"Yeah. But you took my man to the house for it!"
"And we're going to take Fran Kee Z to the house for killing the kid and everything will be fine, won't it?"
There was a moment of tense silence.
"Jeremy?"
"Yes, Chief."
"I think you were a little rough on Leonard, Jeremy."
"Yeahhhh. I guess. Didn't mean to go all racial on ya, Lanky."
Remo just had to have a look at the surreal scenario his ears were revealing to him. He rose under a window enough to peer through a slit in the boards. There was a human skeleton decked out in a sleeveless camouflage jacket. His unhealthy skin was so filthy that Remo wouldn't have known he was the one who almost used the N-word except the man he was apologizing to was black. The rival gang lords bounced their fists together in what had to have been the nonaffiliated street version of a handshake among Pueblo's killers, bangers and dealers.
"Nothing, Jax," Leonard said with a grin. "You'z okay for whitey."
Jeremy, whose shoulder tattoos included the word "JAX" in red letters dripping blood, grinned sheepishly. Chief Roescher was smiling benevolently, and it was exactly the look that Sister Mary Margaret got on her face when she managed to get some playground warriors to mend their differences.
Chief Roescher, Remo decided, was one demented puppy. But he had to have some damn effective leadership skills if he had the gangs lords of this town acting like simpering orphans.
He was about to wonder what his next step should be when there was a curious hollow noise coming from a few houses down, too soft for the normal ears of the back-door cop to hear. The almost melodic noise ended with a click, and Remo knew exactly what it was.
He'd used some pretty big shoulder-fired boom devices when he was a soldier, before he ever heard the word "Sinanju." Now he disdained such weaponry, but someone two doors down did not. That someone had just telescoped the fiberglass tube of a shoulder-fired grenade launcher, and the click was the sights and firing trigger popping out. Remo went to watch.
He crept away quickly and circled, remaining unseen and coming up seconds later behind the man who was readying a second Light Antitank Weapon. The first disposable LAW was leaning against the abandoned house that was his cover. The man was alone and he was dressed in the now familiar blacksuit with the white gloves, now dirty, and the white ski mask, now dingy.
Two rockets seemed like overkill to Remo Williams, but who was he to argue? This guy really looked like he knew what he was doing and, let's face it, Remo was out of touch when it came to using firearms.
With both LAWs prepped the man crept out into the weedy mess of a backyard, putting himself in the open but giving him a clean shot at the house where Chief Roescher was having his boy's club meeting. The cop at the back door was examining his fingernails and didn't notice the danger. Remo moved into the open a few paces behind the shooter. He didn't want to miss any of the action.
The white-masked man put a LAW to his shoulder.
"Wait. Don't." Remo's mumble was drowned out by the whoosh of the LAW. The back-door cop looked up, startled, and watched death come right at him. The projectile missed his body by inches and tore through the soggy wall before it hit something inside that was solid enough to blow it. The back-door cop hadn't taken his first step. Chief Roescher and the gang lords never had a chance as the house blew apart in all directions in a way a tank on the battlefield never would have, and the mess of rotted timbers and curling shingles that had once been the roof collapsed on top of what was left.
"Stop," Remo said under his breath as the man in the white mask snatched up the second LAW. He fired it at all that was left of the house, obliterating the ruins, then dropped the tube and ran two steps before the solid earth was no longer under his feet.
"Nice shooting," Remo commented.
The white-masked man was a pro. He wasted no time with surprise before launching into a series of moves designed to extricate himself. They would have worked on any other assailant, but they didn't work on Remo.
"I thought the second one was kind of overkill, though," Remo said as he walked with his prisoner into the train yard and over the tracks. The masked man kicked at Remo's chest, missed, then lost his cool and started wiggling and twisting frantically.
"Stop that." Remo shook the shooter vigorously, nearly rendering him unconscious. Then he ripped the man's blacksuit at the shoulder, looking for a wound. He found it, a big mass of bloody bandages applied over the spot where his wooden missile had impaled it just before the quick escape from the courtroom yesterday. "You're a dedicated employee, I'll hand it to you, going to work today even feeling under the weather."
The ground in the vacant train yard was contaminated with train oil and fuel. When Remo put a few rusting boxcars behind them they couldn't see the dilapidated neighborhood any longer, just a plume of black smoke climbing into the blue sky. Remo plucked off the mask, his prisoner too dazed to resist.
"White's not a good color for this kind of work, you know? It's all dirty." He dropped the mask, then removed the gloves, as well, and ripped the front of the blacksuit open at the chest.
"No dog tags?"
"That would be stupid," his prisoner answered.
"Well, depends on your point of view. See, now that I've heard you talk I know you're an American. I also know you're military. So Upstairs is going to want a positive ED on you. If you had dog tags, I could have taken those. Instead, I have to give them your fingerprints."
"Won't do you any good. I'm a dead man anyway."
Remo scowled, then gingerly sniffed the air in front of the prisoner. "You took something, huh?"
"I saw you working yesterday, remember? Didn't want to take any chances. What if you showed up again and took off all my hardware? Had to have another last resort."
Remo considered that, then nodded. "But if I didn't show up you could take an antidote, right?"
"Yeah." The prisoner grimaced ruefully. "What are you, anyway, some sort of freaky Special Forces experiment?"
"Yeah. I eat steroids for breakfast every day," Remo answered, then began patting down the blacksuit. The man began to fight again, but Remo found the place where a tiny capsule was sewn into the lining of the suit. He slashed the fabric and poked the pill into the back of his prisoner's throat, then held his mouth closed until the pill was gone.
"Son of a bitch!" the man gasped.
"Okay, now we've got all the time in the world, so talk while we walk." Remo heard the approach of sirens behind them and began carrying his prisoner into a gully that meandered downhill and under an overpass.
"Boris Bernwick. U.S. Army, retired."
"I give two shits, Boris. I've learned enough about you in the last five minutes to know you are definitely not the brains behind this little operation. Those are the people I want to know about. Who, why, where, when."
"I'm telling you nothin'," Bernwick growled.
"Let's hold hands," Remo said, and grasped the dangling soldier by the wrist, inserting his finger into one special pressure point that made the soldier whine like a beagle.
"Well?" Remo asked.
Boris Bernwick, for the first time in decades, began to cry.
"Hurts!"
"What about this?"
"Hurts more!"
"And this?"
"Hurts hurts hurts hurts okay hurts hurts!"
Remo decreased the pressure slightly. "I'm taking you back to 'hurts more' so you can answer, but if you want to get down to 'hurts' again, you're going to have to earn it."
"What about 'no hurts at all'?" Bernwick pleaded.
"That," Remo said, "you're really gonna have to earn."
Boris Bernwick tried hard for more than ten minutes to earn "no hurts."