Warren Murphy: American Obsession

One of the linebackers pointed at the gear still hanging in Boomtower's locker. Half-laughing, he said, "Say, F.V., didn't you forget something?"

All eyes shifted from the locker to Boomtower's shoulders. Given his grossly overdeveloped deltoid muscles, it was difficult to tell whether he was wearing any protection under the jersey.

"Fuck the pads, you know what I'm sayin'?" Boomtower replied.

The L.A. Riots exchanged uncomfortable glances. The physical transformation they'd witnessed was not natural. Boomtower had to be taking something. As professional athletes, they knew all about performance-enhancing drugs and their side effects, which included irrational behavior.

As Boomtower reached for his uniform pants, the fearless running back pointed at his backside and said, "What's that stuck on your butt? It looks like a time-release patch. Are you on some new kind of steroid? Human growth hormones?"

Boomtower patted the two-by-two-inch square of pink adhesive bandage, "It's magic, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"What kind of magic is that?" Parks asked.

The players edged in closer, straining to hear. "Cutting edge. I eat nothin' but fat and I get thin. The more fat I eat, the thinner I get. Thinner and bigger. And I got my mind on the game, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Uh, not exactly," the rookie admitted.

Moving quick as a cat, Bbomtower provided a demonstration. He snatched hold of a 275-pound defensive end by the back of his trouser waistband. Then, with one hand and a seemingly effortless upward thrust, like he was hoisting nothing more substantial than a broomstick, he bashed the man's unhelmeted head through the gridwork of orange acoustic ceiling tiles. With nightcrawler-sized veins popping out on his massive right arm, Boomtower held the guy trapped there while he helplessly thrashed and kicked. "Now, do you know what I'm sayin'?" he asked his teammates.

There was a stunned silence in the locker room. Boomtower carefully set down the defensive end. Flecks of orange paint stuck to the man's face, and a trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead ran down and off the tip of his nose.

"Who'd you score it off?" the Riots' center asked.

The Fighting Vehicle shook his head. "That's a secret. "

"You got any more?" demanded the confettispeckled, bloody-faced defensive end.

"Yeah, I got more, but this stuff ain't cheap, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"How much?"

"Twenty-five hundred a pop. One pop a day. Run you around one mill a year to stay on the program." The players made a mad dash for their respective lockers. In a matter of seconds, thick wads of cash appeared from all sides; Boomtower's teammates fanned him with greenbacks like an Oriental emperor.

"Fuck that shit!" said Regional Parks as he removed both of his diamond ear studs. He slapped the pea-sized gems into Bradley Boomtower's open palm and said, "I'll take all the extra magic you got."

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he knew he was being stalked.

A late-model, four-door gray sedan crept along the city street thirty yards behind him. Relying on his years of training in Sinanju, the oldest of the martial arts, Remo crossed with the traffic light, taking the briefest of sideways looks as he passed the car. There were four heads inside, and beneath the heads were four extremely large bodies. In that same blink of an eye, his mind registered the car's proximity to the pavement, a function of overloaded shocks and springs.

Under similar circumstances, a normal person would have been alarmed, if not panicked. What with its indigenous ethnic gangs and freelance psychopaths, Los Angeles had a well-deserved reputation for violence, senseless and otherwise. Yet this Remo, this wiry man in a faded black T-shirt and baggy tan chinos, strolled through Koreatown as if he didn't have a care in the world. With his whole being, he sucked in the beautiful, mild October evening and admired its smog-created, fire-orange-and-turquoise sunset. Along the parking strip to his left, 50-foot-tall palm trees jutted up from rectangular openings in the sidewalk, like widely spaced hairs on a concrete scalp.

Remo turned into a small strip mall that divided the block of two-story apartments and cut through the small parking lot. From the accumulation of stains on its asphalt, the mall was, by mall standards, ancient. No amount of scrubbing by the shopping center's current owners could remove the rainbow residue of decades of illicit midnight oil changes. The signs above the freshly repainted, chain-link-fenced storefronts were all written in Korean ideograms. The minimall housed a dry cleaner, a discount-jewelry-and-electronics store, the Kimchi Noodle Palace and Mr. Yi's fish market.

"Ah, the venerable pupil of the venerated Master of Asian cooking," said Yi as the second-greatest assassin on earth entered his narrow, spotlessly clean shop. The fishmonger had decided that these two customers were master chefs, and neither of them bothered to correct this misconception. He was short and squat, with a perpetual smile on his face. Yi smiled even when he was angry. His thick black hair was stuffed under a white golf cap; his uniform and apron were likewise white. A totally assimilated resident of central Los Angeles, he wore a belt holster clipped to the small of his wide back, and in the holster was a compact, 8-shot pistol. Like ninety-five percent of his fellow citizens, Yi had no aspirations to assassinhood; he just wanted to survive to see the weekend.

It was always cool inside Yi's shop, thanks to the white tile floor and the open beds of heavily iced seafood along the walls. The smell was of salt, bleach and iodine. Behind the glass of the refrigerated display case sat heaps of whole and filleted tuna, bonito, mackerel, sole and sea bass. Stuck in each pile of fish was a little plastic sign with Korean characters on it. In addition to the standard fare, Yi stocked some of the oddities of the Asian table. Sea cucumber. Urchin. Bloodworm. A selection of chichi bottom-crawlers for the quesadillas and frittatas of discerning, jaded Los Angelinos.

In the reflection of the refrigerator case's glass, Remo saw the gray sedan pull into the mall's lot and stop, parking sideways across the painted stripes on the asphalt. All the car doors opened, and its occupants piled out, on the run.

"I put aside for you something special," Yi told him, opening a stainless-steel cooler behind the display case. As he turned back with the prize, he said, "Today fresh from Yellow Sea."

The pewter-colored sea creature the fishmonger held up so proudly was more than three feet in length and weighed less than two pounds. But for the greenish fin that ran from behind its head to the tip of its pointed tail, it would have looked like a snake. A snake with a wicked set of upper and tower fangs and an underslung bottom jaw.

"You like for Master's dinner?" Yi said, showing Remo the firm white belly, then smoothing his hand along it.

The cutlass-fish, or hairtail, was a stone bitch to clean-imagine trying to fillet the meat from a shoestring-but it was one of Master Chiun's special favorites. The skinny fish was native to the waters around Sinanju, the Korean village where the Master had been born, nearly a century ago. Even in the late sixties, before the Korean government's rapid push to industrialization, the vicious, delicious predator had been plentiful. Due to the current availability and quality problems, the two assassins' mostly rice-and-fish diet rarely featured Yellow Sea hairtail.

Remo looked over the entire skin, checking for telltale clear blisters and weeping, bloody ulcers, evidence that the fish had been taken from polluted waters. And, to his delight, found none. "I like very much," he said to the fishmonger. "Please wrap him up."

With a matador flourish, Yi tore a sheet of white butcher paper from a big roll mounted on his cutting table. "You make Master happy meal tonight," he said as he passed the long, slender package over the counter.