Warren Murphy: Death Sentence

The dream Remo lunged forward, the palm of his hand striking the doorknob with such force that it shot from its socket and into the penthouse. An unseen man howled in exquisite agony, and Remo casually pushed the door open.

He paused beside a man holding his groin with both hands in a doubled-up stance only long enough to poke him in the eyes. Before he fell face-forward, Remo caught a glimpse of the mashed jelly his eye sockets now contained. If he hadn't been sleeping, he would have turned away.

In the dream, Remo was moving from room to room in an elegant penthouse suite until he found a man cowering against a plate-glass window that gave him a panoramic view of some unidentified city. There was neon piping in the background. It was not rolled into scroll or signwork, but edged several tall office buildings. That told Remo that the penthouse overlooked Dallas, Texas.

The fat man had his back to the glass as if he were standing on a narrow ledge and only the friction of the glass kept him from falling to his death.

"If you're a cop," he was saying, "I can pay you."

"Wrong guess," Remo heard himself say.

"If you're a fed, I can roll over."

"Not even close."

"Then what do you want?"

"Oh, a nice home, a pleasant wife, maybe a couple of kids."

"Done! I'll set it up." The fat man was sweating, even though he outweighed Remo by an easy sixty pounds.

"Sorry," Remo told him. "There are some things not even money can buy. It won't buy me, and it won't buy the life I want."

"There's gotta be something we can do," Don Tentacolo said urgently. "Some deal we can cut."

"Let me think about this," Remo said disinterestedly. He tapped the glass beside the man's head. The fat man winced as if Remo's fingers were hypodermics.

"Is this a single pane or a sandwich?" Remo asked.

"Single. Bulletproof."

"Good," said Remo, tracing a ruler-straight line over the fat man's quaking head. The glass squealed as if scored by a glass cutter. Then Remo ran the finger from one end of the line to the floor and repeated the action on the other side.

The manipulation framed the fat man in a thin white rectangular line, rather like the outline of a coffin.

"What ... what are you going to do?" he quavered.

"You look hot. Like you could use some air."

"Yeah," Don Tentacolo said, wiping his forehead. "It's roasting in here."

"Then permit me," Remo said. He placed his hand on the man's heaving chest and gave him what looked like a gentle shove.

Except that there was nothing gentle about the way Don Polipo Tentacolo went through the thick glass, taking with him a doorlike rectangle of glass. His feet were the last things to disappear into the darkness beyond the window.

Remo saw himself lean out of the opening in the glass, and his dream viewpoint suddenly dollied to follow the madly gesticulating body as it fell twenty or thirty stories to the hard pavement below.

The glass struck first. It shattered into thousands of separating shards. The fat man shattered too, but the bag that was his fleshy envelope kept his disintegrating bone structure from becoming organic shrapnel. With one notable exception. A short length of femur shot out of his trouser seam to impale his left palm.

Dusting off his hands as if having completed a minor but stubborn household-repair task, Remo's dream self turned from the window as if to go. But recognition crossed his face and he gave a cocky half-grin and asked an unseen person, "How did I do?"

The responding voice was squeaky and querulous, like Daffy Duck after a hard day on the set.

"Your elbow was bent," it said bitterly.

And the expression of disapointment that spread over Remo's dream face was tragic.

Remo woke up with the identical expression on his true face. He just didn't know it.

Popcorn's voice whispered through the shell-pink cinder block to his ear, "You okay, Jim?"

Remo sat up. "Had a bad dream," he said quietly.

"Got news for you. You still havin' it. 'Cept now your eyes are open. You dig me?"

"I know where I am. It just seemed so real." And for the first time, Remo's voice had lost the hard edge that prison life had made second nature.

"I got a sayin', Jim: Dead Men dream deepest. You be on death row awhile, you get to know what I'm sayin'."

Remo felt under his pillow. The Camel was still there, only now it had developed a fissure and resembled a bent paper nail.

"Don't suppose you have a match?" Remo prompted.

"Not since Muhammad Ali went soft in the head."

"That's old."

"In stir, every joke is old. If I slip you a matchbook, you gonna slide it back afterward?"

"Sure."

"Okay, my man. Don't screw up any worse than you did to get here."

The matchbook slid into view like a dim hockey puck. It came to rest beside a cell bar and Remo retrieved it on the first try. He tore off a match and struck it. The flame caught the dirty end of the Camel in Remo's mouth.

Remo sat on his bunk and took a deep drag.

The tobacco smoke hit his lungs like mustard gas. The urge to cough was overpowering. He tried to choke it back, knowing that it could bring the guards or, worse, wake up every man on death row. But the coughing refused to be suppressed.

Remo went to his knees. He put his head under the cot and surrendered to a coughing fit. He hacked like a twelve-year-old trying to get through his first smoke.

"You okay, Jim?" Popcorn hissed. "You gonna bring down all kinds of shit on our sorry heads if you don't stifle yourself."

Remo's coughing spasms trailed off into a strangled moan.

"Don't you die on me, Jim," Popcorn pleaded. "You got my last book a' matches. Don't you die on me."

Through his own pain Remo heard the sincerity in Popcorn's voice. Prison sentimentality. Don't die until I get back what's mine. He never got used to its callous ruthlessness.

Finally Remo crawled back into his bunk. "First time?" Popcorn asked wryly.

"I'm used to filtered cigarettes," Remo said. His lungs felt like they were on fire. Instead of clearing his head, the nicotine dulled his brain even more. Maybe, he thought, he was having a reaction to the sedative that had kept him asleep during the trip from New Jersey. Still, he shouldn't have a reaction like that. He was a pack-a-day man.

"What about my matches, man?"

"In the morning," Remo shot back weakly. "I'm sick."

"You crazy if you think you're gonna keep my matches, sucker," Popcorn hissed. "You hear me?" The speed with which Popcorn's easy solicitude had turned hard and then nasty was elemental.

Remo turned over and tried to find sleep, but it eluded him until the five-o'clock buzzer, and then, too soon, it was the start of another interminable gray day.

Chapter 5

Before the guard appeared with the breakfast trays, Remo set the matchbook outside the bars of his cell and gave it a single-finger shove.

"There it is," he called. "Got it?"

"Yeah, man, I got it." Popcorn's voice was wary. Remo imagined him opening up the cover to carefully count each match. He must have done it twice because it was a while before his voice, again suffused with cocky good humor, came back.

"That's two you owe me, Jim," he said. "One for the tailor-made and the other for the igniter."

"Catch you in the yard sometime," Remo said. "If we get the yard on the same day."

Breakfast was cold cornflakes in a single-serving package and a separate pint container of low-fat milk. Remo poured the milk over the flakes slowly. The smell of it was strong. He put his nose to the bowl. Not sour. Just strong. He had never smelled milk this strong. Funny. He had never thought of fresh milk as having a smell before.

Remo decided to skip the sugar and forced the first spoonful down his throat. It went down hard. The flakes felt like they were sandpapering his esophagus. He got it down. Five minutes later he threw it up all over the floor.