Remo nodded. “Now, just so I have it straight, Vlad, you burned your best friend alive for fifty grand.”
“Well,” Vlad said slowly, “yes. I do feel bad about it now.”
Remo nodded and glanced out the window, “Oh, look. There’s your pants.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you want to see them?”
“No. They’re torn. I have no use for them.”
“But it’s kind of funny. They landed on a No Parking sign.”
“Heh” Vlad said.
“Have a look.” Remo gave Vlad a nice close look at the pants. As Vlad plummeted toward the pants, he kept his eyes closed until, at the last moment, he opened them and saw the pants. He saw the No Parking sign they were draped over, then Vlad became as one with the No Parking sign and the torn pants.
Much later that evening as the coroner labored to separate man, pants and sign, he was amused to discover a fake mustache, which had apparently become stuck to the No Parking sign by some prankster shortly before the pants and the image consultant were skewered on it
Chapter 3
“I think that about wraps it up for Remo,” said Remo, standing at an Albuquerque pay phone at a sprawling Happy Go Gas Service, Snacks & Shopping Hub. If he wanted to, he could have purchased gasoline, magazines, fast food, canned beverages, home remodeling equipment, travel insurance and bronze cowboy sculptures, all at this one place. He could get his oil changed, get his hair cut and buy tiny hamburgers by the sackful. As if that weren’t enough, several vendors hawked their wares in the grass along the street.
The feature that most attracted Remo to Happy Go Gas, however, was the vast asphalt. He needed at least three acres to make a U-turn in the vehicle he was driving.
“I don’t think we have wrapped up anything.” The man on the other end sounded calm but sour, as if he had been sucking a lemon just before he picked up the receiver.
“I made a to-do list.” Remo fished in the pockets of his tan Chinos, retrieving a FedEx receipt with a scrawled note on the back. “Here it is. Remo’s to-do list. Item one—wrap up Jack Fast loose ends. I’ll just scratch that one off right now.”
“Remo—”
“Hold on.” Remo used his Vlad Florescu, Image Consultant pen to scratch off item one. “Okay, so much for that. Item two. Oh, look, no item two. I guess I’m finished.”
“There’s much more to be done.”
“Not according to my paperwork. Let me look again.” Remo scanned the page, then turned it over and scanned the front, where the receipt detailed the delivery of fifteen pairs of handmade Italian shoes to a Connecticut address. It was dated two days previous. The declared value of the shipment was half the price of a midsize sedan. “Nope. That’s it. Finito.”
“Do not hang up the phone.”
“Hanging up now.”
Remo hung up and found himself surrounded. He wasn’t surprised. He had heard the attackers as they approached.
“Some lovely flowers?” asked a swarthy man with a greasy bucket labeled Bokays.
“No, thanks.”
“T-shirts, tree for ten doh-lar.” A damp cigarette dangled from the second man’s lips.
“No, thanks.”
The third man had come over with his entire cart, which was a wheeled contraption with a pole across the top for rugs on hangers. “Look, señor. Beautiful wall hangings. Use them as a beautiful rug, too.” The rug he displayed was jet-black and illustrated with a brilliant orange life-size jaguar in midsnarl.
“Naw.”
“I have many beautiful pictures. You like ladies?”
The rug seller whipped out another black sample, this one showing a model in the midst of taking off her denim shorts. Her top half was bare, her breasts were buoyant, her blond hair billowed out like yellow mist. Big pink letters declared that Swedes Are Superb.
“Not Swedish.”
“I haff more!” He was now wheeling his rack alongside Remo and he lifted out another picture of the same woman, now a redhead and wearing a kilt. “Scottish, see?”
“Got anything Korean?” Remo asked, but he didn’t stop walking.
“Sí! See?”
Remo glanced at a black rug illustrated with a life-size Bruce Lee in his famous Enter the Dragon kick pose.
“If that’s Korean then you’re Puerto Rican.”
The rug seller stopped smiling. ‘I’m not a fucking Puerto Rican.”
“Exactly.”
A fat, short man in a child-size T-shirt waddled out the front of the convenience store of Happy Go Gas and headed straight at Remo. “Son, what the hell you think you’re doing?”
Remo looked around.
“That’s right, I’m talking to you, son,” the fat man bellowed. “What are you doin’?”
“Leaving.”
“Stealing’s more like it. Come in here and buy not a damn thing.”
“I used your phone.”
“I know. I was watching you.”
“That’s why I moved over. Didn’t want you watching me dial.”
“Uh-huh. I saw enough to know you didn’t even put in any dum money. I’m not running no free phone service, son.”
“You’re standing between me and my…thing that I’m driving.”
“That thing you’re driving is taking up fifty percent of my square footage, son. That means half my paying customers are being denied entry. I dropped one-point-three million dollars into this-here establishment. You think I can afford to let folks come in and rob me blind?”
“I notice the other half of your square footage is empty, too,” Remo pointed out. “What was it I stole exactly?”
“I think you best make some sort of a purchase before you be on your way,” the fat man said threateningly.
“I’m guessing the minimart doesn’t have rice or fresh fish?” Remo asked. The fat man looked at him as if he were insane. “That’s what I thought. Sorry, I gotta go.”
Remo started walking again. The fat man folded his arms defiantly and stepped between Remo and his vehicle—then found himself doing an energetic whirl, as light and graceful as the little girls doing the ice-skating twirlies on ESPN2. His arms flew out and the centrifugal force even lifted and stretched his belly away from his body. Then he collapsed and threw up.
“Hey, smart-ass,” the rug seller said. “You think you tough, huh?” The rug, flower and T-shirt sellers were closing in on Remo. A mechanic, from the Lube-U-Kwik garage was striding out to give them a hand, wielding a wrench.
The fat man wiped his mouth with his arm. “Work him over while I call the cops.”
“Yeesh,” Remo complained, and then began whistling while he worked. It was an old Disney tune about whistling while you worked.
The red-faced flower seller threw a punch, then found himself airborne. The smart-ass had him by the collar and moved him quick. Just then the mechanic brought his oily wrench down on the smart-ass’s head.
The mechanic saw the switch happen faster than he could believe, and for sure too fast for him to react to. His wrench collapsed the flower seller’s head instead of the smart-ass’s, and then the wrench zipped out of his hands. The next thing the mechanic knew, the oily wrench handle was in his mouth and going down, down until the fat head lodged between his teeth. The mechanic gagged and clawed at the wrench.
The T-shirt seller found himself tied up. Had he lost consciousness? Because getting his hands knotted up in T-shirts had to have taken five, ten minutes, right? His ankles were bound up, and a second later the whistling man tied his ankles and hands together around the pole of the rug rack. The T-shirt seller dangled like dead game being carried home for dressing.