He had been warned at the start. "You'll have no friends, Remo Williams. You'll have no family. You'll have no place you can call home. All you'll have is a sense that maybe, just maybe, you can do something to make America better."

He had thought it was bullshit then, and now, more than a decade later, he still thought it was bullshit. But he did not leave, and he knew why he stayed. Because CURE and the training of Sinanju had given Remo the only thing he had ever had in his life. Self-respect. Pride in his work. And nobody could take that away from him.

Behind him, from the front door of the house, Remo heard sounds and he drifted back through the darkness under the trees.

Two men were leaving the home of Sam Speer. One he recognized as Billy-Ben Bingham, a particularly vicious rapist who had been released after serving ten years of a life sentence. The man with him looked lawyerly. They headed for a car and Remo moved up next to the car in the darkness. When the motors had started and the lawyer backed the car up and made a turn in the driveway to head back toward the road, Remo opened the front door and slid in next to the rapist.

"Who?.." said the driver.

"What the?.." said the rapist.

"Hi," said Remo. "Just drive. I'm getting out soon."

The rapist's hands were at his throat but they closed on air and Remo put him away with an economical right index finger into the right kidney area. The rapist whooshed and slumped forward against the dashboard's digital clock between Remo and the lawyer, who threw the car into parking gear and reached for the door handle.

Remo's left hand pulled him back inside the car. Remo's right hand dropped the gear shift into "drive" and steered the car down the driveway, out onto the road, and made a right-hand turn.

Twenty-five yards down the road was a sign posted by the lakeside homeowners association, explaining that it wanted to keep out bad elements. On the right side was a small roadway leading down to a boat ramp. The way the lawyer's head flopped at the end of Remo's left hand, he knew the man's neck had snapped. Remo drove to the water's edge, dropped the gear shift in "low," and stomped on the gas pedal. As the car surged, he slipped out the door and watched as the car hurried down the slight incline, hit the edge of a wooden dock, teetered momentarily, then dropped into the waters of the lake.

The car hit with a splat and a sizzle. It began to sink but Remo did not stay to watch it because he was already moving back toward the house. He had to be careful that a big bunch of them didn't all leave at once, because then he would have to dispose of them on the lawn and that could get messy.

He waited in the tree again and heard Sam Speer's voice telling them that it would be safest if they continued to leave one at a time. "Just in case."

Remo nodded with satisfaction. "Good for you," he mumbled to himself. "Good for you."

The next one was Lee-Bob Barkins, who got into his Lincoln, recklessly swerved it around and started up the driveway. As he passed under Remo's tree, Remo let himself drop down onto the roof of the car. The driver's window was open and Remo turned his body sideways on the roof of the car, and reached his left hand through the open window and put it around Lee-Bob's throat.

"Hi, fella," Remo said.

Lee-Bob saw the head hanging upside down in the driver's window and he wanted to reach out and crush it, but the pressure around his own throat was too great.

"Twenty five yards down the road, hang a right," Remo said.

Lee-Bob hit the brakes and the car stopped.

"C'mon," Remo said. "I don't have all night."

He slipped off the car's roof, still holding onto Lee-Bob's throat, pushed the man roughly across the seat and got in behind the wheel.

"Who are you?" Lee-Bob managed to sputter.

"I'm the welcome wagon," Remo said. "Come to make your brief stay in the outside world as pleasant as possible. Goodbye."

He heard the bones separate in the neck as he turned into the small roadway leading to the boat ramp. Behind him, he heard voices in the doorway of the Speer house.

"Damn," Remo said. "Hurry, hurry, hurry."

He got out of the car, aimed its wheels straight down toward the water, then wedged Lee-Bob Barkins under the dashboard against the gas pedal. He closed the door behind him, dropped the gear shift into "drive," and the car gunned down the slight hill. Remo did not wait to hear the splash. Two more men were getting into a car in front of Speer's house.

He caught that car on the road. In it was Jimmy-Joe Jepson, an arsonist whose fires had killed twenty-three persons. Remo decided that putting everybody into the lake was too time-consuming, so he just turned off the key after killing Jimmy-Joe and his lawyer, and let the car roll down the road until it stopped, nose-first, against a tree.

It was getting complicated now. Remo reached into the pocket of his black T-shirt and took out a list. Right. He had Lee-Bob Barkins. And he had Billy-Ben Bingham. And he had Jimmy-Joe Jepson. Plus assorted attorneys. But they weren't on the list. Tonight lawyers were a bonus he would give Smith for free, just as a part of his annual contribution to the good of the republic.

By the time he reached the seventeenth car, the roadway leading from Speer's house was pretty full, so Remo took Tim-Tom Tucker and his lawyer in the driveway, before they even started their car.

Remo looked at his list again. Every one of them. He had them all. He snapped his index finger against the list with satisfaction. "There," he said. "Now nobody can complain about that."

He walked to the front door of the house, unlocked because even though the crime rate in the South was the highest in the nation, it wasn't crime that took place in houses. It was generally just senseless violence that Remo thought came out of a streak of viciousness that ran deep through the Southern character. It exploded in saloons and parking lots and on street corners, but it was rarely premeditated so no one ever had to lock their doors. Remo was glad he did not have to live in the South. Angry violence annoyed him as a waste of energy.

He strolled inside the house and found Sam Speer in the living room, pouring the last of a bottle of champagne into an oversized brandy snifter.

"Who are you?" Speer asked as he turned to face Remo.

"My name is Remo."

"What do you want?"

"What I want is some time off to go fishing," Remo said. "But what I got is to kill you."

"Not a chance, Buddy," Speer said. He reached inside his jacket, very quickly for such a big man, and pulled a .38 caliber revolver from a shoulder holster.

Remo shook his head.

He frowned. "Don't waste my time with that," he said.

Speer raised the gun at Remo and squeezed the trigger.

He blinked his eyes at the sound of the report. When he opened them, Remo was not standing in front of him. Nor was he on the floor in a bloodied heap.

"You're not a nice person," he heard Remo say. "Just because you're a fat, ugly schemer who would steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke doesn't mean you couldn't try to be a nice person."

Speer felt the tap on his left shoulder, but before he could spin around and fire again, he felt a sharp burst of pain in the center of his back. Normally, the brain could tell a body what kind of pain it was suffering from and where, but the brain relied on impulses that traveled along the spinal cord, and here Speer's spine had been snapped, so he felt nothing and knew nothing after the first burst of pain and instead just slowly slumped to the oak flooring of the house.

On a table, Remo saw a large pile of money. It should have been seventeen payments of two hundred thousand dollars each. He calculated quickly and decided that that would be more than a million dollars. Maybe even two million.