Political Pressure

19

"This is Sister Francine's. Sister Camille speaking. May I help you?"

"Sister Francine's what?" Remo asked.

"Sister Francine's Home on the Water. Were you trying to reach someone else?"

"What water are you on?" Remo asked.

"Why, Lake Superior. We're up in the U.P. It is a lovely place, especially during warm weather. We have tours all summer long."

"The U.P. as in Upper Peninsula Michigan? So your summer is like a week long, right?"

Sister Camille tittered. "Well, a month, anyway. The rest of the time it's colder than hell!"

"Tsk, Sister Camille, your language," Remo remonstrated.

"And the cold! You freeze your..."

Sister Camille was gone and Howard Smith came on the line. "Remo, where are you?"

"Hey, Smitty, put the nun back on. I wanted to hear what she froze off in the winter."

"What? It was just a computer, Remo," Smith said. "We've got a real situation developing here. Now, where are you?"

"Truck stop. Somewhere near Fountain, Colorado. Is that a real town? Named Fountain?"

"What are you doing there?" Smith demanded. "Wait. You're heading to Pueblo, going after Police Chief Gord Roescher."

"How did you know that?" Remo demanded. "And how come you didn't tell me about Gord Roescher? Because if you only knew what I had to go through to get a line on this guy."

"Gord Roescher is small potatoes," Smith said. "There are other, bigger targets. Mark's come up with a way of identifying possible targets across the country. This situation could be more dangerous than we thought, Remo."

"Possible targets are not the same thing as confirmed targets, Smitty. I talked to the paramedic who worked on the mercenary from the courtroom before he died. He was spilling his guts. Thought it would earn him a shot of painkiller."

"The paramedics withheld painkillers?"

"Guess they misplaced them. Anyway, he only knew about the next planned hit, and it was supposed to be today, and it was supposed to be on Police Chief Gord Roescher. If I can get there first, I can nab the guy I missed yesterday and make him answer questions."

"Yes. Good."

"What's this Chief Roescher done wrong anyway that they want to turn his toes up?"

Smith quickly rattled off the chief's offenses.

"Now," Remo said, "I notice you didn't say 'allegedly.'"

"Chief Roescher's guilty of most or all of the crimes. He's been under investigation by various federal agencies. They've simply been unable to come up with enough evidence for an indictment."

"But he's dirty?"

"Yes, but I want you to focus on whoever attacks the chief, not Roescher himself," Smith said. "Phone as soon as you've got results." There was a click.

"You know, Smitty," Remo said, "I liked Sister Camille way better than you." Then he hung up, too.

Remo walked into his third Pueblo police station of the day before he finally got the correct place.

"Yeah, Chief Roescher's here," the desk sergeant allowed. "You got an appointment?"

"No. He doesn't take walk-ins?"

"Uh-uh."

"Think he can squeeze me in?"

"Uh-uh."

"Could you ask him?'

The desk sergeant decided to humor the thin man. One thing he could tell easily enough was that the guy wasn't packing. Guy walks in off the street in nothing more than a T-shirt and Chinos there's not much place to hide a piece. Just some goof with enough money for a new pair of expensive shoes and a new T-shirt.

"Hey, Chief! Some guy here to see you!" the desk sergeant shouted across desks and a booking station.

A basset-hound face came out of one of the offices, chewing something. "Who?" he shouted back.

"Who are you?" the desk sergeant asked.

"Remo. Tuscadaro."

"Remo Tuscadaro?"

"Yes."

"Name's Remo Tuscadaro!"

"Never heard of him! I'm busy!"

The desk sergeant was clearly pleased to be of disservice. "Ya heard him."

"Ask him if I can wait until he's not busy," Remo asked.

The sergeant shrugged and shouted to the rear again, "He wants to wait until you're not busy!"

The chief's head popped right back out. "He can wait until hell freezes for all I give a shit."

"Great!" Remo said, and took a seat on the wooden benches, ignoring the bemused look from the desk sergeant.

In the next forty-five minutes he listened to the low-grade murmur of activity. Pueblo wasn't Newark, but it was big enough to have its full share of violence and crime on any given day. Junkies and street gangs and dealers and hookers. There were a lot of grumbling cops, but most of them were grumbling from the stress of the job. The city of Pueblo, like a thousand other

cities, had a just-enough police force—just enough cops to keep the assembly line of arrests in motion, with no time left for its officers to do any real good. Remo could feel the anxiety in the place—way too many protectors of the public on an arrest-them-and-book-them treadmill. Still, most of them were doing their best, struggling to make a positive impact.

