Chiun. Eighty-year-old men were supposed to be senile and doddering. That's what all the magazines and TV commercials said. Hadn't Chiun ever heard about irregularity? Or dentures, or tired blood? Didn't he know there were such things as arteriosclerosis and arthritis and gout and plain old age?

Of course not. All Chiun knew was how to kill people and how to be a pain in the ass to Remo.

Fifty bullets. That was what the old man wanted. "Boom droppings," he called them, as if Remo were in this ghetto hellhole on pigeon patrol instead of real business.

"Real business, pah," Chiun had said when Remo's assignment came in. "Unwashed amateurs with boom shooters."

"Guns, not boom shooters," Remo corrected. "And they kill people."

"Slow people."

"Maybe. Still, I'm supposed to stop them."

"You will never stop them," Chiun argued. "Louts with boom shooters are like fruitflies. No

sooner does one send them into the void, than a whole new generation appears to take their places."

"It's my assignment, Little Father," Remo said.

The old Oriental sighed. "Ah, yes. Emperor Smith. Well, if you must satisfy the whims of your mad employer, then go to his sister's house as he wishes. But remember the boom droppings. At least you can exercise a little on this worthless mission. Twenty-five droppings in the left hand, twenty-five in the right. Balance, always."

Remo explained that Sister Evangélica was nobody's sister, but the name of an apartment complex where the main pastime among the tenants was murder. The casualty toll for the complex was in the hundreds, and the corridors of Sister Evan-gelica's served as an active war zone for every punk in the city who had access to an illegal handgun.

For years the metropolitan police had been unable to curb the violence, and the number of killings had risen sharply in recent months.

Dr. Harold W. Smith, Remo's employer, had learned that the reason for the increase in violence was that regular shipments of handguns and ammunition were coming into the complex. Whereas before merely a handful of hopped-up muggers had sported in Sister Evangelica's, now virtually every man, woman, and child was packing a pistol and shooting at anything that moved. It was full-scale war.