Warren Murphy: Death Sentence

"Faggot?" Remo wondered.

"Yeah. Real butch. Why you ask? He take a shine to you?"

"Yeah."

"That Crusher, you gotta watch out for him. He pitches, but he don't catch. Know what I mean?"

"Yeah. He says he'll be looking for me in the yard."

"Then don't go into the yard."

"Have to. I have to keep in shape."

"What for? Sparky suck you dry in the end, bro."

"Someday I may get out of here," Remo said. He noticed that someone-himself or the guard-had kicked the corridor cigarette closer to the bars. He went over and put his hand through the bars. He forked the cigarette between two fingers and withdrew to his cot.

"Sure," Popcorn said as Remo examined the white paper for damage. It had split at one end and was dirty where a boot sole had crushed it. But the other end was clean. Remo flicked dust off it carefully. "Someday you'll get out," Popcorn was saying. "There's a white hearse that's gonna carry all us Dead Men outside of these walls one fine day. You can count on that."

"No. Not that way," Remo said, putting the clean end of the Camel into his mouth. "Someday they'll figure out that I'm innocent."

Remo ignored Popcorn's howling laughter as he searched his pockets for a match. He discovered he had no pockets, and of course there was no match either.

And Popcorn kept laughing as if Remo's innocence was the funniest thing on death row.

Chapter 4

For Remo Williams, convicted murderer, his first day at Florida State Prison was not much different than all the days he could remember at Trenton State Prison. The guards came around for the ten o'clock head count. Lunch was served at twelve-thirty. Remo's food tray was placed on the shelflike slot in his cell door. It was meatloaf stew. He smelled it, and although he felt hungry, he returned the tray to the slot. By the time the guard came back to retrieve it an hour later, the surface had congealed into cold grease.

There was another head count at three in the afternoon, and again at eight. Lights-out came at the stroke of eleven, and a final bed check came twenty minutes later as a lone guard strolled down the line, pausing to turn his big D-cell flashlight on each cell. Once he called to a con to uncover his head. Only then did the beam pause for a moment; then its on-and-off activity continued.

The light came on in Remo's eyes and he turned over. The guard went on, repeated his ritual at Popcorn's cell, and then clumped away, his going punctuated by the diminishing loudness of the door buzzers as they closed in succession.

Remo stared at the flat blackness of his cell's outer wall, wondering if the nights here would be as bad as those in Trenton.

They were.

Distantly a voice called out, "Beam me up, Scotty," and Remo almost laughed. Except that the forlorn tone of the man's voice dampened the laughter. He had not been joking. In fact, he launched into an extended one-man performance of an imaginary Star Trek episode, playing in turn the parts of Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and even, in a ridiculous falsetto voice, Uhura.

"Shut your hole, chump!" a bass voice warned.

"You shut your hole. Let the man be. He be entertaining us."

That last came from Popcorn. Sighing, Remo rolled out of bed.

"Does this go on every night?" he asked.

"Some nights," Popcorn told him. "That be Radar Dish. He know every Star Trek episode by heart. Says he seen 'em seventeen times each. So naturally he get to the point where he roll his own, so to speak. You shoulda heard the one he spun last Saturday. When it was over, Kirk had got hisself zapped by the Romulans and Spock took over the bridge. First thing he do is to order retreat and start ballin' Uhura. That Radar Dish, he really gets into being Spock. But he likes to put his own spin on things."

Remo sighed. Back at Trenton, there had been a con who did Dragnet impersonations all night long. His Joe Friday had been so accurate that it prompted one lifer to stick a sharpened number-nine pencil into the con's Adam's apple, with fatal results. It seemed like a long time ago now. Remo couldn't even remember either man's name.

Finally the talking aloud, the sobbing, and the groaning tapered off and silence descended over the humid darkness of death row.

Remo slept.

In his sleep, he dreamed.

And in his dream, he was free.

Remo dreamed that he was riding an elevator to the penthouse of a high-rise apartment building. He saw himself framed in the gold-wallpapered elevator cage, as if having an out-of-body experience. One hand was in his pocket and the other hung at his side, fingers snapping impatiently.

The elevator doors slid open and he started to step from the cage. He hesitated momentarily. The gleam that came into his eyes was short-lived. Then, casually taking the hand from his pocket, he stepped out into the corridor. He whistled.

From either side of the elevator doors, a burly man appeared. Each wore an expensive Italian silk suit. They carried compact little Mac-11 machine pistols. One placed the muzzle to Remo's neck and the other on his opposite side. Remo stopped whistling.

In his sleep he cried, "Oh, shit!" But in the dream he looked as cool as an actor starring in a TV movie of the week.

One of the two men mumbled, "Get off on the wrong floor, pal?"

To which Remo heard himself reply, "Not if this is Don Polipo Tentacolo's suite."

"Don Tentacolo ain't seeing visitors tonight, pal." This from the other man, the one who started patting Remo down. The other goon-there was no better word for him-kept his Mac-11 jammed in Remo's side.

What happened next happened so fast that it made Remo jerk in his sleep.

The kneeling guard was checking Remo's ankles when one of Remo s feet snapped up. The toe seemed only to tap the man's chin, but his head flew back like it was on the end of a snapped cable. The crack of splintering vertebrae was as distinct as thunder.

Then-or perhaps it occurred simultaneously, because Remo's attention was on the head snapping back and not elsewhere-the dream Remo twisted his upper body so that the pistol muzzle pointed at thin air. He took the other goon by the wrist. Instead of exerting pressure against the natural flex point of the joint as he'd been taught at the police academy, Remo inserted his pinky finger into the open muzzle of the Mac-11. The sound of the barrel splitting merged with the crack of the splintering vertebrae.

The Mac-11 fell apart as if every weld and screw had simultaneously disintegrated, leaving the goon holding a very shaky gun butt with the shiny little bullets visible in the exposed top of the magazine clip.

The goon looked down at his useless weapon and then at his fallen comrade, whom Remo dislodged from his expensive Italian loafers with a casual flick of his ankle.

"May I?" Remo asked, smiling politely. And without waiting, he extracted a bullet from the clip. Another bullet sprang up to replace it.

Remo watched himself take the tiny bullet in one hand and place it against the goon's forehead. Then, with coiled forefinger, he tapped the primer cap on the end of the shell casing. There came a firecracker pop! and the standing goon suddenly became the prone dead goon with a black crater in the center of his forehead.

Remo casually stepped over the bodies and walked up to a black door of fine wood. He knocked on the door and waited, hands on hips.

In his cell, Remo tossed in his sleep. He noticed for the first time how thin his arms were. He looked like he had lost all his natural body fat and thirty percent of his musculature. His wrists, however, were unusually thick. The combination made him think of Popeye the Sailor Man-but less grotesque.

Remo was staring at his own oddly expanded wrists when a splintery hole jumped into the black door panel and his dream self simply faded back from the line of fire-for the solitary hole had been made by a gun pressed to the opposite side of the door.