Warren Murphy - Failing Marks

As it was, the sentry failed to see Remo until after the final leap from the adjacent roof.

Remo dropped down directly in front of the startled neo-Nazi. He smiled.

"Hi. I'm here to kill Gus. Is he in?" Shock.

The young neo-Nazi immediately swung the barrel of his machine gun in Remo's direction. He tried to pull the trigger but was stunned to discover the gun was no longer in his hands. Looking desperately for the weapon, he found to his astonishment that it had somehow ended up in the hands of the strange intruder.

"No, no, no," Remo admonished, as if speaking to a toddler who had just scribbled crayon cave paintings all over the living-room walls. "Mustn't make boom noise."

As the neo-Nazi watched in horror, Remo took the gun barrel in two hands and twisted sharply. There was a quick groan of metal as the barrel bent in half.

A six-foot-high section of wall nearby was dotted with ancient rusted hooks that had been once used to secure lengths of clothesline. Remo hung the U-shaped gun barrel around one of the hooks. Immediately a large section of the wall collapsed under the relatively light weight of the gun. Some of the debris fell to the alley. Most fell to the roof. When they hit the roof's surface, the slabs of concrete continued downward. They crashed through the rooftop, landing in a heap in the apartment directly below.

"Well, crap," Remo griped, peering down into the hole.

There was shouting from the apartment. Through the dancing dust, a wide, pale face peered up through the opening. When he saw Remo, the man grew panicked. The face hastily withdrew.

Since landing on the roof, Remo had been between the guard and the stairwell door, which was rusting on its hinges in an alcove beyond the toppled wall. With Remo's attention redirected momentarily, the guard made a break for the door.

Remo grabbed the man by the back of his brown shirt collar before he could take two steps. He held the man several inches off the roof. "Hold up a second, Frankenfurter," Remo said.

"No, no!" the young man screamed in heavily accented English. "Let me go! Let me go!!"

"In a minute," Remo promised. "First things first. Where's Gus Holloway?"

"I do not know a Gus Holloway."

"That is a lie," Remo said simply. "Every lie gets a whack. In case you were wondering, this is a whack."

Whirling, Remo slammed the neo-Nazi's forehead into the remains of the half-toppled side wall. A square section of mortar shattered from the force of the blow, toppling to the alley far below.

When Remo brought the neo-Nazi back from the wall, his frightened face was caked with dust. He coughed, and a puff of concrete powder gusted into the chilly air. A streak of blood trickled down his dirty forehead.

"My next question is surprisingly similar to my first. Where is Gus Holloway?"

"I do not know!" the man cried. He blinked blood and dust from his eyes.

"Wrong answer," Remo said. "Whack time." He slammed the man's head against the wall once again. Again more concrete tumbled away. "I'd feel safer living in a shoe box," Remo frowned, looking down at the rubble in the alley.

"Please!" the young man begged woozily. "I do not know this Holloway."

Remo shook his head. "You must," he stated, firmly. "My last lead pointed me here. And your 'Hi, I'm an asshole Aryan' merit badge-" he nodded to the swastika armband "-indicates to me that you're maybe not being entirely forthright. Hey, I know what might jar your memory!" Remo said brightly. "A whack!"

He slammed the man's head against the wall. This time most of what was left crumbled away, tumbling in long angry sheets to the asphalt five stories below.

Once it was gone, only one four-foot finger of mortar remained upright.

"Gus ...Gus," the man wheezed, choking on dust. "Gustav? Do you mean Gustav?" He looked desperately up at Remo, one eye shut painfully. A shard of concrete had gotten stuck beneath the lid during his last whack. By now his forehead was bleeding profusely.

Remo frowned, confused. "Yeah, I think that might be his alias or something. Is there a Gustav here?"

"Yes!" the man cried. "That vas him." Still halfblinded, he pointed at the hole in the roof.

"The fat guy that looked up here?"

"Yes!" the neo-Nazi howled in frustration. Remo shook his head angrily. "Why didn't you say so?" Cupping his hand on the back of the neoNazi's head, he drew the man toward the last upright section of side wall.

"Vait! No vack! No vack!"

"That's 'whack,'" Remo instructed even as he slammed the man's head into the remaining portion of wall. It collapsed against the pressure.

Unlike the first three times, the man's injuries did not end with a simple whack. As he passed through the wall, Remo released his grip on the young man's hair. The neo-Nazi continued his forward momentum, sailing out over the alley amid a pile of concrete fragments and a cloud of mortar dust. Bleeding and filthy, he dropped from sight. He landed with a squishy thud in the alley a few seconds later. Remo did not stay on the roof long enough to see him splatter. As the young neo-Nazi was free-falling to his death, Remo had gone over to the hole in the roof. He hopped down into the apartment below, landing atop the pile of collapsed ceiling.

The apartment was empty. Scowling at himself for allowing his target to escape so easily, he moved stealthily through the small flat and out into the dank hallway.

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL months, Gustav Reichschtadt had been hearing about the pair of terrifying men supposedly slaughtering neo-Nazis throughout Germany. He had disregarded the stories.

Certainly Gustav didn't deny that people were being killed. However, he was convinced that it was the work of the German government out to punish pro-Nazi groups for the embarrassment they had caused a few months before.

Modern Germany prided itself on its intolerance of the underground fascist organizations that seemed to spring up cyclically-like spring daisies in a Bavarian meadow. It was therefore humiliating to the national government when hundreds upon hundreds of its citizens began clamoring to the French border after the covert neo-Nazi takeover of Paris that had occurred the previous summer. Much to the German government's embarrassment, these young fascists made it clear to the world that they wished to join the leaders of that great campaign as soldiers under a unified Nazi flag.

The crisis in Paris had been defused by means that were still uncertain-at least as far as the press was concerned. The men who had eagerly swarmed to join the neo-Nazi forces had returned to their homes, never having set foot on French soil. And Germany was left to squirm in embarrassment as the world looked on in veiled distaste at the country that had failed to anticipate or control its most vile element.

It was at the beginning of this silent condemnation that the first bodies began to show up.

Gustav was certain that German authorities were doing the killing. The government in Berlin was attempting to prove its worthiness to a scornful world by murdering its most favored sons.

This was what he had been telling the members of the Goring Brotherhood for the past several months. He had told them this in English, for-though he dressed as a Nazi, lived in Germany and vociferously condemned the current weak German government--Gustav spoke not one word of German.

Gustav Reichschtadt had been born Gus Holloway, son of "Cap" and Dottie Holloway of the Pittsburgh Holloways. He had lived at home, jobless, bitter and without any life prospects, until his thirty-fifth birthday, at which point his more than tolerant father had thrown him out on his hairy ear.

With so much time on his pudgy hands, Gus had whiled away his youthful days at home as an active member of several American fascist groups. He had even achieved some notoriety for once throwing a chair at the host of the Horrendo show on national TV. When his parents finally disowned him, his friends in the skinhead movement took him in.