Warren Murphy: American Obsession

As Remo stepped out of Mr. Yi's fish market, a gruff baritone voice barked, "Hold it right there."

Remo stared down the barrel of a blue-steel Beretta. It gleamed with fresh oil. Three more men stepped up on the storefront sidewalk, bracketing him with raised weapons. One held a snub-nosed nickel-plated revolver, another had a stubby-barreled combat-type pump shotgun, and the last brandished a Taser stun gun. All four were Baby Hueys, big and doughy, and dressed in what looked like official SWAT uniforms-black armored vests, black skintight leather gloves, black T-shirts and BDU pants. They had communications headsets clamped on their wide heads, and shiny gold badges hung on cords around their thick necks.

Not LAPD, Remo thought.

Stenciled in bright yellow across the front of their body armor were the words Bail Recovery Enforcement Agent.

Bounty hunters.

"Don't move," said the guy aiming the cocked 9 mm pistol at the middle of Remo's forehead. The bounty hunter's own skull was shaved to the skin, leaving a dark shadow of receding hairline. He sported a black goatee, and the tattoo on his hairy forearm bragged I Make Shit Happen. From a distance of six feet, he smelled like a cross between a burned-out coffeepot and an old cigar butt.

Remo smiled at him. Not an inscrutable smile-mask like Mr. Yi's; this baby came straight from the heart, radiating generous sympathy and warmth, and a patience that matched the serenity of the evening. Sometimes, once in a while, he found himself slipping into this persona and he wasn't quite clear why. But it made him feel as though he were floating above all problems, without taking anything from his lethal edge.

While the other three covered Remo, Goatee referred to a flimsy sheet of fax paper, holding it up to compare the blurred, virtually useless photo with the thick-wristed, 160-pound guy holding the long package. "William M. Ransom," he said.

"That's not me," Remo told him. "Whatever this is about, I think you've made a mistake."

The bounty hunter with the .357 snub-nose got a chuckle out of that.

"According to the bench warrant, Mr. Ransom," Goatee went on, "you're wanted in the state of Oregon for a little over twenty-three thousand dollars in outstanding traffic tickets. Seems you skipped bail. The contract you signed with the bondsman, a Mr. Tretheway of Portland, authorizes us to return you to that jurisdiction, by force if necessary."

"You've got the wrong guy. I'm not a bail jumper."

"You drive a 1994 white Camaro Z28 with the personalized Oregon license plate WEIRDMAN."

"No, I don't."

Goatee flicked at the fax with his Beretta's muzzle. "The police report's all right here in black-and-white. Your whole rap sheet. Says you fancy yourself some kind of big-time Dungeons ole-player." Grinning, he aimed the pistol at the parcel under Remo's arm. "What've you got in there, Ransom? Is it your Singing Sword?"

"Maybe it's his Magic Wand," the bounty hunter with the Taser stun gun snickered. "Ooooooh, Mr. Wizard, are you going to turn us all into toads?"

"Unfortunately," Remo said, "somebody's beat me to it."

"For a skinny little shithook, you've got a real smart mouth," Pump-gun snarled. He wore his black ball cap backwards, and the adjustable white plastic tab cut deep welts into the meat of his forehead, after the style of the day. "Smart mouth's something we can fix...."

"Why don't you take a look at my ID?" Remo suggested. "That'll straighten everything out. It's in my hip pocket."

Goatee deftly removed his wallet, scanned the New Jersey driver's license, then passed it over to his colleagues.

"Well?" Remo said, holding out his hand to the last man for the return of his property.

Taser made no move to give the billfold back. "This license looks like a phony to me, and not a very good one," he said. "And the last names on these credit cards are all different. 'Remo Ito,' `Remo Kalin,' 'Remo Barbieri.'" He checked the driver's license again. "Why don't you explain what that means, Mr. Remo?"

"Means we just scored a grand apiece," Pump-gun chimed in gleefully.

Remo felt the first stirrings of annoyance intrude on his calm. Of course the license and credit cards were fakes. They had to be. That was one of the problems with being declared dead prematurely: your real name got buried along with the empty coffin. Officially, Remo Williams was a former Newark cop who had been electrocuted more than two decades ago by the state of New Jersey for a murder he didn't commit. Electrocuted and then resurrected so he could serve as a roving hitman for CURE, an ultrasecret, virtually autonomous intelligence-gathering, crimefighting organization. The fact that the ID he now carried was so laughably poor could be laid at the feet of his one and only boss for all those years. Recently, Dr. Harold Smith had refused to pay for any more top-quality documents, accusing his assassin-employee of going through assumed identities "like Milk Duds." Remo suspected that Smith had started doing the forgery himself, to save money. To make matters worse on the annoyance front, the long package was starting to leak; hairtail slime was slowly dripping down the inside of Remo's arm.

"I say we cuff him nice and tight," Goatee said, "stick him in the trunk and haul his sorry ass up to Portland to collect our dough."

The quartet of Baby Hueys began to close in. Remo decided it was time to make his excuses-and his exit. "The road trip sounds great, a real hoot," he told them, "but I've got to get home to cook this puppy." He opened the end of the package and showed them the green-fanged snake head.

"Christ on a crutch!" Snub-gun exclaimed.

"It's probably part of one of his twisted blackmagic rituals," Taser said.

"I think we ought to pound the little bastard flat and fold him twice before we stash him in the trunk," Goatee suggested. "I think it'd do him a world of good."

At this point, Mr. Yi appeared in the shop doorway, smiling as big as all outdoors.

"Stay back, this is official business," Snub-gun growled, holding up his phony gold badge for Yi to see.

Remo spoke a few words of fractured Korean, asking Yi to please not concern himself with this unimportant matter, that it was under control.

"I call 911?" Yi offered.

"Ask for two ambulances," Remo said. "These guys won't all fit into one."

"What was that mumbo jumbo you laid on the gook?" Taser snapped as the still-smiling Yi retreated into his shop.

"I told him you're mistaking me for somebody else. Better take a closer look, before something bad happens..."

"The shrimpboat's trying to tell us he works out," Pump-gun scoffed.

"Looks to me like he does wrist curls, big time, and forgets about the rest," Goatee said. "Some reason for that?"

"It's all in the wrist," Remo confided.

"Did this peckerwood threaten us?" Snub-gun said, outraged as the idea finally sank in. "I think he just threatened us!"

"Let's take him down," Pump-gun urged.

Taser had a better suggestion. "Shit, let's do a Rodney on him."

While Taser kept Remo covered, the others put away their guns and pulled out black rubber truncheons.

Snub-gun waggled his foot-long sap under Remo's nose and said, "Role-play this...." The bounty hunter thought for sure he had a solid grip on his trusty truncheon, but then it was gone, vanished, his hand empty. Just as suddenly, the blunt weapon reappeared out of the ether, its lead-weighted tip violently colliding with the point of his chin. With a bone-splintering crunch, his jaw hinges gave way and flying teeth skittered across the sidewalk.

"Muhhhh!" he cried, clutching his face in both hands.

It all happened so quickly that it caught the other bounty-hunters flat-footed.

Taser recovered first. He aimed the stun gun at Remo's chest and fired from a can't-miss distance of six feet. With a phut of compressed air, the microdarts launched, trailing the fine copper wires that connected them to the hand-held power source.