Warren Murphy: The Sky is Falling

Remo thought a moment. There was testimony that was needed from the fat man, but what? It was specific. He knew it was specific because he wrote it down. He wrote it down and then he did something with the note. What did he do with the note?

One of the rifle muzzles quivered in an obvious pre-fire sign. The man behind it was about to squeeze the trigger. It was on a white paper that he wrote the note. The rifle fired. It fired a burst that sounded more like a string of firecrackers to Remo, each pop separate and distinct. But his body was already moving toward the castle wall where the man couldn't get a firing angle. The bullets thudded into the ground as the crack of a second burst followed. Another gun opened up, this one trying to comb the wall free of Remo. Making his way up it now, he felt the stone against his fingers. He didn't climb by grabbing and pulling, which was how most people climbed and the reason why they couldn't do verticals. He applied the pressure of his palms to the wall for lift, and used his toes to keep level between hand movements. It looked easy. It wasn't.

He had written the note with a pencil. There were three key points to the testimony. Good. Three points. What were they?

Remo arrived at the top of the parapet and stopped the AK-47 from firing by ramming it through blue jeans into something warm and moist, namely the natural opening into the triggerman's lower bowels. Then he pushed it into the upper bowels and slapped in the man's belly with a hard short blow, setting off the rifle and sending the top of his cranium toward the blue North Dakota sky.

The other guns ceased because the men firing didn't want their weapons muzzled the same way. They dropped them on the stone walkway as they reached for the sky. It was as though the ten men, as one, suddenly became strangers to violence, their weapons foreign objects which had mysteriously appeared at their feet. Ten innocent men with innocent expressions gingerly nudging their rifles away with their toes.

"Hello," said Remo. He had just shown the Hemp King that his military books that asserted a man alone was useless were themselves useless.

"And Robert Wojic says hello to you, friend," said Wojic, looking around at his useless gunmen. They had their hands in the air like a bunch of petrified pansies.

"I need your help," said Remo.

"You don't need no one's help, friend," said Wojic. And then to the toughs he had picked up in the waterfronts of the world: "You there. Put your hands down. You look like you're going to be frisked. You gonna frisk them?"

"No," said Remo.

"Put your hands down. All of you. This whole castle. Everything. Useless. A lousy investment. Listen to me, friend. Robert Wojic, the Hemp King, biggest importer and exporter of hemp rope around the world, tells you here this day: castles suck."

"I need your testimony on three points."

"Oh, the trial," said Wojic, shaking his head. "I got a right to remain silent, not to testify against myself."

"I know, but there's a problem with that," said Remo.

"What's that?" asked Wojic.

"You're going to."

"If you force me, my testimony will be thrown out of court," said Wojic triumphantly, very satisfied with his legal point. He was sitting in a very large chair encrusted with gold. He wore a purple robe trimmed in white ermine, and hand-tooled cowboy boots of Spanish leather peeped out from under the robe. Hemp rope did not pay for all these luxuries.

"I am not going to force you," said Remo, who wore just a white T-shirt and tan chinos. "I am not going to apply any untoward pressure to make you testify. However, I will push your eardrums out through your nostrils as a way of getting acquainted."

Remo clapped both palms against Robert Wojic's ears. The slap was not hard, but the absolute precision of the cupped hands arriving simultaneously made the Hemp King's eardrums feel that indeed they would come out of his nostrils at the slightest sniffle. Robert Wojic's eyes watered. Robert Wojic's teeth felt like they had just been ground by a rotating sander. Robert Wojic could not feel his ears. He was not sure that if he blew his nose, they would not appear in his lap. He did not, of course, hear his own men laughing at him.

And at that moment, Robert Wojic suddenly knew how to help this visitor to the prairie castle. He would give Remo the three pieces of information needed to help the prosecutor in his case. Wojic explained that the three pieces of information had to be the names of three cocaine runners. Wojic's hemp-import operation covered for them, and his international contacts allowed them to move the drug and the money freely. That was how Robert Wojic could afford such luxury from importing a material that wasn't much in demand since the invention of synthetic fibers.

"Right," said Remo. "That's what it was."

And Robert Wojic assured Remo that he would testify to this willingly because he never, ever wanted to see Remo come back for a second favor. Perhaps he would be killed by the angry cocaine runners; but Wojic wasn't concerned. He had seen death just moments before, and the man lying on the parapet with his brains blown out of his skull looked a hell of a lot more peaceful than Wajic himself felt as he checked his nose. Nothing was coming out. Then he felt his very tender ears.

"So long, friend. Will I see you in court?"

"Nah," said Remo. "I never have to go."

Robert Wojic offered to have one of his men give Remo a lift into town. All ten said they would personally have been willing to drive the stranger who climbed up walls, but they had immediate appointments in the other direction.

"Which direction is that?" wondered Remo.

"Where are you going?" they asked in chorus.

"That way," said Remo, pointing east, where Devil's Lake Municipal Airport lay.

"Sorry, that seems to be in the general direction of New York and I'm heading for Samoa," observed one of the triggermen. "I don't know about these other guys."

As it turned out, they, too, were headed for Samoa. Immediately. All of them. So Remo had to walk to the airport alone, back the way he came over the scorched prairie grass where hidden mines were supposed to reduce a company of men to a single quivering human being.

At a push-button pay phone in Minnewaukan, Remo had to punch in a code to indicate that the job had been successfully completed. The code was written on the inside of his belt, along with an alternate code that indicated a problem and the need for further instructions. This was a new system. He was fairly certain the "mission complete" code was on the right. He punched in the numbers, suddenly wondering if Upstairs had meant his right or the belt's right. When he got a car wash, he knew he had copied down the codes wrong. He threw away the belt and caught a 747 for New York City.

On the plane, he suddenly realized that throwing the belt away was a mistake. Anyone finding the belt could punch in one of the correct codes and throw the entire organization Remo worked for off course. But nowadays he wasn't sure what that was anymore. He went to sleep next to a thirtyish blond who, sensing his magnetism, kept running her tongue over her lips as though rehearsing a lipstick ad.

In New York City, Remo's cab let him off at a very expensive hotel on Park Avenue, whose elegant windows now reflected the dawn. About thirty policemen crowded the lobby. Someone, it seemed, had thrown three conventioneers thirty stories down an elevator shaft with the force of an aircraft catapult. Remo took a working elevator to the thirtieth floor and entered a major suite.

"I didn't do it," came a high squeaky voice.

"What?" said Remo.

"Nothing," said the voice. "They did it to themselves." Inside the living room, draped in a golden kimono trimmed in black, his frail body seated toward the rising sun, wisps of hair placid against the yellow parchment of his skin, sat Chiun, Master of Sinanju. Innocent.