"You don't," Remo informed him blandly.
Tortilli missed the sarcasm. "It's just that I hear things," he persisted. "Some true, some not. People confide in me 'cause I'm at the vanguard of the new culture."
"You look just like the ass end of the old one," Remo said. "And what was our rule about annoying Mr. Driver?"
Tortilli instantly dummied up.
The last time he'd spoken out of turn, Remo had followed through on his roof-rack threat. Tortilli had spent fifteen minutes up in the rain clutching on for dear life as Remo tore down the highway.
His ugly purple suit was stained dark with water. He never thought polyester could absorb so much. On the floor, water pooled at his soles. His Skechers were soaked through. Dead bugs filled the gaps in his teeth.
Thankful to be in out of the cold and rain, the young director remained mute as Remo headed into a less reputable part of town. He offered directions with a pointed finger.
Along the street on which they now drove, squalid tenements scratched at the joyless earlymorning gray sky. The tiny front yards were pools of rain-spattered mud. In spite of the deteriorating neighborhood, the sidewalk seemed fairly new. The street itself was in good repair.
Remo suspected that the bombed-out look was affected. It had as much to do with Generation-X atmosphere as anything else. In the new counterculture, disrepair was chic.
"Mmm-mmm-mmin," Tortilli hummed abruptly. His bugging eyes were frantic. He tapped the dashboard.
"I told you to go while you were on the roof," Remo reminded him.
Tortilli shook his head violently. "Mmm-mmmmmm."
When Tortilli began to nod and point desperately, Remo realized they'd reached their destination. He pulled to the curb between a pair of matching rusted Ford Escorts.
"Okay, limited talking privilege is restored," he said to the shivering director. "Which one is it?" Quintly Tortilli scrunched up his already overscrunched face. It resembled a tightly balled fist.
"The guy I called said it was that one," he said. His pointed chin singled out a four-story building down the block. "But he could be wrong. He's just some guy I met in a bar who likes my movies. He said the group in there bragged about doing the sorority girls in Florida, the ones they found hanging from that tree. But they weren't in on the others. At least not according to my source."
Remo popped the door. "Then they'll only pay once," he promised thinly.
His tone made Tortilli shiver all the more.
As Remo rounded the curb, Quintly Tortilli opened his own door a crack. He jutted his protruding lips through the narrow opening.
"You gonna be okay?" Tortilli asked in a whisper. "My boy says there's a whole gang in there."
"Stay here," Remo said in reply. He slapped the director's door shut.
Tortilli had barely enough time to pull his pursed lips to safety. Just in case, he crossed his eyes and did a rapid inventory. He was relieved to find both lips still attached below his drooping, broad nose.
Trembling at the damp and cold, he glanced back up.
In both directions, the sidewalk that ran before the row of crumbling tenements was empty. Remo was already gone.
"Shit, a guy moves like that ought to be on film," Quintly Tortilli muttered, impressed. Suddenly recalling Remo's objection to his cursing, he bit his lip. "I hope his freakin' puritanism don't make me lose my knack for gritty, true-to-life urban dialogue," he said worriedly.
Frowning across every unnatural angle of his twisted face, the famous director began patting his soaked suit jacket. He needed a cigarette.
LIFE SUCKED.
Leaf Randolph knew it with certainty. He'd come to this drear conclusion during a single, drug-inspired epiphanic instant on his fifteenth birthday.
Until that moment of insight nearly ten years earlier, Leaf had been so consumed with the mundaneness of life that he hadn't really been aware of its pervasive suckiness.
Back then Leaf's father programmed for Macroware-the software giant based in Seattle. The Randolph patriarch was always too busy trying to eliminate the bugs du jour from the company's latest behind-schedule software to notice anything about his son's life. The fact that Leaf had become a junior high-school junkie wasn't even a blip on his radar.
Even though Leaf's mother had to know something was amiss, she turned a blind eye to his drug use. As his habit worsened, she retreated further into blissful ignorance. Whenever he was exceptionally stoned, she'd take to polishing the furniture. By the time Leaf was thirteen, the Randolph family had to wear sunglasses to Thanksgiving dinner in order to dull the glare from the credenza.
On that fateful day that would alter his outlook on life forever, Leaf and his two closest friends, Ben "Brown" Brownstein and Jackie Fams, had scored some Scandinavian Mist from a dealer who'd just smuggled it back from Europe. The stuff was powerful.
"Man, no wonder them Vikings, like, kicked the Pilgrims' ass," Brown commented as he exhaled his first puff of the extrastrong European marijuana.
He was perched on Mr. Randolph's tidy workbench. An electric guitar lay behind him.
Since it was Seattle and they were teenagers, the three of them were just expected to be in a band. Brown had gotten the expensive instrument two birthdays ago. He had yet to figure out how to tune it.
