Warren Murphy: Father to Son

Even though it was broad daylight, the police at the rear of the building didn't see the thin man slip between them. Their eyes always seemed to be where Remo wasn't. The uniformed men milled about anxiously, guns drawn.

Remo found a caged window in the alley near a Dumpster. The metal mesh popped in silence. He lifted the window and slipped soundlessly inside without a single living eye tracking his movements.

He found himself in the downstairs ladies' room. There were two bodies in the bathroom. One was near the sink; another had been sitting in a stall. The woman near the sink had lived for a time after she'd been shot. She had crawled on her side to the wall, only to die near a trash can. The blue tiled floor was streaked with congealing blood. The other woman had been luckier. A shotgun blast through the flimsy stall door had delivered her a speedier, if grislier, end.

Face steeling, Remo slipped from the room. Another body in the hallway. The man wore a suit with no jacket. The back of his white shirt was stained red. Papers that had been so important in the last moments before his violent death were now scattered on the drab green carpet around his prone body. Unlike the women, the man hadn't been felled by a shotgun blast. This one was a bullet, not a shell. The newscast had mentioned this. According to eyewitnesses, the killer carried an arsenal.

There were vending machines in the hallway. They had been blasted open, their contents looted.

The building was still. The only activity came from the small room in the distant back.

Remo followed a trail of bodies to a rear office. When he peeked around the corner, he saw the face that had been plastered across his TV set an hour before.

Paul "Munchie" Grunladd looked like Satan's Santa. The killer had a wild, untamed beard that clung to his face like a tenacious porcupine. Long, mottled hair stuck out in every direction. What looked like cornrows were merely tangles of dirt and grease.

Munchie was six foot five and weighed more than four hundred pounds. His great, ponderous belly stretched the fabric of his flannel shirt. Buttons strained to bursting.

A shotgun, two rifles, handguns and sacks of boxed ammo sat on the desk, surrounded by a pile of candy from the blasted-open vending machines.

The killer was leaning back in his chair. One finger was digging deep in his ear. In his other hand he clutched a phone. It looked like a toy in his big, meaty paw.

A pair of crisscrossing bandoliers ran over his shoulders and across his chest. Munchie munched casually on Butterfingers and Pay Days as he spoke into the phone.

"No way," the killer was insisting. "You make me so mad, Jane Pauley. I'm warning you, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters are already in a hairpulling contest over my story over on ABC." The line clicked. "Hold on a sec, I think that's 60 Minutes calling back."

Munchie unplugged finger from ear and tapped the phone.

It wasn't 60 Minutes. In fact, it was no one. Scowling, he tried to switch back to Jane Pauley. He found that she was gone, too.

"Hang up on me, will you?" he groused. "That's it, I'm going with Barbara."

When he tapped the cradle again, he was surprised that no dial tone sounded in his ear. Maybe the jack had come loose. Face growing puzzled amid his big beard, he traced the line to the wall.

He found that the jack had come loose. Along with a fair-sized chunk of the wall. There was now a gaping hole where once phone cord had met wall plate. The saw-toothed section of extracted wall dangled from the end of the cord now in the hand of a very thin man with a very unhappy look on his face.

"Holy Jesus!" Munchie cried, clutching his chest. "You scared me half to death."

Remo's face was cold. "Not to worry," he said. "The next half's on the house."

Suddenly remembering just exactly how he'd spent his morning, Munchie released his flabby man bosom and jumped for his pile of weapons.

The first gun he grabbed up was an AR-18 rifle. He was surprised to find the weapon knotted up like a metal pretzel. He was reasonably certain it hadn't been like that when he'd used it to shoot Doris from accounting.

He threw down the rifle and snatched up a shotgun. It disintegrated in his hands, clanking in a dozen fat pieces to the surface of the desk.

He grabbed a handgun that somehow suddenly became a ball of fused metal with bullets dropping out. When he pulled the trigger, it pinched his finger. Yelping in pain, Munchie threw the worthless gun to the floor.

"I surrender!" Munchie cried, throwing up his hands.

Remo took a step back from the stink clouds that emanated from Munchie's armpits.

"What kind of job do you do around here that they'd let you come in to work reeking like that?" Remo asked.

"I do Web designs, mostly," Munchie replied. He saw Remo's blank face.

"For the Internet?" Munchie offered.

"Oh," Remo nodded, as if that explained everything. "Let's go, Buttercup. You're late for your own funeral."

Grabbing Munchie by a shell-filled bandolier, he yanked the killer toward the door. On his way out of the room, Remo picked up something from Munchie's desktop arsenal.

"What the hell were you just doing on the phone?" Remo asked as they made their way down the hall.

"Negotiating," Munchie said nervously. His belly jiggled as he huffed and puffed to keep up. "You know, my first television interview, post-tragedy. They've been calling like crazy ever since my story went national. The network-TV people have been very sympathetic to my problem."

They were stepping over the body of a forty something male with salt-and-pepper hair and a hole in his forehead.

"Your problem," Remo said, his voice flat.

Munchie nodded. "I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," the killer explained. "It makes me tired and irritable all the time. Are you with the police? You don't look like you're with the police. What did you mean about my own funeral?"

"You're claiming you killed two dozen people because you were sleepy?" Remo asked.

"Well, yeah," Munchie said. "I also had Attention Deficit Disorder as a kid. Could have contributed. Oh, and I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"From what?"

"Vietnam," Munchie insisted.

"I saw the news, genius. You're forty-one years old. You were barely out of diapers when Vietnam ended."

Munchie bit his lip. "I suffer from low self-esteem...?" he suggested tentatively.

"You ought to. You're a murderer," Remo replied, shoving the killer along.

"I have a bad body image," Munchie argued.

"Join a gym."

They were at the fire exit at the end of the hall. Munchie's face grew hopeful. He had gotten the impression that this dead-eyed stranger was actually planning to do him bodily harm. "Will I be able to?"

"I meant in Hell. Don't let Hitler hog the exercycle."

With one thick-wristed hand he slapped open the stairwell door and shoved Munchie through.

"My mother didn't hug me enough," the killer panted as he stumbled up the stairs. He had to grab the metal railing repeatedly to keep from falling.

"If the baby you was anywhere near as ugly as the adult you, you're lucky she didn't beat you to death with a rake."

They climbed three stories to the roof door.

"I have Repetitive Stress Syndrome!" Munchie cried as Remo propelled him through the door and onto the roof. He landed on his gelatinous belly, his hands scraping pebbles.

"Sick Building Syndrome!" the killer gasped as Remo took a mittful of blubber and hauled him back to his feet.

"Psychologica Fantastica!" Munchie pleaded as he was dragged to the edge of the roof.

"Male menopause!" he tried desperately as Remo picked him up and stood him on the ledge.

The parking lot was below. The lot and the street beyond it were filled with police and emergency vehicles. Men ran for cover when Munchie appeared three stories above. The police trained weapons on the teetering figure. The crowd gasped.