In his sleep he cried, "Oh, shit!" But in the dream he looked as cool as an actor starring in a TV movie of the week.
One of the two men mumbled, "Get off on the wrong floor, pal?"
To which Remo heard himself reply, "Not if this is Don Polipo Tentacolo's suite."
"Don Tentacolo ain't seeing visitors tonight, pal." This from the other man, the one who started patting Remo down. The other goon-there was no better word for him-kept his Mac-11 jammed in Remo's side.
What happened next happened so fast that it made Remo jerk in his sleep.
The kneeling guard was checking Remo's ankles when one of Remo s feet snapped up. The toe seemed only to tap the man's chin, but his head flew back like it was on the end of a snapped cable. The crack of splintering vertebrae was as distinct as thunder.
Then-or perhaps it occurred simultaneously, because Remo's attention was on the head snapping back and not elsewhere-the dream Remo twisted his upper body so that the pistol muzzle pointed at thin air. He took the other goon by the wrist. Instead of exerting pressure against the natural flex point of the joint as he'd been taught at the police academy, Remo inserted his pinky finger into the open muzzle of the Mac-11. The sound of the barrel splitting merged with the crack of the splintering vertebrae.
The Mac-11 fell apart as if every weld and screw had simultaneously disintegrated, leaving the goon holding a very shaky gun butt with the shiny little bullets visible in the exposed top of the magazine clip.
The goon looked down at his useless weapon and then at his fallen comrade, whom Remo dislodged from his expensive Italian loafers with a casual flick of his ankle.
"May I?" Remo asked, smiling politely. And without waiting, he extracted a bullet from the clip. Another bullet sprang up to replace it.
Remo watched himself take the tiny bullet in one hand and place it against the goon's forehead. Then, with coiled forefinger, he tapped the primer cap on the end of the shell casing. There came a firecracker pop! and the standing goon suddenly became the prone dead goon with a black crater in the center of his forehead.
Remo casually stepped over the bodies and walked up to a black door of fine wood. He knocked on the door and waited, hands on hips.
In his cell, Remo tossed in his sleep. He noticed for the first time how thin his arms were. He looked like he had lost all his natural body fat and thirty percent of his musculature. His wrists, however, were unusually thick. The combination made him think of Popeye the Sailor Man-but less grotesque.
Remo was staring at his own oddly expanded wrists when a splintery hole jumped into the black door panel and his dream self simply faded back from the line of fire-for the solitary hole had been made by a gun pressed to the opposite side of the door.
The dream Remo lunged forward, the palm of his hand striking the doorknob with such force that it shot from its socket and into the penthouse. An unseen man howled in exquisite agony, and Remo casually pushed the door open.
He paused beside a man holding his groin with both hands in a doubled-up stance only long enough to poke him in the eyes. Before he fell face-forward, Remo caught a glimpse of the mashed jelly his eye sockets now contained. If he hadn't been sleeping, he would have turned away.
In the dream, Remo was moving from room to room in an elegant penthouse suite until he found a man cowering against a plate-glass window that gave him a panoramic view of some unidentified city. There was neon piping in the background. It was not rolled into scroll or signwork, but edged several tall office buildings. That told Remo that the penthouse overlooked Dallas, Texas.
The fat man had his back to the glass as if he were standing on a narrow ledge and only the friction of the glass kept him from falling to his death.
"If you're a cop," he was saying, "I can pay you."
"Wrong guess," Remo heard himself say.
"If you're a fed, I can roll over."
"Not even close."
"Then what do you want?"
"Oh, a nice home, a pleasant wife, maybe a couple of kids."
"Done! I'll set it up." The fat man was sweating, even though he outweighed Remo by an easy sixty pounds.
"Sorry," Remo told him. "There are some things not even money can buy. It won't buy me, and it won't buy the life I want."
"There's gotta be something we can do," Don Tentacolo said urgently. "Some deal we can cut."
"Let me think about this," Remo said disinterestedly. He tapped the glass beside the man's head. The fat man winced as if Remo's fingers were hypodermics.
"Is this a single pane or a sandwich?" Remo asked.
"Single. Bulletproof."
"Good," said Remo, tracing a ruler-straight line over the fat man's quaking head. The glass squealed as if scored by a glass cutter. Then Remo ran the finger from one end of the line to the floor and repeated the action on the other side.
The manipulation framed the fat man in a thin white rectangular line, rather like the outline of a coffin.
"What ... what are you going to do?" he quavered.
"You look hot. Like you could use some air."
"Yeah," Don Tentacolo said, wiping his forehead. "It's roasting in here."
"Then permit me," Remo said. He placed his hand on the man's heaving chest and gave him what looked like a gentle shove.
Except that there was nothing gentle about the way Don Polipo Tentacolo went through the thick glass, taking with him a doorlike rectangle of glass. His feet were the last things to disappear into the darkness beyond the window.
Remo saw himself lean out of the opening in the glass, and his dream viewpoint suddenly dollied to follow the madly gesticulating body as it fell twenty or thirty stories to the hard pavement below.
The glass struck first. It shattered into thousands of separating shards. The fat man shattered too, but the bag that was his fleshy envelope kept his disintegrating bone structure from becoming organic shrapnel. With one notable exception. A short length of femur shot out of his trouser seam to impale his left palm.
Dusting off his hands as if having completed a minor but stubborn household-repair task, Remo's dream self turned from the window as if to go. But recognition crossed his face and he gave a cocky half-grin and asked an unseen person, "How did I do?"
The responding voice was squeaky and querulous, like Daffy Duck after a hard day on the set.
"Your elbow was bent," it said bitterly.
And the expression of disapointment that spread over Remo's dream face was tragic.
Remo woke up with the identical expression on his true face. He just didn't know it.
Popcorn's voice whispered through the shell-pink cinder block to his ear, "You okay, Jim?"
Remo sat up. "Had a bad dream," he said quietly.
"Got news for you. You still havin' it. 'Cept now your eyes are open. You dig me?"
"I know where I am. It just seemed so real." And for the first time, Remo's voice had lost the hard edge that prison life had made second nature.
"I got a sayin', Jim: Dead Men dream deepest. You be on death row awhile, you get to know what I'm sayin'."