Warren Murphy: The Final Death

He released the pressure on the judge's throat.

"But who are you?"

"I'm just your friendly old harbinger of spring, better times, and equal justice outside the law," said Remo, hardly moving but planting three stiff fingers into the exact point between the beginning of the judge's brain covering and the beginning of his face, creating a massive hairline fracture that splintered internally, down into the gray pulpy brain.

The judge nodded, seemed to sigh except no sound came out, flopped off his seat, given him in gratitude by the Aztec Furniture Company which had been given permission to erect a neon sign in a residential zone, and was obsolete before he hit the floor.

Remo carefully returned the $10,000 bill to his shirt pocket. Dr. Harold W. Smith, his boss, had a tendency to get upset when Remo left money laying around.

Remo looked around. There was no other door leading from the judge's chamber, except the one back into the courtroom, and Remo knew cops would be standing guard outside. Not that they could stop him, but they could force him into making a mess, and besides the policemen hadn't done anything wrong. No, the door was out.

So Remo opened the large window of the judge's second-floor office and stepped out. He dropped sharply for a few feet until he slapped back with his hands against the rough red brick of the courthouse building. His heels dug in and found a horizontal groove between the bricks and Remo stopped, leaning backward against the wall, suspended like a fly, and then slowly he let himself drift downward, concentrating on feeling the texture of the bricks under the palms of his hands, counting the grooves of the bricks with his heels, moving slowly until he was only a foot off the ground, and then stepping off the wall onto the sidewalk, as if the wall had been a small kitchen stepladder.

Tucston, North Dakota, was still too small to have traffic problems and Remo had no problem flagging down one of the town's three taxi cabs for the flight to the airport, and got there with plenty of time to spare.

Eight hours later Remo stood outside the New Haven Sheraton in Connecticut.

"Just another hotel in a long line of hotels, motels, inns, guest rooms, and flophouses. Remo had left little bits of himself on registers all across the world.

Sometimes Remo Boffer, Remo Pelham, Remo Belknap, Remo Schwartz, Abraham Remo Lincoln. Even sometimes his real name, Remo Williams.

It didn't really make any difference anymore since he was dead.

Remo Williams had been dead since that hot Newark, New Jersey, night years before when a two-bit drug pusher was found mangled in an alley. The department had slapped a young rookie cop named Remo onto the train to prison and railroaded him to the electric chair.

It didn't make a difference that the chair didn't really work and Remo woke up afterwards in a sanitarium in Rye, New York. It didn't make a difference that he was to be trained as the enforcement arm of the super-secret agency CURE. It didn't make a difference that he had become a more efficient killing machine than CURE ever had imagined.

None of those things mattered because what had once been Remo Williams had really died in that electric chair. Ten years of constant, bone-bruising, mind-stretching training had turned him into something else, something beyond human.

Remo had died so that Shiva, the Destroyer, could live. In the Hindu world, Shiva was the god of death and destruction. In Remo's world, the one man who counted thought that Remo was the reincarnation of that god.

Remo thought of this as he stood on the deserted, garbage-strewn New Haven street on the coldest evening of the year.

"Welcome home, Remo," he mumbled to himself. "Happy New Year."

Remo moved into the painfully lit, nearly empty lobby. He marched up the escalator, feeling the wide grooves through the thin soles of his black handmade loafers, to the mezzanine and the elevators.

He pressed the "up" button, went into a wide opening elevator, and rode up to the 19th floor, reading advertisements for the Tiki-Tiki Room, the Brunch Room, the Rib Room, and the Top of the 'Ton, which lined the opposed wall.

The doors opened smoothly onto the 19th floor and artificially chilled air, in which he could detect tiny residues of charcoal used in the filtration process, swept across his face like a plastic cloud. Remo allowed two long days to catch up with him and weigh his limbs down with the luxury of needing sleep. And with his training, that was all sleep was. A luxury.

He went to the door of his suite, which was never locked, and walked in.

A tiny, aged Oriental stood on a rice mat in the middle of the room holding several large pieces of parchment in his frail, long-nailed bony hands.

"What kept you? Must I do everything myself?"

"Sorry, Chiun," said Remo. "If I had known you were in a hurry, I would have run back from North Dakota."

"If you had, you would not have that stench of plastic airplane seats dripping from you." The little Oriental's hand swept the air in an arc. "Wash, then return, for I have a matter of the utmost urgency to discuss with you."

Remo willed himself to move wearily into the bathroom. He stopped at the door.

"What is it this time, Little Father? Another interruption of your soap operas? Barbra Streisand get a bad review? You have a Chinese bellboy? What?"

Chiun waved his hand again, like the swoop of a joyous dove before his face. A sign of indifferent patience.

"A Chinaman is just good enough to carry my trunks, although one must always watch them to be sure they do not steal the paint from the sides. Barbra Streisand's voice is still as clear as Korean sunlight and her beauty is unequalled. As for those other things you mentioned, they no longer warrant my attention."

Remo took a step back from the bathroom.

"Run that one by me again. I think it had something to do with your not watching soap operas anymore. Since when?"

"Since they have failed me," Chiun said. "Will you please wash the filth of plastic from your body? I will wait here for you."

Remo showered and when he came out of the bathroom wearing a knee-length cotton robe, Chiun was scrawling in Korean characters on the sheets of parchment.

"Now what's this about the soap operas?" asked Remo.

"They have turned to violence and have betrayed their own beauty. I have tried to stop this. I had you mail that letter to Norman Lear to warn him. Nothing has gotten better. Things have only declined." Chiun put down the feather pen and stared at Remo. "So I have written a daytime drama of my own." He waved the sheets of parchment. "You see it now, here before you."

Remo snickered. "You've written a soap opera?"

"I have written a daytime drama. That is correct."

Remo laughed aloud and fell back onto the sofa in the suite's living room. "Don't tell me. I know what you're going to call it. Rove of Rife. Right?"

Chiun transfixed him with a narrow stare. "Unlike some, I do not have any problem pro-nouncings R's and L's. If I had, how could I pronounce your names?"

Remo Williams nodded.

"For after all," Chiun continued, "cretin has an R in it and lunatic an L. To pronounce either wrong would be a disservice to your uniqueness as a semi-human being."

Remo stopped laughing and sat up. "You set me up for that, Chiun."

"At last I have your attention. Now perhaps we may get down to business."

"Go ahead," Remo said sullenly.

"A daytime drama must be seen to be appreciated," Chiun said.

"Even to be believed," Remo mumbled.

"Silence. Now there are a number of ways to bring such a work of art to television. But since we do not own our own television station or manufacture baby food in small jars, we must find another way. Pay attention now, because this part concerns you."