A few of them had become a part of the problem, but they didn't reveal it in what Remo Williams overheard.

Remo was staring into a three-year-old issue of Golf Getaways magazine when he heard the voice he recognized as Chief Roescher, informing the desk sergeant he'd be out of the office for an hour. The desk sergeant told him about the guy who was still waiting out front and they shared a chuckle. Chief Roescher left through the rear.

Remo stood and stretched as the desk sergeant returned to his throne, which towered over the waiting area. "I think I'll get a burger down the street. Could you let Chief Roescher know I'll be back in a little while if he has a minute?"

"I'll be sure and let him know."

"Thanks so much."

Outside, Remo raced to his own rental and was soon following an unmarked car with Chief Roescher at the wheel. He stayed several car lengths behind and kept an eye out for other suspicious vehicles. He knew the chief was supposed to pay for his corruption this afternoon, but that was about all he knew. The attack could come at any minute.

He fell behind as the chief's unmarked car pulled into a squalid neighborhood on an isolated patch of gravel that was cut off in the rear by railroad tracks and walled in on either side by warehouses. Remo parked and pursued on foot, moving in a fast glide of motion that would have looked impossibly fast if there had been anyone watching him cross the street. Nobody was.

The neighborhood was a ghost town, with bright orange Condemned stickers on every building. A peeling billboard on the street announced that the site would be the home of a beautiful new manufacturing campus, ready for occupancy in May 2003. Remo found the chief's car pulled up in front of one of the squalid houses, this one with an entire corner collapsed. Another squad car was also parked and empty—Roescher's collaborators in crime from the police force.

The chief squeezed in around the half-open front door, which was jammed in place, and a moment later a swaggering trickle of young men began appearing, coming from across the tracks in the rear and from the main street out front. They came singly, they came with attitudes and they came wearing their colors—and there wasn't a single matching gang insignia in the whole bunch.

"Ah, crap," Remo said to himself. This meeting looked like Chief Roescher's monthly conference with the gang lords of the city. Every gang in town sent its top dog, and any gang that decided not to attend the meetings was automatically out of business. Chief Roescher and his partners in crime would see to it.

This was where they planned strategy and handled the logistics of distributing the narcotics that Roescher had trucked in from Mexico. This was where the chief accepted payment for same. Usually there would be arrangements made for some sort of a drug bust during the ensuing weeks, just to keep the public satisfied that he was indeed a competent law-enforcement official. The chief was careful to distribute the drug busts evenly among all the gangs throughout the year. Nobody got special treatment.

The arrangement worked well. The chief got rich, the gang leaders made a lot of money and police interference was usually limited to the lower ranks of the gang hierarchies. Only the top men in each gang knew about this arrangement anyway. Smith had related that the federal probe had twice coerced one of the city gang lords to turn informant and gather evidence, only to find said gang lord dead within days. When a gang lord betrayed him and was killed, Roescher shut down the gang with a series of spectacular arrests that had earned him accolades and a national award from a law-enforcement association.

Chief Roescher clearly knew he was being investigated, but his activities continued and the Feds had nothing, which meant Roescher had to be a pretty slick weasel. The lone surviving gunman from the courthouse battle, if he struck, wasn't going to strike from the inside. There would be no bursting in with his machine gun firing. Roescher would have defenses in place for any kind of a raid. So where would the attack come from?

Remo moved from his hiding place, crossing the street and snaking through overgrown yards until he was lying in weeds at the back of the drug house. A cop was standing at the back door, one eye watching what was going on inside, the other on guard for anything suspicious outside. He never had a clue that Remo Williams was close enough to spit on.

"All right, you punks, first things first. I want to know who killed the kid in the playground last Saturday." It was Chief Roescher speaking inside the condemned house. There was a chorus of mumbled denials from the gang leaders.

"Listen up," Chief Roescher said. "Somebody shot that kid on the merry-go-round. It was a member of one of your gangs, or at least one of you knows who did it. I'm taking serious heat on this one. There's going to be no merchandise until I get an answer."

"Aw, man!"

"What's this shit?"

"You can't do that!"

