Warren Murphy: Power Play

"All right," Marcia said. "I'll wait."

Remo had the hole big enough now. The two-by-fours of the interior walls and the lathing strips and the rough inside surface of the wall plaster were clearly visible.

Jeffrey was looking at the sky, hoping for an aurora borealis.

"Hey, Jeffy, look," Marcia said.

Jeffrey leaned over and looked but all he saw was a pile of bricks in the yard.

"What?" he said.

"He jus' go through that wall. Like it isn't there," Marcia said. She giggled. Jeffrey leaned over to try to see better. As they both watched, a body soared through the hole in the rear wall and out into the yard where it hit the bricks with a wet, doughy thump and lay still. They heard a thwacking sound, and another body came flying through the hole into the yard. Then more sounds and another body and another. They all hit hard. Two of them bounced on contact. None of them moved afterward.

"Wow," Marcia said.

"You can say that again."

"Wow," said Marcia who thought it was stupid to say it again.

"I'm gonna see the guru tomorrow and get us some more of this," Jeffrey said.

Marcia didn't answer. She was waiting for the man in black to come back out of the hole in the brick wall and climb up to the roof and make love to her. And if he had to fight off Jeffrey, so much the better. And if he couldn't fight off Jeffrey, then she would fight off Jeffrey.

But Remo didn't come.

He found the kidnaped businessman in a closet, blindfolded, gagged and tied. Remo removed the gag and the ropes, but left the man's blindfold on.

"You're all right now," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Just another guy trying to do two men's work," Remo said.

The hostage reached for his blindfold but Remo stayed his hand.

"You can take that off when you hear the front door close," he said.

"Where are they?" the businessman asked.

"They left," Remo said.

"I heard noises. Like a fight."

"No, there wasn't any fight," Remo said truthfully. "Some scurrying, maybe, but no fight. Look, I'm going now. You take that off when I leave."

On the roof, three minutes had passed and Marcia had decided that that was long enough to wait for the one great love in her life. She would live with the tragedy forever, the sense of loss that the man in black had not come back. She would suffer. She would even give her body to Jeffrey out of her sense of remorse. She would try to find happiness in the arms of many lovers.

"Jeffrey," she said. "I'm yours. Take me."

She turned to look for Jeffrey. He was sleeping in a corner of the roof, snoring heavily. Marcia thought about it for a moment, then lay down beside him. She would give her body away tomorrow, to try to drown her sorrows in the arms of many men. But for now she would sleep.

Remo got a cab on the corner and told the driver he was in a hurry to get to Brooklyn.

"How much of a hurry?"

"A hundred dollar hurry," Remo said, flashing the bill at the driver.

"How much of a tip?"

"That includes the tip," Remo said.

"Okay. You're as good as there. Did you hear about..."

Remo touched the driver on the right shoulder.

"I also want it quiet. I'm trying to think of something. So every time you say anything from here on in, I'm taking ten dollars off the hundred."

"All right. I won't say a word," the driver said.

"That's ninety," Remo said.

The driver wouldn't make that mistake again. Ninety dollars to Brooklyn was all right and everybody knew that New York cab drivers were the smartest in the world, so he decided he would say nothing, not a word, he would just let that hundred dollar looney sit in silence, but there was that shine who looked like he might be going to cut him off and put a dent in the last unscarred spot on his left front fender and that was worth a yell, and hell, everybody wanted to hear some kind of comment on New York's weather, and the passenger must have an opinion about the New York Yankees, and maybe the passenger would like to see his polished rock collection because sometimes people bought rocks from him and a man who would pay a hundred dollars to get to Brooklyn might pay God knows how much for rocks that the driver got himself at this little place called Snake Hill, across the river in Secaucus, New Jersey, and by and by they reached Brooklyn and Remo hadn't had any chance at all to think and at ten dollars deduction per outburst, the driver owed Remo forty dollars.

He did not want to pay.

Remo extracted it from the man's pocket.

"If you want to wait," he said, "I'll give you the same deal going back."

"Hell, no," the driver said. "You think I'm made of forty dollarses?" He jammed the car into gear and drove off angrily, scratching the last virgin piece of fender on a heavy wire trash basket used by the neighborhood as a Dempster dumpster.

The building on Halsey Street was a tired, chalky old tenement. Outlined against the black midnight sky, with no lights on, it looked like dirt rampant on a field of dirt. Remo double-checked the address. This was it. The basement.

He went down the stairs in the back of the first floor hall. The cellar was dark but he moved easily between the ash cans and the stacks of newspaper to the locked door in the rear of the cellar. The old wooden door fit in its frame so tightly that no leak of light showed around its edges. He touched his fingertips to the wood and could feel the heat from inside that signified a light on.

Good. It was getting late and Remo wanted to be finished with this day.

Remo reached his hands up above his head, then drove the fingertips of his arched hands into the wood. They slammed in like nail punches. Remo yanked the door toward him, the lock snapped and the door came off the hinges easily. Remo tossed it to the side.

A big man was working at a bench. He was wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt. A heavy mat of hair covered his shoulders. He whirled toward Remo.

"What the..."

"Not a lot of time," Remo said. "You Ernie Bombarelli?"

"Yeah," the man growled. "Who the hell..."

Remo silenced him with a wave of his hand.

"Nice factory you've got here," he said. He looked around at the neat cans of powder and the long waxed cardboard tubes. "You could win a war with all these explosives."

"I could punch your face out, creep. Who are you?"

"You've been pushing these firecrackers in schoolyards. Last week, two kids lost their hands playing with your toys."

"I don't know nothin' about that," Bombarelli said.

"One of the kids was a concert piano player," Remo said.

Bombarelli shrugged. "Maybe he can learn to play with his feet."

"I'm glad you said that," Remo said.

Bombarelli's right hand was easing behind his back, toward a small drawer in the end of the workbench.

"Don't waste my time with guns," Remo said. "It won't do any good."

It didn't. Bombarelli had the gun out and in his hand and pointed at the skinny intruder. He squeezed the trigger but the gun never went off and then it was in the skinny guy's hands and then with two hands he snapped the gun apart and dropped the pieces onto the concrete cellar floor.

"Who..." Bombarelli started again.

"Who doesn't matter," Remo said. "What matters is that this is the kind of work I do. Every so often, I just get somebody who's a piece of garbage like you and fix him up so that he's kind of a lesson to the other pieces of garbage. It's your turn in the barrel, Bombarelli."

Bombarelli went for Remo's throat with his hands. He was a big man, with shoulders like the hams of a champion hog, but Remo met the hands with his own hands, and squeezed his thumbs into the inside of Bombarelli's wrists, and the firecracker manufacturer's fingers didn't work any more. He tried to yell, but there was another thumb in his throat and he couldn't yell. He tried to run, but there was a thumb in the base of his spine and his legs didn't work, not even to hold him up, and Ernie Bombarelli crumpled onto the cellar floor. All that worked were his eyes and they worked too well because as Bombarelli watched in growing horror, the thin man began scooping up M-80s from the work-bench, firecrackers almost three inches long and an inch-and-a-half thick, and with tape, he began fastening them to Bombarelli's thick, hairy fingers.