Sue Me td-66

by Warren Murphy

  But Francine Waller knew who was really responsible. She was. If she had reported what she had done, the second aircraft might not have gone up in flames.

  And she couldn't live with that. She couldn't live with knowing that she could have saved lives but chose instead to keep herself comfortable. Even the new motorbike she had won in a contest she didn't remember entering failed to console her. Nothing was worth anything until she cleared her conscience.

  So she took her new Yamasaki motorbike with the teardrop gas tank and the super deluxe chrome exhausts and drove it to the police station. But on the only stretch of open highway, the bike picked up speed because the throttle jammed, and the brakes failed.

  Francine thought at first of jumping off, heading the bike into a tree and saving herself. At fifteen miles an hour there would be a few broken bones. But the Yamasaki was up to twenty, and then thirty-five, a killing speed on a motorbike. By the time she was at fifty, Francine Waller was holding on for her life. At eighty-five miles an hour, when she had to make the most minor turn, the bike spilled her like a bag of potatoes flying unprotected into a concrete wall.

  The only thing left unbroken was her crash helmet. Her neck snapped, four ribs jammed into her heart, and her spinal cord was so badly damaged that had she lived, she wouldn't have been able to wiggle anything below her chin ever again.

  But her parents were not without recourse in the death of their precious daughter. An attorney for Palmer, Rizzuto a famous Los Angeles negligence firm, said others had died in the same tragic way. They were handling the estate of a famous actor who had died on a Yamasaki just like the Wallers' daughter.

  "It seems there is a retention ring on the throttle that has to be replaced or the bike in some cases just keeps on accelerating. In some cases the driver becomes a human cannonball. They are not safe machines. "

  "Isn't this ambulance-chasing?" the mother asked. The young lawyer was smooth, as though he were rehearsed.

  "You could call it that. And you'd be right. But look at who's doing the chasing. We're Palmer, Rizzuto and we redress the damages done by large corporations to otherwise helpless individuals. You can go to any lawyer you want. But no law firm has won as many judgments, large judgments, as we have. And I might add righteous judgments. Yamasaki knew they had problems, but they thought it was cheaper to pay off some small negligence suits than to change a design. And they will continue to operate like that if people don't make it too expensive for them to do otherwise. We don't think they should get away with it. And we don't think you should let them get away with it."

  "Who are you?" asked the mother. "Palmer, Rizzuto, or Schwartz?"

  "Neither, ma'am. I'm Benson, as I introduced myself. I find that many of the grieving don't even hear the name at first."

  "Tell me, Mr. Benson, how many grieving homes have you entered?"

  "It would be a lot fewer, ma'am, if the companies knew they had to pay more when they failed to take reasonable safeguards. "

  "How many, Mr. Benson?"

  "I'm afraid I've lost count."

  "Do you really believe that bull you've just given me?" said Francine's mother. It was too hard to listen to nonsense when her young daughter had been taken from her so abruptly. All her illusions of a nice world had ended at Francine's grave.

  "We've got this company cold. We can do the best job. We won't charge you a penny, but only do it on contingency. "

  "And how much for taking the case on contingency?"

  "Fifty percent."

  "Isn't thirty usual?"

  "We get more for you at fifty percent than you'd get at seventy percent with someone else. Palmer, Rizzuto has a record of securing judgments almost twenty percent above the national average."

  "You're a damned vulture, young man. But I suppose the grieving now require vultures. All right. I agree. Make them pay for Francine."

  "You won't regret it," said young Mr. Benson.

  It was not a major transaction for a firm as large as Palmer, Rizzuto But it was recorded by a secretary whose job was to enter all new accounts in her computer. Strangely, it also required her to list the time and date a lawyer was sent to the stricken family, when the assignment was given, and who made it.

  She never knew why this was required of her, and in a firm as large as Palmer, Rizzuto no one noticed a lowly secretary performing yet another computer function, especially since most of the employees didn't understand how the computer system worked anyway, and those who did assumed either Mr. Palmer or Mr. Rizzuto or Mr. Schwartz had asked for it.

