Warren Murphy: Scorched Earth

But these were men who had come up from the mean streets, and the thud of one of their own hitting the rug was enough to make them reach for assorted 9 mm artillery.

Remo started moving then.

To his superhumanly developed eyes and senses, the surviving five men were moving in slow motion.

A hand snaked out with a gun butt, and Remo's much quicker hand slapped the knuckles, unnerving the fingers. The gun dropped. While the hands, sensing emptiness, clutched for it, Remo's free hand slipped two chisel-stiff fingers into the man's abdominal cavity, located the liver, flopped it over like a fat, foldable steak and drew it out through the quartersized hole.

Splat. It landed on lettuce, a purply paste.

By that time, Remo was on to mafioso number three, who brandished a switchblade with an illegal-length blade. It went snick as it came out of his belt sheath, and Remo guided the blade so that it debuttoned the owner's sharkskin suit coat before bisecting the front of his white shirt.

The man's exposed hairy belly opened up like a bearded man smiling. And out spilled his lower intestinal tract.

Remo fished the throbbing liver out of the steaming mass of internal organs and slapped the liver between two hands, rolled it in a ball and tossed it casually over his shoulder.

It landed perfectly. By this time, slow brains were beginning to grasp hard reality.

"Get out of here!" the bodyguard started screaming. "It's a hit!"

Remo let him scream.

There was a bald guy with three rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He fumbled his 9 mm pistol out and was sweeping the room with it.

Remo stopped being a moving blur long enough to deal with him.

The gun snapped out shots, catching the bodyguard across the front of his chest. Blood came out of the holes, including his gulping mouth, and he pitched forward as Remo moved in on the rolls of fat from the side.

The edge of Remo's palm connected with the doughy rolls, and the man's head all but jumped off the neck. The dislocation left him looking like a broken-necked puppet, and Remo allowed him to fall dead while he attended to the final live gunman in the room. The local guy festooned with gold chain like some alternative-life-style Christmas tree.

This one had a wheelgun-a chrome-plated Colt Python. Remo handled it with a trick any ordinary man could pull off. He simply clamped the cylinder with his fingers and let the man try to pull the trigger. The trigger wouldn't pull. So Remo plucked the pistol from his hands and showed him a trick no ordinary man could perfect.

He crushed the wheelgun to metallic fragments with a single hard squeeze.

The goon goggled at the chrome bits dropping to the rug. "How'd you-?"

"Do that?" prompted Remo, spanking his hands clean of steel shavings.

"Yeah."

"Easy. I gave it a good squeeze."

"It's steel and you're not."

"I'm alive and you're not," countered Remo.

The "Huh" matched the gunman's dulled-by-shock expression, and Remo used his right index finger to hook the man's network of gold ropes. He gave a quick tug.

The chains were solidly anchored. They came loose, pulling off red pieces of nose, lips, earlobes, nipples and navel.

The belly button was especially well secured. It came out last, taking the twenty-four-carat gold stud and a big swatch of washboard musculature with it.

Remo got another flood of internal organs and caught the liver on its way down.

Quickly he collected the remaining livers of the dead and worked them into pate, which filled the remaining serving dishes very nicely.

Recapping them, Remo smacked his hands together and surveyed the room. "Can I cook or what?"

And he walked away whistling.

Chapter 3

It was Kwanzaa in the White House.

The traditional Christmas tree stood on the White House's sprawling North Lawn. A Douglas fir this year, festooned with traditional holiday lights and decorations.

It had been a tremendous relief to the President of the United States when the First Lady had announced that they were going traditional this year.

"Does that mean no Star of David on top?" he asked, recalling one memorable tree-lighting ceremony he'd rather turn into a repressed memory. Like the 103rd Congress.

"No Star of David," the First Lady had promised on the day after Thanksgiving, which was also celebrated in the traditional way, much to the Chief Executive's unbounded relief.

"No kachina dolls, Eskimo totems or voodoo saints?" the President asked, burping up the fresh taste of turkey.

"Red and green bulbs garnished with silver tinsel."

"Your fans are going to think I had you killed and replaced with a clone," the President said warily.

"I want to celebrate our fourth White House Christmas like Abraham Lincoln did."

"Fighting the Civil War?"

"No," the First Lady said, chewing on a dry turkey drumstick. "In the traditional, all-American manner."

The President realized at last she was serious, grinned broadly and said in his hoarse Arkansas twang, "I'll make the arrangements right away." He bolted for the door before the bluebird of political correctness could settle on the First Lady's cashmere shoulders.

"While you're at it . . ." the First Lady called tartly.

The President froze. "New Year's?"

"A traditional New Year's. See to it."

"Done," said the President, relaxing all over again. His hand was on the door. He paused to issue a warm sigh of relief and forevermore regretted not flinging open the door and charging through to do his presidential duty.

"But in between, we're doing Kwanzaa," said the Voice of Steel.

The President whirled as if shot in the back. "Kwanzaa? The Black Christmas!"

"It's not Christmas," she corrected gently. "Christmas is the 25th. New Year's is January 1. Kwanzaa is celebrated during the six days in between. And don't say 'Black: Say 'Afrocentric.' It's more correct."

"Didn't we have this argument once before?" the President said, thick of voice and tongue.

"And I let you win. But the election is over with. We have nothing to lose by celebrating Kwanzaa."

"I won't have to wear a dashiki or anything, will I."

"No, we light a candle a day and host Afrocentric cultural events."

The President thought that wouldn't be so bad. And the election was behind them. What had they to lose-except a little more of their fading dignity?

"I'll look into it."

"No, you do it," the First Lady said, the familiar steel creeping back into her tone. Then she used her perfect white incisors to gouge a hank of dark meat from the bone.

Closing the door behind him, the President was halfway down the red-carpeted hall when he thought he heard the crunching of dry bone. He hoped she didn't choke on a bone fragment. Even for a lawyer, the woman sure had peculiar appetites.

The First Lady didn't choke. Not on the turkey thigh bone. And not on the Kwanzaa deal.

And so on the second day after Christmas, the President of the United States found himself at a Blue Room photo op standing before the African candelabra called a kinara, lighting the red candle that the First Lady whispered in his ear stood for the basic principle of kuji-chagulia.

"It means 'self-determination,'" she added.

"Maybe you should be lighting this one," said the President, holding the long candle lighter, which smelled exactly like the punk cigarettes he used to smoke in his boyhood days in Arkansas.

"Smile and light it," the First Lady urged with her most steely smile. "In that order."

The President applied the flame to the red candle.

"Now pick up the unity cup," she undertoned.

The President blew out the lighter and laid it aside. He took up the small wooden goblet that sat on the table mat on which the kinara reposed with quiet dignity.