Warren Murphy - Sue Me

"Just want to keep you here until I find the boy."

"This is Corsazo, man. They're gonna cut your throat. And then I'm gonna be stuck here."

"That's the least of your worries."

"Yeah, what's a worse worry, man?"

"That they don't cut my throat," said Remo. Finding a brothel in Corsazo was like finding a hamburger at McDonald's. The small Mexican town served as a magnet for American vice. There was nothing Americans couldn't buy here, from children to cocaine. Anything the warped mind could desire, Corsazo provided. Consequently, because it gave some Yankees what they wanted, the Yankees thought of the residents as less than moral.

Nobody liked anyone else, and everyone got what they wanted.

Remo went to the first brothel. It looked like a hardware store, but instead of pots and machinery in the window there was a young woman, looking willing.

"I've come for a twelve-year-old boy. His name is Davey Simpson. He has dark hair, and he has been taken recently from America. He probably has bruises from being forced to work in a place like this."

"We can get you a nice twelve-year-old boy."

"I've come to take this one home."

"We can sell you a boy. A nice boy with skin so soft a duck would die of envy." This from the proprietor, a large woman who smelled of rum and perfume so strong it could overpower a garbage dump. Remo could almost see the particles of odor emanate from her too-ample breasts. She had a dark mustache. "Do you have a bodyguard?" asked Remo.

"Are you going to cause trouble?"

"Absolutely," said Remo.

"Then you can take me on," said the woman, producing a stiletto with a point like an ice pick. She pressed it against Remo's jugular.

"That your safety pin?" said Remo.

"You want something I can give you, stay. If no, senor, I am afraid you must leave."

Remo flicked two fingers up under the ulnar artery of her knife hand, cutting off the blood flow as the knife flew away somewhere near the ceiling. He grabbed her neck like a dog collar and pressed her face into the glass of the store window. The young woman who sat there as advertisement fled, screaming. The madam was told either the glass or her face was going to give way any moment unless she told him the whereabouts of a new boy kidnapped in America and sold down here.

The bodyguard appeared from one of the back rooms. He looked short for his six feet, four inches because he was as wide around as he was tall. Masses of dark hair covered everything from his knuckles to his nose. He reached out to crush the thin American and went sailing back into the interior of the brothel with a crash to shake the building. His eyes rolled up into his head as his bladder released all over his shiny green pants, now somewhat shinier and darker from the moisture.

"Okay, Yankee. I do what I can," said the madam.

"No. You tell everyone down here that there is a mad American who has come for an American boy who was sold into slavery. Tell them this American is going to take the town apart, starting with the brothel owners and then the chief of police. Tell them that all their drug dealers will find their automatic weapons embedded in their intestines. If I don't have the Simpson boy by sundown, this town will cease to exist."

Thus spoke Remo. And naturally, when the madam quickly hurried to the bosses of the small city, they refused to believe such a threat. For that would mean accepting intimidation. And if there was one thing owners of whorehouses, dope cartels, and other forms of social malignancies could not tolerate, it was a threat to their authority. They knew better than anyone else that once people lost respect for their power they would be deposed by their own troops. So they sent a strong-arm team from several cocaine dealers, all armed with the latest American weapons, even grenade launchers.

There was much firing and many explosions around the brothel where they surrounded the American. Many of the leaders of the town bemoaned the public destruction. They even discussed making compensatory offerings to those who lost property.

When the firing died down and the hit men from the drug dealers failed to return, the leaders of the little city sent word to a Mexican Army post that an American was causing great damage to Mexican property.

While the Mexican Army, of course, was not as well equipped as the drug dealers' hit men, it considered itself somewhat better by virtue of valor. But even valor was no good against this amazing American, so they contacted the American consul, who apologized for the actions of his fellow countryman and took it upon himself to talk reason to the American.

The consul too did not return, and as the sun set bloody red in the west, the town leaders at last decided to produce the boy. As it turned out, he was still in training, being broken in to his new life.

Remo saw the welts on his back.

"Who did this to him?" he asked, feeling a rage that almost took away his balance, almost took away the powers he now had access to through his own, very different training.

A crone of a woman bent with age came forward. "Who owns this house?" asked Remo.

Timidly, a well-dressed man in a white suit, Italian loafers, and one sedate gold chain around his neck emerged from a back room.

Remo buried both of them in the rubble of their brothel as the Simpson boy stood outside crying. "It's all right," said Remo. "Your countrymen are here, son. You're going home."

Remo walked slowly down the main street with the boy, daring anyone to try to take him back. No one moved. The boy was afraid to be left alone, so Remo brought him to the hotel room where Walter Hanover sat with his spaghetti legs.

"That's him. That's one of them," said the Simpson boy.

"We'll just let him stay down here this way," said Remo.

"Ain't I gonna get better?" asked Hanover.

"No, as a matter of fact," said Remo, "you're going to get worse. Your legs will atrophy and it will creep up your spinal column."

Remo felt Davey Simpson tug his arm.

"Mister, I don't want to hurt anyone. I just want to go home. Don't do whatever that is to him."

"Okay," said Remo, and asked the Simpson boy to stand outside while he fixed up Walter Hanover. When the door was shut, Remo broke Hanover in two over his knee like a piece of kindling, leaving him for the city of Corsazo to bury.

"His legs won't be any worse than the rest of him," Remo told the Simpson boy on the way to the airport.

Remo delivered the boy just before dawn the next day. His parents couldn't believe their good luck. The mother stood dumbfounded for a moment and then in a rush of tears grabbed her son, hugging him as though she could make sure by the firmness of her grasp that he would never be stolen again. The father looked to Remo.

"How can we say thank you?" he asked.

"I should thank you."

"What for?"

"For giving me a chance to feel human again," said Remo.

At CURE headquarters hidden behind the cover of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the full impact of Remo's insanity was churning up out of the computer terminal. Not only had he risked exposure (there were several good identifications of him), but single-handedly he threatened U.S.-Mexican relations and brought enough attention to himself for foreign governments to wonder if America had a secret weapon.

They would not wonder for long because now foreign intelligence services would be looking for that weapon. Remo had done what he should never do. He had brought CURE dangerously close to exposure, and more than a decade ago CURE had gone to herculean efforts to arrange a phony execution for him just to have a man who no longer existed be the sole killer arm of the organization that could not exist.

For if it became known that America had set up an organization for its own survival working outside the Constitution, it would seem that the great experiment in democracy had failed. This could never be allowed to happen.