Death Sentence td-80

by Warren Murphy

  Enquirer readers had come forward with their own accounts, many of which agreed that Dead Man was often accompanied by an old Oriental in colorful robes. No one knew Dead Man's true name. Or at least no one could agree upon it. A Detroit hotel manager had identified him as a former guest of his establishment who had signed the register book "Remo Murray." A Malibu boat dealer claimed that "Remo Robeson" had purchased a Chinese junk from him only last year and sailed away in it. And on and on the reports went, some sightings going back over a dozen years. All the reports agreed that the man's first name was Remo. The last name was always different. "Williams" was not one of the examples.

  "My name," Remo Williams muttered in the reflected pink glow of his bare cell. "My face. But how could I be in two places at once-in prison and out on the street?"

  Remo read the article over and over until he knew it by heart. Then he stuffed it under the mattress. Lights-out came and Remo didn't bother undressing or getting under the covers. Tomorrow at seven A.M. he would walk down the line, not for the killing he hadn't committed over twenty years ago, but for the murder of a Trenton guard he had been forced to kill only because he had been sent up for a killing he never did in the first place. The guard had been an asshole. He had asked for it, Remo thought, but he was a corrections officer. The irony was that after fighting to escape death row for someone else's crime, Remo Williams was about to pay the ultimate price for one he was forced to commit.

  Remo replayed the killing over and over in his mind. He remembered sticking the makeshift shank in the man's stomach and "jugging" it-twisting the rusty blade to maximize the internal damage. It replayed like a continuous loop film strip. He didn't realize he was drifting off to sleep.

  Remo dreamed. He was walking down a long treelined country road. The fog hung low, as if in an old Universal horror movie. Up ahead, the wrought-iron gates of a sprawling brick complex loomed. In his dream, Remo thought it was a prison, but as he approached, he saw the brass plate gleam against a stone pillar topped by a severe lion's head.

  It read: FOLCROFT SANITARIUM.

  The gates were padlocked. Remo leapt for them anxiously.

  "Let me in," Remo cried, rattling the chain. He pulled on the fence. It rattled too, but wouldn't budge. "Can anyone hear me? They're coming to get me."

  A splash of headlights illuminated him from behind. A long car turned the corner, its wheels lost in fog. It was a hearse. A white hearse. Remo attacked the fence with renewed ferocity.

  "Someone answer me! Please!" he cried.

  And through the mists on the other side of celllike fence floated a figure in saffron robes. The old Oriental. Not Lim Ting Tong. His name was Chiun and he pointed at Remo with stern, long-fingered nails.

  "Go back, white. I deny you. Never again will you enter these hallowed halls."

  "It's me. Remo. Don't you know me?"

  "I know you too well," Chiun intoned. "You have shamed me. Forever. I can bear to look upon your disgraceful form no longer."

  "But why? What did I do?"

  "Your elbow." The voice rumbled like doom.

  "What about it?" Remo said anxiously. Car doors slammed behind him. He was afraid to look back over his shoulder.

  "It was bent!" The Oriental's words dripped bitterness.

  And then, materializing from the mists was a tall vulturelike figure in black robes. Not an Oriental kimono, but a judge's funereal robes. The figure looked at Remo with a disapproving expression on his dry-as-dust features. Remo recognized the face. Judge Harold Smith.

  "He refuses to leave us alone," the Oriental told Smith.

  "Remo Williams," the judge pronounced, "I have sentenced you to death." Smith pointed beyond Remo. Remo turned. The white hearse was parked with its rear gate to him. It was open, and inside was a legless electric chair. And standing beside it, attired in a three-piece gray suit, was the executioner, his head smothered in a black leather hood.

  "Who are you?" Remo demanded.

  The executioner's voice was chilly. "You know me. We have done this before."

  Impelled by some irresistible urge he could not explain, Remo approached the executioner.

  "Please take a seat," the executioner said solemnly. His feet were enveloped by low-lying ground fog, like a ghost.

  "I know your voice," Remo said. Impulsively he reached for the hood. It came away, leaving the craggy, soft features of Harold Haines. But there was something wrong with the face. It didn't match the voice. Remo pulled at the man's suddenly obvious false nose. The face came away, and the hair. A mask. And behind it were the austere features of judge Harold Smith.

