Table Of ContentThe Destroyer
The Arms of Kali
Created
by
Warren Murphy
& Richard Sapir
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PINNACLE BOOKS
are published by
Windsor Publishing Corp.
475 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016
Copyright (c) by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior
written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Chapter One
He wouldn’t take a tip for helping her home from the airport. No, not even a nice
frosted piece of yellow cake or even a cup of tea from the old woman.
All he wanted was to put a pale yellow cloth around her neck, and he wouldn’t
take no for an answer. He also wouldn’t stop tightening it.
The Chicago police found her body in the morning. Her bags had not been un-
packed. A homicide detective thought he recognized a pattern he had seen be-
fore, and he thought he had read about another death like that in Omaha: a trav-
eler found strangled to death with the luggage still packed.
The detective checked with the FBI clearinghouse in Washington to see if this
might be some sort of pattern. “The dead woman had a ticket with just Folks
Airlines?” asked the FBI voice from Washington.
“Yes, she did.”
“She met someone on the plane? A nice young person, perhaps?”
“We don’t know that yet,” the detective said.
“You will soon enough,” the FBI voice answered.
“So there is an M.O.,” said the detective, referring to a repetitive crime pattern.
“Like a clock ticking,” replied the FBI agent.
“A national pattern? Or just here?”
“National. She was the hundred and third.”
“A hundred and three people strangled?” asked the detective. His voice rose in
horror as he imagined that old woman back in her picked-clean apartment, her
purse open, her furniture rifled. More than a hundred, just like that? Impossible,
he thought. “But this one was also robbed,” he said.
“So were all hundred and three others,” the FBI agent said.
Number 104.
Albert Birnbaum was in seventh heaven. He had found someone who was not
only willing to listen to the problems of selling retail hardware but was actually
enthralled.
His late wife, Ethel, may she rest in peace, used to say: “Al, nobody cares about
the markup on a three-quarter-inch screw.”
“That markup gave you Miami Beach every year for two weeks during the win-
ter, and-“
“And the ranch house in Garfield Heights and the educations for the children and
those charge accounts. I’ve heard it, but nobody else wants to hear it. Not even
once do they want to hear it. Albert, precious, sweetheart, loved one, a three-
quarter-inch screw lacks glamour.”
Unfortunately, she did not live to see the day that she would be proved wrong.
Because Albert Birnbaum had found a young woman, a beautiful young thing
with pink cheeks and yellow hair and innocent blue eyes, and a little shiksa nose
and she was fascinated about hardware markup. Truly fascinated.
Albert had thought for a moment that she might be after his body. But he knew
his body, and what he knew about it was that no one as good-looking as this
lovely young thing would have to listen to hardware stories to get it, if she even
wanted it in the first place already.
She had the adjacent seat on the just Folks Airlines flight to Dallas. She had
asked him if he were comfortable. He had said he was, considering that this was
an economy fare. For a reduced rate, he said, it was a wonderful flight. However,
she could keep the sandwich and candy bar they had tried to hand out at lunch.
“Cheap planes serve cheap food and it’ll rot your stomach.”
“Isn’t that ever so?” she said. “You really have such a philosophy of life. Even
something like a flight, Mr. Birnbaum, you turn into an object lesson of compar-
ative values.”
“Listen, I don’t need big words,” he said. “Life is life, right?”
“So well put, Mr. Birnbaum. That’s just what I mean. Life is life. It has majesty.
It rings.”
“You’re putting me on,” said Al Birnbaum. The seat was pinching his hips. But
the way he looked at it, everything but a first-class seat pinched his hips nowa-
days. And he wasn’t going to pay five hundred dollars extra not to get a pinched
hip. He didn’t mention this. The girl couldn’t see the few extra pounds he was
carrying around, as long as he was sitting down, so why mention it, right? And
as pretty as she was, she was allowed to exaggerate a little bit -about his philos-
ophy of life being so wonderful.
But when he talked hardware and she really listened, Al Birnbaum realized he
had found someone who would not lie. You did not keep those big blue eyes
transfixed on the speaker, without honestly caring, not when you were able to
say:
“You mean a little three-quarter-inch screw is the backbone of hardware-store
profits? The ones I used to apologize for, buying just a few and wasting the
clerk’s time? Those screws?” she said.
“Those screws, those nails, those washers,” Al Birnbaum said. “They’re the gold
of hardware. A sixty-maybe sixty-five-percent markup on every one of them,
and next year they won’t go out of style or be replaced, but the price’ll go up.
The screw and the nail are the backbone of the business.”
“Not the big appliance? That’s not your big moneymaker?”
“God should never have invented them,” said Al Birnbaum. “You take some six-
hundred-dollar-ticket item, they see a scratch on it, they don’t want it. Back it
goes. You put one out for display, kiss it good-bye, you sell it for junk. Then
you’ve got your markup. How you going to compete with a discount store? I saw
a convection oven at a discount house selling for fifty-seven cents over what I
purchased it for wholesale.”