The chief let the anger die down. "Well?" he said. "I'm waiting. Whoever you are, you're just ruining it for everybody else."

Remo had always hated it when the nuns pulled that kind of thing. Usually they withheld recess for everybody until they found the guilty party. Eventually somebody would rat out the guilty one, and often paid for it later on the playground. He imagined the stakes here were higher.

"I gotta leave today without a delivery date, then somebody here is gonna die!"

"None of that, Jimmy," the chief ordered gruffly. "Nobody is going to kill anybody over this. It's just business. My business is to look like a good cop in the eyes of the taxpayers and that means locking up somebody on this kid killing. I don't care if it's one of your boys, and I'm not going to hold it against you."

More mumbling. Finally, "Okay, Chief, it was one of my guys. It was Fran Kee Z. His real name's Zuder, or something like that."

"Thanks, Leonard. You did the right thing coming forward."

"I knew it! You fuckin' nig—!"

"Jeremy! We will have none of that here, do you understand!"

"But what the fuck, Chief, he tried to shank you, man!"

"Now, Jeremy, we all make mistakes. Remember the two old men your guys shot in last year?"

"That's different! They was asking for trouble!"

"They were playing chess on a park bench, Jeremy. They just got caught in the cross fire, didn't they?"

"Yeah. But you took my man to the house for it!"

"And we're going to take Fran Kee Z to the house for killing the kid and everything will be fine, won't it?"

There was a moment of tense silence.

"Jeremy?"

"Yes, Chief."

"I think you were a little rough on Leonard, Jeremy."

"Yeahhhh. I guess. Didn't mean to go all racial on ya, Lanky."

Remo just had to have a look at the surreal scenario his ears were revealing to him. He rose under a window enough to peer through a slit in the boards. There was a human skeleton decked out in a sleeveless camouflage jacket. His unhealthy skin was so filthy that Remo wouldn't have known he was the one who almost used the N-word except the man he was apologizing to was black. The rival gang lords bounced their fists together in what had to have been the nonaffiliated street version of a handshake among Pueblo's killers, bangers and dealers.

"Nothing, Jax," Leonard said with a grin. "You'z okay for whitey."

Jeremy, whose shoulder tattoos included the word "JAX" in red letters dripping blood, grinned sheepishly. Chief Roescher was smiling benevolently, and it was exactly the look that Sister Mary Margaret got on her face when she managed to get some playground warriors to mend their differences.

Chief Roescher, Remo decided, was one demented puppy. But he had to have some damn effective leadership skills if he had the gangs lords of this town acting like simpering orphans.

He was about to wonder what his next step should be when there was a curious hollow noise coming from a few houses down, too soft for the normal ears of the back-door cop to hear. The almost melodic noise ended with a click, and Remo knew exactly what it was.

He'd used some pretty big shoulder-fired boom devices when he was a soldier, before he ever heard the word "Sinanju." Now he disdained such weaponry, but someone two doors down did not. That someone had just telescoped the fiberglass tube of a shoulder-fired grenade launcher, and the click was the sights and firing trigger popping out. Remo went to watch.

He crept away quickly and circled, remaining unseen and coming up seconds later behind the man who was readying a second Light Antitank Weapon. The first disposable LAW was leaning against the abandoned house that was his cover. The man was alone and he was dressed in the now familiar blacksuit with the white gloves, now dirty, and the white ski mask, now dingy.

Two rockets seemed like overkill to Remo Williams, but who was he to argue? This guy really looked like he knew what he was doing and, let's face it, Remo was out of touch when it came to using firearms.

With both LAWs prepped the man crept out into the weedy mess of a backyard, putting himself in the open but giving him a clean shot at the house where Chief Roescher was having his boy's club meeting. The cop at the back door was examining his fingernails and didn't notice the danger. Remo moved into the open a few paces behind the shooter. He didn't want to miss any of the action.

The white-masked man put a LAW to his shoulder.

"Wait. Don't." Remo's mumble was drowned out by the whoosh of the LAW. The back-door cop looked up, startled, and watched death come right at him. The projectile missed his body by inches and tore through the soggy wall before it hit something inside that was solid enough to blow it. The back-door cop hadn't taken his first step. Chief Roescher and the gang lords never had a chance as the house blew apart in all directions in a way a tank on the battlefield never would have, and the mess of rotted timbers and curling shingles that had once been the roof collapsed on top of what was left.