  "No!" Remo shrank from Smith's cold, unhuman eyes. He made a break for the gate. The old Oriental bounded to intecept him. He took the gates in his tiny hands as if to hold them in place against Remo's assault.

  Remo shouted in mid-course, feeling the ground pushing against his running toes. He ran into the stone wall and up the side, his toes shifting from the soft horizontal ground to the hard vertical wall as easily as from sand to blacktop.

  At the top, Remo paused, read the distance to the ground, and jumped. He floated to the grass as if weightless. Remo ran past the old Oriental, away from judge Harold Smith's grasping hands, and into the building. An elevator took him to the second floor and the door marked DIRECTOR. Remo pushed the door in.

  A man sat in a cracked leather chair behind a Spartan oak desk. The chair was turned to a big picture window that framed a large body of water, so that only the back of the man's head was visible over the high seat back. His hair was white.

  Then the chair slowly swiveled and the sharp profile came into view, continued until the shaky fluorescent lights made the round rimless eyeglasses momentarily opaque, and then the gray eyes looked at him reprovingly.

  Remo's eyes jumped to the nameplate: "Harold W. Smith, Director."

  Without a word, Smith pressed an intercom button and suddenly Remo was surrounded by burly orderlies in hospital green. They grabbed Remo by the arms and the legs and wrestled him to the floor, trying to force his arms into a straitjacket. Only after they had succeeded in locking Remo into the strangling garment did he see the electrical connectors on the jacket front. Then, to his horror, they were pushing into the office a complicated electronic device on a wheeled stand. Swiftly, grimly, they plugged heavy old-fashioned jacks into the connectors, and the voice of Harold W. Smith, as astringent and pitiless as lemon dishwater detergent, was asking Remo a doleful question. "Do you have any last words?"

  His last word was to scream the name "Chiun" in an anguished voice. And then a grinning orderly threw an antiquated knife-switch.

  "What's wrong?" Smith asked over Remo's howl of fear.

  "The damned jacks," the orderly barked. "We connected them wrong. Have to try again."

  "Do it!"

  Remo snapped awake. He was breathing like a drowning man. He couldn't see past the cold sweat that dripped down his forehead and into his eyes. His T-shirt was soaked. And cold. It stuck to his skin.

  Remo rolled out of bed. None of it made sense, but it was adding up in a weird way. Dreams and reality. They were mixed up in his mind. What was real? What was it Popcorn had said? Dead Men dream deepest.

  After Remo got a grip on himself, he walked over to the cell door. He placed his fingers against the electronic lock. It had worked in the dream. He started tapping. He felt foolish as he varied the rhythm of his fingers. He closed his eyes, trying to remember exactly how it worked in the dream.

  Almost at once, he felt something. A current, a vibration. He keyed into it like a concert pianist playing a half-forgotten chord.

  Miraculously, the door rolled aside. Remo stepped out into the corridor. He walked low, keeping to the far wall. The lights were out, which made it easier. He came to the first section-control door, found the lock with his fingers, and started tapping. He crouched under the glass window of the door.

  The door rolled aside. There were no guards visible beyond.

&nbs
p; A gasp came from a cell. Another man snored. A third crept to his cell bars for a better look. Remo met his eyes in the darkness.

  The man shot Remo a thumbs-up sign and said, "Good luck, Dead Man."

  Remo nodded and moved to the next door. Beyond the third door was a control booth. Remo peered up and saw that the guard on duty was sitting behind the Plexiglas reading a newspaper. His face was turned toward the corridor. But Remo had gotten this far. He had to go on.

  The door rolled open after a brief manipulation. Remo froze, exposed. In a dream, he remembered Chiun's exortation to stay still whenever he was within range of a man's peripheral vision. Remo waited till the guard finished the paper and looked up. The door had rolled shut automatically, and only when the guard was staring directly at him through almost impenetrable darkness did Remo advance on him.

  For some reason, Remo could see through the darkness like a gray haze. He moved on the booth like a jungle cat stalking, feeling the freedom in his muscles, feeling something else he hadn't felt since the day he woke up on Florida's death row: confidence.

