile and watch TV,” he said to Joy.

“Relax? Is that supposed to be a joke? You’ve got three dead men in your bathtub!”

“Not for long. They’re checking out.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“It gets easier,” he told her, stepping out to look for someplace where the bodies would be safe.

And found the motel’s ice machine.

It had a spacious bin—enough for several hundred pounds of ice cubes, Remo estimated—but the unit was unplugged. No point in wasting power, if you had no guests in residence—or none that you expected to survive the night. He found the socket, snapped the three-pronged plug in place and went back to his room to fetch the meat.

It took three trips, because he didn’t want an extra body stretched out on the pavement, just in case an unexpected visitor should pull in from the highway. Two more trips for Raynard and Matilda, wedging them inside the bin before he closed the metal trap.

The first few ice cubes had already tumbled into place, on top of them, as Remo finished up his chore.

Chiun had managed to extract a name and number from Raynard, the proprietor, along with the admission that he had received a hundred dollars monthly for the past five years, with no requirement other than a warning if suspicious strangers stopped at the motel and asked about Ideal Maternity.

In the beginning, it had probably seemed like a good idea. And it was too late to reconsider now.

The name was Garton, almost certainly an alias. The number was long-distance, somewhere in the neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Remo dialed it from the motel office, after taking care of Raynard and Matilda, just in case there was an automatic tracer on the other end.

The distant telephone rang half a dozen times before a man’s voice answered. “Yes?”

“Put Garton on.”

“Who’s calling?”

Remo hesitated, listening to tension crackle on the line. He stretched it out, deliberately not answering.

“Who is this? How’d you get this number?”

Remo smiled and cradled the receiver. It was petty, almost childish, but he pictured someone sweating in Kentucky, wondering what kind of damage they had suffered to their cover without even knowing it. The number could be changed in no time flat, but Smith could trace it anyway, despite a disconnect. And in the meantime, Remo still had work to do.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said, as he reentered their room.

“Thank God.” The mere announcement brought some color back to Joy’s young face.

“My program,” Chiun protested, eyes still fastened on the TV screen.

“You’ll have to catch the reruns, Little Father,” Remo. said. “We can’t afford to stay here any longer.”

“Stay, go,” muttered Chiun. “Is there no respite for the aged and infirm?”

‘I’ll ask them if we meet some,” Remo said. “We have to go now.”

Running well does not mean running far, in every case. New Albany was only fifteen miles away, but it was in a different county, large enough to offer Remo a selection of motels. With distance, change of jurisdiction and potential lag time on discovery of corpses at the Dogwood Inn, he reckoned they should have the best part of a day, at least, before the heat came down.

By that time, Remo hoped, his work in Indiana would be done.

He stopped once, on the way; to use a public telephone in Lanesville. Smith picked up on the first ring. He promised to investigate the Garton alias and see what he could learn about the phone number in Louisville. The casualties in Dogwood were of no concern to Smith, a strictly local problem that would not reflect on CURE. Three minutes saw the briefing done, and Remo drove until he found a motel called the Singing Pines.

Joy Patton joined him while he checked in—to make it look more natural. She was a trifle pale, but the old man behind the registration counter didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were locked on to her sweater like a smart bomb’s sensors homing on their target, even when he spoke. It was the first time Remo could remember watching someone have a conversation with a woman’s breasts.

“Old creep!” Joy muttered as they left the motel office. “Did you see him staring at me?”

Remo shrugged. “At least he’s got good taste.”

She broke into an unexpected smile. “You think so?”

“What I think,” he told her, “is we need to talk.” Their conversation had been brief and rudimentary as Remo drove her from Ideal Maternity back to the Dogwood Inn, and after cleaning up that mess, he had been busy watching out for stalkers on the drive from Dogwood to New Albany. At this point, Remo knew the lady’s name, together with the fact that she was willing to risk life and limb in an escape from Dr. Radcliff’s “home.” The rest of it was still a blank, but Remo knew she must have more to say. The strange behavior he had witnessed at Ideal Maternity, along with Joy’s determination to escape, told him it was no ordinary home for unwed mothers.

