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gone stiff as a board, and it felt as if someone was manipulating him from behind like a ventriloquist's dummy. Gun still in hand, he felt himself being drawn to the stove.
    "What? It's my fault he don't know where the drugstore is?" Dominic's words were brave, but his jaw clenched in pain as the pressure on his spine increased. They were at the stove now.
    A huge cauldron of spaghetti boiled for customers who had long since fled.
    "Dominic Scubisci, you have been found guilty of murder in the first degree. Do you have anything to say in your defense before this court passes sentence?"
    "Eat shit," Dominic offered.
    To hell with Perry Mason. Remo wrapped his fingers around Dominic's wrist. Though the man outweighed him by a good hundred pounds, he proceeded to force the hand into the pot of boiling pasta.
    It was a display of impossible strength, the impressiveness of which was completely lost on the mobster.
    Dominic's shriek of pain was almost feminine. He immediately released his gun. It dropped to the bottom of the pot with a muted clang. After a second, Remo pulled the hand free. Dominic was horrified to see that his skin had gone as scarlet as a cooked lobster. Blisters had already formed all around the palm and back of the hairy hand.
    He howled in pain and rage, ready to spin on the faggy little punk who had destroyed his gun hand, desperate to vent his horrific rage. But before he had time to react, he felt himself moving up in the air, very lightly. The pain in his hand was constant and fierce, but he couldn't help but watch in wonder as the filthy tiled ceiling of the kitchen grew closer. All at once, he felt himself turning in midair. Blinking in surprise, Dominic found a moment later that he was upside down and staring into the churning, roiling pot of pasta. Steam poured up around his ears, pasting his short black hair to his bullet head. He felt himself being lowered toward the pot.
    Utter panic struck him.
    "Hold it! Hold it! I know everythin'!" Dominic begged. He tried turning toward his assailant, but found that he couldn't move. Hot steam curled up into his nose and mouth.
    "That seems unlikely," Remo ventured. "What's six times seven?"
    "What?" Dominic asked. His thick nose hairs were curling.
    "See? You don't know everything."
    The bubbling water came closer.
    "I'll turn state's evidence." Dominic screamed as the pot closed in. "I'll give you my brother Anselmo on a silver platter. Just let me go."
    The downward movement arrested. Bubbles of boiling water burst against Dominic's hair.
    "You want me to let you go?" The voice behind him sounded puzzled.

    "Yeah, yeah. Please."
    Behind Dominic, Remo shrugged. "Suit yourself."
    None of the members of the Scubisci Family had ever been very well supplied in the brain department, but it had been agreed by the rest of the clan that they could all safely look down on Dominic's limited mental capacity with superior disdain. But in that infinitesimally brief instant before his scalp touched the water, Dominic Scubisci realized that he had mis-spoken.
    Before he could speak, before he could shout, before he could take back his ill-chosen words, gravity plunged Dominic's wrinkled head below the boiling water.
    He immediately tried to pull himself free. Strong hands were again upon him, holding him in place.
    Though he thrashed in place like a large fish in a small boat, his head didn't move an inch from below the burning water. He tried briefly to fight the brilliant pain, but it wasn't long before it proved too great. All at once, he let himself succumb to the exquisite torture, and in that instant it was as though the bottom had dropped from the pot and Dominic felt himself slipping through the boiling water and into a greater, more eternal flame.
    The fire here burned brighter and more fiercely hot than anything Dominic had ever imagined, and long after his earthly shell returned to the dust from which it had come, the name of Guillermo Murietta and countless others