He bounced off an overstuffed chair, grabbing a Mac-10, which he cocked with a quick, nervous jerk.
Soapy threw open the door, leaning so his gun hand was hidden by the jamb.
A man stood there with his arms folded impatiently.
"Yeah?" Soapy asked. "Whatchu want?" He didn't notice the corpse-filled Camero out on the curb. His eyes were on the man. He was a white dude. Roughly six feet tall, but looking taller because he was so skinny.
"Welcome Wagon," the skinny man said in a chipper voice. "I've been sent by request of the neighborhood to formally welcome you from Jane Street."
"You mean to," Soapy suggested.
"My mistake," the man said. "I'm new at this."
"You shittin' me?" Soapy asked, spitting out the words. "You really with the Welcome Wagon?"
"Absolutely," said the man. "May I come in?"
"Not dressed like that, you don't," Soapy said with a raucous laugh. The stress lines in his face melted with his widening grin of relief. "We got standards in this house. Just look at you."
"Oh?" the white guy said with a falling face. It was a strong face, lean with deep-set dark eyes and high cheekbones. He wore his dark hair short. His T-shirt was as black as his flat pupils. His chinos were blacker. He looked like a pool hustler in mourning. "Perhaps you'd like me to come back after I've changed into something more formal," he added good-naturedly.
"Yeah, you do that," Soapy Suggs said, his trigger finger loosening. "You get silked down. And while you're at it, trade in those jivy shoes for some good Nikes or something. Those things look like they'd scratch my floor some."
The white guy looked down at his well-polished loafers.
"These are Italian leather," he complained. "What's wrong with them?"
"They out of style," Soapy barked, spitting on the left shoe. "By about thirty years." Laughing, he drew back to shut the door.
Instead, the polite man from Welcome Wagon gave him a close-up look at the hand-tooled Italian leather.
Splat!
Soapy Suggs swallowed his teeth. His head flew back. His Mac burped reflexively, chewing the wood like a runaway buzz saw.
"Welcome Wagon!" Remo Williams sang out, stepping in and slamming the door behind him.
On the floor, Soapy gurgled as he tried to claw loose teeth from his mouth. He was having inexplicable trouble breathing-inexplicable because everything had happened so fast.
Remo gave him another close look at his very expensive shoes. He pressed one of them into Soapy's eyes.
"These particular shoes are made by diligent craftsmen in Milan," he was saying. "Notice the all-leather soles. The heel is a single piece. Also notice the tasteful absence of neon labels. No factory stamped these out."
Soapy spat up a squirt of blood. A bicuspid danced momentarily atop the red fountain. The squirt died. The tooth slid down Soapy's spasming gullet.
An inner door opened and a long black face peered around its edge.
"Who you?" he asked.
Two more faces looked down from the top of the stairs.
"Yeah," one said gruffly, "and whatchu doing to my man Soapy?"
"Educating him on the fine points of quality footwear," Remo said, trying to sound convincingly like a shoe salesman. "Come on down. This is for all of you. Don't be bashful." Remo wiggled a playful finger at them.
The two black faces at the top of the stairs exchanged dumbstruck glances.
The face at the door crack withdrew cautiously. It asked: "You ain't said who you was yet."
"Welcome Wagon."
"You said that. Don't mean nothing to me." This from the stairs.
"Neither does proper English, it seems. Welcome Wagon is a benevolent organization dedicated to making new neighbors feel a part of their chosen community."
"By steppin' on their faces and making 'em squirm on the floor?" the face at the door asked.
"Oh," Remo said, remembering Soapy under one shoe. "Sorry. I was so engrossed in our highly educational exchange, I forgot about your friend." Remo looked down. He said he was sorry. He sounded sincerely contrite. Then he brought his left heel up and down like a jackhammer. Once. Once was enough. When the foot came away, Soapy Suggs's throat looked like a Tonka toy steamroller had flattened it.
Thus did Soapy Suggs become number five.
Remo put his hands on his hips. He looked up. "Now, where were we?"
"Getting dead," snarled Jarris Jameel, flinging the door open and launching himself out. He carried a combat knife held low. His angry eyes were on Remo's flat stomach.
Remo unfolded his arms. Jarris Jameel drove in, his knife arm out like an uncoiling viper. The knife went through a ghostly afterimage. Jarris kept going.
Remo chopped at the back of his neck in passing. It was a quick, casual chop. But it sent Jarris Jameel's head rolling out the open front door to bounce down the steps. The jettisoned body took two stumbling steps and banged off a wall. It struck a throw rug, raising dust. The spurting neck stump began repainting the fading wallpaper, actually improving it, Remo thought.
"Anyone else?" Remo asked, looking up hopefully.
"One moment," he was told.
"Yeah. We be with you in a mo', Welcome Wagon," the other added.
They retreated. To get weapons, Remo assumed.
Remo went up the stairs like a bouncy wraith. His feet on the rubber runners were silent. He was actually in a good mood. It was good to work again. Really work.
The hallway was long and definitely not designed by a claustrophobic architect. Doors lay open on either side of its narrow length. A variety of odors assaulted Remo's nose. Some were chemical. Others organic. Sanitation did not seem to be a household tradition at the modest two-story frame dwelling that was 334 Jane Street.
Remo gave his abnormally thick wrists a warm-up twist. Then he casually began going from room to room, where people sprawled on beds and couches with vacant expressions.
Most of them were drugged out, which disappointed Remo. He wanted action.
"Hello?" he called, ducking his head into a promising room. "Anyone sentient?"
"Who you?" a sleepy voice asked.
"I answered that already," Remo told the muscular man who quickly pulled a silk sheet over his naked legs. The nude woman beside him lifted a rust-red head off a ridiculously large pillow.
"I ax you a question," the black man snarled, taking a chrome-plated revolver from under his own fluffy pillow.
"And I ax you back," Remo returned, relieving the man of his threatening weapon with a chop of his knifelike hand.
Chuk! Bunngg!
The pistol bounced off the floor, where the attached hand finally shook loose. The man used his remaining hand to grab his bloodied stump of a wrist. He looked from it to Remo with a horror-struck "Why me?" expression.
The expression was so piteous that Remo erased it with the heel of his hand. The gunman fell back on his pillow, his face turning into a massive bruise like a concave prune.
The redheaded woman jerked her head up, saw the blood, and asked a shrill question.
"You don't do womens, do you?"
"You sell drugs?" Remo asked.
"Sell, snort, and swallow," she said eagerly.
"I do women," Remo said, driving her nose flat and riddling her brain with splinters of nose bone. Her head was swallowed by the pillow.
Whistling "Whistle While You Work," Remo moved on to the next room.
It looked empty. But his highly attuned senses detected a heartbeat on the other side of the open door. Remo silently took the doorknob in hand.
"Well, nobody in this room," he said aloud.
He stepped back, pulling the door closed. A man inhaled sharply. A preattack inhalation. Grinning, Remo reversed the door on its hinges.
He used only the strength of his bare right arm, but the door struck the inner wall so hard that the plaster cracked on both sides, fissuring the wallpaper.