P14 Slayground

P14 Slayground

SLAYGROUND

Robbing the armoured truck looked easy to an efficient thief like Parker, but he has to settle for second-best when it comes to his getaway driver.

Laufman takes the corner too fast leaving himself and Grofield unconscious and Parker alone with $73,000, no means of escape and the sirens getting closer. The only place to hide is Fun Island, an amusement park which is closed for the winter, but Parker soon discovers that the only way out is the way he came in and he had been seen entering the park by two uniformed cops. Parker awaits the arrival of the law, but soon realises that the cops, aided by the local mobsters, have decided to go into business for themselves…

Richard Stark (Donald E Westlake)

Slayground (1969)

P14 Slayground

PART ONE

P14 Slayground

One

PARKER JUMPED out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosive in the other. Grofield was out and running too, and Laufman stayed hunched over the wheel, his foot tapping the accelerator.

The armored car lay on its side in a snowbank, its wheels turning like a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep. The mine had hit it just right, flipping it over without blowing it apart. There was a sharp metallic smell all around, and the echo of the explosion seemed to twang in the cold air, ricocheting from the telephone wires up above. Cold winter afternoon sunlight made all the shadows sharp and black.

Parker ran to the rear door of the armored car, slapped the packet of explosive against the metal near the lock so that the suction cups grabbed, then pulled the cord and stepped back out of sight. The armored car’s right rear tire turned slowly beside his head.

This explosion was short and flat and unimpressive, with a little puff of gray smoke that lifted into the air. Parker stepped out again where he could see, and the door was hanging open. There was nothing but blackness inside.

Grofield had been up at the cab and now he hurried back to say, “He’s on his phone in there and I can’t get at him.”

There were no sirens yet. They were in the middle of a large city, but it was the most isolated spot on this armored car’s route, a straight and little-traveled road across mostly undeveloped flats from one built-up section to another. At this point the road was flanked by high wooden fences set back on both sides, the gray fence on the left being around the ball park and the green one on the right being around an amusement park. Both of them were closed at this time of year, and there were no private homes or open businesses within sight.

Parker rapped his gun against the metal of the armored car. “Come out easy,” he called. “We don’t want anybody dead, all we want is money.” When there was no response, he called, “Make us do it the hard way, we’ll drop a grenade in there with you.”

A voice called from inside, “My partner’s unconscious.”

“Drag him out here.”

There was a shuffling sound from inside, as though they’d uncovered a mouse nest. Parker waited impatiently, knowing either or both explosions might have been heard, knowing there’d be traffic along this road eventually, knowing the driver was up there on his radio-phone.

The blue-coated guard backed out, finally, bent over, pulling his partner by the armpits. The partner had a bloody nose.

As soon as they were out, Parker took the satchel from Grofield and went in. He knew which part of the load he wanted, and he moved fast and sure in the semi-darkness inside. Outside he could hear Grofield say, “Put some snow on the back of his neck. You want to make sure he doesn’t strangle on his blood.” His words were muffled by the mask he wore.

A siren, far away. Parker had the satchel full. Green bills littered the sideways interior of the armored car like confetti after a St. Patrick’s Day parade, but Parker had most of the big bills. He zipped the satchel shut and climbed out into the sunlight again. The conscious guard was kneeling over his buddy in the snow like a battleground scene. Grofield was watching them, and looking up and down the road. The siren was still far away, it didn’t seen to get any closer, but that didn’t mean anything.

Parker nodded, and he and Grofield ran back to the Ford. They climbed in, Grofield in front next to Laufman, Parker in back with the satchel, and Laufman stood on the accelerator. Wheels spun on ice and the Ford slued its rear end leftward.

“Easy!” Parker shouted. “Take it easy, Laufman!” He knew Laufman was a second-rate driver, but he was the best they could find for this job and he did know this city.

I Laufman finally eased off on the accelerator enough so the wheel could grab, and then they started moving, the Ford lunging down the road. It was like hurrying down the middle of a snowy football field with a high gray fence on the left sideline and a high green fence on the right and the goal posts way the hell around the curve of the earth somewhere.

Far away ahead of them they saw the dot of flashing red light. Laufman yelled, “I’ll have to take the other route!”

“Do it, then!” Parker told him. “Don’t talk about it.”

They’d worked out three ways to leave here, depending on circumstances. The one behind them they’d ignored, the one ahead was no good any more. For the third one, they should take the right at the end of the green fence, go almost all the way around the amusement park, and wind up in a neighborhood of tenements and vacant lots where they had three potential places laid out to ditch the Ford.

They had plenty of time. The end of the fence was just ahead, and the flashing red light was still a mile or more away. But Laufman was still standing on the accelerator.

Grofield shouted, “Laufman, slow down! You won’t make the turn!”

“I know how to drive!” Laufman screamed, and spun the wheel without any deceleration at all. The side road shot by on an angle, the car bucked, it dug its left shoulder into the pavement and rolled over four times and wound up on its right side against a chain-link fence by a snow-covered empty parking lot.

Parker was thrown around the back seat, but wasn’t knocked out. When the Ford finally rocked to a stop he got himself turned around and looked past the top of the front seat, and Laufman and Grofield were all balled up together down against the right-hand door. Grofield’s head had hit the windshield, he had a red sunburst on his temple now. Laufman had no visible mark on him. Both were breathing, but both were completely out.

Parker stood up and pushed up over his head to shove the door open. It kept wanting to slam again, but he finally got it all the way open to where it would catch. Then he shoved the satchel out and climbed out after it.

It was a mess. The siren was close now, and screaming closer. There was no other traffic, no car to commandeer. Parker stood in the snow beside the Ford, its wheels now turning the way the armored car’s had done, and looked around, and the only thing he- saw was the main entrance to the amusement park, on an angle across the way. High metal gates were shut across there, and ticket booths and drawings on walls could be vaguely seen beyond them. Above the gates tall free-standing letters said FUN ISLAND.

What about this side? The amusement park’s parking lot, that was all, with the Ford now sprawled against its fence. Down a little way, just about opposite the Fun Island entrance, was the parking-lot entrance, flanked by a one-story small clapboard building that probably didn’t contain much more than the parking lot office and a couple of rest rooms.

And the other side of the main road? Nothing but that blank gray fence, no way into the ball park along this road at all.

The only possibility was Fun Island. Parker grabbed up the satchel and ran through the ankle-deep snow and across the road and up to the gates. There were faint tire tracks in the snow, probably meaning a watchman who made occasional rounds, but there was no car here now, neither inside nor outside the gates. Parker looked back and saw he was leaving tracks of his own, but that couldn’t be helped. The first thing to do was go to ground, get out of sight. Then he could see what possibilities were left.

The gates were eight feet high. He tossed the satchel over and climbed over after it, dropping on all fours on the cement inside. This area was roofed, and free of snow.

The siren screamed by, down at the corner. Going to the armored car first, and not to the wrecked Ford. That was good, it gave him another couple of minutes. He straightened, reached for the satchel, and happened to glance across the way.

