Warren Murphy: Unite and Conquer

That got everyone's attention. A TEC-22 was produced and pointed at the man holding the Coke can.

"Don't give it up or I'll shoot you dead," said the man with the gun.

"I think you're pointing that in the wrong direction," Remo said agreeably. "You need to point that at me."

"I said give it up," the TEC wielder growled.

"Just now you said don't," the smoker said.

"Changed my damn mind." And changing it again, he pulled the trigger.

The Coke smoker's head became choppy and red, and he fell backward.

Three pairs of hands lunged for the flung Coke can as if scrambling for the last bottle of oxygen on earth.

While a fight broke out on the floor, Remo began collecting refuse.

Bang went the trash-can lid over another tangle of arms and legs. Bang it went again, fast enough to swallow a drug addict but not fast enough to let the previous drug addict climb out.

When the lid went bang for the last time, pieces of cloth and pink and brown flesh oozed from the air holes. A distinct nostril poked out of one. It was rimmed with white powder residue. It pulsed once, as exhaled nitrogen rushed from it, then was still.

"Everyone okay in there?" asked Remo.

There was a low groan of finality, two death rattles and Remo decided all parties were as they should be.

He walked the can over to a plywood panel nailed into a steel window frame, reached under one edge and pulled it loose with the nerve-jangling shriek of nails coming out of metal.

Remo looked down. An open Dumpster sat in the alley, its lid open.

Remo brought the can out, angled it into open space and dropped it straight down. It landed in the Dumpster, collapsing like a telescope.

The loud whang of metal brought a face poking out of a window several floors above.

"What's going on down there?"

"I'm putting out the trash."

"Who you?"

"Sanitation department."

"City taking out the trash for us?"

"No. The taxpayers."

The face grinned broadly. "Well, come on. This place is a damn dump. Ninth floor."

"On my way," Remo sang.

Recovering two other cans from the sidewalk, he carried them up the stairs to the ninth floor.

Rap music pounded against the walls like rubber hammers. Every third word was a four-letter word. The song was about the romance of rape. A woman shrieked inarticulate obscenities into the mike as a kind of human back beat.

Remo decided the music would have to go first.

"In here," a voice called. Another voice laughed and said, "Guess we be taxpayers now. We getting our trash hauled."

Remo stepped into the room. It was a pit. Once it had been a company cafeteria. Now it resembled the aftermath of a cyclone. The charred remains of a chair in one corner testified to the low order of heating-and-cooking facilities.

A tall black man with a serious face glared at Remo. "You! Clean this damn mess up right now."

"Yes, sir," said Remo, walking over to a surviving table and harvesting the pulsing boombox. He flung it over his shoulder without looking, and it landed in the left can with a bang of finality. The music stopped in midcurse.

The laughter stopped too. Grinning faces froze.

"Hey! That wasn't no trash."

"Matter of opinion," said Remo in an unconcerned tone.

"Yeah, well, you see all this nasty refuse. Pick it all up and get it out of my sight."

"Right away," said Remo, stooping to take up the assorted hamburger wrappers, french-fry containers and rusty used hypodermics that littered the parquet floor.

"Look," the tall man said, "we contribute to the local economy so much we're getting serviced."

"Why damn not?" another chortled. "We be taxpayers."

"Yeah. I paid a tax once. Never saw nothin' for my trouble."

The laughter started up again.

It stopped when Remo straightened with two handfuls of paper refuse and jammed one down the throat of one man and the other down the throat of the other.

While the two danced around clawing at their throats in a futile attempt to clear obstructed windpipes for breathing purposes, Remo switched to harvesting the trash he had come to harvest.

A knife licked out to meet him.

Remo met it with a quicksilver movement of his left hand. The knife tried to parry the hand. The blade lost when it came into contact with the edge of Remo's palm.

It snapped like a plastic birthday-cake knife.

The knife man looked at it with his mouth hanging open.

"That ain't the way it's supposed to work," he muttered.

"Can you say 'comminution fractures'?" asked Remo.

"Say what?"

And Remo brought the heel of the tougher-than-leather hand to his opponent's face with a meaty splat.

The man pitched forward wearing a pinkish brown slab of meat where his face had been.

"Comminution fractures," the second man said hastily, throwing up his empty hands. "See? I can say it fine."

"You can say it, but can you say what it means?"

"Yeah. Fractures of the comminution."

Remo made a buzzer sound in his throat. "Wrong. Comminution fractures are eggshell fractures. When your face hits the windshield at ninety miles per hour, the result is comminution fractures of the facial bones."

The man started backing away. "Thanks but no thanks. Don't want 'em."

"Too late," said Remo, making another meat pattie with his hand and the man's face.

The bodies all fit with a little extra effort. Unfortunately the two with mashed faces began leaking fluid from their damaged facial tissues, which left a trail of blood from the spot where Remo picked up the can to the open window where he dropped the can into the Dumpster with a resounding crash.

It took less than an hour to clear the building. A lot of the addicts were scattered. Remo solved that problem by setting cracktraps. He dumped confiscated crack into open trash cans and left them in strategic areas, the pungent smoke wafting irresistibly from the air holes, now serving a function not intended by the manufacturer.

It worked like cheese set out for rats.

They came sniffing out of their rooms and warrens, and happily crawled in of their own volition.

When a can got full, all Remo had to do was clamp the lid back on and heave the whole thing out the nearest window.

It turned out Remo didn't need the sixth can, so he brought it with him. It should come in handy for loose end number two, he decided.

The elevators didn't work because the electricity had long since been disconnected. It was this that had defeated Friend in the end. Dependent upon electricity, the host mainframe had ceased to function when its power had been shut off.

In the basement Remo found a litter of debris. He looked up. He could see clear to the building's topfloor ceiling.

The center grid of all seventeen floors had collapsed, depositing tons of mainframe computers and office furniture at the bottom. It had collapsed under Remo, who survived the fall. It had been designed as a final death trap, and it hadn't worked because Remo had been trained to kill, not to be killed.

Amid the clutter were tons of loose computer chips. Remo looked around. There were not as many as he remembered. No doubt scavengers had scooped some of them up. Some chips were worth twice their weight in gold.

Just to be sure, Remo began picking up chips, glancing at them with his deep brown eyes before tossing them into the trash.

He knew exactly what to look for. Friend was a VLSI-Very Large Scale Integration-chip. VLSI chip was about the size of a saltine cracker.

The trouble was there were a lot of VLSI chips lying around. And they all pretty much looked the same. Remo was no expert, either.

When he got every VLSI chip he could find into the barrel, Remo carried it up to the top floor.

There he hammered the trash-can lid all the way around the edge until it was so dented it could never be pried open by man or machine.