"Stop," Remo said under his breath as the man in the white mask snatched up the second LAW. He fired it at all that was left of the house, obliterating the ruins, then dropped the tube and ran two steps before the solid earth was no longer under his feet.

"Nice shooting," Remo commented.

The white-masked man was a pro. He wasted no time with surprise before launching into a series of moves designed to extricate himself. They would have worked on any other assailant, but they didn't work on Remo.

"I thought the second one was kind of overkill, though," Remo said as he walked with his prisoner into the train yard and over the tracks. The masked man kicked at Remo's chest, missed, then lost his cool and started wiggling and twisting frantically.

"Stop that." Remo shook the shooter vigorously, nearly rendering him unconscious. Then he ripped the man's blacksuit at the shoulder, looking for a wound. He found it, a big mass of bloody bandages applied over the spot where his wooden missile had impaled it just before the quick escape from the courtroom yesterday. "You're a dedicated employee, I'll hand it to you, going to work today even feeling under the weather."

The ground in the vacant train yard was contaminated with train oil and fuel. When Remo put a few rusting boxcars behind them they couldn't see the dilapidated neighborhood any longer, just a plume of black smoke climbing into the blue sky. Remo plucked off the mask, his prisoner too dazed to resist.

"White's not a good color for this kind of work, you know? It's all dirty." He dropped the mask, then removed the gloves, as well, and ripped the front of the blacksuit open at the chest.

"No dog tags?"

"That would be stupid," his prisoner answered.

"Well, depends on your point of view. See, now that I've heard you talk I know you're an American. I also know you're military. So Upstairs is going to want a positive ED on you. If you had dog tags, I could have taken those. Instead, I have to give them your fingerprints."

"Won't do you any good. I'm a dead man anyway."

Remo scowled, then gingerly sniffed the air in front of the prisoner. "You took something, huh?"

"I saw you working yesterday, remember? Didn't want to take any chances. What if you showed up again and took off all my hardware? Had to have another last resort."

Remo considered that, then nodded. "But if I didn't show up you could take an antidote, right?"

"Yeah." The prisoner grimaced ruefully. "What are you, anyway, some sort of freaky Special Forces experiment?"

"Yeah. I eat steroids for breakfast every day," Remo answered, then began patting down the blacksuit. The man began to fight again, but Remo found the place where a tiny capsule was sewn into the lining of the suit. He slashed the fabric and poked the pill into the back of his prisoner's throat, then held his mouth closed until the pill was gone.

"Son of a bitch!" the man gasped.

"Okay, now we've got all the time in the world, so talk while we walk." Remo heard the approach of sirens behind them and began carrying his prisoner into a gully that meandered downhill and under an overpass.

"Boris Bernwick. U.S. Army, retired."

"I give two shits, Boris. I've learned enough about you in the last five minutes to know you are definitely not the brains behind this little operation. Those are the people I want to know about. Who, why, where, when."

"I'm telling you nothin'," Bernwick growled.

"Let's hold hands," Remo said, and grasped the dangling soldier by the wrist, inserting his finger into one special pressure point that made the soldier whine like a beagle.

"Well?" Remo asked.

Boris Bernwick, for the first time in decades, began to cry.

"Hurts!"

"What about this?"

"Hurts more!"

"And this?"

"Hurts hurts hurts hurts okay hurts hurts!"

Remo decreased the pressure slightly. "I'm taking you back to 'hurts more' so you can answer, but if you want to get down to 'hurts' again, you're going to have to earn it."

"What about 'no hurts at all'?" Bernwick pleaded.

"That," Remo said, "you're really gonna have to earn."

Boris Bernwick tried hard for more than ten minutes to earn "no hurts."

"I'm not impressed with your effort, Boris," Remo said finally.

"That's all I know!" Boris sobbed, knowing he had become something pathetic.

"I believe you, Boris," Remo said.

"So do I get 'no hurts'? I really want 'no hurts.'"

Remo nodded. "Okay."

"Thank you thank you thank you."

"In fact, you're never going to have hurts ever again."

"Oh," Boris said, seeing the light. Then, as blackness engulfed him so swiftly he didn't even know how it happened, he wondered about the afterlife. Because there were some who said the afterlife, for the bad people, had a lot of hurting in it.