There were two cars there, parked next to each other beside the small building at the parking-lot entrance. They were on the opposite side from where he’d been, and must have been there all along. One of the cars was a black Lincoln, as deeply polished and gleaming as a new shoe. The other one was a police prowl car.

Standing in front of the two cars were four men, two uniformed policemen and two bulky men in hats and dark overcoats. They were just standing there, looking over in this direction at Parker. One of the policemen had a long white envelope in his hand, as though he’d just gotten it and had forgotten he was holding it.

Parker was the first to break the tableau. He grabbed the satchel, turned, jumped over the turnstiles, and ran off into Fun Island.

P14 Slayground

Two

TWO WEEKS ago Parker had come out to look at the operation and see if it was feasible. The man who was selling it to him was named Dent, and a long time ago he’d been in this kind of work himself. But he was an old man now, with blue-white parchment skin, and long since inactive. Partly inactive; he and his wife traveled around the country in a blue Ford pulling a trailer, what was now called a mobile home, and they stopped here and there at trailer camps around the country, and Dent kept his eyes open. His body had aged but his mind was as good as ever, and from time to time he saw jobs that were there to be done, things he would have done himself in the old days. And now he called this man or that man, younger than himself, and told them the job, and if they liked it they paid him for it. A kind of finder’s fee.

Dent had met Parker at the airport, with his blue Ford but without his wife or his trailer. “Good to see you,” he said, in his uncertain old man’s voice, and they shook hands, and Parker sat be,side him in the Ford while Dent drove. Dent drove carefully, maybe a little too slowly, but mostly well.

And he felt like reminiscing. “What do you hear from Handy McKay?” he said.

“Still retired,” Parker said. He wasn’t good at small talk, but he’d learned over the years that most people needed it, to give them a feeling of assurance about who and where they were. Like a dog circling three times before lying down, people had to talk for a while before saying anything.

“You and Handy sure pulled a lot of jobs together,” Dent said, and grinned out the windshield and shook his head.

“Yeah, I guess we did,” Parker said.

“He’s got a diner now someplace in Maine, don’t he?”

“Presque Isle.”

“Maybe I’ll get up there next summer, drop in. Think he’d like that?”

“Sure,” Parker said.

“It’s a pity about Joe Sheer,” Dent said next, talking about somebody else who’d retired and was now dead.

“Yeah, it is,” Parker said. Dent didn’t know the half of it. Sheer had been the only man who could connect Parker with the name he was using in those days for his legal front, and the manner of Sheer’s death, five years ago, had made it impossible for Parker to use that name any more or collect any of the money he had stashed here and there under that name in resort hotel safes. This was Parker’s eighth job in the five years since that had happened, which was more often than he liked to work, but he was still trying to catch up with himself, still trying to rebuild his reserve funds.

Dent was still talking, still going on with his own thoughts. “It’s a pity about a lot of people,” he was saying, and his grin turned sour as he glanced at Parker. “Be a pity about me pretty soon.”

“Why? You feel sick?”

“No, I feel okay. But I got me a haircut at the barber shop last week, and I looked in the mirror, and I saw the back of my head in the other mirror behind me, and the elevens are up. You know what that means, Parker.”

“It means you’re thin,” Parker said.

“It means you’re finished,” Dent said. He sounded grim, but not as though he was complaining.

Parker said nothing, but glanced at the back of Dent’s neck, and the two tendons were standing out there, just as Dent had said. The elevens are up. When the number eleven shows in the tendons on the back of a man’s neck, he’s finished, everybody knew that. Parker didn’t waste time trying to lie to the old man.

Dent got quiet after that, and didn’t have anything else to say until they turned down the road that ran between the ball park and the amusement park, and then he said, “How do you like this for isolated, Parker? Broad daylight, and nobody here.”

“What’s this road used for?”

“In the summertime — I’ve been here in the summertime, and in the summertime you can’t move on this road. Not with the ball park, not with Fun Island. But why come out here in the winter? No reason. Except at rush hour. Four o’clock till maybe six, it’s a steady stream of them headin the same way we are now. In the morning comin the other way, naturally. But all day long, nothin at all. No reason for it.”

“Here comes something,” Parker said.

“It’s what I wanted you to see,” Dent said, and grinned at him.

It came closer, black-looking against the piles of snow mounded on both sides of the road, and Parker saw it was an armored car. It went by, and Parker twisted around in the seat to look out the back window and watch it drive on. He said, still looking back, “Where’s it going?”

“Back to the main branch of the bank,” Dent said. “It goes out to the suburbs, all the different little branches, and picks up money at every branch. And the last one is out this way, so it finishes by comin down this road.”

“That’s the job?”

“You’ll never find a better.”

“Show me some more,” Parker said. So Dent drove Parker around town, and they talked over different escape routes, and different ways to open the armored car, not because Parker felt he needed any help but because this was the way Dent helped himself stay alive, by keeping an interest in things. Then they had lunch together in a place downtown, and Parker said, “You still be around here in a couple weeks?”

“Oh, about a month, I figure. We usually get where it’s warm, this time of year, but this year we don’t either of us feel like doin all that drivin. About a month, though.”

“That’s enough time,” Parker said.

“If you don’t want it,” Dent told him, “drop me a note at Winding Trail Court here in the city.”

“Right.”

After lunch Dent drove Parker back out to the airport, and Parker took a flight to Newark, and drove out to Claire’s house.

The lake was frozen, and people were going by out there on yellow skimobiles. Claire was watering plants on the window sills that faced south. She turned and said, “Did it turn out to be any good?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me about it.”

This was a big change for her. When they’d met, three and a half years ago, the circumstances had gotten bloody and dangerous, and for three years she hadn’t wanted to know anything about anything. But lately a thaw had taken place, and it was interesting in a different way to have somebody to talk things over with. Somebody not a part of the job. He’d been married once — she’d died nine years ago — but Lynn had always been active in the jobs, she’d worked with him. That sort of thing wasn’t for Claire, and Parker preferred it that way. He liked knowing this house was here, in an isolated corner of New Jersey, with Claire in it waiting for him. A completely different life, with no threads attaching it to the life he lived on the outside. It was a different kind of thing having that, and he enjoyed it.

In traveling around the city with Dent it had seemed to him to be a simple job Dent had come up with, and talking it over later with Claire he got it more completely into focus, and he saw that it could be done, quickly and neatly, with three men.

He had no trouble getting the second man: Alan Grofield, an actor who supplemented his stage income this way, and who Parker had worked with four times in the past. The third man, though, was a problem, and he knew he was settling for second best when he took on Laufman, but it was either Laufman or let the job go. There’d been times in his life when he would have let the job go, but that was before the trouble that had stripped him of the name Charles Willis and all the money stashed around the country in the Charles Willis name.

It took two weeks to get organized, to get the equipment they needed, to have the right moment of the right kind of day. They arrived in town separately the day before, stayed in separate hotels, and Parker went out to Winding Trail Court that evening to see Dent and his wife, a short thin woman who had aged into a clean white doll caricature of her younger self.

Parker gave Dent an envelope with a thousand dollars in it, and Dent said, “Good luck to you.”

“Now you can go south,” Parker said.

