The Last Dragon td-92

by Warren Murphy

  "You a dentist?" asked Sonny.

  "No, I'm not a dentist."

  "What's that in real talk? Dyna-"

  "It means that in our infinite wisdom, we've decided that your complaints are not without merit," Remo said, choosing his words with Raymond Burr in mind.

  "Not without merit. That means what?"

  "That means, yes, the 247 appeals we've filed on your behalf claiming that 15 years on death row constitutes cruel and unusual punishment have been deemed sound, and we have decided to take emergency measures to remedy your plight."

  "Plight? We got plights?"

  "Situation. Or whatever Perry Mason would say."

  "Our situation is that we're stuck in stir," Orvis grunted. "Hah!"

  "And I'm the remedy," said Remo.

  "What's that?"

  "The CURE," said Remo.

  "They letting us go?" wondered DeWayne.

  "No, I'm pulling you out of here."

  "ACLU can do that?"

  "If the four of you will kindly keep your voices down long enough for me to get your cell doors open," Remo said.

  Immediately everyone shut up. Except Sonny, who grunted like a pig and asked, "You got the key?"

  Remo held up his index finger. "Right here."

  "That's a finger. And this here's an electronic lock. You gotta have one of them magnetic credit card things."

  "Pass cards," Remo corrected. "And I don't need one because I got a specially trained finger."

  And Remo began tapping the lock housing. At first tentatively, then with increasing rhythm.

  There was a red light on the lock. It winked out, and immediately below it a green light came on. Remo knew he had exactly five seconds to open the door, before the electronic mechanism automatically shut down.

  Remo yanked open the door and said, "Hurry it up!"

  Sonny Smoot came out in a cloud of body odor.

  Remo went to the next door. Boggs's. Smoot crowded close, his eyes intent upon Remo's finger.

  "You're in my light," Remo told him, breathing through his mouth so Smoot's microscopic scent particles would not enter his sensitive nostrils, to lodge there for the next seventy-two hours like petrified snot.

  "Ain't no light. It's lights out."

  "Don't argue with a trained professional," Remo said.

  Sonny Smoot obligingly went around to Remo's opposite side and hovered there like an upright turd.

  Remo worked the lock. He had the rhythm now, so the red light was replaced by green in jig time.

  Orvis Boggs came out.

  "I can't believe it! Free!"

  "Not until we get past the guards," said Remo, attacking DeWayne Tubble's cell door now. It came open and Tubble came out.

  Last to exit was Roy Short-sleeve, the last person on death row. He had been a participant in the lawsuit against the state of Utah, citing their lengthy sojourn on death row as cruel and unusual punishment, and contrary to the eighth amendment of the Constitution.

  He had one question. "Is this legal?"

  "Only if we don't get caught," Remo told him.

  "Then I'm staying."

  "You are?"

  "Breaking jail won't clear my name. I'm innocent."

  "Me, too!" said Sonny Smoot.

  "Innocent, that's me."

  "Likewise."

  "But I'm really, really innocent," Roy Shortsleeve said quietly.

  Remo looked into the man's soft eyes. They were dark and wide-pupiled as a cat's, and his long, haggard face was sincere.

  "Okay," Remo said. "You get to stay. But only because you're innocent."

  "Wait a minute," said Sonny Smoot. "ACLU will bust us out of stir, but not an innocent guy?"

  "That's the ACLU way," Remo said. "Innocent guys aren't that much of a challenge. Besides, I thought you were innocent, too."

  "We are," said Orvis Boggs. "We just ain't innocent the way Roy's innocent."

  "Yeah," DeWayne added. "We were born innocent and got a little lost, is all. Roy stayed innocent clear through to today." He grinned in the gloom. "That's why he's gonna eat needle, and we're gonna sleep with whores tonight."

  "Only if you follow me, and do exactly what I say," Remo said flatly.

  "Can that finger get us past the guards?" Orvis asked.

  "It got me in, didn't it?" Remo countered.

  "Oh."

  As Remo led them away, Sonny had a question.