  Remo saw that the only door to the booth was on the other side of the wall. There was no way in from this corridor.

  He decided on the bold approach and walked right up to the glass. Remo knocked on the Plexiglas. The guard jumped nearly a foot.

  Remo smiled at him disarmingly, as if nothing was wrong. He opened his mouth and made shapes with it, but no words. The guard's "What?" was dim but audible through the Plexiglas.

  Remo repeated his pantomime, pointing back toward the row.

  The guard gave him a terse, "Wait a minute," and stepped through the exit door. Remo waited tensely.

  A corridor door rolled back and the guard hurried in, demanding, "What is it?"

  Remo decked him with a sharp fist to the jaw. Swiftly he stripped the guard and exchanged pants with him. He donned his jacket over his apricot T-shirt. Then he ducked back, not bothering to hide the body. He knew that the quickest way out was through Grand Central, and beyond that, the yard. It was also the most dangerous way out of the facility.

  Walking with an easy grace, Remo moved from door to door, until he was in the cathedrallike Grand Central. The tiers of C Block towered above him like medieval dungeons designed by a condo-mentality architect.

  He kept to the shadows until he got to the door leading to the yard. It gave under his tapping fingers and Remo found himself on the threshold of the yard, and freedom.

  Out there, the lights were too bright for shadows to exist. He took a deep breath.

  Confidently Remo stepped out, knowing that his guard uniform would buy him a minute. Maybe more than a minute.

  He got only four paces when a searchlight swiveled in his direction. Remo shielded his face with an upraised forearm, a natural eye-protecting gesture that also concealed his identity.

  "Who goes there!" a voice called down.

  "It's me!" Remo said in a gargling voice. "Pepone."

  "What's the problem, Pepone?"

  "Dead Man on the loose. We got him cornered in the shower room. Warden says to watch the outside walls for a car or accomplice."

  "Right," the guard returned. The searchlight obligingly swiveled out of Remo's eyes and began to rake the grass beyond the fence.

  Remo stepped back into the exit door, and then, after a pause, he sprinted out for the wall.

  He ran stiffly at first, and then something in him clicked over. He hit the inner fence like a monkey going up, vaulting over the razor wire to drop to the narrow dirt corridor between it and the outer fence. He raced to the outer fence. A bullet spanked a rock beside his shoes.

  "Halt!" an emotion-charged voice ordered.

  Remo knew that the guards had standing shoot-to-kill orders-his uniform notwithstanding-for anyone caught where he was now. Going up the fence was suicide, so he went through the fence. He didn't think about what he was doing. It was as if his body was on autopilot. His hands took hold of fistfuls of chain link until he had a group that felt soft. He twisted violently. To his astonishment, the fence unraveled vertically, like a poorly knit sweater.

  Remo dashed through the opening. Shots cracked behind him. No one came close. He ran zigzag fashion, the way he had been taught in the Marines. Distantly a shotgun boomed once. Twice.

  Remo grinned wolfishly. He knew shotguns. At this range, the guard could shove the close-range weapon up his own ass for all the good it would do him.

  Remo could hear the cars starting up. The gate was ordered opened. Electric motors hummed as the gates rolled aside. The escapee warning siren started yowling.

  In the darkness, Remo doubled back. They would never expect that. He eased into the shelter of the gatehouse as one of the two guards on duty ran out, rifle in hand, and hopped into the first patrol car tearing out of the gate.

  While a procession of cars roared out and the siren wailed from the control tower, Remo slipped into the guard box and up behind the unsuspecting guard. He took the man's throat in both hands and squeezed until the blood to the brain was choked off long enough to cause unconsciousness. He couldn't remember where he'd learned that trick, but as he lowered the man's limp body to the floor, it was obvious he'd learned it well.

  Remo waved to the cars as they continued spitting out of the prison gates. Hours later, after they still had not returned and dawn was a smoky red crack on the eastern horizon, Remo casually picked up a workman's lunchbox and walked up the prison road as if going home after a long night of work.

  None of the tower guards bothered him. In his black and gray guard's uniform he was virtually invisible.

