“Debs. Hey, Debbie, come on,” Chutsky said. She ignored him and marched on into the park. Chutsky sighed and looked at me. “Okay, buddy,” he said. “I got the right flank; you got the left. Let’s move out.” And he followed Deborah through the gate.
Have you ever noticed that no matter how often we all talk about freedom we never seem to have any? There were few things in the world I wanted to do less than follow my sister into the park, where a very obvious trap was set for us and, if everything went really well, the best I could hope for was having Samantha Aldovar ruin my life. If I truly had any freedom at all I would have taken Deborah’s car and gone down to Calle Ocho for a palomilla steak and an Ironbeer.
But like everything else in the world that sounds good, freedom is an illusion. And in this case, I had no more choice than a man strapped into Old Sparky who is told he’s free to stay alive as long as he can when they throw the switch.
I looked up at Roger the Pirate. His smile looked kind of mean all of a sudden. “Quit smirking,” I told him. He didn’t answer.
I followed my sister and Chutsky into the park.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I AM SURE WE HAVE ALL SEEN ENOUGH OLD MOVIES TO KNOW that sensible people avoid abandoned amusement parks, especially when the sun is going down, which it was. Terrible things lurk in these places, and anyone who wanders in is only setting himself up for some kind of dreadful end. And perhaps I was being oversensitive, but Buccaneer Land really did seem spookier than anything I had ever seen outside of a bad movie. There was an almost audible echo of distant laughter hanging over the dark and moldering rides and buildings, and it had a mocking edge to it, as if the long years of neglect had turned the whole place mean and it just couldn’t wait to see something bad happen to me.
But apparently Deborah had not done her due diligence in the old-movie department. She seemed quite undisturbed as she drew her weapon and strode into the park, looking for all the world as if she were headed into the corner store to shoot some bacon rinds. Chutsky and I caught up with her about a h
undred feet inside the gate, and she barely glanced at us. “Spread out,” she said.
“Take it easy, Debs,” Chutsky said. “Give us time to work the flanks.” He looked at me and nodded to the left. “Go nice and slow around the rides, buddy. Go back behind the booths, sheds, anyplace somebody could be hiding. Sneak and peek, buddy. Keep your eyes and ears open, keep one eye on Debbie, and be careful.” He turned back to Deborah and said, “Debs, listen …” But she waved her gun at him to cut him off.
“Just do it, Chutsky, for God’s sake.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Just be careful,” he said, and then he turned away and moved out to the right. He was a very large man, and he had one artificial foot, but as he glided off into the dusk the years and injuries seemed to melt away and he looked like a well-oiled shadow, his weapon moving from side to side automatically, and I was very glad that he was here with his assault rifle and his long years of practice.
But before I could begin to sing “Halls of Montezuma” Deborah nudged me hard and glared at me. “What the fuck are you waiting for?” she said. And so even though I would much rather have shot myself in the foot and gone home, I moved out to the left through the growing darkness.
We stalked carefully through the park in best paramilitary fashion, the lost patrol on its mission into the land of the B movie. To Deborah’s credit, she was very careful. She moved stealthily from one piece of cover to the next, frequently looking right to Chutsky and then left at me. It was getting harder to see her, since the sun had now definitely set, but at least that meant it was harder for them to see us, too—whoever them might turn out to be.
We leapfrogged through the first part of the park like this, past the ancient souvenir stand, and then I came up to the first of the rides, an old merry-go-round. It had fallen off its spindle and lay there leaning to one side. It was battered and faded and somebody had chopped the heads off the horses and spray-painted the whole thing in Day-Glo green and orange, and it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I circled around it carefully, holding my gun ready, and peering behind everything large enough to hide a cannibal.
At the far side of the merry-go-round I looked to my right. In the growing darkness I could barely make out Debs. She had moved up into the shadow of one of the large posts that held up the cable car line that ran from one side of the park to the other. I couldn’t see Chutsky at all; where he should have been there was a row of crumbling playhouses that fringed a go-kart track. I hoped he was there, being watchful and dangerous. If anything did jump out and yell boo at us, I wanted him ready with his assault rifle.
But there was no sign of him, and even as I watched, Deborah began to move forward again, deeper into the dark park. A warm, light wind blew over me and I smelled the Miami night: a distant tang of salt on the edge of rotting vegetation and automobile exhaust. But even as I inhaled the familiar smell, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and a soft whisper came up at me from the lowest dungeon of Castle Dexter, and a rustle of leather wings rattled softly on the ramparts. It was a very clear notice that something was not right here and this would be a great time to be somewhere else; I froze there by the headless horses, looking for whatever had set off the Passenger’s alarm.
I saw and heard nothing. Deborah had vanished into the darkness and nothing moved anywhere, except a plastic shopping bag blowing by in the gentle wind. My stomach turned over, and for once it was not from hunger.
My pistol suddenly looked very small and inadequate and I wanted to run out of the park more than I wanted my next breath. The Passenger might be peeved with me, but it would not let me walk into danger, and it was never wrong, not when it spoke this clearly. I absolutely had to grab Deborah and get us out of here before whatever it was hit us.