Dent gave him a quick look. “Saw through me, did you?”

“The only reason you’d stay in the cold,” Parker told him, “.was if you needed cash to pay your tab.”

“In the old days,” Dent said, “I’d have gone down the fire escape with a suitcase in my hand. You can’t take one of these damn house-on-wheel contraptions down a fire escape.”

“I know.”

Dent glanced toward the kitchen end of the trailer, where his wife was making them a pot of tea. “Don’t say anything to the missis,” he said. “She’s afraid she’s a drag on me, you know.”

“I won’t.”

Parker stayed through one cup of tea, for Dent’s sake, and then left, and the next day he and Grofield and Laufman went and opened the armored car, just the way they’d planned it, and then Laufman blew up and soured the job completely, leaving Parker on foot outside the entrance to the amusement park. There was nothing else for it; under the eyes of two cops and two black-coated civilians, he went over the gate and in.

P14 Slayground

Three

THERE WAS no way out.

Parker spent over an hour going slowly around the perimeter of Fun Island, and there was no usable exit anywhere except the main gate he’d come through on the way in. Where he’d been seen by the cops.

The park was a large square shape, completely enclosed by the eight-foot-high board fence that was painted gray on the outside but on the inside was an endless mural of ocean, with ships and birds and distant islands painted on it. The whole idea of the place was that it was an island, cut off from the cares of the ordinary civilized world, and in their own way the people who’d built the park had succeeded just fine. Inside the fence, all the way around, there was a stream or moat, about ten feet wide, now with a thin crust of ice on it, under which the water could be seen swirling along, black and cold. It was impossible to guess how deep it was, though probably not very. And it must be connected with a real stream some way, or it would have been turned off for the winter.

Apparently the people who ran this place were afraid then summertime customers might turn into wintertime vandals, because three secondary exits were boarded shut, there were marks to show where footbridges had been removed leading to these exits, and — most important — above the fence all the way around the park ran two thick strands of wire, bearing at intervals signs saying WARNING — HIGH VOLTAGE.

There was a waist-high chain-link fence just inside the moat all the way around, probably meant to keep children from falling into the water. Parker walked along next to that fence, ignoring the structures behind him, studying the high board fence beyond the moat, the boarded-up exits, the two strands of wire.

There was no way out.

At first as he’d moved along, toting the satchel, he’d had a great feeling of urgency, an itch at the back of his neck, a conviction that any minute this place would fill up with law. He’d been seen by those cops at the parking-lot entrance, there was no question of it. Maybe they hadn’t picked up anything about the armored-car job yet on their radio, but they would soon. They’d follow the sound of the siren, the different groups of cops would compare notes, and they’d barrel in here after him. He wanted to be out again before they came in, but there just wasn’t any way to do it.

There wasn’t any chase either. He kept moving, he kept listening behind him, and nobody was coming into the park. He could hear sirens and noise from the other side of the fence when he went past the place where the armored car had been hit, but that was the closest the sound ever got. He didn’t know what was taking them so long to get themselves coordinated, but he’d take the extra time, he wouldn’t complain. Every minute they gave him was another minute in which he might find a way out of here.

But he didn’t. He was a big man, big and blocky, wearing rubber-soled shoes, dark trousers and a heavy dark zipper jacket closed up to the throat. He had a gun in the jacket pocket and a satchel full of money and a busted plan. He walked along beside the moat, studying the fence, seeing no way out, and didn’t waste time worrying about what might have happened. He might have found a better driver than Laufman. Laufman might have kept his head. Those cops might have stopped somewhere other than that parking-lot entrance. But none of it had worked that way, so he shoved it all out of his mind and thought about the situation he had and not what he might have had if things had gone different.

The situation he had was bad. He was in a box, he knew that by the time he was halfway around the perimeter of the park, and after that he kept going only because he was thorough, always thorough. But he was in a box, and the law had seen him climb in, and sooner or later the law would come in after him.

It looked bad. He had Claire waiting for him at the house on the lake a couple of thousand miles from here, and it was looking now as though the next word she’d get of Parker would be in the newspapers.

He was coming near the gate again, and he moved more and more slowly, more and more cautiously. The satchel was heavy now, but he didn’t change hands, he kept it in his left hand. When you carry something heavy it affects your muscle control in that arm, it makes you less accurate. Parker was saving his right hand in case he had to use the gun.

The gate was up ahead, and still shut. Were they waiting for somebody to show up with keys? Were they massed outside there, and the only delay was that somebody in some office downtown had to get out here with the keys to unlock the gate?

That could be it. The local law would know, as he hadn’t, that this was a box with only one exit. They didn’t have to knock the gate down and rush in after him, they could take their time. They already had him in a prison.

Parker turned at last and looked inward, at Fun Island. It was all little buildings, scaled-down houses, with little trees and even a couple of low hills to match. It was crowded and compact, with blacktop paths everywhere.

He could hide in here. There were millions of crannies, the place was nothing but hidden corners. He could hide.

But not forever. They’d find him, sooner or later. They’d just fan out from the gate and run their drag slowly through the park and sooner or later they’d turn him up.

What were they up to now? Parker moved on, coming down the last side and back to the gate again. He left the satchel against the rear of one of the low buildings and crept along the edge of the moat until he came to the entrance again.

Nothing. Nobody.

That didn’t make any sense. Why weren’t they massed out there, why wasn’t that space of sidewalk and road out there crawling with law?

Parker moved farther out, where he could see more, and there on the other side of the road was the black Lincoln, in the same place as when he’d first seen it. The police car was gone now, and in its place was a pale green Dodge station wagon. Both cars were empty.

No police. Nobody in sight at all.

By pulling back and looking through the gates at an acute angle he could see the spot on the parking-lot fence where Laufman had rolled the Ford, and there was nothing there now but a great sagging indentation in the chain-link fence. The Ford was gone, the cops probably had Laufman and Grofield. And they had to know Parker had the money.

But where were they? None of this made any sense. Hadn’t they seen him?

They had. He was sure of it, the four of them just across the street, two cops and two men in overcoats, all four of them looking directly at him. They’d seen him, all right, they’d stared at him.

Something was screwed up somewhere, something was wrong. Parker had no idea yet what it was, but something just wasn’t right. But if it meant he could get out of his box after all, he didn’t care what the answer was. And from the looks of things, that was what it meant.

He hurried back to get the satchel. The building he’d left it against was clapboard, like most of the structures in Fun Island, this one painted a bluish gray. There was a door in this rear wall with a hasp lock on it. The satchel was under a window, a small double-hung window with small panes of glass, and when Parker bent to pick up the satchel he glanced inside and saw a small office in there, a desk and a chair, a radio and an electric clock. The clock said twenty minutes past four.

He picked up the satchel and went back to the gates, still moving cautiously but now in more of a hurry, wanting to get out of here before the goof-up, whatever it was, was discovered by somebody and fixed.

