Warren Murphy: The Last Dragon

"Well, maybe I won't ever be back this way again," Orvis allowed.

"Guarantee it," said Remo, pausing at an area-control door.

There was a guard seated beside it. On the floor. His head was lolling to one side and he looked peaceful and contented sitting there on the shiny floor.

Sonny grunted. "Hey, I know that screw. He done me a bad turn once. Think I'll cut his face."

"You cut his face," Remo warned, "and my finger will turn off the red light in your eyes."

"Can your finger do that?"

"My finger can do whatever I want it to," Remo told the man.

The three dead men exchanged looks in the dark as Remo went to work on the lock.

As he tapped in the darkness, Orvis whispered to DeWayne. "Maybe we should just jug this guy and bite his finger off."

"What if it won't work after it's off?" asked DeWayne.

Orvis grinned broadly. "Then I'll swallow it down. That way it won't go to waste."

"You'd eat a man's finger?"

"Sure."

"Thought you only ate little girls."

Sonny backed away. "Yeah. You queer, or something?"

"No, I ain't no queer. You know that."

"I can hear every word you say," Remo called back.

"Your ears magic, too?" Orvis demanded.

"I can hear you fart before you do."

This impressed the trio. "Forget what we said about that finger, man," DeWayne said quickly. "That your finger. You just let it do its stuff and don't worry about us none."

"Much obliged," said Remo, and the green pinpoint light came on. They passed through.

Remo took point. In the gloom, he did something that would have astonished and frightened the three trailing convicts. He closed his eyes.

Remo could see fairly well in the darkness. But for what he had to do, his eyes would be less useful than the magnets in his brain.

For over twenty years now, Remo had been aware of the magnets. He never thought of them as magnets, but as pointers. Since learning to breathe properly through his entire body and not just his lungs, he had been able to find his way in complete darkness by paying attention to the pointers in his head.

Remo wanted to go north. By closing his eyes, he knew exactly where north was. He was walking north.

It wasn't until recently, after he had read a magazine article claiming scientists had discovered that the human brain was riddled with tiny crystalline biological magnets, that Remo realized the pointers were magnets. If he had thought about it at all, he would have realized they had to be magnets.

According to the scientists, the magnets were present in the brains of many mammalian species, including man. They explained salmon returning to their spawning places, bird migrations, and even how the lost family cat could find its owners, who had moved clear across the country. Remo couldn't quite make the leap of faith that last example required, but he could accept natural magnets, which the scientists had said also explained how people got brain tumors from living too close to high-tension wires and other electromagnetic sources. The magnetic fields screwed up the delicate balance of the magnetic webs, causing the tumors.

Remo had no tumors. He didn't need a CAT scan or an X-ray to tell him that. His own brain told him it was tumorless. And that the magnets were guiding him unerringly north.

Other things guided him, too.

He felt a faint breeze on his cruel face and exposed hands that told of air currents coming from under doors. Remo had memorized every door on the way in. And every twist in the path. He knew exactly where he was. All he had to do was escort the three suffering butchers to the garbage disposal area.

"This ain't the way to the front door," said Orvis Boggs, a trace of suspicion darkening his voice.

"We're not going out the front," Remo said.

"It ain't the way out back, either," DeWayne muttered uneasily.

"The front and the back are always the best guarded places in a prison," Remo explained with more patience than he felt. "My ACLU bosses made a careful study of this before sanctioning a dynamic extraction."

Sonny winced at the word extraction, and felt his bicuspids.

"You do this before?" he asked.

"Actually, this is my first time," Remo said.

"What if we get caught?" Sonny wondered.

"We blame my superiors, and throw ourselves on the mercy of the guards."

"We do?" said DeWayne.

"The ACLU isn't exactly the CIA," Remo said pointedly. "It's every man for himself."

"I like that philosophy," said Orvis.

"I knew you would," said Remo, suddenly opening his eyes.

They were on the threshold of the central crossroads of the prison. Most prisons had central crossroads, much like traffic interchanges and performing the same function.

Remo knew this well. He had twice found himself on death row, once in his earlier life as patrolman Remo Williams, when he had been framed for the murder of a lowlife pusher, and the second time, when he had been warehoused in a Florida prison, his memory wiped clean, because of a screwup in the organization that had framed him in the first place.

That organization was not, and never had been, the ACLU.

Oh, there were some letters in common between the ACLU and CURE. But a world of difference lay between. The ACLU stood for some self-appointed mandate to meddle in an already muddled judical system, such as taking up the cause of a knot of death row inmates first by helping them stave off their lawful punishment-dragging the appeals process on ad nauseum-and then using the extended period as a justification to let them off the hook, citing the constitutional guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment" as an argument.

CURE had been set up to deal with situations like those caused by the ACLU. CURE was no anagram, but a prescription for America's ills. Conceived by a president who died in office too young, his promise unfulfilled, it was set up to balance out the often imbalanced scales of blind justice.

Remo was CURE's enforcement arm-judge, jury, and executioner if need be. Today, he was just executioner, thank you. The judge and jury had done their job long ago. Remo's task was to see to it their hard work and sacrifice had not been in vain.

At the crossroad, Remo looked through the square glass window in the door. On the other side was a guard in a glass-enclosed booth. He was preoccupied with a copy of Playboy.

Remo went to work on the door lock, using the same technique that had opened the other locks. He couldn't explain it, any more than he could have explained the magnets in his head, but his sensitive fingers detected the current that flowed through the lock mechanism. Once found, it was a matter of tapping in harmony until the current did what Remo wanted.

Soon, the door surrendered. Remo slipped it open. No alarm sounded. It had not sounded when he had entered, either.

"Stay close behind me and no sudden moves," Remo warned.

"Got it," said Orvis.

"You the man with the magic digit," added DeWayne.

"So far," muttered Sonny.

They crept out. The crossroads were well lit.

That was when the others got a good look at Remo.

He was a tall, lean man, with dark eyes under dark hair and cheekbones as pronounced as those on a skull. His age was indeterminate, and even looking at his face the three dead men could tell there wasn't an ounce of unnecessary fat on his catlike body. He wore a gray-blue uniform with the words Sanitation Dept. over the blouse pocket.

"Hey! How come he's dressed like a garbageman?" Sonny Smoot grunted.

"Sanitation engineer," Remo corrected. "And it's a disguise."

"How come you didn't bring no disguises for us?"

"Yeah," Orvis chimed in. "I want a drum majorette's outfit-preferably with the bitch still in it."

The others decided they wanted the same. Their metallic laughter made Remo want to fuse their empty skulls together right then and there. But if he did that, no way would the ACLU get the credit they so richly deserved.