The room had HBO, and Chiun soon found an action film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was sitting on the floor and arguing with someone on the TV screen when Remo sat Joy down and started to debrief her.

“Look,” she said before he got a fair start on the questions, “I am really whipped, okay? It’s been the strangest day I can remember, and I need some rest.”

“Some answers, first,” he said. “I have to know what’s going on in Dogwood, at the home.”

“You mean the baby bunker?” Joy surprised him with her vehemence. “Call that a home, I guess you’d think San Quentin was a theme park.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she said, then added, “in November.”

“Seventeen,” said Remo. “You’re from California?”

“How’d you know? My accent?”

Remo smiled and shook his head. “Most people, when they want to name a prison, mention Leavenworth or Attica. Old-timers go for Alcatraz. A California girl would know about San Quentin.”

“So, I guess you’re Sherlock Holmes.”

“Not quite. I try to pay attention.”

“I see that.”

“So, fill me in about the baby bunker.”

“Look,” she said, a grim expression on her face, “I’d rather just forget about the whole damn thing, if that’s all right.”

“Too late for that; I’d say.”

“You mean the kid?” She hesitated, and a trace of color came back to her face. “It really isn’t mine, you know.”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“You really don’t know what they’re up to, do you?”

Remo frowned. “I understood it was an unwed-mothers home.”

Joy laughed at that, another sharp note verging on hysteria, reminding Remo of the way she acted in the woods as he was squaring off against the khaki goons.

“I guess that’s true,” she said. “None of the girls were married. Doctor wouldn’t go for that.”

“Doctor?”

“The honcho,” Joy informed him. “Dr. Radcliff. Mr. Big.”

“He chose the girls himself?”

“Recruited us, would be more like it. There were physicals and tests, the whole nine yards, for anyone who passed inspection. Answering the adjust meant an interview. From there, you had to sell yourself—and that’s exactly what I mean.”

“What ad?” He was confused, as if the girl had veered off into subject matter foreign to their conversation. Remo felt as if he were a Yankee tourist, getting street directions in Chinese.

“What ad? Oh, man, where have you been?”

“Behind,” he told her, “but I’m catching up.”

“Okay. He runs this ad, you know? In different papers, freebies from the underground, that kind of thing. It’s like, some university of hospital will advertise for human guinea pigs to test a new vaccine, whatever. You’ve seen those, I bet.”

He nodded. They were on the television now and then, requests for patients suffering from allergies, arthritis, hypertension—any variety of ailments—to earn some extra money taking new, untested medication under rigid medical controls.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Well, it was just like that… except it wasn’t medicine, exactly. They were interested in single women—though I found out it wasn’t hard to lie about your age—who would agree to serve as surrogates for families who couldn’t make a baby on their own.”

Remo felt as if he had received a stinging slap across the face. “So, you weren’t…?”

“Pregnant when I joined the program? Uh-uh,” Joy replied. “No way.”

It was a twist that he had not considered. “Who’s the father?” Remo asked.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Can we go back and start from the beginning, Joy?”

She rolled her eyes but said, “Okay. I saw this ad in the Free Press. Los Angeles, you know? I don’t recall exactly what it said, but there was money mentioned—no specific details—for some kind of personal service. They listed a toll-free number at the bottom, and I made the call.”

“Sounds like a come-on from an escort service,” Remo said.

“Well,” Joy responded, “I was working at the time, same kind of thing, but L.A.’s dangerous, you know? I didn’t mind relocating, if there was better money to be made.”

“So, you were—”

“Hooking. You can say it.”

“Right. What happened when you made the call?”

“This grandma-sounding woman picks it up and asks some general questions—age, health, this and that. She. says they’re doing interviews for something special, but she can’t spill any details on the telephone. I’ll have to talk to Doctor if I want the scoop.” She read the question in his eyes and said, “They always call him ‘Doctor,’ like he was the only one. Like God, you know?”

