Warren Murphy: Fade to Black

There was muttering from the crowd.

Most of the actors merely seemed confused. A burly man at Chiun's elbow who understood exactly what was being said tapped the Master of Sinanju on the shoulder. His beefy face wore a surly expression.

"Or what?" he challenged.

Later he swore he'd gotten both words out before he became airborne. Most of the other extras told him he only got as far as the first syllable before he went sailing over their heads.

The rest of the cast and crew watched in shock as the 240-pound extra sailed over the mock-up walls of their squad room. He landed with a heavy thud somewhere distant. Judging by the ensuing hail of shrimp and finger sandwiches, he'd touched down in the vicinity of the craft-services tables.

As food rained down, the men and women on the set nearly plowed over one another in their haste to return to work. The soundstage exploded in a frenzy of activity. For the first time since Chiun's arrival, it looked like an actual police station. Standing amid the chaos, the old man beamed proudly over at Bindle and Marmelstein, who were standing near the edge of the set.

When Chiun looked away, Bindle elbowed Marmelstein in the ribs.

"What do we do?" Hank Bindle muttered nervously. His lips didn't move. Though his heart raced excitedly, he dared not even smile.

Bruce Marmelstein was equally unemotional. "We shut up and tell the A.D. to roll 'em," he whispered in reply. "This production is finally back on track."

Plastering on the phoniest toothy smile he could muster, Marmelstein strode across the chaotic set to the Master of Sinanju. Hank Bindle trotted to keep up.

Chapter 5

"I don't know if I know anything," Quintly Tortilli cautioned. As they drove through Seattle's suburban streets, a light mist collected sullenly on the windshield.

"You don't," Remo informed him blandly.

Tortilli missed the sarcasm. "It's just that I hear things," he persisted. "Some true, some not. People confide in me 'cause I'm at the vanguard of the new culture."

"You look just like the ass end of the old one," Remo said. "And what was our rule about annoying Mr. Driver?"

Tortilli instantly dummied up.

The last time he'd spoken out of turn, Remo had followed through on his roof-rack threat. Tortilli had spent fifteen minutes up in the rain clutching on for dear life as Remo tore down the highway.

His ugly purple suit was stained dark with water. He never thought polyester could absorb so much. On the floor, water pooled at his soles. His Skechers were soaked through. Dead bugs filled the gaps in his teeth.

Thankful to be in out of the cold and rain, the young director remained mute as Remo headed into a less reputable part of town. He offered directions with a pointed finger.

Along the street on which they now drove, squalid tenements scratched at the joyless earlymorning gray sky. The tiny front yards were pools of rain-spattered mud. In spite of the deteriorating neighborhood, the sidewalk seemed fairly new. The street itself was in good repair.

Remo suspected that the bombed-out look was affected. It had as much to do with Generation-X atmosphere as anything else. In the new counterculture, disrepair was chic.

"Mmm-mmm-mmin," Tortilli hummed abruptly. His bugging eyes were frantic. He tapped the dashboard.

"I told you to go while you were on the roof," Remo reminded him.

Tortilli shook his head violently. "Mmm-mmmmmm."

When Tortilli began to nod and point desperately, Remo realized they'd reached their destination. He pulled to the curb between a pair of matching rusted Ford Escorts.

"Okay, limited talking privilege is restored," he said to the shivering director. "Which one is it?" Quintly Tortilli scrunched up his already overscrunched face. It resembled a tightly balled fist.

"The guy I called said it was that one," he said. His pointed chin singled out a four-story building down the block. "But he could be wrong. He's just some guy I met in a bar who likes my movies. He said the group in there bragged about doing the sorority girls in Florida, the ones they found hanging from that tree. But they weren't in on the others. At least not according to my source."

Remo popped the door. "Then they'll only pay once," he promised thinly.

His tone made Tortilli shiver all the more.

As Remo rounded the curb, Quintly Tortilli opened his own door a crack. He jutted his protruding lips through the narrow opening.

"You gonna be okay?" Tortilli asked in a whisper. "My boy says there's a whole gang in there."

"Stay here," Remo said in reply. He slapped the director's door shut.

Tortilli had barely enough time to pull his pursed lips to safety. Just in case, he crossed his eyes and did a rapid inventory. He was relieved to find both lips still attached below his drooping, broad nose.

Trembling at the damp and cold, he glanced back up.

In both directions, the sidewalk that ran before the row of crumbling tenements was empty. Remo was already gone.

"Shit, a guy moves like that ought to be on film," Quintly Tortilli muttered, impressed. Suddenly recalling Remo's objection to his cursing, he bit his lip. "I hope his freakin' puritanism don't make me lose my knack for gritty, true-to-life urban dialogue," he said worriedly.

Frowning across every unnatural angle of his twisted face, the famous director began patting his soaked suit jacket. He needed a cigarette.

LIFE SUCKED.

Leaf Randolph knew it with certainty. He'd come to this drear conclusion during a single, drug-inspired epiphanic instant on his fifteenth birthday.

Until that moment of insight nearly ten years earlier, Leaf had been so consumed with the mundaneness of life that he hadn't really been aware of its pervasive suckiness.

Back then Leaf's father programmed for Macroware-the software giant based in Seattle. The Randolph patriarch was always too busy trying to eliminate the bugs du jour from the company's latest behind-schedule software to notice anything about his son's life. The fact that Leaf had become a junior high-school junkie wasn't even a blip on his radar.

Even though Leaf's mother had to know something was amiss, she turned a blind eye to his drug use. As his habit worsened, she retreated further into blissful ignorance. Whenever he was exceptionally stoned, she'd take to polishing the furniture. By the time Leaf was thirteen, the Randolph family had to wear sunglasses to Thanksgiving dinner in order to dull the glare from the credenza.

On that fateful day that would alter his outlook on life forever, Leaf and his two closest friends, Ben "Brown" Brownstein and Jackie Fams, had scored some Scandinavian Mist from a dealer who'd just smuggled it back from Europe. The stuff was powerful.

"Man, no wonder them Vikings, like, kicked the Pilgrims' ass," Brown commented as he exhaled his first puff of the extrastrong European marijuana.

He was perched on Mr. Randolph's tidy workbench. An electric guitar lay behind him.

Since it was Seattle and they were teenagers, the three of them were just expected to be in a band. Brown had gotten the expensive instrument two birthdays ago. He had yet to figure out how to tune it.

"Dude, don't Bogart it," complained Jackie when Brown started to take another hit. Grumbling, Brown passed off the joint to him. "Try not to drool all over it this time," he muttered.

Only when it came time to pass the marijuana back to where it had started-the soft, uncallused hands of Leaf Randolph-did the other two boys notice something was wrong.

Leaf was staring into the corner of the garage where his untouched drum set had been gathering dust for the past five years. But as they studied the expression on their friend's face, they realized that Leaf was looking at a place far beyond the confines of the two-car garage.