Warren Murphy: High Priestess

As these idle thoughts passed through the remarkably calm brain of Remo Williams, the gunman growled, "Give me your money." He pulled back on the hammer. The thick wheel turned with all the smoothness of a windlass, bringing a bullet into line with the barrel, which was the most primitive of tools-a hollow tube. It happened in the blink of an eye, but to Remo's heightened senses, the action had all the subtlety of a drawbridge clanking into the raised position.

"You the one that's been holding people up?" asked Remo in the cool, unruffled voice which, like his body language, was calculated to relax the target.

Nonthreatening was better. They never saw it coming.

"No, I'm the one who's holding you up," the gunman snapped.

And while he was snapping out the words, Remo's right hand, dangling loosely at the end of an unusually thick wrist, came up. One finger went into the gun barrel like a long cork.

The gunman looked at Remo as if he were crazy. He didn't fire. Remo knew he wouldn't. If Remo had tried to run away or fight or yell for help, he would have fired. All the gunman wanted was Remo's money.

He didn't expect his victim to do something as stupid as trying to stop a bullet with his finger.

"What're you, on drugs or something?" the gunman demanded in an indignant voice.

"That's right," said Remo, holding his finger steady because it would hold the Magnum steady.

The gunman squinted at Remo in the yellowish haze of a nearby streetlight.

"Yeah?" he asked curiously. "What is it? Crystal meth? Crank? Acid?"

"Sinanju," said Remo.

"That's a new one on me," the gunman muttered. "What kinda high do you get from it?"

"The ultimate high. It teaches you to breathe with your whole body, think with every part of your brain and not the ten percent most people use-in your case, two percent-and become at one with the universe."

"Sounds like acid," the gunman said in a disappointed voice. "You trippin' on acid, man? Acid ain't new."

"No," returned Remo. "But this is."

And holding the .357 Magnum steady with his right index finger, Remo used the stiff, steel-hard fingers of his right hand to spank the heavy cylinder out of the frame.

The cylinder flew a short distance and bounced off the Plexiglas door, scattering soft-nosed bullets on the walk.

The gunman's reflexes weren't bad. He was pulling the trigger at the first loud sound. He never saw Remo's hand or felt the cylinder jump off its sheared pins. He was reacting to the impact of the cylinder against the door, never realizing he was dropping the hammer on thin air.

The gun went click. The gunman blinked. Remo let a cool, insolent smile touch his thin lips. His dark eyes, set deep in his skull, grew grimly humorous.

The gunman kept pulling the trigger and getting noisy ineffectual clickings.

Removing his index finger, Remo brought the precision-machined weapon up and turned it sideways so that the gunman could see the square aperture where the cylinder had been. For an instant in eternity the gunman saw it for what it actually was-a crude contraption of steel.

Then it turned lethal again as Remo's hands drove the shiny barrel up and back into the gunman's surprised brain.

Remo left him jittering on the sidewalk, the maimed weapon sticking out of his shattered forehead, gun hand frozen on the grip as if he had lain down preparatory to putting a bullet in his own brain.

The next morning, when the police found him there, they would run a check on fingerprints found at the crime scene. When all was said and done, every set would be accounted for, and every possible suspect questioned and released. Except one set: Remo's. The police never found that set in any fingerprint file on record.

They had no way of knowing the file on Remo Williams had been pulled two decades ago. After he was pronounced dead.

As he walked home, whistling, Remo didn't think of himself as dead. He felt very much alive. The night wind was blowing the cool salt tang of the Atlantic Ocean inland. A sea gull perched on top of the street lamp, eyeing the ground for scraps.

As he walked, Remo thought that he was a long way from the orphanage of his earliest memories, from the jungles of Vetnam, where he had been a Marine, from the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, where as Patrolman Remo Williams, he had tried to protect honest citizens from the kind of criminal scum who changed only their tactics, and from death row in Newark State Prison, where he had lived out his last days. He was home.

It had taken a year to come to think of Quincy, Massachusetts, as home. Not that it was a bad place to live. It was fine-a residential suburb of Boston with a nice beach busy with cormorants and sea gulls, sand you could sit on and calm blue water you could swim in when the fecal coliform bacteria count was safe. Usually twice a year.

It was convenient to Logan Airport when work called him to travel and handy to the Weymouth Naval Air Station when a national emergency required flying at taxpayers' expense. You could be on the Southeast Expressway within five minutes of starting the car-not that you ever really wanted to be in Boston traffic-and except for the odd convenience-store robbery and night burglary, it was pretty quiet.

No, the problem with getting used to Quincy, Massachusetts, was not in thinking of it as home, but in thinking of the house where Remo lived as home.

As he turned off Hancock Street and came within sight of the high school, Remo was reminded why he had had such trouble adjusting.

There it was, a warm golden brown in the light of the street lamps, tucked behind the high school. Once it had been a Congregational church. According to neighborhood legend, it had served as a Sikh temple after the church fathers had sold it. Then, at the height of the condo craze, a real estate developer had condoized it into its current state.

Technically it was still a condo. There were sixteen units, but only Remo and the man who taught him Sinanju, which was not a drug but a way of life, lived there. But it looked like some mad cross between a church and a Tudor castle.

It was ugly. The peaked roof had been built up to form a third floor with rows of closely spaced dormer windows. The outer walls were fieldstone and set with Tudor-style decorative panels high up in the eaves, and the concrete foundation had been painted beige. Here and there a few jewellike stained-glass windows remained.

Still, it was home. Remo was used to it now. The crenellated tower was like a lighthouse shedding an amber glow that called him home.

Yes, it was a long way from his past life, where he had been Patrolman Remo Williams, veteran, honest citizen and patsy. It had not been a great life. What child who couldn't remember his parents could say he had enjoyed a great life? But the nuns at St. Theresa's orphanage had raised him right, the Marine Corps had made him a man, and in police work he had found something he could believe in.

Until the detectives came to arrest him.

It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking a mistake had been made. Remo had been an honest cop. But his badge had been found next to the pusher's body lying in an alley on his beat. No cop would have gone to trial on such circumstantial evidence, but Remo Williams had. No cop would have been convicted. But Remo Williams was.

By the time he found himself on death row, Remo still hadn't stopped believing in the American justice system. But he had begun to wonder if he was being railroaded because he was honest.

He still wondered who among his higher-ups had hung him out to dry when the Capuchin monk came to deliver the last rights. The monk had slipped him a black pill and whispered instructions to bite down when they pulled the knife-blade switch that sent current to the electric chair. Then they took him to the death house of Newark State Prison.