Foxx dug his thumbnail into her ear in a gesture of endearment. Irma giggled. "Be right back," he said. He returned a moment later.
His hands were sheathed in rubber gloves. In his left hand was a brown, medicinal-looking bottle. In his right, a thick wad of cotton.
"What's that?" Irma asked.
"Something to make you crazy."
"Like drugs?"
"Like." He poured some of the contents of the bottle onto the cotton wool. The fumes stung his eyes and made his breathing catch.
"You're really good to me, you know that?" Irma tittered. "I mean, champagne, now this. ..."
"Breathe deeply," Foxx said.
She did. "I'm not getting off."
"You will."
"This the new thing at the discos?"
"The latest. They say it's like dying and going to heaven."
"What's it called?" Irma asked, her eyes rolling.
"Prussic acid."
"Groovy," Irma Schwartz said before she died.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and he was climbing an electrified fence. He'd had trouble before with electricity, but after the old man had shown him how to conquer it, the matter of scaling a twelve-foot high screen of electrified mesh was no problem. The trick was to use the electricity.
Most people fought against the current, just as they fought against gravity when trying to climb. The old man had shown Remo long ago that gravity was a force too strong for any man to fight, and that was why most people fell off the sides of buildings when they tried to climb them. But Remo never fell off a building because he used gravity to push him forward, then redirected the momentum generated in his body by the gravity to push him upward.
It was the same with electricity. As he neared the top of the fence around the compound, he kept the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet exactly parallel to the surface of the fence, inches away from the steel frame. He kept in contact with the electric current, because that was what kept him suspended in air, but never varied his distance from the fence.
That contra! had taken him time to learn. At first,
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during his practice sessions, he'd come too near the fence, and the electricity had jolted him, causing his muscles to tense. Then he was fighting electricity, and it was all over. No one fights electricity and wins. That was what the old man said.
The old man's name was Chiun. He had been an old man when Remo first met him, and he had known him most of his adult life. When the electric current felt as if it were going to fry Remo alive, Chiun had told him to relax and accept it. If anyone else had told him to hang loose while a lethal charge of electricity coursed through his body, Remo would have had words with the person. But Chiun wasn't just anyone. He was Remo's trainer. He had come into Remo's life to create, from the expired form of a dead police officer, a fighting machine more perfect than anything the Western world had ever known. Remo had been that policeman, framed for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't quite work.
Not quite. But bad enough. Years after the morning when he had come to in a room in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the burns still fresh on his wrists, he remembered that electric chair. Long after he'd met the lemon-faced man who had personally selected Remo for the experiment and introduced him to the ancient Korean trainer named Chiun, he remembered. A lifetime later, after Chiun had developed Remo's body into something so different from that of the normal human male that even his nervous system had changed, the fear of electricity stiil lurked inside Remo.
So when Chiun told him to relax, he was afraid. But he listened.
Now he made his way up the fence, the fringe-ends of the electric current in contact with his skin. His
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breathing was controlled and deep, his balance automatically adjusting with each small move. The current was the force that kept him aloft. Using it, never breaking contact, he slid slowly up the fence, moving his arms in slow circles to generate the friction that propelled him upward. At the top of the fence he broke suddenly, pulling his legs backward and over his head and somersaulting over the top.
The compound he was in was an acre or more of snow-covered gravel and frozen mud set in the far reaches of Staten island. Rotting wooden crates, rusted cans, and soggy sheets of old newspapers littered the ground. At the rear of the compound stood a large, dirty cinderblock warehouse, six stories tall with a loading dock at the right end. A truck was parked at the loading dock. As Remo neared, he saw three burly men packing crates into the truck.
"Hi, guys," he said, thrusting his hand into a crate on the dock. He pulled out a five-pound bag of white powder encased in plastic. "Just as I thought," he said.
"Huh?" One of the dock workers pulled out a Browning .9mm automatic. "Who are you, mister?"
"I'm with the Heroin Control Board," Remo said through pursed lips. "I'm afraid this won't do. Sloppy packaging. No brand names. Not even a yellow plastic measuring spoon, like the coffee boys give out. No, this just isn't up to par. Sorry, boys." He yanked open the plastic bag and dumped its contents into the wind.
"Hey, that stuff's worth half a million dollars," the man with the Browning said.
"Do it right, or don't do it, that's our motto," Remo said.
"Move out of the way, fellas," the man holding the gun said two seconds before he fired. He was one sec-
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ond late. Because one second before he fired, Remo had coiled the barrel of the Browning into a corkscrew, and by the time the bullet left it, it was spinning toward the dock worker's chest, where it came to rest with a muffled whump.
"No gun, see?" another worker said, demonstrating his lack of weapons by raising his arms high in the air and wetting his pants.
"No gun, see?" the other said, falling to his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.
"You the boss?" Remo asked.
"No way," the worker said with touching sincerity. "We're just labor. Management's what you want, yessir."
"Who's management?"
"Mr. Bonelli. 'Bones' Bonelli. He's over there." He gestured wildly toward the interior of the warehouse.
Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli sat behind a desk in the only carpeted and heated room in the place. Behind him was one small window, placed high above the floor. Seated in a huge red feather chair, he looked more like an overaged wraith than an underworld heroin don. His hair was thinning, and his leather skin fell in folds down his skull-like face, which was grinning in ecstasy. The top half of Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli was a tiny, wrinkled, happy crone. The bottom half, displayed beneath the leg opening of the desk, was an ample, satin-covered rear end facing in the opposite direction. Below it protruded two spiky black high heels.
The satin oval swayed rhythmically. Bonelli's mouth opened to emit a small squeal of joy. "Oh. . . oh. . . shit," he said, noticing Remo standing in the doorway. "Who're you?"
One hand twitched frantically in his lap, while the
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other pulled a ludicrously large Colt .45 from his jacket. "Arggh," he screamed, throwing the gun into the air. "Zipper. The freaking zipper's caught."