He was about to toss the satchel over the gate when the door of the little building across the way opened and a guy stepped out. Parker ducked back as the guy glanced this way. He wasn’t one of the men in overcoats Parker had seen before, he was a tall heavy-set guy in a black-and-white-checked hunting jacket and a brown-billed cap. He stood in the open doorway for a second, looking over toward the gates, then turned to say something to somebody inside the building. Parker heard him laugh, and a second later he shut the door and walked around the building to where the two cars were parked. He opened a rear door of the Dodge and got out something about a yard long and very thin, wrapped in a faded pink blanket. He shut the car door and carried the thing around and went back inside the building over there.

Parker waited and watched. On this side, facing the street, the building had tollbooths on each corner for parking-lot customers and one window in the middle of the street-side wall, where there was apparently some kind of office. The rest rooms were at the other end of the structure, inside the parking lot. Parker stayed where he was, watching, and after a minute he saw movement behind that window in the middle of the wall.

He turned and carried the satchel away from the gate.

P14 Slayground

Four

PARKER SWITCHED off the radio and sat at the desk to try to think things out. What he’d heard was bad news, maybe even worse than if the law was going to be coming in here after him.

Where he was now was in the gray building he’d left the satchel against before. The hasp lock had been easy to break. When he’d seen the clock through the window, giving the right time, he’d known the electricity was turned on at least in this building, if not throughout the park, and it seemed to him the radio he’d noticed in here would confirm for him the suspicion he now had about what was going on.

It had. He’d found a local station with a four-thirty news broadcast, and naturally the armored-car job had been their top news story. “At least one of the gunmen is still at large,” the announcer said, and went on to say that two others were in a local hospital as a result of an accident with their getaway car. “The accident was seen by officers in a police patrol car, who saw at least one man flee from the wreck and commandeer a second automobile. The officers gave chase, but lost the fugitive ‘in the North Hill section.” The fugitive was said to have the loot, seventy-three thousand dollars, in a suitcase with him.

The second news item had been about the war. Parker turned it off and sat at the desk to think.

This office seemed to be in current use, with a hot plate on a table behind the door, instant coffee and other items on a shelf above the table, and a small John through a narrow door opposite the desk. A sweater, a dark gray cardigan, hung from a hook on the back of the John door, and an old pair of black leather gloves lay with curled fingers on the desk.

The way it looked, there was a night watchman on regular duty here. He would be showing up sometime after dark, and he would be a further complication.

But not the main one. The main one was the cops who’d seen him when he came in, and the people in the tollbooth building across the street. They were obviously on guard, making sure Parker didn’t escape before dark, or before their buddies the cops could get back.

It was a clear-cut case of private enterprise, a couple of cops going into business for themselves. Parker remembered now the envelope one of the cops had been holding when he’d first seen I hem, and in thinking about that envelope and the circumstance of a police car and a black Lincoln parked in an out-of-the-way spot like that, it seemed to him it was easy to figure what had been going on. A payoff of some kind, between local hoods and a couple of tame cops.

The idea had been a natural for them, of course, once they’d seen him go over the gate with his satchel and once they’d tuned into the radio in the police car. They had watched a heist artist carry seventy-three thousand dollars over a gate and into a box. Should the cops be heroes, with their picture in the paper, and should the two in the Lincoln quietly fade out of sight? Or should they get together and maybe call in a couple of friends in a Dodge station wagon and wait around till dark — or till the cops were off duty, maybe — and then go into that box and get the seventy-three grand for themselves?

An easy question to answer.

In one way, though, the complication was a help. Those two cops had done a song and dance about Parker getting away in a second car, and as a result they’d shifted the official search away from this area. So far as running into regular law was concerned, Parker was now pretty safe, he was no longer being looked for by them anywhere around here.

But in another way, the situation was now a hell of a lot worse. The authorities wouldn’t have wanted to do anything but get their hands on Parker and shove him in a cell, but these people, the hoods on watch across the road and their cop friends, they couldn’t afford to have Parker around and able to talk about them afterward. They would have to kill him, for their own good, and they surely knew it.

When would they come in? Any time, any time at all. The hoods were probably over there waiting for the cops to come back, and as soon as they did they’d all come in, half a dozen of them or more. The four Parker had seen before, the one he’d seen just now, and whoever else had maybe showed up in that Dodge wagon. They had the numbers, so they wouldn’t wait for darkness if they could help it, they’d have an easier job smoking him out in daylight, and it would be cleaner to do it and get it over with before the night watchman showed up.

So Parker knew he probably didn’t have very much time, and the first thing he was going to have to do was find somewhere to stash the money. He couldn’t tote that satchel around with him all the time, it would slow him down and get in the way.

In here? No, this little office was too functional and bare, there was no place to hide anything in it. There’d be a better spot somewhere else in the park.

Before leaving the office Parker gave the desk a quick shakedown, looking for anything that might prove useful, and came up first with a flashlight from the middle drawer. He didn’t know if the electricity would have been left on in the rest of the park or not, so he stuffed the flashlight into his other jacket pocket, opposite his gun.

In the bottom desk drawer he found a stack of colorful maps of the park. He opened one out on the desk and took a look at it. This was his battleground, it would be good to know what the terrain was like.

Fun Island was a large square, divided into eight approximately similar pie-slices, each of the eight representing another kind of island. To the left of the entrance gates, in the area containing this little office building and a couple of other small unidentified administrative buildings, the emphasis was on Desert Island. There was a Desert Island black-light ride — “on rubber life rafts!” — a Desert Island snack bar and a Desert Island fun house.

The next section was Voodoo Island, with another black-light ride, plus an outdoor jungle ride on wooden rafts, a snake house, a band shell — “name performers every weekend all summer long!” — and something called Theater of Jungle Dances.

Beyond that was New York Island, a miniature town full of Kill and camera shops, a steakhouse restaurant, a nickelodeon and so on, plus a Coney Island amusement area and a kiddie unto ride.

Treasure Island was next, with another black-light ride, a Ferris wheel and an outdoor pirate ship ride.

Fifth was Alcatraz Island, which contained a roller coaster, shooting galleries, wax museum, mess-hall restaurant and an outdoor gunboat ride.

After Alcatraz came the Island of Hawaii, with a volcano bobsled ride, an underwater submarine ride and a Polynesian restaurant. Connecting the Hawaii section with the Voodoo Island section directly opposite was the Island in the Sky ride.

Seventh was Pleasure Island, as in Pinocchio. There was a pony ride, plus a carousel and a porpoise display in an outdoor pool and a snack bar.

Last, all the way around to the gates again, between Pleasure Island and Desert Island, was a section called Island Earth, which was mostly science-fiction, with an interstellar space black-light ride, a Trip to the Moon and some ordinary amusement-area rides.

So it was an amusement park, like any other, with all the standard attractions. Parks of this kind built since the Second World War have all been thematic, whether islands or something else, but whatever the theme, they’ve always managed to get the ordinary mixture in. The Ferris wheel, the carousel, the roller coaster, the rides, the black-light rides, the snack bars and gift shops and wax museum and shooting galleries, all the same ingredients, but in each park under a slightly different name and with a slightly different paint job.

The two structures nearest to where Parker was sitting right now were the Desert Island snack bar and the Desert Island black-light ride, called Marooned! With any luck, there might be someplace to stash the money in the Marooned! building until he could get out of the park.