  "Where can I get a finger like that?"

  "This is an ACLU-issue finger. You can't just go into a Walmart and buy it."

  "Can a guy boost it, then?" No.

  In the darkness, the faces of Orvis, DeWayne, and Sonny grew long with disappointment.

  "Well, maybe I won't ever be back this way again," Orvis allowed.

  "Guarantee it," said Remo, pausing at an area-control door.

  There was a guard seated beside it. On the floor. His head was lolling to one side and he looked peaceful and contented sitting there on the shiny floor.

  Sonny grunted. "Hey, I know that screw. He done me a bad turn once. Think I'll cut his face."

  "You cut his face," Remo warned, "and my finger will turn off the red light in your eyes."

  "Can your finger do that?"

  "My finger can do whatever I want it to," Remo told the man.

  The three dead men exchanged looks in the dark as Remo went to work on the lock.

  As he tapped in the darkness, Orvis whispered to DeWayne. "Maybe we should just jug this guy and bite his finger off."

  "What if it won't work after it's off?" asked DeWayne.

  Orvis grinned broadly. "Then I'll swallow it down. That way it won't go to waste."

  "You'd eat a man's finger?"

  "Sure."

  "Thought you only ate little girls."

  Sonny backed away. "Yeah. You queer, or something?"

  "No, I ain't no queer. You know that."

  "I can hear every word you say," Remo called back.

  "Your ears magic, too?" Orvis demanded.

  "I can hear you fart before you do."

  This impressed the trio. "Forget what we said about that finger, man," DeWayne said quickly. "That your finger. You just let it do its stuff and don't worry about us none."

  "Much obliged," said Remo, and the green pinpoint light came on. They passed through.

  Remo took point. In the gloom, he did something that would have astonished and frightened the three trailing convicts. He closed his eyes.

  Remo could see fairly well in the darkness. But for what he had to do, his eyes would be less useful than the magnets in his brain.

  For over twenty years now, Remo had been aware of the magnets. He never thought of them as magnets, but as pointers. Since learning to breathe properly through his entire body and not just his lungs, he had been able to find his way in complete darkness by paying attention to the pointers in his head.

  Remo wanted to go north. By closing his eyes, he knew exactly where north was. He was walking north.

  It wasn't until recently, after he had read a magazine article claiming scientists had discovered that the human brain was riddled with tiny crystalline biological magnets, that Remo realized the pointers were magnets. If he had thought about it at all, he would have realized they had to be magnets.

  According to the scientists, the magnets were present in the brains of many mammalian species, including man. They explained salmon returning to their spawning places, bird migrations, and even how the lost family cat could find its owners, who had moved clear across the country. Remo couldn't quite make the leap of faith that last example required, but he could accept natural magnets, which the scientists had said also explained how people got brain tumors from living too close to high-tension wires and other electromagnetic sources. The magnetic fields screwed up the delicate balance of the magnetic webs, causing the tumors.

  Remo had no tumors. He didn't need a CAT scan or an X-ray to tell him that. His own brain told him it was tumorless. And that the magne
ts were guiding him unerringly north.

  Other things guided him, too.

  He felt a faint breeze on his cruel face and exposed hands that told of air currents coming from under doors. Remo had memorized every door on the way in. And every twist in the path. He knew exactly where he was. All he had to do was escort the three suffering butchers to the garbage disposal area.

  "This ain't the way to the front door," said Orvis Boggs, a trace of suspicion darkening his voice.

  "We're not going out the front," Remo said.

  "It ain't the way out back, either," DeWayne muttered uneasily.

  "The front and the back are always the best guarded places in a prison," Remo explained with more patience than he felt. "My ACLU bosses made a careful study of this before sanctioning a dynamic extraction."

  Sonny winced at the word extraction, and felt his bicuspids.

  "You do this before?" he asked.

  "Actually, this is my first time," Remo said.

  "What if we get caught?" Sonny wondered.

  "We blame my superiors, and throw ourselves on the mercy of the guards."

  "We do?" said DeWayne.