“My God,” gasped the girl, clutching her breast.
“Fifty-seven cents,” said Al Birnbaum. “On a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-ticket
item.”
The girl was close to tears hearing that. Al Birnbaum had found a wonderful
young woman and his only problem was that he didn’t know a young man good
enough for her. Which he told her.
“Oh, Mr. Birnbaum, you’re too kind.”
“No. You’re a very special young lady. I’m only sorry I’m not young enough.”
“Mr. Birnbaum, you’re just the sweetest man I have ever met.”
“C’mon,” said Al Birnbaum. “Don’t give me that.” But it was nice to think
about.
Later on, when the girl had trouble getting her own baggage, Al Birnbaum of-
fered to step in. Al Birnbaum wasn’t going to leave a decent young girl stranded.
He wouldn’t leave someone he didn’t like stranded, so why should he leave this
young girl who didn’t even have a way to get into Dallas to visit her fiance? He
hailed the cab. He rode in with her. He even said he would like to meet her
boyfriend.
“I wish you would. I know you’ll just love him, Mr. Birnbaum. He’s thinking of
going into hardware too, and he could use advice from someone experienced.”
“Tell him for me, it’s a hard business but an honest one.”
“Oh, you should tell him. You know so much more about it.”
“He’s got to watch out for buying now. American tools are getting killed by Ko-
rea and Taiwan.”
“Please, not me. You tell him. You just can’t buy experience like yours.”
“Oh, you can buy it,” said Al Birnbaum. “It just won’t be any good.” He liked
that.
Her boyfriend lived in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods and the apartment
had virtually no furniture. He wondered how he might be able to offer them
some help in getting a decent place to live. But he had to be careful. You didn’t
just barge in on a nice young couple like this and insult them by offering to help
with the rent.
He sat on a simple wooden box under a bare light bulb, smelling old coffee
grounds and a mustiness as if the place hadn’t been cleaned in a year or two.
Then he remembered that the door hadn’t required a key. This was an abandoned
apartment. They had no place to live. He decided he would have to help them.
He heard a creaking of footsteps behind him and he turned to see another clean-
cut young man with a yellow handkerchief that he held by each end, spinning it
into a pale yellow rope.
“Excuse me,” the young man said. “Can I get this around your neck?”
“Wha-” Al Birnbaum started to say. He felt hands grab his legs, pulling him off
the box, while other hands grabbed his right wrist. It was the girl. She had
thrown her entire body on his right hand, and his left was pinned behind him and
the ropelike pale yellow handkerchief was around his throat.
The handkerchief tightened. At first it just hurt, like something cutting into his
neck, and he thought: I can handle this for a while.
He tried to twist away, but they seemed to twist with him. At his first try for air,
that helpless try to breathe, he gave a violent lunge and when no air would come
into his body, he felt a searing, desperate lust for just one breath. For mercy’s
sake, one breath. Give him one breath and he would give them anything.
They were chanting. He was dying and they were chanting. Strange sounds. Un-
English sounds. Maybe he was too far gone to understand words? Already that
far gone?
Darkness, darkness in the room, darkness in his skull, darkness in his convuls-
ing, air-desperate body. And he heard very English words.
“She loves it.”
And then, strangely, in the darkness, the deep darkness, there was no need for
air, just a great peace upon him with much light, and there was Ethel waiting for
him and somehow he knew that now, at this time, she would never tell him he
bored her with talk about hardware. Never again would she be bored. She was so
happy to see him.
Then he heard a voice, far off somewhere, and it was a promise: “They will not
get away with this, these players with the gods of death.”
But he didn’t care now in this place of light. He didn’t even have to tell anyone
about hardware. He had forever to be absolutely happy.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and they had not given him the right breathing equipment.
They were going to kill him. He realized it even before the diving boat pulled
out from the Flamingo Hotel in Bonaire, a flat jewel of an island in the Nether-
lands Antilles.
During the winter, Americans and Europeans came here to escape the cold and
dive in the turquoise waters and watch the fish of the Caribbean reefs as the fish
watched back.
Tourism had been quite profitable to the island, and then someone wanted more
profit. So Bonaire became a pumping station in the cocaine pipeline into the
United States, and there was so much money, people would kill to protect it. Lo-
cal police had disappeared, Dutch investigators from Amsterdam had disap-
peared, but when American assistance personnel disappeared, America told the
Antillean government that the United States would take care of it in another way.
Then nothing seemed to happen. No American investigators came down. No in-
telligence agents came down. And no one in America seemed to know what on
earth America had promised. All anyone knew was that it would be taken care
of.
A highly placed American assured the Bonaire governor who was his friend:
“I’ve seen things like this happen before. Usually with the CIA, but sometimes
with the FBI or the Secret Service. It’s usually something at crisis level and
nothing seems to work. Then somebody says: Stop everything, forget it. It will
be taken care of.”
“And then what happens?” asked the Bonaire governor, his voice a stew of
Dutch and English accents on a stock base of African dialects.
“It really gets taken care of.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know.”
