Warren Murphy: Mafia Fix

Chiun had made him a superman, but Chiun could do nothing about changing the human anatomy. Shoulder joints were not designed to withstand the force Remo had applied to his own, no more than knees were designed to resist the tearing and pulling put on them by two-hundred-eighty-pound giants who could run the hundred in 9.5 in football garb. Maybe in twenty generations of evolution. But not yet.

And it was cold. Cynthia Hansen shivered as she stood in front of him, leaning against a trailer truck. Remo shook his eyes into focus. The truck said Chelsea Trucking but there were four of them in a row, parked neatly, and Remo knew he had found the four Ocean Wheel trucks that had carried the heroin.

But more important than the four trailers and the cold was something else, this pistol Cynthia Hansen held In her hand, pointed at Remo's head.

Remo struggled to his feet and swayed groggily back and forth. His arm was really shot. He could tell. There was no sense of belonging, no sense of muscle, just a numbing pain somewhere south of his left shoulder.

"Where are we?" he asked, speaking more thickly than was necessary.

"You're in the place you've been looking for. Our drug factory. These are the trucks of heroin," Cynthia said.

Remo allowed himself to be impressed. "Enough here for a tidy little nest egg," he said.

"More than enough," she said and he could sense her grasping for the little straw he had held out.

"How'd you get me here?"

"I drove you here. My druggist carried you down from upstairs."

"You've got a partner?" Remo questioned, trying to sound hurt.

Cynthia looked up and saw the door leading to the top of the stairs was tightly shut. "Him? He's an employee," she said.

"There's too much here for one person to spend," Remo said.

"Better one than none," she said, and she shuddered as the cold went through her.

Remo swung his good right arm as if to warm himself and as her eyes went toward the movement, he slid forward a step, imperceptibly, toward her.

"Yeah," he said, "but better two than one."

"It could have been, Remo," she said sadly. "It really could have been."

For the first time she met his eyes full and Remo turned on the warmth in them. He forced his mind to conjure up visions of their sex, under tables, among salami skins, against desks and in chairs. His eyes mirrored exactly what was on his mind and she responded to his eyes.

She said again, "It really could have been. Just you and me."

"Yeah, just the three of us. You, me and your gun," Remo said, swinging his arm again, moving another step closer. "You know," he said, "we've got something. It never took any gun for me to perform."

"It was never like that for me before, either," she said. "But never again. How could I trust you?" she asked, hoping that he could convince her.

"How do women ever trust men? Most of them don't need guns," Remo said.

"I didn't think I needed one," Cynthia said.

Remo answered, "Everything you ever needed you were born with."

Her gun hand wavered slightly. Remo saw it and said, "It would just be you and me." Slowly the gun came down and she was defenceless before him. He was only a few feet away and, dammit, all he could see was that finely chiselled face and that great bosom and long sloping waist, she leaned her face forward and Remo was on her lips with a groan. When she searched his mouth, he heard the gun drop to the floor with a clank.

Then he was moving her, their mouths still joined, but slowly, step by step, he was moving her toward the cab of the first truck. He leaned her against the cab and took his good hand from her breasts and reached up and caught the door handle and opened the door. Then he lifted her up and slid her into the seat. And he had her dress up around her eyes and he forced her legs apart so one was up on the dashboard and he forced himself between her legs, ignoring the pain in his torn shoulder and he put himself in.

The cold was chilling and the cab was uncomfortable, but for Remo, with this woman, it was like an overstaffed bed.

He leaned against her ear and told her, "I always wanted to do it in a truck," and he brought her up to his rhythm.

He kept her there as he kept moving. Her arms came around his head and pulled him close to her face, as she whispered in his ear, "Remo, I love you. I love you. Please. Please."

They were both nearing the end. She was bucking and writhing under him on the seat of the truck and she bit into his ear as they came. He pulled back slightly, not to escape her teeth, but to give himself room to pull her skirt up over her face, so she would not see the blow coming as his good hand came up over his head and then down into her waiting face. Remo felt the bones crunch under his hand and he knew she was dead.

He knew that if he had looked into her face, he might not have been able to do it, and he had to do it. He had to do it in the name of all those teenage junkies who infested the country, whose curse was the source of Cynthia Hansen's riches, and whose lifelong agonies would pay for her pleasures.

Out of hatred, he killed her. But because, in a way, he loved her, he had let her die quickly.

Then Remo pulled away from her and he saw for the first time why the truck cab had seemed crowded. Huddled on the floor in the corner under the steering wheel were the bodies of two men, crowded together for warmth, frozen solid. Remo stared at them unseeing for a moment.

Then in a flame of anger, he brought his hand up again and down hard into the already crushed face beneath the black skirt, this time with hatred only, and said, "That's the biz, sweetheart."

Remo stepped down from the truck cab. He thought to himself sadly that he had left a great deal of himself in the cab along with the twisted body of Cynthia Hansen.

Then he tried to remember her face and found out he could not. Perhaps such memories were only for men. And he was not just a man. He was the Destroyer.

Suddenly he felt cold again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Myron Horowitz had been humming.

He had helped Cynthia carry that impossible bastard, Remo something or other, down into the deep freeze, had left her down there to shoot him.

He was needed up here. The machines were busy and the pills were spinning out, dropping into bottles labelled "aspirin" but containing a better medicine than all the acetaminphen in the world. Ninety-eight per cent pure heroin. He had taken a tablet that morning before Cynthia arrived and he felt good. Of course, that was no real drug problem because he could stop any time, and he must admit, it did make him feel even more the fine upstanding man that he knew he was. Doctors did it, didn't they? And if he had wanted to, he could have been a doctor.

He was busy monitoring the pill-making machines and he had been humming tunelessly, the kind of humming that a man who will soon be a multi-millionaire can indulge himself in. He did not notice the footsteps behind him.

Finally, when someone cleared his throat and Horowitz turned, he was only mildly surprised that it was not Cynthia Hansen, and not much more surprised that three men stood there. They were funny looking men. If Myron Horowitz had not been a gentleman, he might have giggled. He giggled anyway.

There was this round little man with a head like an egg and a twisty little moustache who said "allo," who must have been a Frenchman because he was carrying an umbrella. There was a silly looking Oriental with thick eyeglasses who just stood there smiling insanely at Myron Horowitz. And there was a very funny one indeed, an enormously fat man who looked like Hoagy Carmichael after six months of forced feeding; he stood there, grinning out of the side of his mouth and clutching the handle of his briefcase with both hands.