Warren Murphy: Sue Me

Anyway, Harold W. Smith, head of top-secret CURE, had more important problems. His killer arm had gone insane.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he didn't care if anyone thought he was crazy. He had just realized the world was crazy. Maybe he was the only sane man in the universe. He didn't care about being the only one. He did care about staying sane.

Remo made sure the oven was lit before he went through the house looking for the person to put into it. It was a simple two-story frame house in Chillicothe, Ohio, but it had a few added attractions. Like trapdoors. Secret chambers carved into supporting beams. Double walls to hide behind.

Dope dealers had used it for a while until it was occupied by a petty criminal named Walter Hanover, who had most recently acted as a go-between for a kidnapped boy and his parents. Somehow lawenforcement authorities had bungled the ransom and the parents were out $300,000 and the boy was gone. Remo had seen the weeping parents on television, saying they had mortgaged everything to get their son back and now there was nothing left to lure the kidnappers. No law could touch Walter Hanover even though he now sported a new red convertible, yet had no visible means of support.

Walter's new convertible was sitting proud and shiny in the driveway when Remo approached Walter's house despite all warnings from upstairs about how insane all this was, that he had no business in this affair.

Walter Hanover sat on the porch smoking a strange cigarette that seemed to make him exceptionally mellow.

Remo put his right hand on the fender.

"Hey, man, fingers leave prints. That's fresh polished," said Walter Hanover.

Remo smiled. He closed his fingers ever so smoothly, sensing the metal under the pads, knowing each finger ridge could collect tiny particles of polish, hearing a tiny squeaking as the flesh compressed first the polish, then the paint, then the metal under the paint until there was a crack so loud it felt like steel wool scrubbing the eardrums, and Walter Hanover clasped his hands to his ears and then shook his frizzy blond head in astonishment. The right fender of his shiny new car looked as though someone had grabbed a handful of it and crushed it like children's clay.

Standing beside it with a maniacal smile was a dark-haired man in his early thirties. There was nothing exceptional about him. He was thin, with thick wrists, dark eyes, high cheekbones, wearing a dark T-shirt and light pants, and very casually with his right hand he had crushed the right-front fender of Walter Hanover's new convertible.

"Hi," said Remo.

"Whadya do that for?"

"So when I tell you I am going to stuff you into your oven, you'll believe me."

"Wait here," Walter said, and disappeared into the house. It was a wooden house and therefore gave off undistorted vibrations. Metal warped sound. The cells in wood purified it. These very light sound waves that people thought they didn't really hear gave them the illusion of knowing someone was in their house by extrasensory perception.

But there was nothing extrasensory about it. People were just not aware of those senses, or rather never learned to be.

Remo had been trained over the years so that now he knew he walked among people who had never been introduced to their bodies, dead bodies, unused bodies, improperly used bodies, clogged with the fat of animals, distracted by worry, overwhelmed by fear, slogging along using less than eight percent of everything available to them.

So Remo knew the house and the ground he stood on and knew Walter Hanover had not fled through a rear window but was hiding somewhere in the house.

"Coming, Walter," Remo called out pleasantly, and walked up the steps to the porch, and waited listening to the wood in the house reverberate with his coming. Then he went into the kitchen and turned on the oven.

"Walter, I'm turning on the oven," Remo sang out.

Remo glanced at the dials and the buttons. It was a new form of oven, made simple for the housewife who hated gadgets. Remo pressed the button to turn on the oven, and the grill light lit up. He pressed what he thought was the grill-light button and the timer went off. He pressed all the buttons and the oven announced it was cleaning itself.

Remo sensed a lot of heat coming from the oven, and that was good enough. He was not going to bake a cake, after all.

"Walter, I'm coming. Ready or not. Here I come," Remo sang out. He paused a moment, and his senses drew him to the second floor. He moved swiftly up the steps and found himself in a hallway with four closed doors. He opened every door. The rooms were furnished in pre-junk. Glass tables with wirebacked chairs, and pottery lamps that looked more like the solids from a septic tank than hand-molded clay.

Walter was not hiding in any of the rooms. But he was very close.

"I know you're here, Walter. Come on out. The oven is ready for you."

Remo felt a rustling behind a wall with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it. Someone had framed what had to be the worst movie poster ever made. A man was hanging from the Statue of Liberty, and he looked as stiff as a grade-school entry in an art show. The body didn't go with the head, and the head didn't go with the hands, and there were more people at the bottom of the poster getting their names mentioned than on any other poster he had ever seen. In fact this movie had more producers than World War II or the fall of the Roman Empire.

Walter Hanover was hiding somewhere in the wall under the picture. Obviously the picture hid some button or lever. Remo pressed both palms against the picture, steadied his breathing, and then simply pushed the picture back through the wall as shards of plaster and wood strips exploded into dust.

Walter Hanover cringed in the little once-hidden crawl space behind the wall. Remo picked him up by the neck.

"Got you," said Remo pleasantly.

"Hey, man, who are you? What are you?"

"I am the voice of righteousness. The good fellow doing the good deed. Your friendly helpful neighbor."

"You're crazy, right? I hear crazy men have incredible strength sometimes."

"I am the only sane man in the universe."

"Now I know you're crazy. Whaddaya want?"

"There's a boy missing. His family paid three hundred thousand dollars."

"They buy you?"

"Yes, they did."

"What'd they pay?"

"I think their taxes. They paid their taxes and they lived a good life and I think they deserve a good deal better than they got."

"You with the government?"

"In a way, yes."

"Then you can't touch me. I got my rights."

"Ah, my good man," said Remo, lifting Walter Hanover like luggage and carrying him with his feet trailing down the stairs like shirts that had been improperly packed. "You have a problem. I only sort of work for the government."

"You're crazy. "

"Walter," said Remo when they reached the oven that was still cleaning itself, "you know where the boy is. I'm sure of it. I want to know."

"Hey, man, I don't have to testify. There's no law in the world that'll make me testify. And besides, that oven is locked because it's cleaning itself."

Remo punched a hole in the oven door big enough to fit Walter through. At that moment Walter Hanover, for the first time in his life, considered his civic duty. He liked Remo and he wanted to help.

"The problem is they got the kid down in Corsazo. They sold him to some brothel."

"Did you help?"

"No. No way. I swear. By my mother's sainted grave. There's no way to get the kid back. That's a foreign country."

"We'll see what we can do, won't we?"

"I hate foreign countries."

"Do you like roasted ass of Hanover?" asked Remo. Walter did not. Walter agreed to fly down to Corsazo with Remo, where Remo left Walter in a hotel room. Walter did not flee. Walter would have fled, but the thin man with the thick wrists named Remo had put pressure on the back of his neck in some strange way that made Walter's legs as flabby and useless as overcooked spaghetti.