He folded up the map and tucked it into his hip pocket, pulling the elastic bottom of his jacket down over the protruding top of it, then picked up the satchel and carefully let himself back out into the cold air.

There was still no activity down by the gate. He turned the other way, and ahead of him saw a long oval building, windowless and doorless and painted gray. He walked over that way and around to the front of the building, where shivery letters screamed MAROONED! over the entrance.

The worst thing was the tracks he was leaving, but there just wasn’t anything to be done about that. There was about an inch of loose snow on the ground, and no way on earth to keep from leaving tracks when you walked through it. All he could hope to do was leave so many tracks that by the time the hoods came in they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure where he’d been or where he was or what he was up to.

Marooned! was closed up solid, but a secondary entrance behind the ticket booth looked flimsy, and when Parker kicked the door twice with his heel next to the knob it popped open and hung there ajar, revealing black darkness within.

Parker stepped inside, flicked on his flashlight, and pushed the door shut again. It closed, but not all the way.

He was in a small black-painted room with an electric control panel mounted on one wall. He went over and studied it and saw that a master switch was standing open, so he shut it, and at once the lights came on.

Lights and music, and voices. Laughing, talking, chortling, all of it full of echoes and seeming somehow to be both very close and far away at the same time.

There was a door in the opposite wall. Parker opened it, and found himself at the edge of a narrow black stream that ran through the building, probably an offshoot of the stream bordering the park. To his right a bunch of rubber life rafts were tied up and bobbing. He went over and untied the nearest one, and it wasn’t rubber at all but some kind of plastic, hard to the touch. He got into the raft with the satchel, and it began to float along the stream. That is, it was pulled along an underwater track by hooks built into the bottom of the raft.

Black-light rides are all similar in style. The customer is transported along a determined route in darkness, while various paintings or tableaux light up on either side of him and various fluorescent objects flutter around him. At the same time, recordings play music or screeches or laughter or explanations or whatever is desired.

This ride was an endless series of desert-island gags. On both sides the little boxes would light up, their mechanism triggered by something in the bottom of the raft as it went by, and in the boxes were representations of desert islands. Some of them contained one male doll alone, some contained two males, but most had one male and one female. Recorded voices gave out the tired old gag-lines, and the lit-up mannequins would make small mechanical movements, lifting their arms or slapping one another’s face. In the meantime, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling one after the other, as though to collide with the raft, but always swung hack up out of sight at the last moment.

Parker watched, but for a long time there didn’t seem to be any place in here to stash the money. Then, just before the end of the ride, there was a bigger tableau than any that had come before it. This one, almost life-size, showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. What one first saw on coming around I lie corner was a mannequin in tattered rags bobbing his head in delight over a chest of gold he’d just accidentally dug up. After l lie raft went by him, though, one could see that on the other side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, was a longboat full of pirates that had just landed.

Parker studied that last island, and then directly ahead was a pair of low wide doors closed above the water, with a huge mi cams hip painted on them in fluorescent colors as though a collision were imminent.

This time the collision took place, the doors being locked for the winter. There was a slight bump, a brief grinding noise as the hooks disengaged from the track, the water began to make small gurgling sounds as it swirled by the stopped raft, and Parker got to his feet and climbed out onto the narrow walk In-side the channel. He carried the satchel back to that last display and stuffed it down inside the pirates’ longboat. Several of the figures were movable, and Parker shifted one until he was hull-squatting over the satchel. Then he walked back to the raft, used it to get over to the other side of the channel, and walked down a narrow corridor to the control room he’d started from.

He opened the master switch and silence and darkness immediately fell. He cautiously pulled the outside door open, saw no one and went out.

He still had a lot more to do.

P14 Slayground

Five

TEN MINUTES to five. Parker opened a door and stepped into darkness. When he switched on the flashlight it reflected back a dozen times, it showed him himself over and over, from every angle, as though he’d just sown dragon’s teeth and grown himself an army. It was the hall of mirrors, on the second floor of the fun house.

In his other hand Parker carried a spray can of white paint he’d found in the storage closet downstairs. He began to move through the mirrors, spraying a round white circle about the size of a pancake about chest-high on every mirror.

It took almost ten minutes to work his way through to the other end, and then he went through the black door and up the metal ladder to the roof, where he looked over the fake-grass roof of the Desert Island snack bar to the main gates. They hadn’t come in yet. He went back down to familiarize himself with the rest of the fun house.

Quarter after five. Parker rode a rocket with wooden seats past suns and satellites to the end of the black-light Voyage Through the Galaxy. He got out of the rocket at the end of the trip, went into the control room, and turned off the electricity. Then he followed his flashlight beam back along the black-painted floor under the stars and moons.

They were all hung by wire from the ceiling, the wire thin enough to be invisible but strong enough to hold some fairly heavy models. Parker found metal rungs in one wall, went up them to a catwalk, and from the catwalk reeled in a Saturn, a communications satellite and some rockets and stars. He removed them from their wires and left them lying together on the catwalk, then undid the wires from the ceiling. He carried the wires back down to floor-level and tied them in new places.

When he was done, he went outside again. At the corner, he could look down past the Island Earth amusement rides section — a whip, a caterpillar, whirling pots — at the gates. Not yet.

The other way was Pleasure Island. Parker walked through Pleasure Island, past the carousel with its mournful ponies and on into Hawaii.

Five-thirty. The underwater ride was a vessel that rode almost completely submerged in water. Two streams ran across Fun Island from the moat that surrounded the place, and several rides and attractions were built on, or otherwise made use of, the water. Where the water was indoors, as in the Desert Island black-light ride, it had not yet frozen, but outdoors, as here, a thin crust of ice had formed.

There were four of the underwater vehicles, three of them enclosed in a small service area behind the main ride, and the fourth out by the entrance and the ticket booth. Parker opened the hatch of one and went down inside, where a long row of seats faced portholes in the side wall. He had to stoop to walk down to the far end, where a separate seat faced all the rest. This is where in summer the boy would sit who delivered the spiel during the ride.

What Parker was looking for was an underwater exit, even a small hatch, but there didn’t seem to be one, so he went back outside to look around. He walked back and forth, and in the service area he found a loose length of pipe with an elbow at one end. It was lying on the ground near one of the vehicles. He picked it up, carried it back to the first vehicle, and lowered it into the water. It would reach the portholes. Good. He put the pipe in the ticket booth and walked on down past the Polynesian restaurant to look down the main central blacktop path toward the gates.

Still not.

Twenty minutes to six. Parker took the ax from the executioner’s hand and squeezed the blade. It cracked in two, it was wax, like the masked executioner, like the kneeling victim, like the two priests looking on with hands clutched together at their breasts and fiendish smiles of joy on their faces.

The wax museum was useless. Parker left it and walked through the thin powder of snow to the Alcatraz Island shooting gallery. His tracks were spreading out all over the park now, they wouldn’t lead anybody directly either to him or to the money.