"Dude, don't Bogart it," complained Jackie when Brown started to take another hit. Grumbling, Brown passed off the joint to him. "Try not to drool all over it this time," he muttered.
Only when it came time to pass the marijuana back to where it had started-the soft, uncallused hands of Leaf Randolph-did the other two boys notice something was wrong.
Leaf was staring into the corner of the garage where his untouched drum set had been gathering dust for the past five years. But as they studied the expression on their friend's face, they realized that Leaf was looking at a place far beyond the confines of the two-car garage.
Since Leaf had been first to try the weed, his eerie silence and glazed expression were troubling to the others.
"Dude, what's up?" Jackie asked, afraid this
Euro junk was some kind of secret Russian podpeople plot to hollow out the brains of America's youth. He didn't realize that for years MTV had been doing a more effective job at this than the most diabolically inspired Communist mad scientist.
When Leaf spoke, his words were a croak. "It sucks, man," he said.
Jackie and Brown relaxed. Their brains-such as they were-were still their own.
"Are you shittin' me, dude?" Brown scoffed. "This shit is, like, the best."
"Not this, dude," Leaf said, accepting the joint in his clammy hand. "This. " As he took a massive toke, he swept his hand grandly. "The whole suckhole world."
"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.
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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.
"We were paid."
Remo blinked. "Paid?" he said.
"Yeah." Leaf nodded. "This guy called me on the phone one night. Told me what we should do and where we should do it." He glanced at his dead compatriots. His frightened eyes grew sick. He closed them, hoping full disclosure would buy him some of Remo's promised mercy points.
Remo's thoughts were beyond Leaf and his companions. He was right back to his own suggestion to Smith that this was a scheme to enrich Cabbagehead's backers.
"You recognize his voice?" he pressed.
"No. He said he knew about me, is all."
"If he paid you, how'd you get the money?"
"He mailed it here."
Remo glanced around. The place was a shambles. Empty fast-food wrappers and dirty laundry were spread everywhere, interspersed with a multitude of used needles.
"I don't suppose you filed the envelope?" Remo asked.
Leaf bit his lip. "That was weeks ago. I tossed it somewhere. But my mom's come to clean once since then. I guess it could still be here." Leaf hugged himself for warmth. "Weird about that Cabbagehead flick that came out after. It was like seeing myself on screen."
Remo turned back to him. "You didn't know about the movie beforehand?" he said.
Leaf shook his head. "No way. When those other ones happened-like that family in Maryland-I thought, wow
." He tipped his head. "You think someone got paid there, too?"
As he leaned his head to one side in a questioning pose, Leaf's exposed neck was too tempting an invitation to refuse. Remo dropped his hand against the drug addict's throat.
A short, meaty buzz, and Leaf's head thudded to the floor. His body joined it a split second later.
Hands on hips, Remo surveyed the grisly scene, a troubled frown across his dark features.
There hadn't been a lone group of killers. In spite of Tortilli's source, Remo assumed this would be the case. But now this seemed too organized to be the work of any of the dolts he'd seen at Cabbagehead. Something was going on here. Something that somehow seemed bigger than either he or Smith had originally suspected.
Turning on his heel, he headed back up the mossy stairs to the backyard. On the flickering television, the warm pastel colors of Tipsy and Doh reflected against the dull plastic surfaces of the many scattered syringes.
AS REMO REACHED the sidewalk out front, a thought occurred to him.
"Dammit," he muttered suddenly.
"What's wrong?"
Quintly Tortilli was standing next to Remo's car, a cigarette hanging desperately from his lips.
"I probably should have asked how much they got paid," Remo said. "Oh, well. Let's go." He rounded the car.
Tortilli stayed on the sidewalk.
"You did more than talk, didn't you?" he said knowingly over the roof of the car, an excited gleam in his eye. "You kacked them, didn't you?"
Remo popped the driver's-side door. "Remo leaving," he warned. "Is bad director coming, too?"
"No way, man," Quintly Tortilli said, shaking his head excitedly. "You've got real-live dead bodies piled back there and you expect me to leave? I only get to see fake violence in my line of work. This is like a fu-" He caught himself. "It's like a dream come true."
Flinging his cigarette to the mud, Tortilli spun away from the car. He fairly danced down the street, a gangly figure in a soaking-wet leisure suit.
As Tortilli disappeared around the alley beside Leaf Randolph's tenement, Remo climbed behind the wheel.
For a moment, he considered waiting for Quintly Tortilli. After all, the director had already given him a lead. And this was a dangerous neighborhood. On the other hand, Remo would be doing the entire moviegoing public a favor if he abandoned Tortilli and allowed the natural savagery of an area like this to take its course.
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