If you enjoyed Death Therapy, maybe you'll like Union Bust, too. It’s the next Destroyer novel, now available as an ebook.
HIS NAME WAS REMO and he felt mildly sorry for the man who had erected the poorly hidden detection devices outside this elegant Tucson estate. It was such a good try, such a sincere effort to construct a deadly trap, yet it had one obvious flaw. And because the builder did not appreciate this flaw, he would die that day, hopefully before 12:05 p.m.—because Remo had to get back to Tucson early for important business.
The electric beams, functioning very similarly to radar, were rather well concealed and appeared to cover the required 360-degree ring which is supposed to be perfect for a single plane. The land was cleaned of just the kind of clump shrubbery that afforded concealment to attackers. The X layout of the ranch house, seemingly an architectural eccentricity, was actually a very good design for cross fire. The estate, though small and pretty, was a disguised fortress that could most certainly stop a mob executioner or could, if it came to it, delay a deputy sheriff—or two or ten.
If it ever came to it—because there was no chance that a sheriff or a state trooper would ever besiege this estate outside of Tucson. The man called Remo was now very simply penetrating the one flaw in the entire defense: the builder had not prepared for the eventuality of one man walking up to the front door by himself in broad daylight, ringing the doorbell, then executing the builder along with anyone else who got in the way. The estate was designed to prevent a concealed attack. Remo would not even be stopped as he walked past the beams in the open Arizona sun, whistling softly to himself. After all, what danger could one man be?
If Mr. James Thurgood had not been so successful in his business, he would probably live to see 1:00 p.m. Of course, if he were not so successful, he would be seeing 1:00 p.m. every day from the inside of a federal prison.
James Thurgood was president of the Tucson Rotary, the Tucson Civic League, a member of the President’s Panel on Physical Fitness and executive vice-president of the Tucson Civil Rights Commission. Thurgood was also one of the leading investment bankers in the state. His profits were too big. After several layers of insulation, his money fueled the heroin traffic at a rate of $300 million a year. It returned a greater yield than land development or petrochemicals, and for James Thurgood—until this bright, hot day—had been just about as safe.
Between Thurgood and the neighborhood fix was the First Dallas Savings and Development Corporation, which lent large sums to the Denver Consolidated Affiliates, which made personal loans to people who needed them very quickly and in large amounts, one of them being recently Rocco Scallafazo.
Scallafazo offered no collateral, and as for his credit rating, it wasn’t good enough to be bad. It was non-existent, since no one had ever given him a loan before. Denver Consolidated transcended the narrow regulations of banking and dared risk capital where other institutions would not. It gave Scallafazo $850,000 on his personal signature.
Denver Consolidated never got back the money. Scallafazo was picked up later with a suitcase full of Denver Consolidated’s funds as he attempted to purchase raw heroin in Mexico. Undaunted, Denver Consolidated made another unsecured loan of an equal amount to Jeremy Wills, who was arrested without the money but with a trunkful of heroin. The Scallafazos and Willses were always being picked up, but no one could tie the evidence legally to the First Dallas Savings and Development Corporation, James Thurgood, President. There was no way to get Tucson’s leading citizen into court.
So this day the man who financed heroin in the southwest would be gotten out of court. Remo casually strolled up the sunbaked driveway, examining his nails. His appearance certainly gave no hint of danger.
He was just under six feet tall, with soft, friendly brown eyes and high cheekbones, a bit thin except for his thick wrists. His gait was smooth and his arms flowed freely. He glanced at the far kitchen window and the far living room window—he was directly in between. He was being watched. Good. He didn’t want to have to wait at the door.
He checked his watch. It was 11:45 a.m. now. He figured it would take him a good fifteen minutes to walk back to town, a half an hour for lunch, maybe a short nap, and he could get back to important work by early afternoon. He still did not know all the duties of a union delegate or the essential aspects of the Landrum-Griffin Bill, and “Upstairs” had said he should be ready very shortly for something big. Upstairs had even told him to ignore the hit on Thurgood if it would take too much time away from studies of the union movement.