The shooting gallery was boarded up. When he broke in through the door at the side, Parker found that the rifles were not along the counter, the chains hung there empty. He looked around, and they were stowed in a wooden crate at the back of the gallery. They were air rifles, firing pellets of pressed cardboard. Parker fired one, and the pellet had no force at all. It would sting, no more. He threw the rifle back into the crate and went outside again.

What else did Alcatraz have to offer him? The wax museum had been no good, the shooting gallery was no good. There was left the roller coaster, an outdoor gunboat ride and a restaurant. Parker went to check them out.

Five minutes to six. Parker climbed to the bridge of the pirate ship. Far down at the other end of the park were the gates, livening was beginning to come on, the temperature was dropping, but the bunch outside still hadn’t made their move.

Were they really waiting for darkness? Didn’t they realize that would only cut their advantage over him? The more time they gave him and the more darkness they gave him, the better off he’d be, didn’t they know that?

Or maybe they were still waiting for their two cop friends to come back. It could be they’d decided not to come in after him without those two, and the cops hadn’t gotten off duty yet. With the manhunt still out for Parker, it might be quite a while before they came off duty.

In the meantime, Parker only had the one gun, and that one not the best for this kind of situation. A Smith & Western Terrier, it was a five-shot .32 revolver with a two-inch barrel. Not enough bullets, not enough punch to the shot, and not enough barrel for long-range accuracy. With luck, he could get five of them at close range, but there were going to be more than five coming in after him. Somewhere in Fun Island he had to find other weapons, other ways to defend himself and disable them.

He left the bridge, went down the stairs and across the deck and down the gangplank off the pirate ship. He walked up to the long low building with the huge name out front: BUCCANEER! Again he had to break through a side door to get inside.

This was another black-light ride, like Marooned! and Voyage Through the Galaxy. The customers rode in small pirate ships this time, through a channel of water like the one in Marooned! and past many similar displays and effects.

This time Parker stopped his vessel halfway through, and stepped out into a miniature representation of New Orleans under pirate attack. Various colored lights flickered and gleamed on the mechanical movements of the dolls. Parker used one of the ornamental lines from his small boat to tie it to a building in the display, and then began to follow the wiring from the lights.

They came together in a small box with an On-Off switch. Parker turned it off, and the display abruptly went dark. The rest of the displays along the route were still working, only this one had stopped.

He had to work by flashlight, removing the wiring from several of the lights and fastening it carefully elsewhere. When he was done, he didn’t turn the display back on. He untied his boat, got back into it, and rode it the rest of the way through the ride. Since in stopping the boat he’d stripped it of its connection to the track, he was borne along by the water flowing through its winding metal trough inside the building, down to the end of the ride.

Ten minutes after six. Parker took the hunting knife from a fake-leather sheath that read Souvenir of Fun Island and balanced it along one finger. The center of gravity was where it should be, where blade met handle. He held it at the point between thumb and finger and flicked it with a snap of the wrist the room. The point thudded into the gift-shop wall, the quivered there.

It was pretty good, better than he’d expected. There was a small cardboard carton containing a dozen of the knives under a counter in the gift shop, the only useful items there. He put the carton under one arm, retrieved the first knife from the wall; and went outside to one of the narrow streets of New York Island, a sentimentalized version of New York City in the gay nineties. He’d been through the other shops, glanced into the camera store and restaurant and nickelodeon, but none of them seemed to contain anything he could use.

It was getting darker. And colder. The gloves he’d found in the watchman’s office were coming in handy, though later on he wouldn’t be able to wear one on his right hand.

At the end of the last street in New York Island he paused to look down toward the gate, but it was all silent and unmoving down there. He walked on to begin sowing his knives.

Twenty minutes to seven. Parker walked into the theater in Voodoo Island. It was a small place, with hard wooden seats, but the stage was surprisingly well furnished. It even had a fly loft, a space above the stage where backdrops and flats could be lifted when they weren’t needed onstage. The ropes ran up from the pipes on which the backdrops were hung, went over pulleys just under the roof, and came down to one side of the stage, where a complicated series of counterweights kept the backdrops well enough balanced to be raised or lowered by one man.

Parker went up the metal ladder to the catwalk, where the ropes and counterweights were. Nine backdrops and canvas flats were suspended above the stage now, each of them weighing two or three hundred pounds. Parker tied the ropes with slipknots to the railing waist-high beside the catwalk, then removed the metal weights from their wooden racks tied to the ropes. Each weight was about twenty pounds, a piece of iron shaped somewhat like a gold ingot. He lined them all along the edge of the catwalk, then climbed back down the ladder to the stage and went over to the main control board. He tried all the switches, and discovered two trap doors in the stage floor. He’d expected there might be one or two, having seen magic acts advertised out front.

The theater had nothing else to offer him, so he went back outside. It was almost fully night now, the buildings all merely black hulks against the pale snow. He was turning on the lights in each building when going in, and turning them off again on the way out, leaving the entire park in darkness. They’d see the intervals of light outside, if they were looking through the entrance, but it wouldn’t tell them anything.

To his left was the snake house. He’d already been in there, and it was empty, the cages standing open. The cages might prove handy eventually, but so far he didn’t see how.

Ahead was the band shell, even more useless than the snake house. Back behind the theater was the entrance to the outdoor jungle ride. There might be useful things there, but it was too dark now to look for them. That left the only other thing in the Voodoo Island section, another black-light ride, this one called Land of Voodoo. Parker walked across the crunching snow and kicked in the door to the Land of Voodoo.

Seven o’clock. Parker stepped into the watchman’s office and turned on the radio. He was just in time to hear the news announcer describe the seven-state manhunt being undertaken in the search for the lone bandit who escaped from today’s daring daylight robbery of a Merchant Bank’s armored car on Abelard Road near the ball park. All city police were working extra shifts, roadblocks were being set up all over the damn place, there was even a special phone number citizens could call if they wanted to confuse the issue. The two captured robbers, neither as yet identified, were unconscious still in Schumann Memorial Hospital, where they were both under tight police guard. “If their buddy tries to get them away from us again,” the chief of police was quoted as saying, “we’ll be ready for him.”

Parker shook his head and switched off the radio. The rest of the world had some strange Robin Hood ideas sometimes. He wouldn’t risk his neck to drag Grofield and Laufman out of the hospital now even if he could, and neither of them would expect him to. They were on their own now, to work things out the best way they could.

And so was Parker. He wouldn’t expect Grofield or Laufman or anybody else to come in here now and give him a hand. He’d walked into this himself, it was up to him to walk back out again himself. He understood that, and he didn’t worry about it. There was a telephone on the desk, but he hadn’t even bothered to check and see if it was working. There was no one to call.

It didn’t occur to him to call Claire. There was no point telling her he was in the middle of a mess, because there was nothing she’d be able to do about it. He would either get back to her or he wouldn’t. In the meantime, he had no space in his mind for anything but what was taking place right here.

He sat at the desk and studied the park map again. Had he covered everything, seen everything, considered every possibility?

The Land of Voodoo and Marooned! black-light rides both used boats traveling through channels of water, so he’d made electrical preparations with them just like the one in the Buccaneer! ride. He’d seeded the knives around in all eight sections of the park, retaining only two, their sheaths now attached to his belt and tucked partway down into his hip pockets. He’d checked out all the buildings and several of the outdoor attractions. There was nothing left to do now but wait.

