"Oh," Jackie said, the light of understanding at last dawning in his glazed eyes.
The three of them pondered the implications of Leaf's remark for several long seconds.
Finally, Jackie broke the silence. "Your mom got any Twinkies?" he said, scratching his nose. Leaf didn't try to press his revelation any further. The implications were clear to him. That was enough.
The knowledge that life was grim and pointless made the following few years even more miserable for young Leaf. He was the only one who understood. Truly understood.
Life was just one bleak minute after another.
Stretching into hours, crawling into days, oozing into years, collapsing into decades.
You died young, you died old. Whatever. It didn't matter. No matter what you did, you still died.
Only single moments of pure intensity broke up the endless, tedious minutes between his fifteenth and twenty-fourth years. Some of these were caused by drugs. If life was a dotted line, his drugged moments were the dots that broke up the empty sameness of the rest of the page.
The only other moments for Leaf that most approached happiness were those of greatest agony. Pain-like any drug-was intense. And Leaf found that he liked to inflict pain. On himself, on others. It really didn't matter.
The razor-blade scarification he practiced on himself and on his strung-out girlfriends inevitably led to murder. A slit arm, a slit throat-what was the difference?
The first girl had been a whore. He was underage at the time. Circumstances were such that they hadn't even bothered to try him as an adult. He walked when he turned twenty-one.
After that, Leaf had picked his moments more carefully. There were other bodies, but they weren't as likely to be traced back to him as the first. Like that pair he and his buds had been hired to take out in Florida.
That one had been sweet. Two girls, tons of screaming and-best of all-money. Leaf was about to enjoy the last of the dough he'd made on that weird job.
He was sitting on the damp floor of his dingy basement apartment. A couple of hard-core friends-he'd long outgrown Jackie and Brown-had just returned with some brown gold.
Grimy needles were passed around. Leaf was lifting his syringe to his scarred forearm when something caught his eye.
A flash of movement.
A small rectangular window at the top of the foundation wall looked out on the backyard. When he looked up, Leaf saw a pair of legs glide past.
The other four men weren't paying attention. In the corner of the shadowy room, the TV hummed softly. Looking at the bright colors on the screen, a pair of the men muttered unintelligibly to one another.
"Shh," Leaf hissed.
When they glanced at him, the others saw that he was looking toward the window. All eyes turned that way.
As he strained to listen, the only noise Leaf could hear was dull music from the TV. Otherwise, all was silent.
Maybe he'd imagined the legs. "What?" one of the other junkies said.
Leaf shook his head. "I guess it was noth-" he began.
All at once a horrible wrenching sound came from the rear of the room. Whipping his head around, Leaf briefly saw something big and flat sail past the window. He swore it had the wedge-shaped contours of the entire bulkhead assembly-concrete base and all. The crash was far away.
The garish gray light of dawn spilled down the wet stairs. Carried down with it came a voice. "Surprise! You've been selected a winner in the official Marion Barry Needle Giveaway Sweepstakes!"
Leaf saw the legs again. They seemed to melt down the backstairs. They were attached to a lean young man who screamed "trouble" with every confident step. In the shadows of the basement, his eye sockets were black and menacing.
The five men scrambled to their feet.
"Oh, there's five of you," Remo lamented as he came across the basement floor. "Sorry, but according to contest rules, you can't all be winners. We have to save some drug paraphernalia for our sponsor. Who's in charge here?"
"Who the fuck are you?" Leaf demanded.
"That answers that question." Remo nodded. The druggies had fanned out around him. Each carried some sort of weapon, but judging by the way they walked, only two of them had guns. Remo singled out one of those.
"In the spirit of tobacco companies paying for antismoking public-service announcements, I am required by the official terms of the Marion Barry Needle Giveaway Sweepstakes to offer a live PSA on the evils of drug use."
The men clearly didn't know what to make of this strange intruder. When they glanced to Leaf for instructions, Remo was already sweeping his arm up and around.
He clapped a cupped hand on the top of the head of one of the gunmen, creating a vacuum. Shocked, the man tried to pull away but found he could not. It was as if Remo's hand were welded to his head. "This is your brain," Remo intoned somberly.
Remo pulled up. The resulting tug of air pressure popped skull bones that had been fused since childhood. Weak flesh surrendered to a force more powerful than a fired cannon ball. With a sucking sound, three pounds of gray matter launched out of the top of the man's head. The brain landed with a fat wet splat at the feet of the four surviving drug addicts.
"This is your brain on the floor," Remo continued. He looked at the others, eyes dead. "Any questions?"
For lifelong drug addicts, the reactions of the remaining four were remarkably quick. Three switchblades snicked open. One of the men whipped a revolver from the back of his waistband, swinging it at Remo's face.
Remo concentrated first on the gunman. "Here's another PSA for you," Remo began. As the young man's finger tightened on the trigger, Remo's hand flashed out. With a quick tug, he pulled the man forward, steering the barrel of the gun into the open mouth of another junkie. With a muffled pop, the gun took off the back of the startled drug addict's skull.
Clouding eyes wide, the dead man joined the first body on the concrete floor.
"Guns don't kill people," Remo concluded to the startled gunman. His voice was cold. "I kill people."
As the gunman tried to take aim a second time, a slap from Remo steered the barrel of the weapon deep into the man's own forehead. He collapsed with a life-draining sigh.
Beside Leaf, the last junkie tried to run. Remo snagged him by the scruff of the neck, flinging him back absently.
Soaring backward, the drug addict hit the foundation wall at supersonic speed. Every bone in his body was crushed on impact. As the gelatinous body slipped to the floor, the cracked concrete veneer revealed a man-shaped silhouette.
With a horrible sinking feeling, Leaf realized that he was alone. He dropped his knife and threw up his hands.
"I surrender!" he pleaded.
"That's not how this works," Remo replied, voice hard. "What happens now is I ask you questions in exchange for mercy points. Each question answered truthfully brings you a step closer to the mercy you don't deserve. Each lie erases a single mercy point. Understand?"
Leaf had fallen to his knees. Tears welled up in his bleary eyes. He knew that he was minutes away from death. And in those moments that he now knew would be his very last on Earth, Leaf had another realization-in its intensity much like the one he'd had back in his parents' garage so many years ago.
Life was worth living. "Please," he begged, sniffling.
Remo ignored him. "The girls in Florida..." Leaf sucked in an involuntary mouthful of air. Guilt flooded his fearful eyes.
"The ones you mutilated and hung from a tree," Remo persisted. "Give me the who, how and why."
Given the surroundings, Remo expected to hear that they'd been influenced by the Cabbagehead movie that depicted a similar scene. Since Quintly Tortilli had said that this group was involved only in the Florida murders, Remo assumed that Leaf and his cohorts were part of some larger gang that got off on mimicking the violence depicted in the low-budget films. But Leaf Randolph's response surprised him.