Warren Murphy: Timber Line

Remo finished his water to the accompaniment of eight guns being drawn and their safeties being clicked off. He asked the bartender for some matches.

"Yes, sir," the bartender said, tossing a pack of matches onto the bar.

"How do you like me so far?" Remo asked.

"Fine, sir. Fine," said the bartender.

"Well, if you like all that, you'll love what's next," Remo said.

But for all his offhand manner, Remo was not happy with himself. This should have been very simple: Walk in, get rid of them all, one by one, and then leave. But the bad walk across the lake had upset him, and now he was going to dispose of this whole building full of people at once. He knew he was going to hear about that.

Remo walked toward the door and stopped alongside some faded white linen curtains. Four men of various ages, but all the same mastodon size, charged at him, and the noise level in the room doubled.

Remo moved slightly and fluttered his left hand at two of them and they fell, forming a natural barricade in front of him and the door. Remo struck a match and set fire to two sets of curtains.

He started to blow the match out and drop it into an ashtray, then hesitated, and instead lit the ties of the two men who were still straining to reach him past the bodies of the two burly men.

While these two began to pay attention to their shirt fronts, Remo walked to the other side of the door and lit two more sets of curtains. Then he walked out the door. Outside, he stacked the bodies of the two guards against the door so it could not be forced open.

The fire was already coursing through the building.

Remo watched with a calculating eye. Every few seconds someone would try to crawl through one of the four small windows, and Remo would walk over to them, smile politely, then push a head, arm, or leg back inside.

Screams started coming from within the building as the people inside realized they were trapped. When they heard the commotion, the guards at the gate to the pier finally turned around. Four of them came running down the hundred yards or so from their posts.

A big, overweight, red-faced man with terror in his eyes was the first to reach Remo.

"Holy jumping Jesus," he said.

Remo was quiet.

"Holy jumping Jesus."

"You said that," Remo said, and picked him up and threw him through a window.

The second and third guards arrived, panting.

"Okay, buddy," one of them growled at Remo. "What the hell's going on here?"

Remo looked at the two of them, then back at the building.

"Looks like a fire to me," he replied.

"Don't be a wiseass," the man said.

"Okay," Remo said, then picked both of them up and threw them into the building. Then he turned to see about the remaining guards.

The fourth guard had almost caught up with his three colleagues as Remo disposed of the last of them. When he saw Remo look in his direction, he turned toward the pier and made a swan dive into the frigid waters of Lake Erie.

Remo started walking toward the street that fronted the pier. As he approached the gate, the last two guards ran off in opposite directions.

In the gloomy, chilly darkness, Remo walked up East Ninth Street, wondering why he felt so bad. It couldn't be just because there were so many people out there who deserved removal; there were always a lot of people who deserved removal. There had to be another answer, and it came to him as he neared Euclid Avenue. What disturbed him was that what he did made no difference at all. Today, sixty-three gang goons died. Tomorrow, there would be sixty-three new gang goons to take their places. Remo was just spitting into the wind, and no matter how hard he spat, the saliva didn't settle anywhere.

What he needed to pep himself up was a job that produced some provable public good, something to make him feel as if he and his work were worthwhile.

By the time he reached Euclid, the streets were filled with ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, and TV camera crews. The spinning emergency lights on top of the vehicles threw swirling splashes of red light across the faces of the nearby buildings. Remo turned right and kept walking, heading for the Terminal Tower and the Rapid Transit trains to the airport.

He had almost reached Public Square when he heard hoof beats behind him. He turned to confront two mounted policemen, their guns drawn, who were galloping toward him.

"They went that away," Remo said.

"Stand where you are, mister," the policeman on the lead horse said, reining his steed to a stop. Nobody in Cleveland had a sense of humor.

"Why?"

"Shut up your face. Stand where you are and raise your hands."

Later, neither of the mounted patrolmen could remember exactly what had happened. One moment, the suspect was raising his hands. The next, he was standing between their horses. And the moment after that, the horses were tearing and bucking, galloping hell-bent along the lakeshore highway half a mile away.

Watching them careen off didn't make Remo feel any better. So he had decided not to remove two nasty policemen. Big deal. What he needed was to do something good, really good, the kind of thing that would score him some points in heaven.

Remo crossed the street and entered the old, bronzed glass doors at the entrance to the Terminal Tower. He crossed the lobby and walked down the long, sloping pink-granite-lined ramp to the main concourse.

The concourse was a man-made granite cavern, the size of half a dozen football fields, and broken up here and there into little clumps of shops, most of which were now closed. The brightly lit center of the concourse was filled with people in evening dress and policemen.

Remo stopped at the bottom of the ramp and looked around. To his right were the stairs leading down another flight to the waiting platforms for the trains going to the airport. In front of the doors were two uniformed policemen, carefully eyeing everyone who went through. To his left were stairs leading to the trams destined for the eastern suburbs. Their entrance, too, was patrolled by a pair of cops.

Remo turned to go back up the ramp. Before he could take a step, he was stopped by the sight of two more cops at the top, checking out anyone who was trying to enter the concourse. He didn't want any policeman's blood on his hands; that would be all he needed to cap a lousy day. He turned away from the policemen and walked straight ahead, joining a crowd that was walking toward one of the darker corners of the concourse. Remo listened to the buzz of their conversation, trying to figure out what all these people in evening dress were talking about. But none of the words made sense.

"...cume potential..."

"...costs per mil..."

"...he's such a darling..."

"...then we zoomed in on all this water sloshing around in the toilet bowl and..."

"...we call it maize... I call it profit... units up eighteen percent..."

The crowd slowed down almost to a stop, and Remo moved to the front as quickly and as easily as he could. The crowd had stopped at a gateway. Beyond it, part of the concourse had been roped off and converted into a banquet hall with a long main table and a hundred smaller round tables, all covered with white tablecloths and set with china and silver. Candles glowed at each table, and eight giant television screens hung from the ceiling at strategic spots around the dining area. Strung across the middle of the room was a giant banner that read: WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT ARTISTRY IN TELEVISION COMMERCIALS.

Remo paused at the ticket stand and looked around. There were dozens of faces he could recognize. Someone asked him for his ticket.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "The fellow in the back's got them," he said. He walked past the ticket table and wandered around the room.