He’d turned on the gooseneck lamp on the desk, but now he folded the map again and switched it off. There was an electric heater on the floor, he’d turned that on before, and in addition to heat it gave off an orange-red glow, enough light to move around by.

He carried the chair from the desk over to the window. Sitting there, he could just see the gates. He rested one elbow on the window sill and waited.

Eight o’clock. Parker was used to the dull red light from the electric heater, it was plenty to see by. He crossed the little office and turned on the radio and waited for the announcer to tell him why nobody had come through those goddam gates yet. But the announcer had no information on that subject. The only news he had about the robbery was that one of the robbers in Schumann Memorial Hospital, the one thought to have been the driver of the getaway car, was not expected to live. The other one was expected to live.

Parker turned off the radio again and went back through the red darkness and sat down in the chair and looked out through the white darkness to the yellow and gray darkness at the main gate. So Laufman was going to die. And Grofield was going to live. Well, Grofield had never been inside the pen, it would be a new experience for him.

Parker had only been inside once, and that was nine years ago, and it had been a simple prison farm in California on a simple vag charge, but it had wound up with his fingerprints on file for the first time in his life, and because of some other things that had happened, those fingerprints were now connected with a couple of murder charges, so even if it was legitimate law he was waiting for here and not hoods, it wouldn’t be very good.

Thinking about Grofield had made him think of prison, and that had made him think of his own single experience that way, and now he went from that to the death of his wife, Lynn, which had been involved in that whole mix-up that time nine years ago, and from that he got to thinking about other people he knew that were dead now, and how few died of old age. Dent, any day now, was going to be an exception.

There was a fellow named Salsa, very pretty but very tough. One time in Galveston when Parker had been staying briefly with a weird girl named Crystal, Salsa had said to him, “Your woman wishes to photograph me unclad.” He’d been asking Parker’s permission, and Parker had said, “What do I care?” That was shortly before Salsa was dead, in a job they were all doing together on an island. A real island, not a fun island.

Now he stirred and sat up and stretched his arms up in the air and shook his head. “I’m getting like Dent,” he said out loud. Sitting here thinking about dead people, as though his own life was over now.

It was having nothing to do. It was stupid that they didn’t come in. They should have come in a long time ago, in daylight. Now they not only had given him time to booby-trap the whole damn park against them, they’d given him darkness to hide in. They were just making it tough. Unless they weren’t coming in? Was that a possibility, any way at all? Parker leaned forward again, his elbows and forearms on the window sill, and brooded out at the silent empty gate, seen at an angle from here, and he thought about it. Possibility one: they were just going to wait out there until he came out again. Possibility two: for some reason, they’d changed their minds and gone away and there was no reason why he couldn’t just pick up the satchel and leave.

Possibility two was a fantasy, and he knew it, and he pushed it to one side. But what about possibility one? Could they really mean to lay siege to him here, just wait outside until he came out?

It seemed unlikely, it seemed damn unlikely. Unless they thought he didn’t know they were there. But even so — All right, say that’s their plan, say they’re waiting, they don’t figure to come in at all. What does that mean, how does it change things?

It doesn’t change them at all. Because he wasn’t going to go out, and sooner or later — sometime tonight it would have to be — they’d understand that he wasn’t going out, and then they’d understand that they were going to have to come in.

Parker nodded to himself, thinking about it. His expression was flat, bleak. He was going to have to be patient, and sit here, and wait for them out there to understand the situation.

He waited.

Ten o’clock. Parker had eaten the crackers from the shelf over the hot plate, and was on his second cup of instant coffee when the headlights flashed over the row of gates. He drained the cup, put it down on the floor behind him, and peered through the window.

Nothing happened for a long minute. The headlights continued to shine on the gates. Then a shadow moved vaguely in front of the lights, and one pair of the gates swung open, pushed by a stocky old man in a long overcoat and a nondescript hat.

The watchman? That’s who it had to be.

Parker waited, following it all through the window. The watchman disappeared again, and a minute later a car drove slowly through the gates and stopped. A dark Volkswagen, blue or green, it was hard to say which.

The watchman got out of the Volkswagen, and three men came through the gates with guns in their hands and handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces.

The watchman seemed too stunned to understand them at first. Parker watched them make angry gestures with their guns, and finally the watchman slowly lifted his hands up over his head. One of the others frisked him, and brought a long-barreled pistol out of the watchman’s overcoat pocket.

Two of them gestured to him to move, to walk toward the office, and he did so, obviously complaining and arguing, walking along with his hands up over his head. The two followed him, pushing his shoulders with their gun barrels, while the third stood in the open gates, lit by the red glow from the Volkswagen’s tail-lights, and gestured to others outside to come in.

Parker got to his feet. He switched off the electric heater, and as the dim red light in the room faded to black, he opened the office door, stepped out into the darkness, and moved silently away.

P14 Slayground

PART TWO

P14 Slayground

One

“LOOK,” CALIATO said.

He’d just given O’Hara the money, and now all four of them stood there and watched a guy throw a suitcase over the locked gates of Fun Island and then climb over them himself. He dropped to the ground on the inside, grabbed the suitcase, and disappeared.

Benniggio said, “I hear a siren.”

Caliato listened. “Close,” he said. “Coming this way.”

“We better blow,” Benniggio said.

Caliato could hear the nervousness in Benniggio’s voice. He’s supposed to protect me, he thought, but he didn’t say anything. Not in front of the cops.

O’Hara was showing nervousness, too, standing there looking at the envelope in his hand as though wishing there was a drawer handy to shove it in. “If it’s for us — ” he started.

Caliato was impatient when he met nervousness, because it was never the right response to anything. “It isn’t for us,” he said. “If it was for us, they’d come with sneakers on. It’s for that bird just went into Fun Island. Get on your beeper and see what’s up.”

“Right,” O’Hara said, and ran around to get into his patrol car. The other cop, Dunstan, went along with him. Caliato noticed O’Hara stashed the envelope in the glove compartment before getting on the radio.

The siren went by, very close. Going along Abelard Road. It went on a ways farther, and then stopped. When it stopped, more sirens could be heard, coming this way.

Benniggio said, “I don’t like this, Cal.”

“I don’t like you wetting your pants in front of cops,” Caliato told him. “Get hold of yourself.”

“I’m the one that’s heeled,” Benniggio said. He thumped his chest. “You know what happens if I get picked up with this thing?”

“A boy like you, without a record? They’ll slap your wrist. That’s why you’re along, you can afford to carry heat. I can’t. Just hold tight, Benny, nothing’s happened yet.”

Caliato walked out in front of the toll building and looked down to the right, where the guy with the suitcase had come from. There was a car lying on its side against the fence down there by the intersection. Nobody moving around it.

He heard the patrol-car door open, and he walked back as O’Hara stepped out of the car. O’Hara looked excited. He said, “A bunch knocked over an armored car! Right over by the ball park. That must be one of them.”