  And so Francine's death and the date and time of her mother's subsequent retention of a lawyer went into the computer. And of course, no one knew someone was taking the information out. No one knew it went into a central file and became a statistic. And this statistic would have made the young lawyer proud of his ability to sell the services of the firm.

  The statistics also showed that so effective was Palmer, Rizzuto that it had put several firms into bankruptcy. It was a symptom of a national problem. America had become so litigious that some industries faced imminent collapse. In hospitals, specialties were dying because it was too expensive for doctors to bear the skyrocketing cost of malpractice insurance. Obstetrics, the bringing of babies into the world, might very well disappear as a practice in America. But it was not a crisis yet and the man looking at the statistics felt he was not sure how to cope with it.

  Anyway, Harold W. Smith, head of top-secret CURE, had more important problems. His killer arm had gone insane.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he didn't care if anyone thought he was crazy. He had just realized the world was crazy. Maybe he was the only sane man in the universe. He didn't care about being the only one. He did care about staying sane.

  Remo made sure the oven was lit before he went through the house looking for the person to put into it. It was a simple two-story frame house in Chillicothe, Ohio, but it had a few added attractions. Like trapdoors. Secret chambers carved into supporting beams. Double walls to hide behind.

  Dope dealers had used it for a while until it was occupied by a petty criminal named Walter Hanover, who had most recently acted as a go-between for a kidnapped boy and his parents. Somehow lawenforcement authorities had bungled the ransom and the parents were out $300,000 and the boy was gone. Remo had seen the weeping parents on television, saying they had mortgaged everything to get their son back and now there was nothing left to lure the kidnappers. No law could touch Walter Hanover even though he now sported a new red convertible, yet had no visible means of support.

  Walter's new convertible was sitting proud and shiny in the driveway when Remo approached Walter's house despite all warnings from upstairs about how insane all this was, that he had no business in this affair.

  Walter Hanover sat on the porch smoking a strange cigarette that seemed to make him exceptionally mellow.

  Remo put his right hand on the fender.

  "Hey, man, fingers leave prints. That's fresh polished," said Walter Hanover.

  Remo smiled. He closed his fingers ever so smoothly, sensing the metal under the pads, knowing each finger ridge could collect tiny particles of polish, hearing a tiny squeaking as the flesh compressed first the polish, then the paint, then the metal under the paint until there was a crack so loud it felt like steel wool scrubbing the eardrums, and Walter Hanover clasped his hands to his ears and then shook his frizzy blond head in astonishment. The right fender of his shiny new car looked as though someone had grabbed a handful of it and crushed it like children's clay.

  Standing beside it with a maniacal smile was a dark-haired man in his early thirties. There was nothing exceptional about him. He was thin, with thick wrists, dark eyes, high cheekbones, wearing a dark T-shirt and light pants, and very casually with his right hand he had crushed the right-front fender of Walter Hanover's new convertible.

  "Hi," said Remo.

  "Whadya do that for?"

  "So when I tell you I am go
ing to stuff you into your oven, you'll believe me."

  "Wait here," Walter said, and disappeared into the house. It was a wooden house and therefore gave off undistorted vibrations. Metal warped sound. The cells in wood purified it. These very light sound waves that people thought they didn't really hear gave them the illusion of knowing someone was in their house by extrasensory perception.

  But there was nothing extrasensory about it. People were just not aware of those senses, or rather never learned to be.

  Remo had been trained over the years so that now he knew he walked among people who had never been introduced to their bodies, dead bodies, unused bodies, improperly used bodies, clogged with the fat of animals, distracted by worry, overwhelmed by fear, slogging along using less than eight percent of everything available to them.

  So Remo knew the house and the ground he stood on and knew Walter Hanover had not fled through a rear window but was hiding somewhere in the house.

