Warren Murphy: Bloody Tourists

Chapter 6

The white man wore only a T-shirt. If he was cold in this unseasonably chilly evening, he didn't show it. If he was concerned about being alone in the worst part of town, he wasn't showing that, either. Maybe, Antoine Jackson thought, he was a crazy man. He'd heard some white men did some mighty stupid things.

But in sixteen years he'd never seen a white man acting this stupid.

He dragged on the front window of his mother's second-story apartment and yelled, "Man, what are you doing here?"

The white man looked right at him as if evaluating him for a moment, but he never slowed his pace. "You ought to stay out of that place! They'll kill you in there!"

The white man ignored him. "I'm just trying to help you out."

The white man waved and went to the door of the crack house without hesitation.

Antoine slammed his window. He tried to be a good kid-Lord knew that was tough enough living in the Nashville slums. He tried to be decent to his fellow human beings. But sometimes people just didn't want your sincere help. Let the white man go get himself killed if that's what he wanted. Nothing more Antoine could do about it.

THE WHITE MAN PUT his hands on the door and waited until he saw the shadow of the young man disappear from the window. The kid was partly right. Somebody was going to get killed.

He felt the movements of people inside the condemned building, and his nostrils were assaulted by the acrid fumes of burning trash.

The quick slap with the flat of his hand looked feeble, but the blow cracked the door at the bolt and sent it swinging open.

"Special delivery!" He stepped inside and nudged the door closed. "Candy-gram! Pizza boy! Anybody home?" The foyer of the condemned apartment building was empty. At the foot of the stairs anyone else would have heard only silence, but he detected activity in the ground-floor rooms and movement upstairs.

The ground-floor inhabitants were his first consideration. But those upstairs might try to make a break while he was otherwise engaged. And he hated to do a half-assed job. He grabbed at a broken steel folding chair and dismantled it into components with a few snaps of his fist, then straightened the longest section of black metal tube and jammed it between the wall and the stair rail six inches off the ground.

That would slow whoever descended from the upper floors.

He strolled through the door of the first ground-floor apartment. The tiny living room was bare, but the burning stench was potent.

"Fire inspector! You need a license for a cookout in this city, you know."

The simmering coals of a fire glowed on a makeshift fireplace of scavenged bricks in what had once been a bedroom. The charred remains of rotted timber, old wooden signs and melted plastic soda bottles littered the floor.

He heard his assailant coming and waited until the noisy footsteps were close, then he intercepted the attacker with movement that looked like quick-seeping mercury.

The attacker was street scum, a crack dealer who used a little too much of his own product. His clothing and hair were filthy; his face had dirt crusted in the creases.

His dirty creases grew when his mouth gaped open. His mouth gaped open because he suddenly found his handgun flying out of his grasp as if it had sprouted wings. The man he thought he was sneaking up on was now holding him by the collar, and there were several inches of empty air between his dangling feet and the floor. "Cleaning service!"

"I didn't order no cleaning service, man!" the drug dealer wailed.

"Somebody did, and man, this place needs it."

"I ain't payin' for no fucking cleaning service!"

"Somebody else is footing the bill:"

Before he protested further the dealer's skull was knocked against the wall hard enough to crack it open-and then he was beyond complaining about anything. The corpse got nudged into the closet as it collapsed.

A buzz-cut man scrambled out of his closet hiding place to escape the cadaver that tackled him.

"Who are you, man?" he demanded.

"I'm the florist," Remo Williams lied.

"You killed Drago, man. Killed him with your bare hands. How'd you do that, man?"

"Even we florists need to know self-defense-they taught judo at the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago." Remo was lying again. He had never attended the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago. Or any floral trade school, for that matter.

"You killed Drago. You killed Drago!" The young man snatched a switchblade from his jeans pocket, "You killed Drago!"

"Are you trying to tell me I killed Drago?"

The young man leaped at Remo with a screech like a rabid beast. Remo extended his arm, letting the flying man connect with his fist, cutting off the noise. The knife wielder's nose exploded across his face and his body cartwheeled before he slammed to the floor. Remo made a quick punt and the knifer's head arced through the air.

In the door a straw-haired woman, as clean-cut as Janis Joplin, issued a grunt of horror and bolted. Remo followed her out of the apartment and into another down the hall. Her pig snorts of panic were joined by the howling and grunting of two other people who stormed out of the bedrooms to stand by her side. More addicts-dealers. But there was something else going on here. The three of them stood in the empty apartment living room and screeched and howled wordlessly, crouching like apes, clawing at the air in front of them. Remo came at them slowly, but their howls became throat-tearing screeches.

"Is that all you have to say for yourselves?" Apparently it was.

"You the nice folks that offed a local distributor named Fumar?"

One of them, a tall white man in torn jeans, managed to get words around his howls. "Kill you!"

He bent and charged Remo. Maybe he played football before crack claimed his brain. Remo applied a palm to the top of his head, creating a tremendous amount of force that compressed the attacker's vertebrae into one fused bone-mass.

The other man whirled a crowbar overhead, issuing a catlike yowl. Misjudging his clearance, the crowbar lodged in the ceiling and he looked up to see what the problem was. Remo drummed his knuckles on the man's chest as if he were knocking on the neighbor's front door.

The druggie forgot the crowbar and concentrated on the fact that his heart had begun pounding as wildly as a rubber ball in a tiny box. He ran blindly into a wall and fell to the floor, dying in spasms.

The woman made singsong wails that came with each exhalation, her mouth pulled back over her teeth like a chimp in a snit. Despite her apparent mania, she calmly leveled the mini-Uzi she had grabbed from somewhere and squeezed the trigger.

Her chemically altered state left no room for skill, and she emptied the entire magazine in a single continuous stream of rounds that crashed into the wall of the room and somehow managed to get nowhere near her intended victim, who slithered away from wherever she directed the fire.

Remo lifted the Uzi out of the crack queen's grasp when she still had a single round left in the magazine and, with a blow to the head, snapped her off like a light.

He heard footsteps and the tumbling of bodies tripping over his booby trap on the stairs. He found two men scrambling to their feet. They were junkyard warriors. One had a piece of old chain, while the other possessed a ragged steel bar. They spotted Remo and instantly began howling, bansheelike.

Whatever was going on here wasn't pleasant, and Remo considered the possibilities as the two howlers came at him. Remo had run into his share of drug users in his day, and none of them made such a racket. It wasn't just ghoulish; it was annoying.

"Oh, be quiet!" He grabbed the iron bar from the first attacker and used it to absorb the blow of the second attacker's chain. The chain looped around the bar and lifted it out of the attacker's hands. Suddenly the bar was descending on them both, the point crashing through the first skull with such momentum it was carried well into the second skull. The first attacker collapsed with a good portion of his brains splattered on the walls and floor around him. The second fell on his back with the bar sticking straight up like a flagpole.