Timber Line by Warren Murphy

Author:Warren Murphy [Warren Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chiun (Fictitious character) --Fiction., Williams, Remo (Fictitious character) --Fiction.
ISBN: 9781035998852
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER NINE

THE MOUNTAIN HIGH SOCIETY was prepared for anything from a border war to a bris. They had come a hundred strong in buses with a supporting network of trucks to carry their camping gear and field kitchens. In private cars came the persons of the media: some male, some female, and some none of the above.

The Mountain Highers were the first to disembus. Among them were a few left over hippies and back-to-the-earth types from the sixties and early seventies. A few more were trying to effect a working-class appearance by dressing in cast-off clothing they had found in thrift shops in Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades.

Most, though, had come for the occasion dressed in spiffy little snow outfits by Halston and St. Laurent and Anne Klein. The media was instantly recognizable; its fashions running to rumpled raincoats and ties that unwittingly advertised Burger King ketchup.

Remo wormed his way through a tangle of reporters and camerapersons and sidled up to a tall, dark man with short razor-cut hair and dark sunglasses on, despite the fact it was after midnight.

“Who’s in charge here?” Remo said.

“Are you speaking to me?” the newsman asked.

“No,” said Remo. “Actually, I was just checking to see if my vocal cords still worked. Of course, I was talking to you. Who’s in charge here?”

The newsman raised one hand to the corner of his dark glasses and with the pinkie of his right hand extending defiantly into the air, slid his glasses halfway down his nose so he could peer at Remo over the tops of the frames.

“Do you know who I am?” he demanded to know.

“I thought you were somebody smart enough to tell me who’s in charge here, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Really?” said the newsman.

“Let’s try again,” said Remo. “I’ll ask you who’s in charge, you tell me, I say thank you, and I’ll walk away. Okay?”

The newsman was silent.

Remo shook his head. He touched the newsman lightly in the center of his solar plexus. The man started to hiccup then began hicking harder and harder until he fell to the ground in a shivering spasm.

Another newsman came running up.

“Hey, you,” he said to Remo. “I saw all that. You can’t just come in here and do things like that. You can’t just mess with the press and get away with it.”

“Who’s in charge here?” Remo said.

The newsman looked at Remo, then down at the other newsman rolling around on the ground, holding his hiccupping stomach, and said, “Over there. Honest. Over there. I’ve got a cat and canary at home, and I’m all they got. Over there.” He kept pointing toward the front of the bus. “It’s Cicely Winston-Alright. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright of the San Francisco Winstons and the Dayton Alrights.”

The media man was pointing at a defiantly feminine woman in her early thirties, one who looked as if she had been sculpted by a straight Michelangelo inspired by the best parts of Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Joan Collins. She was dressed in

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