  "The ACLU isn't exactly the CIA," Remo said pointedly. "It's every man for himself."

  "I like that philosophy," said Orvis.

  "I knew you would," said Remo, suddenly opening his eyes.

  They were on the threshold of the central crossroads of the prison. Most prisons had central crossroads, much like traffic interchanges and performing the same function.

  Remo knew this well. He had twice found himself on death row, once in his earlier life as patrolman Remo Williams, when he had been framed for the murder of a lowlife pusher, and the second time, when he had been warehoused in a Florida prison, his memory wiped clean, because of a screwup in the organization that had framed him in the first place.

  That organization was not, and never had been, the ACLU.

  Oh, there were some letters in common between the ACLU and CURE. But a world of difference lay between. The ACLU stood for some self-appointed mandate to meddle in an already muddled judical system, such as taking up the cause of a knot of death row inmates first by helping them stave off their lawful punishment-dragging the appeals process on ad nauseum-and then using the extended period as a justification to let them off the hook, citing the constitutional guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment" as an argument.

  CURE had been set up to deal with situations like those caused by the ACLU. CURE was no anagram, but a prescription for America's ills. Conceived by a president who died in office too young, his promise unfulfilled, it was set up to balance out the often imbalanced scales of blind justice.

  Remo was CURE's enforcement arm-judge, jury, and executioner if need be. Today, he was just executioner, thank you. The judge and jury had done their job long ago. Remo's task was to see to it their hard work and sacrifice had not been in vain.

  At the crossroad, Remo looked through the square glass window in the door. On the other side was a guard in a glass-enclosed booth. He was preoccupied with a copy of Playboy.

  Remo went to work on the door lock, using the same technique that had opened the other locks. He couldn't explain it, any more than he could have explained the magnets in his head, but his sensitive fingers detected the current that flowed through the lock mechanism. Once found, it was a matter of tapping in harmony until the current did what Remo wanted.

  Soon, the door surrendered. Remo slipped it open. No alarm sounded. It had not sounded when he had entered, either.

  "Stay close behind me and no sudden moves," Remo warned.

  "Got it," said Orvis.

  "You the man with the magic digit," added DeWayne.

  "So far," muttered Sonny.

  They crept out. The crossroads were well lit.

  That was when the others got a good look at Remo.

  He was a tall, lean man, with dark eyes under dark hair and cheekbones as pronounced as those on a skull. His age was indeterminate, and even looking at his face the three dead men could tell there wasn't an ounce of unnecessary fat on his catlike body. He wore a gray-blue uniform with the words Sanitation Dept. over the blouse pocket.

  "Hey! How come he's dressed like a garbageman?" Sonny Smoot grunted.

  "Sanitation engineer," Remo corrected. "And it's a disguise."

  "How come you didn't bring no disguises for us?"

  "Yeah," Orvis chimed in. "I want a drum majorette's outfit-preferably with the bitch still in it."

  The others decided they wanted the same. Their metallic laughter made Remo want to fuse their empty skulls together right then and there. But if he did that, no way would the ACLU get the credit they so richly deserved.

  "Great!" said Remo, seeing the guard start. Remo crossed the space to the guard booth like a shot.

  The door was locked, but the guard solved that problem. He buzzed himself out, dragging a riot gun.

  Remo met him at the door. To the guard, it seemed as if Remo had just sprouted up from the bare door like some gray-blue weed.

  Remo relieved the man of his weapon and his consciousness, using one hand for each task. Holding the guard by the back of his neck, where Remo's hard fingers had found and squeezed down nerve centers, he lowered him to the hard floor.

  Sonny and the others came up, and looked down at the slumbering guard.

  "That's some finger," Sonny breathed.

  "Can we kill this one?" asked DeWayne.

  "No," said Remo.

  "Can we boost his fingers?" Orvis asked. "You know, to practice what you just done."

  "Practice with your own fingers," said Remo. "We gotta shake a leg, if we're going to make it out by dawn. "

  "So how come you're dressed ike a garbageman?" Sonny wondered.