But how could I persuade her? She was so determined to free Samantha and collar Bobby that she would never listen, even if I could think of a way to explain how I knew that things were about to go terribly wrong. And as I clutched my pistol and dithered, the decision was taken out of my hands. There was a kind of giant thunk sound, and lights began to come on all over the park, and then the ground trembled, there was a terrible screech of rusty metal, and I heard a raspy groan—
And overhead, the cable cars lurched into motion.
I spent one long and precious second gaping upward and picturing all the awful things that might rain down on me from someone riding past over my head. Then I had another truly horrible moment in which vile altruism took over, and I looked to my right to see if Deborah was okay; there was no sign of her. And then from one of the cable cars swinging by overhead I heard a gunshot and a savage and happy screeching sound, the cry of a hunter who has spotted its prey, and I recovered my precious self-interest and dived for cover into the darkness under the canopy of the merry-go-round. In my haste to bury myself under one of the horses I banged my nose into a large and hard lump that turned out to be one of the severed fiberglass horse heads. By the time I scrabbled my way past it and shoved it uphill toward the outer rim of the merry-go-round, the screeching from above had stopped.
I waited; nothing happened. There were no more gunshots. No one opened fire with a howitzer. No napalm bombs whistled down from the cable cars. There was no sound at all except the dysfunctional thumping of the old and rusty cable running through its stanchions. I waited a little longer. Something tickled at my nose and I rubbed it; my hand came away with blood on it and for a very long and frozen second I stared at it, unable to think or move or see anything except that awful red smear of precious Dexter fluid. But happily for me, my brain came back online and I wiped my hand on my pants leg and put it out of my mind. Clearly, it had happened when I dived for cover and bumped my nose. No big deal. We all have blood in us. The trick is to keep it inside.
I wiggled carefully around into a position where I was still safe but I could see out, and I pushed the big horse head farther up the slope in front of me for cover and rested my pistol on top of it. Off to my right, above the last place I had seen Deborah, a shattered cable car went by on the wire. There was nothing left of it except the piece that attached to the cable and one small chunk of metal tubing that had been part of the seat, and it bobbed and wobbled crazily past. The next car lurched into view, and although there was more of it, the side panels were gone and it, too, was empty.
I watched several more of the broken cars go by. Only one of them seemed to be in good enough condition to hold a passenger, but it bounced past with no sign that it ever had, and I began to feel a little bit silly, huddling underneath a gilded, crumbling, Day-Glo merry-go-round pony and pointing my pistol at a series of broken-down and very empty cable cars. Another deserted and beat-up car went by—nothing. Still, I had certainly heard somebody pass by overhead, and the warning from the Passenger had been quite clear. There was danger out there in the park, lurking among the carefree memories of Buccaneer Land. And it knew I was here.
I took a deep breath. Clearly, Bobby was here, too, and it sounded like he was not alone. But there could not be more than two or three people total in one of those rickety old cable cars. So if we continued with the original plan and moved on through the park, the three of us should still be able to round up a few loopy kids. Nothing to worry about: Keep breathing, follow the plan, home in time for Letterman. I wriggled back out toward the rim of the merry-go-round, and I had one leg out and on the ground when I heard once again a kind of primitive, fraternity-house whooping sound—from behind me, in the direction of the front gate—and I slid back down the tilted spindle and into the cover of my headless horse.
A few seconds later, I heard happy voices, the shuffle of many feet, and I peeked out as a crowd of eight or ten people began to troop past me. They were mostly Bobby Acosta’s age, the sort of bright-faced young monsters we had seen in Fang, possibly the exact same ones, and they were dressed in stylish buccaneer costumes, which I am sure would have pleased Roger the Pirate. They hurried past, excited and happy and clearly on their way to a party, and leading the way, with a rather lethal-looking sword raised high, was the ponytailed bouncer from Fang.
I watched from behind my decapitated pony until they were gone and the sound of their passing had faded away and I thought about it, and they were not terribly happy thoughts. The odds had changed, and the whole situation was different now. I am not a very sociable person by nature, but this seemed like a really good time to seek out my companions for some quality survival time together.
So I waited another minute to be sure there were no stragglers, and then I left my horse head behind and wormed my way slowly out to the rim of the merry-go-round. As far as I could see, they were gone and the park might as well be completely deserted. There was a building ahead and slightly to the left that I recognized from my childhood. I had spent several dull and puzzled hours wandering through it back then, completely unable to understand why it was supposed to be fun. But if it would provide cover for me, I would forgive it for its misleading name. And so, with a last glance at the still-vacant cable car, I rolled off the merry-go-round and ran for the funhouse.
The outside of the building was in very bad shape, and only a few vague shadows remained of the mural that had once decorated it. I could just barely make out the painted scene of cheerful pirates looting and raping a small town. Its loss was a great blow to the art world, but that was not my main concern at the moment. There was one dim light shining in front of the funhouse, so I circled around to the back at a half crouch, trying to stay in the shadows. It took me in the opposite direction from the last place I had seen Deborah, but I had to find new cover. Whoever was in the cable car had certainly seen me wallowing on the merry-go-round and I needed to get away from it.