The opposite man, straining on his end of the rope, kept losing his grip.
"I'm gettin' friggin' rope burns," he said through clenched teeth.
"How're we doin', Frank?"
The man called Frank lifted his chin and said, "His face is turning red. I think he's almost done."
At that moment the room phone rang.
"I'll get it," Remo said in a crystal clear voice. He strode toward the nightstand, dragging the three men with him. One man lost his grip on the rope and snarled a curse as his palms were singed by the sudden friction.
When Remo casually reached out for the receiver, the one called Frank was forced to relinquish his bear hug.
"Hello?" Remo said into the phone. "Yes, everything's just dandy. Thank you." He hung up.
"The guy in the next room complained about the noise," Remo told the one thug still holding on to his end of the rope and what was left of his composure. "Said it sounded like someone was being strangled. Imagine that."
That brought out the guns. The rope dropped to the floor. Frank gathered Remo up into another bear hug.
Remo swept one foot up and around. Corkscrewing, he left the floor, taking Frank with him. The man was stubborn. He held on.
It happened so fast it didn't seem to happen at all. One second Remo was in the cross hairs of two revolvers, and the next, the revolvers were embedded in the cracked plaster of the ceiling like misplaced doorknobs.
The two thugs stared at their stung hands, blinking the way people blink when something is not quite right.
Frank landed on the bed and went "Whoof!" gustily. He didn't get up immediately. His head had somehow gotten jammed in a pillowcase with a pillow.
Remo let him be. His perpendicular toe returned to the rug, braking his spin. His kicking foot joined it smartly.
Then he had both thugs by the throat and his fingers dug in like blunt drill bits.
"Let's see if you can do red," Remo said airily.
He squeezed.
The faces above Remo's hands became like thermometers in August. The red color just suffused upward like mercury.
"Nice healthy shades," Remo said, changing his grip. "How's your purple?"
The man in Remo's right hand could manage only a pale smoky lavender. But the one on his left achieved true purple.
"Fair enough," said Remo. He made his voice sound like Mr. Rogers. "Now, can we say 'Argghh'?"
Neither man could, it seemed. One did leak a little drool out of his mouth in trying, which Remo thought unacceptable.
He broke the man's neck with a sharp leftward twist. It was easier than it looked. Remo could feel the flexing of his neck vertebrae, felt the pulsing of his carotid, and sensed the cartilage of his larynx as it struggled to make sounds. He knew exactly where to apply the pressure that would turn the two adjacent vertebrae into exploding bone fragments.
Remo let go when he sensed the lack of electrical current running down the man's severed spinal cord.
"Now you," Remo said, turning to the other man. "Who do you work for?" He let the man get a tiny sip of air.
"Don't . . . do . . . this," the man said. It was a warning, not a plea.
"I asked a question," Remo said, clamping down with both hands. He lifted the man straight off the rug, even though the man was a half-foot taller than Remo. Just to drive home the point.
"You're . . . making a . . . mistake," the man wheezed.
"Give me a name."
"Talk . . . to the boss. He'll . . . straighten it all . . . out."
"Who's the boss?"
"Talk . . . to . . . Fuggin," the man gasped.
"Who's Fuggin?" asked Remo, giving him a little air.
"What are you, stupid? Fuggin is Fuggin."
Since an answer that made no sense was just as useless as no answer at all, Remo suddenly released the man from his two-handed throat grip.
Gravity took hold of the man. He started to fall. Before he got an eighteenth of an inch closer to the rug, Remo's hands came back, open and fast.
The sound was like a single sharp clap.
When the man's feet hit the rug, the top of his head struck the ceiling. Since the distance between the two was eight feet, and the man just under six-foot-four, there was about one and a half feet of distance unaccounted for.
When the man's head struck the rug, it bounced twice and stopped suddenly. It would have kept rolling but was stopped by a two-foot length of stretched matter that resembled chewed bubble gum after it had been drawn between two hands.
Of course, it was not bubble gum. It was the man's limp, shock-compressed neck.
Remo turned away and helped the one called Frank to his feet.
The man allowed himself to be set on his feet in front of the bed. He allowed this despite outweighing Remo by almost eighty pounds because he had seen the fate that had befallen his coworkers after he had extracted his head from the pillowcase.
"What'd you do to Guido?" the man asked, pointing to the pink taffylike mass that connected the dead man's trunk and head.
"The same thing I'm going to do to your balls if you don't answer my question," Remo warned.
"Look, I don't know who you are or what you want, but you really, really want to talk to Fuggin. Get me?"
"Who's Fuggin?"
"The boss. My boss. The boss of the guys you just croaked. Fuggin don't like for his guys to be croaked."
"Tough. "
"This is a big mistake," the thug said in an agitated voice. "I want you to know that."
"What's your connection to IDC?" Remo demanded.
"None."
"I believe you. Now, what happened to the IDC technicians who came to fix that computer?"
"Can I take the Fifth on that?"
"Are your testicles made of brass?"
"No."
"Shall I repeat the question, or do you want proof of that immutable quirk of biology?"
"They got whacked," the man said dispiritedly.
"Why?"
"They screwed up."
"What's so important about the computer?"
"Ask Fuggin. I don't know nothin'. Honest."
"Is that the best answer you can give me?"
"It's the only one I got."
"It's not good enough," returned Remo, feinting toward the man's neck. The man grabbed his own throat with both hands in order to protect it from Remo's terrible fingers.
So Remo took hold of the man's head with both hands and inserted his thumbs in his eye sockets. He pushed. The sound was like two grapes being squished. The man fell back on the bed with his eyes pushed all the way to the back of his skull and two spongy tunnels through the brain.
Whistling, Remo recovered the rope and, looping it through the ceiling fixture and around the throats of the three dead thugs, created a scene that eventually went down in the annals of Boston homicide as a first.
As the homicide detective asked when he first viewed the macabre scene, "How could three guys hang themselves from the same rope like garlic cloves?"
Remo left the motel room surreptitiously.
The chauffeur was still behind the wheel, his nose buried in a racing form. He tried to look casual, but his face was like a stone chopped out of a granite outcropping.
Remo figured he knew less than the three dead thugs, so he left the man alone as he slipped away in search of a pay phone.
He wondered what Harold Smith was going to say when he informed him that International Data Corporation, the largest company in American, had somehow become embroiled with the Mafia.
Most of all, he wondered who the hell this Fuggin was.
Chapter 7
From an early age, Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia had only one burning ambition in life. To become an arch-criminal.
"Someday," he would boast, "I'm gonna be a kingpin. You'll see."
Carmine had worked his way up from mere hanger-on to proud soldier in the Scubisci crime family of Brooklyn in only thirty years. No crime was too heinous. No infraction of the law too petty. Dock pilferage was as sweet to him as payroll robberies.