  "You'll see when we get there," said Remo, growing tired of questions.

  "What will we see?"

  "You'll see."

  "When will we get there?"

  "You'll know it by the smell," said Remo, coming to the conclusion that if the educational system had taught these losers to think with their brains, maybe they wouldn't be sitting on death row. Then again, maybe not, noticing Sonny gnawing on a whetstone he had brought along.

  They came at last to an out-of-the-way corridor area that smelled sour and maggoty.

  "This here's the garbage room," Orvis pointed out.

  "You got it," said Remo.

  "It smells," said Sonny.

  "You should talk."

  "Huh?"

  Remo had been forced to lock the door behind him, and it was still locked. He opened it the hard way. It required a real key of the insert-and-turn variety, so he couldn't manipulate any electrical timer. He punched it. The door jumped inward, taking the lock-set and part of the jamb with it.

  They slipped inside.

  The place was a welter of sealed garbage cans and trash bags, and there was an old dumpster by the single loading door.

  The back of a filthy garbage truck had been backed into the dock. The black maw of its cold steel belly gaped, the slablike sweep blade in the up position, like a fat guillotine.

  "In you go," invited Remo, gesturing to the truck. His deep-set eyes, flat as river-bottom stones, were unreadable.

  Orvis made a disgusted face. "What, you mean crawl in with the garbage?"

  "Look," Remo said impatiently, "The ACLU went to a lot of trouble to set this up. We had to steal a garbage truck and a uniform for me to wear, work out timetables, and drill for weeks. Everything has been worked out to the tiniest detail. This is Thursday morning. The truck comes every Thursday morning to haul trash. Okay, we're hauling trash."

  "But there's garbage in there," Orvis said unhappily.

  "I have to make it look good, don't I?" Remo said. "I already emptied half the barrels into the back so the screws would see that I was working."

  "I ain't sittin' in no garbage," Sonny said. "I want to sit up front with you."

  "The gate guards know only one dri
ver drove the freaking truck in. Don't you think he'll get suspicious if two of us drive out?"

  "Tell him I'm your brother."

  "He'll know I'm not because we don't smell like brothers," Remo said.

  Sonny frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Eventually, Remo convinced the trio to enter the truck. They clambered in gingerly and squatted down on their haunches, holding their noses and looking unhappy-except Sonny, who seemed either to enjoy the smell or not to notice it.

  "Hold that pose," Remo said and, knocking off an aluminum lid, lifted up one of the still-full cans. He brought it to the truck's maw.

  Three pairs of hands went whoa.

  "Hey, what are you doing?" DeWayne hissed.

  "Putting in the rest of the garbage," Remo said reasonably.

  "But we're in here!"

  "Look, if I only take half of the garbage, the guards will catch on."

  "Okay, let us out and then put in the stupid garbage. After that, we'll get back in."

  "You don't understand. What if they look in the back of the truck and see you guys?"

  "Tell him we're your cousins," Sonny suggested.

  "It's like this, I throw the garbage in or we call the whole thing off. You guys don't know how many Mission: Impossible reruns my superiors had to sit through to come up with a plan as foolproof as this."

  "You say this is foolproof?" Orvis said.

  "Guaranteed not to fail."

  "Okay. But watch the clothes. I didn't take time to pack."

  "Did I mention all dry cleaning bills are on the ACLU?" Remo asked.

  The three immediately brightened.

  And Remo threw the contents of the can in their beaming faces. He had deliberately saved the worst, smelliest cans for this moment.

  As he flung refuse, inundating the trio, Remo mentally called off the names of their victims, adding after each, "This is for you."

  Eventually, the three were buried in rotting cafeteria leftovers.

  Remo called into the malodorous pile. "That's the last of it. You guys still with me "

  A knot of rancid cabbage seemed to say, "Yeah."

  "Okay, I gotta close the sweep blade now."

  "You mean the hydraulic thing?" DeWayne asked.

  "That's it."

  "Isn't that kinda dangerous?"

  "Only to garbage," said Remo, climbing to the side and giving the lever a yank.