“I might as well do the hit,” Remo had said. “It’ll be a good break.”
So there he was, standing at the doorway of the X-shaped ranch-style home, with two men peering at him from windows right and windows left. He reached into one of the bulging pockets of his trousers and withdrew two plastic envelopes the size of flattened baseballs. They were the heroin packages he had ordered from Upstairs. They were, his little escape tools. Worked correctly, he could stroll away from this house without anyone phoning the police. And, more important, he could do it in the daylight and not miss any sleep. One didn’t have to make a little project like this unpleasant.
Remo rang the doorbell. He could feel the eyes on him.
The door opened and a large man in white houseboy coat stood in the doorway, like a surprise wall. A small pistol, probably a .24 caliber Beretta, was rather expertly strapped beneath his armpit, showing only the barest outlines.
“Yes,”said the man.
“Good morning,” said Remo sweetly. “I’ve come to kill Mr. Thurgood. Is he in?”
The butler blinked.
“What?”
“I’ve come to kill Mr. Thurgood. Will you let me in please.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Look. I don’t really have all day.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Be that as it may, I can’t do my work from out here, so let me in, please.”
“You want a glass of water or something, sir?”
Remo transferred both shiny packages to his left hand, and seeing the butler’s eyes follow the movement, went for the large man’s throat with a free right hand. The flat, knifelike hand was out and back like the flicker of a frog’s tongue scoring on a fly. The butler stood, stunned, his eyes wide. He reached for his throat. His mouth opened. It filled with blood. The butler emitted gurgling sounds, then collapsed, struggling for air.
“The quality of help nowadays,” said Remo disdainfully and stepped over the butler into the house. It was a beautiful home with sunken living room and polished stone floors and large paintings hung in museum-like profusion. Lovely.
A maid saw the fallen body of the butler and dropped her tray, shrieking. The man who had been at the window on the right came clipetting down a stone hallway, gun in hand. It was a heavy gun, probably a .357 Magnum. Foolish. He should have utilized the distance and gotten off a shot. Not that it would have saved him, but at least he would have died making proper use of his weapon.
The man possibly still did not know that the butler, his throat crushed, had strangled on his own blood. Remo disposed of the gun by snapping the man’s wrist with a downchop. Continuing the motion, Remo’s elbow cracked into the man’s nose, jolting him back. Returning his arm from the blow, Remo jammed the heel of his hand into the broken nose, sending bone splinters into the brain. Zip, zip, it was over like that, and the man tumbled forward like a sack of wet asparagus. Plop.
“Mr. Thurgood. Mr. Thurgood. We’re being attacked,” came a voice. Remo peered down the left hallway. A cowboy hat disappeared into a door. Well, so much for surprise.
“How many?” came another voice. It was deep and resonant with just a faint hint of a wide Boston “A” floating in the clear western tones. Remo had heard the voice on identity tapes he had gotten from Upstairs. It was Thurgood.
“One, sir. That’s why we let him through.”
“Dammit. Why didn’t the help stop him?”
“Dead, sir.” Thurgood and the man in the cowboy hat were obviously talking across the hallway.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” sang Remo.
“Who is he?” asked Thurgood.
“Your friendly neighborhood assassin,” Remo called out.
“The man is mad.”
Remo eased down the hallway and spotted a door that moved ever so slightly, like a tremble. The cowboy hadn’t entered that door. Thurgood was behind it. Nice. The door was slightly ajar, just a sliver open. Remo, silent, moved against the wall, out of the line of vision afforded by the crack between door and jamb. When he neared the door, he reached a hand far from his body and knocked quickly. Twice.
Two slugs tore through the door and thudded into the wall across the hall, clipping a grapefruit-sized hole in the plaster. Nice pattern.