“And that was Radcliff.”

“Yeah, turns out it was. First thing, I asked the woman where they’re doing interviews, and she says Bloomington. Big college town, up north of here.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Remo. “Bobby Knight, whatever.”

“Yeah, they’re crazy over basketball. I figured, later on, they set it up that way so it would seem legitimate, like maybe they were tied in with the university somehow.”

“Could be,” said Remo, thinking to himself that it would also point investigators in the wrong direction—north, away from Radcliff’s clinic, in Kentucky—if security broke down.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Okay. I told the lady she could put me on the ‘maybe’ list. I figured at the very worst. I’d get myself a free vacation, see some countryside. They wouldn’t spring for plane fare, but they put me on a Greyhound from L.A. to Bloomington. I never did much riding on a bus before, since I got out of school. It gives you time to snooze.”

“I guess that’s right,” said Remo.

“Anyway, we get to Bloomington on Friday, and they’ve booked a room for me. at this hotel down by the depot. Doctor comes and takes me out to dinner Friday night, which struck me as a little odd, but who am I to bitch about free food? Red Lobster’s where we went. It wasn’t bad.”

She hesitated, glanced down at the nervous fingers twining in her lap. “You wouldn’t have a smoke, by any chance?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“No sweat. I’m not supposed to, anyway. The kid, you know? I haven’t had a cigarette for nearly seven months. I guess that means I quit.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Anyway, we just made small talk over dinner, then he drives me back to the hotel. It crossed my mind that Doctor may have been a lech, but nothing happened after all. He just explained the program, like, to fill me in.”

“Which was?”

“Was what?”

“The program,” Remo said.

“Oh, right. He said he was a baby doctor—and he worked with couples who were having difficulty in the reproductive area. No matter what they tried, the women couldn’t get knocked up, so they were hiring surrogates. I have to tell you, I was floored at first. The thought of being pregnant, first of all, then carrying a kid around for nine months and it’s gone, like that.”

“What made you go for it?” asked Remo.

“Money, and the way he laid it out all scientific-sounding. I never had to meet the couple—that was one thing. It was artificial all the way, no hassles. Once I passed the physical and all, I would be artificially inseminated, spend the next nine months at Doctor’s place—Ideal Maternity, no less—and once the baby was delivered, I’d have-fifty grand to get me started, someplace fresh. A whole new life, you know?”

“They offered fifty thousand dollars?”

“Right. No money down, of course, but that was cool, since I’d have no expenses of my own. It seemed all right.”

“You mentioned physicals.”

“Oh, yeah. I had to. take all kinds of tests—for HTV, fertility, a bunch of stuff I didn’t even understand. They’ve got all kinds of laboratory gear back at the so-called home. Technicians come and go with Doctor all the time.”

“I see.”

“They had about a dozen girls already there, when I moved in. All pregnant, due at different times. I never knew what Doctor and the staff were getting paid, but if the girls were getting fifty grand apiece, I figured he and Matron must be taking in a pretty penny.”

“Matron?”

Joy made a disgusted face. “Althea Bliss,” she said. “House mother, chief bad-ass, you name it. Doctor owns the place, but Matron runs the show, with assholes like the two you met tonight.”

“They were security?” asked Remo.

“Matron calls them ‘orderlies,’ like any decent hospital would let them through the door. Fact is, they do a little bit of everything, from cleaning up around the place to making sure the girls stay put.”

“Did many try to run away?”

Joy shook her head. “A couple, in the time I spent there. I’m the only one who ever made it out, and that was thanks to you.”

“Forget it.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“I need to hear the rest of it,” he said.

“Okay. They do the dirty deed, all nice and sterile like, in the infirmary. Next thing you know, I’m pregnant. Thing is, by that time, I’ve had a chance to ask some questions, get to know some of the other girls. It’s coming to me that Ideal Maternity’s not so ideal. You get my drift?”

“Not quite.”

