"It tells me that I should get the fuck out of here. Sorry, Williams. You have my sympathy. But I want no part of you."
"What about my rights? What about the law?"
"A few years ago I would have fought this tooth and nail, believe me. But I've got a wife now. Two kids. A condo. I get jammed up, she'll leave me and take the kids with her. I'm not an idealistic young guy anymore. Sorry. Good-bye."
Remo Williams watched his last hope in the world walk off in a six-hundred-dollar suit, his insides feeling like chopped liver too long in the refrigerator. He didn't hear the door behind him open and the guard shouting his name.
"Williams!" the guard repeated, taking him by the arm.
Remo tensed, nearly jumped to his feet and down the guard's open throat. Then his eyes refocused and, head bowed, he allowed himself to be led back to his cell.
His biggest regret was that Popcorn wasn't there to talk to. Already he missed the little con. But on this, the last day of his life, he had no interest in trying to start up a new friendship through pink cinder block.
Remo thought back to the night his fellow officers came to his apartment and apologetically informed him he was under arrest for the murder of a black drug pusher whose name, over twenty years later, Remo could no longer remember. An important fact like that, and he couldn't summon it up. The judge and the prosecution must have repeated it a thousand times throughout the trial. What was the judge's name? Harold something. Smith, that was it. Smith. A sourpuss, with his starchy white hair and puritanical mouth. The guy had worn rimless glasses, so he looked like a high-school headmaster gone old and sour.
"Wait a minute," Remo blurted out. "That face!" Suddenly he remembered. Judge Harold Smith. That was the face in one of his strange dreams. What did it mean?
Dinner was spaghetti with meatballs. Remo refused it. His appetite had fled.
"You sure?" the guard had asked. It was the one who had questioned him over the National Enquirer article the other day. His name tag said: Fletcher. "I hear this could be your last supper."
"Then it's true," Remo said, hollow-voiced.
"They're keeping mum about it. But that's the buzz. Pardon the expression."
"Look, I don't want the food. But you can do me a favor. "
"And I could lose my job," the guard said, his voice going from solicitous to crystal hard in midsyllable.
"It's nothing illegal," Remo assured him. "You had a newspaper the other day. It had my face on it. How about letting me have it, huh? Just something to read, to take my mind off my troubles."
The guard hesitated. He rubbed his undershot jaw thoughtfully. "Can't see that it'll do any harm," he admitted. "Just do me a favor. After you're done with it, shove it under the mattress. I'll get it after . . . you know."
"It's a promise," Remo said as the guard snatched up the tray from the cell-door slot.
Remo had to wait until the guard was finished feeding the row before he wandered back. His first words made Remo's heart sink.
"I checked the prison library," he said. "Couldn't find it. But the new one came in." He stuffed the folded paper into the slot. Remo had to use both hands to wrestle it through without tearing it to pieces.
"That do?" the guard asked.
"Yeah," Remo said as his eye caught sight of the headline STARTLING FURTHER RELEVATIONS OF "DEAD MAN."
"Remember that promise," the guard said, walking off.
"Sure, no problem," Remo said vaguely, folding open the front page. There was a reproduction of the earlier artist's sketch of his face. It looked like a police I.D. sketch, but beside it was another sketch. This one was of a wizened old Asian man with a wisp of a beard hanging from his chin, and clear, penetrating eyes.
In a box beside that face was the following: "First Look at Dead Man's Spirit Guide, Identified by Enquirer Panel of Psychics as Lim Ting Tong, High Priest of the Lost Continent of Mu. See Page 7."
Remo, reading this, sank onto his cot heavily. The face of the old Asian was identical to the face from his dream. The one called Chiun. Swiftly Remo turned to page 7. He read so fast his eyes skipped over whole sentences as he searched for his own name. He found it.
The gist of the article was that Enquirer readers from across the country had written in to share sightings of Dead Man, who had been brought to the Enquirer's attention by renowned University of Massachusetts anthropology professor Naomi Vanderkloot. According to Vanderkloot, Dead Man, by virtue of his superhuman feats, could be none other than the vanguard of the next evolution in Homo sapiens.
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.