  "Coming, Walter," Remo called out pleasantly, and walked up the steps to the porch, and waited listening to the wood in the house reverberate with his coming. Then he went into the kitchen and turned on the oven.

  "Walter, I'm turning on the oven," Remo sang out.

  Remo glanced at the dials and the buttons. It was a new form of oven, made simple for the housewife who hated gadgets. Remo pressed the button to turn on the oven, and the grill light lit up. He pressed what he thought was the grill-light button and the timer went off. He pressed all the buttons and the oven announced it was cleaning itself.

  Remo sensed a lot of heat coming from the oven, and that was good enough. He was not going to bake a cake, after all.

  "Walter, I'm coming. Ready or not. Here I come," Remo sang out. He paused a moment, and his senses drew him to the second floor. He moved swiftly up the steps and found himself in a hallway with four closed doors. He opened every door. The rooms were furnished in pre-junk. Glass tables with wirebacked chairs, and pottery lamps that looked more like the solids from a septic tank than hand-molded clay.

  Walter was not hiding in any of the rooms. But he was very close.

  "I know you're here, Walter. Come on out. The oven is ready for you."

  Remo felt a rustling behind a wall with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it. Someone had framed what had to be the worst movie poster ever made. A man was hanging from the Statue of Liberty, and he looked as stiff as a grade-school entry in an art show. The body didn't go with the head, and the head didn't go with the hands, and there were more people at the bottom of the poster getting their names mentioned than on any other poster he had ever seen. In fact this movie had more producers than World War II or the fall of the Roman Empire.

  Walter Hanover was hiding somewhere in the wall under the picture. Obviously the picture hid some button or lever. Remo pressed both palms against the picture, steadied his breathing, and then simply pushed the picture back through the wall as shards of plaster and wood strips exploded into dust.

  Walter Hanover cringed in the little once-hidden crawl space behind the wall. Remo picked him up by the neck.

  "Got you," said Remo pleasantly.

  "Hey, man, who are you? What are you?"

  "I am the voice of righteousness. The good fellow doing the good deed. Your friendly helpful neighbor."

  "You're crazy, right? I hear crazy men have incredible strength sometimes."

  "I am the only sane man in the universe."

  "Now I know you're crazy. Whaddaya want?"

  "There's a boy missing. His family paid three hundred thousand dollars."

  "They buy you?"

  "Yes, they did."

  "What'd they pay?"

  "I think their taxes. They paid their taxes and they lived a good life and I think they deserve a good deal better than they got."

  "You with the government?"

  "In a way, yes."

  "Then you can't touch me. I got my rights."

  "Ah, my good man," said Remo, lifting Walter Hanover like luggage and carrying him with his feet trailing down the stairs like shirts that had been improperly packed. "You have a problem. I only sort of work for the government."

  "You're crazy. "

  "Walter," said Remo when they reached the oven that was still cleaning itself, "you know where the boy is. I'm sure of it. I want to know."

  "Hey, man, I don't have to testify. There's no law in the world that'll make me testify. And besides, that oven is locked because it's cleaning itself."

  Remo punched a hole in the oven door big enough to fit Walter through. At that moment Walter Hanover, for the first time in his life, considered his civic duty. He liked Remo and he wanted to help.

  "The problem is they got the kid down in Corsazo. They sold him to some brothel."

  "Did you help?"

  "No. No way. I swear. By my mother's sainted grave. There's no way to get the kid back. That's a foreign country."

  "We'll see what we can do, won't we?"

  "I hate foreign countries."

  "Do you like roasted ass of Hanover?" asked Remo. Walter did not. Walter agreed to fly down to Corsazo with Remo, where Remo left Walter in a hotel room. Walter did not flee. Walter would have fled, but the thin man with the thick wrists named Remo had put pressure on the back of his neck in some strange way that made Walter's legs as flabby and useless as overcooked spaghetti.

  "Just want to keep you here until I find the boy."

