He was nearly lost in his reverie when he noticed the thin man in the dirt-spattered black tee shirt was doing an amazing thing. He was picking up one of the Amaza-Gro bags with one hand. With his other hand, the thin man was wrapping a green garden hose around the assistant manager from neck to ankles. It all took place in less than three seconds.
"Just tidying up," Remo said. "Don't want you to be upset because of messy customers who dare to criticize your merchandise." He yanked the assistant manager's hair so that his eyes bulged and his mouth popped open and every follicle on his head screamed in anguish.
The assistant manager also screamed, but no one heard him because Remo had stuffed his mouth with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.
"Yum, yum, eat 'em up," Remo said, kicking the assistant manager's feet out from beneath him so that he toppled to the floor and bounced on his rubber tubing exterior like a beach toy.
"Mff. Pfft," said the assistant manager.
"Beg pardon? Speak up."
"UHNNK! MMMB!"
"Seconds, you say?" Remo dumped the rest of the bag's contents into the man's mouth. Since it didn't all fit, Remo helped the Amaza-Grow through the man's quivering esophagus with a nearby trowel. The metal spade broke in two, so Remo used the handle to tamp down the dirt.
When the assistant manager stopped asking for more and only opened and closed his eyes in blind terror, he saw Remo do another amazing thing. With no discernible preparation, the thin man with the big wrists vaulted over aisle after aisle of factory-rejected merchandise, laying waste to the contents of the store. Broken kewpie dolls zoomed across the length of the ceiling with the speed of jet fighters. Dog-eared greeting cards sprinkled the store in a cloud of confetti. One female checkout clerk screamed. The others, seeing the assistant manager immobilized, were too busy robbing the cash registers.
A very old lady, dressed in black and carrying a cane, looked up apologetically to Remo as he sailed over a pile of plastic shoes tossed randomly in a heap. The lady was holding one of the shoes in her hands, the thin sole flapping apart from the rest of the shoe.
"I didn't break it, sir," the old lady said quiveringly, offering the shoe to Remo. "It just fell apart when I touched it." She had tears in her eyes. "Please don't make me pay for these, too." Remo saw that she was wearing a similar pair on her feet, the soles held on by dozens of rubber bands. "I only wanted to see if they were all... all..." Her wrinkled old eyes crunched up around her tears.
Remo grabbed the shoe away from her. It cracked and crumbled in his hand. "Lady," he asked wonderingly, "Why don't you wear sneakers? These shoes are worthless."
"I can't afford sneakers," the lady said. "Do I have to pay for the one you broke, too, sir?"
Remo reached into his pocket. "I'll let you go on two conditions," he said, handing her a wad of bills. She stared at the money in astonishment. Hundreds peeked out. "That you buy yourself a good pair of shoes, and that you never return to this store again. Got it?"
The old lady nodded dumbly. She began to totter away, but Remo pushed her gently to the side when he heard the heavy breathing of a man with an obesity problem waddling toward him three aisles away. Remo sensed from the man's uneven footfalls that he was carrying a gun. Remo waited.
When the manager appeared, the .38 poised amateurishly in his hand, Remo was leafing through the paperback book section, a pile of loose pages at his feet where they had fallen as the book was being opened. A sign above the books read No Browsing. The man raised his gun and fired. Remo yawned. "Missed," he said.
The store manager looked unbelievingly at the gun. He had fired it point blank at Remo's chest, and he had missed. Directly behind Remo, a bullet hole smoldered through a stack of school notebooks with lines misprinted diagonally down the page.
"How'd you do that?" the manager asked. Remo felt no need to reveal the obvious: that he had moved faster than the bullet. The man fired again. Again, Remo shifted his weight off his heels, and then back onto them, and then there was another hole in the notebooks.
"This is getting dull," Remo said. And just as the fat manager was squeezing his fat finger around the trigger for the third time, he saw Remo move and decided not to shoot. As manager of a successful economy-budget chain store, he recognized his responsibility to the community. He realized that innocent people might get killed if he continued to pursue this nut case. He reconsidered shooting a defenseless man at point-blank range. He also observed that Remo had twisted the barrel of his revolver around so that it formed a perfect U and was now pointed directly into his own pudgy face.
He opened his hand to drop the gun but the gun did not drop and the hand did not open because the butt of the gun was jammed into the metacarpals of his hand. Then came the pain. "Eeeeeeeee," the manager cried.
Remo tugged at his ear and shook his head. "That's not E. That's A-flat. You tone deaf?"
"Eeeeee," the man insisted.
"No, no," Remo said. "Here's E." He twisted the man's ear. The pain shot up eight notes. Remo nodded his head approvingly. "Now I'll make the pain go away, if you'll do something ha return," Remo offered.
"Anything. One-thirty-five-twenty-four-sixteen-eight."
"What?"
"That's the combination to the safe. Eeeeeeeee."
"Hallelujah," said one of the checkout clerks who had come to watch the action. She ran off toward the safe in the back of the store, followed by the rest of the staff.
"So much for your money," Remo said. "Now I want you to do a little advertising, to let your customers know what an honest guy you are."
"Sure, sure," the manager grunted, the veins in his neck throbbing. "Stop this... please."
"In a second. Right after I give you your instructions. Are you listening carefully?"
"Yes. YES!"
"I want you to stand outside this store and tell everybody on the street what kind of operation you're running. The markups, the merchandise, the help. Everything. And the whole truth, right?"
"Right." The man panted to hold down the pain in his ear and his hand, but nothing helped.
Remo escorted him to the doorway by the ear. "Okay, start talking," he said.
"Pain," the man yelped.
"Oh. Forgot." Remo released the ear and pressed a small nerve network beneath the skin on the man's wrist and the man's arm went numb. The pistol clattered to the sidewalk.
He breathed in heavily with relief.
"Can you move your arm?" Remo asked.
"No."
"Good. Then it doesn't hurt. But if I don't like what you're saying, I'll make the numbness go away and the pain come back, understand?''
"Yes."
"Okay. I trust you. Talk."
"Help!" the man yelled. "Eeeeeee!"
"What'd I tell you?" Remo scolded. He touched the manager's wrist.
"B-bad merchandise," the man sputtered.
"Louder."
"Can't," the man sobbed.
Remo numbed his arm again. "Try now."
"This store has been cheating the pants off you every since it opened," the man yelled with the zeal of an evangelist. "I ought to know, I'm the manager. I buy rejected merchandise from factories and don't let you know about it when I sell it to you. All of these stores are stocked the same way."
"The clerks," Remo reminded him, smiling and nodding to the bewildered pedestrians on the sidewalk.
"The clerks are nasty as hell! You'd be crazy to shop here."
"Good work," Remo said and patted the man on the back. "Keep at it." Remo strolled back into the store. He picked up a bunch of plastic flowers and walked over to the assistant manager who was still rolled up tightly in his sarcophagus of green rubber garden hose. "Look what I brought to cheer you up," he said, and stuck the stems into the flower pot that used to be the assistant manager's mouth.