“Argh,” called out Remo, collapsing to the floor with a thud. He stuck out his tongue crazily and rolled his eyeballs back into his head so that only the whites would show. He heard the door near him open.
“I got him,” said Thurgood. Steps, perhaps twenty yards away and coming close. Something hard, metallic, against his temple. Pushing. Rifle barrel. Too much weight for a pistol. Smell of shoe leather. One has remnant of cow dung. Floor cold on back. One standing over the right shoulder. Other standing near hip. Hand on chest. One kneeling. Pressure.
“Still breathing, but faintly. Nice shot, sir.”
“Where did I get him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see the bullet hole. What’ll we tell the sheriff, Mr. Thurgood?”
“That I shot an intruder, of course. What did you expect me to say?”
“He’s got something in his hand.” Remo felt his fingers unfolded and the two plastic packages of heroin being removed. “It’s horse. Yeah. Looks like the powder. It is.”
“Dammit.”
“Maybe we could say he brought it, Mr. Thurgood. That’s the truth.”
“No. Flush it down the toilet.”
“It’s thirty grand worth, at least.”
“Flush it. I’m an investment banker, you ninny.”
“Yessir.”
Remo felt the gun barrel tremble slightly. He could wait no longer. Up came his right thumb, deflecting the barrel as a shot chipped into the stone floor. Following through on the hand motion, his body rose in a single smooth flow. His left hand, whipping like an unsprung car aerial, caught the fine face of Tucson’s leading businessman flat. Like a shot. Splat.
“Ugh,” said Thurgood in shock.
Spinning through the blow, Remo brought an elbow up and around to where the cowboy should have been. He was. The elbow caught the armpit, separating the shoulder and driving into the collarbone. The collarbone cracked. The cowboy, ten-gallon hat and cow-manure shoes, went forlornly into the wall and collapsed in pain.
Remo checked the hallway. Clean. He turned to Thurgood.
“Regards from the turned-on generation, sweetheart,” said Remo, as two fingers of his right hand drove the testicles of James Thurgood, leading Tucson citizen and heroin financier, into the lungs. On their way, they took a good portion of the intestinal tract, some of which now gushed in a bloody flood from the mouth of the man the courts could not touch. Thurgood lurched forward to spend the last twenty seconds of his life in awesome agony.
The cowboy would live.
“Ooooh,” he groaned.
Remo looked around the hall. Where were the bags of heroin? He lifted up the cowboy who emitted a shriek. There they were. Remo knocked the cowboy into them. He waited for the cowboy to regain some clarity of mind. Then he pushed the bags of heroin under the cowboy’s nose.
“I think you’ll want to get this cleaned up before you phone the sheriff,” said Remo. One bag had been torn open. Remo opened the second also. In full view of the cowboy, he sprinkled the white powder along the Thurgood hallway until now unsullied by its touch.
For final measure, Remo sprinkled the last of the heroin over the Thurgood living room, grinding it into the deep pile rug with his heels. He flipped the empty plastic bags to a sofa and strolled to the door.
“So long, shitkicker,” he called out to the cowboy and left the X-shaped fortress which had, after all, only one serious flaw in its defense.
It was a pleasant, dry, invigorating day, on which a man could whistle to his heart’s content, and the stroll back to Tucson was enjoyable. By the time he reached the city limits, Remo had worked up a thirst. He dropped into a hamburger stand for a cola and “two with everything, to go. Thanks.”
While waiting for the burgers, he briefly reviewed his morning’s reading on collective bargaining. Something big was going to come off in Chicago. And somehow it had to do with the union movement. That was all Upstairs had said.
Remo added an extra dose of ketchup to his hamburgers and consumed them almost in four bites, washing them down with large draughts of the dark, sweet cola.
As he wiped his mouth a strange thing happened. Numbness crept up his arms into his neck, immobilizing his face. He heard a woman shriek, and as the hamburger stand whirled crazily above him, everything became very black.