“First thing, we never get to leave the grounds—and I mean never. They’ve got TV, VCR, all kinds of games and hobby shit, but no one can go shopping, take a walk out in the woods without a chaperone—forget it. Right away I figure Doctor’s. covering his ass, ’cause selling babies is illegal, and he doesn’t want some yokel putting two and two together, ’kay?”

“Makes sense,” said Remo.

“Right. Except it’s more than that. The seven months I spent there, half a dozen girls delivered, got their payoff checks and split. A couple of them, you could say were pretty tight. They were supposed to write and stay in touch, you know?”

“But never did?” asked Remo.

“Oh, they did, all right…except it wasn’t them.”

“You lost me, Joy.”

“Okay, take Karen, for example. I got notes from her, all right, but they were typed, even the signature. But neatly. Karen couldn’t type a sentence without spelling half the words wrong if her life depended on it.”

Joy chewed her lip for a minute nervously, then went on. “There’s more. A couple of the girls were pissed off in a major way before they left. The orderlies had tried to fool around with them, that kind of shit. Their names were Sheila and Regine. They left about three weeks apart, and both of them swore they would blow the whistle on Ideal as soon as they had cashed their/checks and banked the money someplace safe.”

“But nothing happened?”

“Zip. A few weeks later, there’s a postcard from Hawaii, supposed to be from Sheila.”

“And it wasn’t?” Remo asked.

“No way. The handwriting was off, and all she talked about was how she felt such gratitude for Doctor and the others helping her to get a brand-new start on life.”

“And what do you think happened to the other girls?”

Joy shrugged, a nervous twitch. “I couldn’t say, but nothing would surprise me. If a girl lips off, gets out of line around the home, there’s discipline, you know? Like slaps across the face or whippings with a belt. They don’t do anything to hurt the babies, but the rooms are locked at night—and in the daytime, too, if Matron puts you on restriction. Ever see the movie Cool Hand Luke?”

“Long time ago.”

“It’s like that, in a way. No guns, I mean—at least, I never saw any—but they’ve got tons of rules. All for the baby’s sake, they tell you, but it comes down to a lot of grunt work in the house, and childish shit like making sure you clean your plate at every meal. Mess up a time or two, and Matron lectures you, but it gets tougher after that. The baby bunker, like I said.”

“You think the so-called graduates were harmed somehow?”

“Hey, I don’t know! I mean, where are they? Did they ever cash their checks? Things happen, right? A bullet don’t cost fifty grand.”

“So you decided not to wait and take the chance.”

“Would you?”

He shook his head. “Do you have family in L.A.?”

“None that I’d care to see again.”

“I know how this must sound, but—”

“You feel like protecting me,” she said. “Is that about the size of it?”

“Not quite. I have a friend who runs a sanitarium. That’s like—”

“I’m not a dummy, mister. I know what it is.”

“Right, sorry. Anyway, he’s got connections, and I’m sure he’d put you up while you’re, uh, waiting for the, uh…”

“Delivery?”

“And keep you safe,” said Remo.

“So what’s his angle?” Joy inquired.

“Just someone I used to know years ago,” Remo lied. Smith would go berserk if he let the girl know too much.

“You’re after Doctor, right?” she said suddenly.

“Could be.”

“And when you find him?”

“That depends.”

“You’ll do him like Mahoney and Gutierrez?”

“Who are they?”

“Those two jerks at the home,” she said.

“Hey, don’t worry your head about things. If there’s something off. I’ll fix it so no more girls end up in your spot.”

Joy thought about it for a moment, finally said, “You know, I’d hate to wind up chilling in a hotel ice machine.”

“No chance,” said Remo. “You’re a friend.”

“You make friends, just like that?”

“I try.”

She thought some more. “Where is this sanitarium?”

“Sorry. That’s a secret.”

“I’ve had enough bus rides,” she warned.

He smiled. “I thought we’d try an airplane. How about first-class?”

“You’ll have to call, I guess, and check it out.”

“That’s right.”

The smile lit up her face. “What are you waiting for?”