This time Remo had no problems. He hadn't gone an eighth of a mile when a blue Camaro, shedding a purple neon glow from tubes bolted under the Chassis, blasted in behind him and accelerated.
Remo relaxed a fraction of a second ahead of the jolt of bumper meeting bumper. Most people tensed up. That was how bones were broken. Remo's fully working brain, one of only two in these last years of the twentieth century, told him to relax. And he moved in his seat with the jolt, breaking nothing.
A massive arm gesticulated by his side mirror.
"You! Pull over. Gotta exchange insurance papers witchu. "
"Happy to oblige," Remo said to himself, and pulled off an exit and into a gas station that had succumbed to urban blight. There were no pumps, plywood covered the windows, and weeds grew up from cracks in the broken asphalt.
Two probable urban predators popped out of the Camaro. Remo tagged them as probable because they came out holding Tec-9s, one hand on the grip and the other clutching the lower end of a ruler-straight 50round clip jutting from the magazine receiver.
They held the pistols before them like mechanical scythes.
"Give us whatchu got!" one grunted.
Out of the open passenger window sailed Remo's baseball cap and the can of orange safety paint. They landed at the feet of the armed youth.
"Your wallet, fool!" one snarled.
"My wallet's mine," said Remo, opening the door and stepping out. "And you wouldn't shoot a guy over his wallet."
"Wrong. We gangstas!" the other spat.
One Tec-9 came up to shoulder height and began popping.
Remo wove wide of the sudden storm of bullets. The weapons were equipped with hellfire switches that sprang the triggers back into firing position, giving the ticky-tacky weapons an extra edge.
Which in this case was absolutely none at all.
While the hapless rental car began collecting washerlike perforations along its paint job, Remo swept in on the blind side of the nearest definite urban predator. In the strict sense, all sides were blind sides when a ordinary man armed only with a bullet-spewing handgun took on a Master of Sinanju.
The first attacker was still looking at the afterimage of his intended victim poised before the open car door when Remo's right index finger entered his left temple and came out again in a single pumping motion.
Brain function ceased immediately, and he fell on his weapon.
This put the second man at Remo's mercy. He had started firing late and so still had a quarter clip left. Remo hated to see all those bullets go to waste so he slipped up and under the popping barrel that was threaded to accept a silencer and turned the soft part of the gunman's throat into an organic silencer.
The barrel lifted suddenly, came into contact with the underside of a slack jaw, and seven Black Talon rounds entered soft flesh and removed the upper quadrant of the man's head in a single mass like a raspberry pie.
The rest of him fell flat. He landed on his back, and after a few seconds the falling top of his head snacked his face.
Remo returned to the perforated rental car after spraying an orange safety circle around the two dead bodies and then bisecting them with a diagonal slash of paint. A minute later he was back on the highway.
A mile farther along a battered gray van pulled up alongside Remo's car, and a voice insisted that Remo's wallet be tossed into the broad palm that floated between both vehicles.
"If I throw it, I might miss," said Remo.
"Don't miss, else I won't miss," a broad face behind the broad hand growled, displaying the perforated barrel of yet another Tec-9.
"That's a popular make around these parts," Remo commented.
"She be made in Miami."
"Always buy American, I say."
White teeth flashed in the broad face, and the broad palm shook for emphasis.
Remo shrugged and said, "I didn't know my wallet was so popular."
"Fuck the wallet. It's what be in it. And I want it in my fucking hand."
Remo slipped the wallet from his pocket, fingered out the money and ID cards and slapped the empty billfold into the hovering hand.
The hand looked strong enough to support a two-by-four, never mind a soft leather wallet, but the wallet somehow slipped to the speeding highway. Two of the man's four fingers slipped with it, along with his severed thumb.
The man screamed with dull shock as he realized he was shy three fingers and a stranger's wallet.
"My damn fingers! Where'd they go to?"
"If you turn around quick," Remo said helpfully, "you might get them to the hospital in time to get them sewn back on."
"They sew fingers back on, too? I thought that only worked with dicks."
"If you don't hurry, they're going to have to sew your dick onto one of those stumps for a thumb."
The broad man began shouting at his driver, "Turn around! Damn it! Turn around before my damn fingers get run over. I don't want no fucking dick for a thumb."
The van accelerated, and Remo decided to let them both live. Advertising usually paid.
The next attempt to rip him off came disguised as a silver Cadillac. It was shiny with chrome and meticulously kept up. So when it veered in front of Remo and abruptly slowed down, rather than break slowly to minimize an unavoidable crash, Remo accelerated.
The entire rear deck crumpled. Remo backed up, and as the driver jumped out screaming his rage, Remo jammed it again for good measure, destroying the vestigial spare tire.
"Look what you done to my fucking damn car!" the driver screamed.
"You stopped short in front of me," Remo pointed out politely.
"I stopped short just to hold you up, motherfuck. Not to total my wheels. I just stole this baby today."
"Tough. You do the crime, you gotta do the time."
"Time? This ain't about time! Oh, man, lookit my damn wheels."
And while the driver was all but tearing his hair out, Remo took the can of orange spray paint he had recovered from the gas station grounds and carefully drew the circle-and-diagonal-slash "No" sign on the undamaged hood of the Cadillac.
The driver gaped at this casual act of vandalism with disbelieving eyes.
"What you do that for?" he blurted.
"It's my mark," Remo said casually.
"What're you, fucking Zorro?"
"Don't use profanity in the same sentence as Zorro. The Sam Beasley people might overhear and sue you for defamation of copyright."
"You're paying for that."
"If you want my wallet, the last dipshit probably has it by now."
A knife came out. Remo was almost disappointed. The thief might as well have pulled a plantain. But Remo let him take his best shot.
The definite urban predator came in low, going for Remo's seemingly exposed belly. It would have been a perfect disemboweling stroke, a lateral rip calculated to split Remo's abdominal wall into a clown grin, letting his tightly packed intestines come tumbling out.
It never landed, because Remo drove the heel of one shoe into the man's definitely exposed belly.
The man stopped, grunted and turned green. He dropped his knife, the better to clutch his stomach. It felt strangely hollow in his mauling hands, the strong abdominal wall flapping like a loose plastic window shade. He doubled over.
When the awful smell emanating from the seat of his pants reached his quivering nose, the knife man muttered, "I think I done shit my pants."
"Better check to be sure."
"I ain't shit my pants since I was little."
The knife man was definitely greener now and still doubled over. He hobbled over to the side of the road, where he gingerly removed his soiled pants.
When he turned around, the knife man saw the gray slimy ropes hanging out his backside and asked, "What's my damn guts doing on the outside of me?"