  "This is Corsazo, man. They're gonna cut your throat. And then I'm gonna be stuck here."

  "That's the least of your worries."

  "Yeah, what's a worse worry, man?"

  "That they don't cut my throat," said Remo. Finding a brothel in Corsazo was like finding a hamburger at McDonald's. The small Mexican town served as a magnet for American vice. There was nothing Americans couldn't buy here, from children to cocaine. Anything the warped mind could desire, Corsazo provided. Consequently, because it gave some Yankees what they wanted, the Yankees thought of the residents as less than moral.

  Nobody liked anyone else, and everyone got what they wanted.

  Remo went to the first brothel. It looked like a hardware store, but instead of pots and machinery in the window there was a young woman, looking willing.

  "I've come for a twelve-year-old boy. His name is Davey Simpson. He has dark hair, and he has been taken recently from America. He probably has bruises from being forced to work in a place like this."

  "We can get you a nice twelve-year-old boy."

  "I've come to take this one home."

  "We can sell you a boy. A nice boy with skin so soft a duck would die of envy." This from the proprietor, a large woman who smelled of rum and perfume so strong it could overpower a garbage dump. Remo could almost see the particles of odor emanate from her too-ample breasts. She had a dark mustache. "Do you have a bodyguard?" asked Remo.

  "Are you going to cause trouble?"

  "Absolutely," said Remo.

  "Then you can take me on," said the woman, producing a stiletto with a point like an ice pick. She pressed it against Remo's jugular.

  "That your safety pin?" said Remo.

  "You want something I can give you, stay. If no, senor, I am afraid you must leave."

  Remo flicked two fingers up under the ulnar artery of her knife hand, cutting off the blood flow as the knife flew away somewhere near the ceiling. He grabbed her neck like a dog collar and pressed her face into the glass of the store window. The young woman who sat there as advertisement fled, screaming. The madam was told either the glass or her face was going to give way any moment unless she told him the whereabouts of a new boy kidnapped in America and sold down here.

  The bodyguard appeared from one of the back rooms. He looked short for his six feet, four inches because he was as wide around as he was tall. Masses of dark hair covered everything from his knuckles to his nose. He reached out to crush the thin American and went sailing back into the interior of the brothel with a crash to shake the building. His eyes rolle
d up into his head as his bladder released all over his shiny green pants, now somewhat shinier and darker from the moisture.

  "Okay, Yankee. I do what I can," said the madam.

  "No. You tell everyone down here that there is a mad American who has come for an American boy who was sold into slavery. Tell them this American is going to take the town apart, starting with the brothel owners and then the chief of police. Tell them that all their drug dealers will find their automatic weapons embedded in their intestines. If I don't have the Simpson boy by sundown, this town will cease to exist."

  Thus spoke Remo. And naturally, when the madam quickly hurried to the bosses of the small city, they refused to believe such a threat. For that would mean accepting intimidation. And if there was one thing owners of whorehouses, dope cartels, and other forms of social malignancies could not tolerate, it was a threat to their authority. They knew better than anyone else that once people lost respect for their power they would be deposed by their own troops. So they sent a strong-arm team from several cocaine dealers, all armed with the latest American weapons, even grenade launchers.

  There was much firing and many explosions around the brothel where they surrounded the American. Many of the leaders of the town bemoaned the public destruction. They even discussed making compensatory offerings to those who lost property.

  When the firing died down and the hit men from the drug dealers failed to return, the leaders of the little city sent word to a Mexican Army post that an American was causing great damage to Mexican property.

  While the Mexican Army, of course, was not as well equipped as the drug dealers' hit men, it considered itself somewhat better by virtue of valor. But even valor was no good against this amazing American, so they contacted the American consul, who apologized for the actions of his fellow countryman and took it upon himself to talk reason to the American.

  The consul too did not return, and as the sun set bloody red in the west, the town leaders at last decided to produce the boy. As it turned out, he was still in training, being broken in to his new life.