  It was the morning before his execution, but Remo felt, for the first time in a long time, like a free man. His first order of business, he decided, was to find out how long that had really been....

  Chapter 14

  The Master of Sinanju sat in the House of the Masters, surrounded by the yellowing scrolls of his ancestors.

  Somewhere in these histories, inscribed by hand by one of his ancestors-the guardians of the House of Sinanju-there must be a hint or clue as to how to deal with the problem of Remo.

  Chiun sighed. After many days of careful study, he had not found the answer he had returned to Sinanju to seek. It would have been so much easier to blame this on Remo's whiteness. He was the first white ever to be trained in the art of Sinanju. His foreign birth, his mongrel heritage, excused much of what was wrong with Remo Williams, his pupil and the only heir to the Sinanju tradition other than Chiun himself.

  No, this problem with Remo was that he fulfilled the prophecy of Shiva. His weaknesses were his strengths. The very thing that made him worthy of Sinanju was the thing that now threatened not only to tear him from Chiun but also to smash irrevocably the proud line that was the House of Sinanju, which stretched back into the mists of antiquity.

  Tiredly Chiun gathered up the parchment scrolls. He would study them later, for soon he must go down the shore road and treat with the waiting vessel of the Americans.

  As Chiun floated to his sandaled feet, there came a timid knocking at the door to his chambers. Girding his skirts, he spoke up in a tone befitting a Master of Sinanju.

  "Who dares disturb my study?" he demanded.

  "It is I, Pullyang," a quavering old voice replied. "Your faithful servant."

  "It had better be important," Chiun warned.

  "Two round-eyed whites stand on our sand, O Master. They come from the iron fish. They bear an important message for you."

  Chiun leapt to the door, but measured his strides so that it would not seem to his faithful caretaker that he was in an unseemly hurry to meet with the Americans.

  "Fortunately, you have come at a time when I could do with a walk," Chiun said importantly as he stepped out of the room.

  Pullyang, bent with age, a cold reed pipe in one hand, executed a full bow at Chiun's approach, getting down on all fours and touching the floor with his forehead.

  "I will carry word of your approach to them." P
ullyang said.

  "No. There is no need to expose yourself to their ugly big-nosed, round-eyed faces again. I will deal with them. No doubt they seek a boon, which I will of course deny them. Whites. They are forever seeking my wisdom. Sometimes even autographs."

  "What are autographs?" Pullyang stumbled over the unfamiliar foreign word as they emerged from the House of the Masters.

  "White Americans value them very highly," Chiun replied as he stepped down the hill to the water. "Yet they are merely the names of unimportant personages written on scraps of paper."

  "The ways of the outside world are those of the mad. "

  "Agreed," said Chiun, outpacing old Pullyang without seeming to hurry. It was several hours before the agreed-upon contact time. Chiun wondered if word had come from his emperor.

  They reached the beach, where two men stood shivering in silence.

  "Greetings, emissaries of Harold the Generous," Chiun told the two seamen. They stood beside a beached rubber craft. They exchanged uncomprehending glances at Chiun's salutation. Obviously they were mental defectives, like most who earned their livelihood by crossing the ocean's face instead of fishing from it.

  "Our skipper asked that we deliver this to you," one said, offering a square of paper.

  Chiun accepted the envelope. It was sealed. Inside was a thin sheet of yellow paper. The machine-typed message was short:

  Chiun:

  Vacation Extended Indefinitely. Do Not Return Until Contacted. R. W.'s Undercover Assignment Taking Longer Than Anticipated. Await Further Contact.

  The Director

  Chiun's wizened face puckered so that his wrinkles appeared to radiate even more wrinkles. He looked up at the seaman with clear, guileless eyes.

  "This urgent message commands me to return to America at once," he said brusquely.

  "We're ready to ferry you back to the boat, sir."

  "One moment," Chiun said, turning to the shore road, where Pullyang hung back, watching with unabashed curiosity.

  "Faithful Pullyang," Chiun called up in Korean. "Have the strongest men of the village bring me my green trunk. And then seal the House of the Masters. I am returning to America this very hour."