“Their car didn’t make the corner,” Caliato said. “It’s tipped over down there. You didn’t report him, did you?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell them you saw him,” Caliato said. “Tell them you saw him get out of the wrecked car and commandeer another. He took off down Brower Road here, and you lost him.”

O’Hara didn’t get it. “How come?”

Caliato said, “What do you think he had in that suitcase, dirty laundry?”

O’Hara looked startled. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Move,” Caliato told him.

O’Hara moved. People always did move when Caliato told them to, he had a natural talent for leadership. He was thirty-eight years old, and he knew for a certainty he’d be running this city before he was fifty. Lozini was top man now, but he was getting old, and already he deferred to Caliato on some issue. Caliato still had to handle the payoffs, that had to be done personally by an executive, but within a couple of years he’d be too important for this kind of thing. And when he moved up, he knew Lozini would go along with whoever Caliato recommended as his own replacement.

In the meantime, he was patient. He’d learned early that the one thing a man with leadership qualities has to look out for is making the current leaders nervous. Leaders don’t like to be nervous, they don’t like to be around a guy who looks like he’s in a hurry to take over. More than one guy with perfectly good leadership potential had had an unexpectedly short career because he’d forgotten not to make the current top men nervous. It was a mistake Caliato never made. He was patient, he was truly patient. He was in no hurry to get to where he knew he was going, and the men above him — especially Lozini — saw that quality of patience in him and were therefore not made nervous.

Now, as O’Hara sat in the patrol car talking again into his microphone, Caliato said, “Benny, get me Lozini on the phone.”

“Sure, Gal,” Benniggio said. He was young and excitable, but he was basically all right. He’d season. He went over to the Lincoln, got into the back seat, and began to dial the telephone there.

O’Hara came over from the patrol car, looking unhappy. “They want us to give chase,” he said.

“So give chase.”

“What about him?” O’Hara nodded his head toward the entrance to Fun Island.

“He’ll keep,” Caliato said. “He can’t get out of there, you know that.”

“You won’t go in after him without us?” O’Hara was worried about his piece of pie, that was obvious.

“I wouldn’t take a step in there without law,” Caliato told him. “That uniform of yours can save us a lot of aggravation.”

“We get off at six,” O’Hara said.

“We’ll be here.”

O’Hara still hesitated, glancing worriedly over at the amusement park, then shrugged and said, “If there’s any hangup, I’ll phone you.”

“Sure. You better get on the stick.”

“Right.”

O’Hara trotted over to the patrol car, and Benniggio got out of the Lincoln, calling, “Okay, Cal.”

Caliato went over to the Lincoln. “Watch over there that he doesn’t come out,” he said, and got into the back seat and shut the door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the patrol car pull out onto Brower Road and turn left. He picked up the phone and said, “Caliato here.”

“One moment for Mr. Lozini, please.” It was a woman’s voice with a faint English accent. But that was all right, Lozini was an old man and a successful man, and if an old and successful man wanted to put on airs with English secretaries, that was his privilege. Maybe some day Caliato would want to spread himself the same way.

Not when he first took over, though. For the first year or so, a new leader should be humble, one of the troops, modest and mild. A patient man doesn’t show off until it’s time.

“Cal?” You couldn’t tell from Lozini’s voice that he was old, he sounded tough and strong. Which he was. “Something wrong there?”

“No. Something good.” He gave Lozini a quick summary of what had happened, finishing, “I figure we’ll stick around here till O’Hara and the other one get back. Then we go in, they make a legal pinch, and the guy tries to escape.”

“How much is in it?”

“I don’t know. It was an armored car he hit, it can’t be nickels and dimes.”

There was a little silence, and then Lozini said, “If you can’t do it quiet, you don’t do it.”

“Naturally.”

“The situation’s a little tricky right now, you know that. We got to keep our heads down.”

“I know,” Caliato said. “Believe me, I know what comes first. If it looks like there’s going to be trouble, I’ll come right the hell away from it.”

“Good man. You want any help down there?”

“Not for slices. It’s only one suitcase he carried in with him.”

“You can afford a C-note a man.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll send you three. Any preference?”

“Not Rigno, and not Taliamaze. Other than that, anybody you got free.”

Lozini chuckled. “You got a good head on your shoulders, Cal,” he said. “Give me a call when it’s over. If it ain’t too late, we’ll have dinner, you can tell me about it.”

Caliato knew how proud Lozini was of his cooking, though actually what he cooked was ordinary, neither terrible nor great. Still, the old man thought it was great, and it was an honor to be invited, so Caliato said, “In that case, I guarantee we’ll be done early. And I’ll work up an appetite.”

“You do that, Cal. I’ll send you some boys.”

P14 Slayground

Two

DUNSTAN WAS terrified. “Joe,” he said, “this is different, this isn’t the same thing at all.”

“It’s more dough,” O’Hara told him, “that’s what it is. Our piece alone will be more than that whole envelope Caliato gave me.” The siren was whining above their heads, O’Hara had both hands on the steering wheel, they were tearing after a fantasy down Brower Road.

Dunstan said, “Joe, we’ll have to kill him. Don’t you realize that?”

“Who said anything about kill? You don’t think he’ll give up when he sees he’s trapped?”

“Joe, we couldn’t bring him in. Don’t try and tell me dumb lies, I can think as good as the next man. We take his money away and bring him downtown and all he has to do is open his mouth once.”

O’Hara looked troubled, as though he didn’t want to hear what Dunstan was saying. “So we’ll work something out,” he said. “We don’t have to bring him downtown. We trade him, we take the suitcase and let him go.”

“We couldn’t take the chance, and you know it.” Dunstan shook his head, blinking at the roadway in front of them. “Besides, Caliato won’t let him go. He wouldn’t stand for it.”

“Caliato isn’t running us,” O’Hara said angrily.

Dunstan looked at him, but he had sense enough not to tell O’Hara the truth. O’Hara had to know it anyway, just as much as Dunstan did. Caliato ran O’Hara exactly the way O’Hara ran Dunstan, which had nothing to do with seniority in grade or time on the force or age or anything else. It was pecking order, that’s all, pure pecking order. O’Hara was dominant over Duns tan, and they both knew it. And Caliato was dominant over O’Hara, and they both knew it.

In point of fact, O’Hara did have age and seniority on the force over Dunstan. Dunstan was twenty-seven years old, four years on the force. The Army had made him an MP during his three-year enlistment — they’d trained him in the field of his choice, as a refrigeration engineer, but after tech school they’d made him an MP — and when none of the other jobs he’d gotten after the Army had worked out, he’d just naturally drifted into the police force. He didn’t expect to be commissioner ever, he didn’t expect even to be a precinct captain at any time in his future. All he expected was a quiet life on the force, fairly decent pay with under-the-counter bonuses, and no trouble.

This armored-car robber struck Dunstan as trouble, huge threatening trouble. Being in on the grease that lubricated the day-to-day affairs of the police department was pleasant, and since nearly a quarter of the force was in on it to some extent or other — including a lot of higher-ups — it wasn’t really dangerous, Dunstan had no objections there. But this armored-car robber, that was something else again.

He tried once more. “I’ve never killed anybody in my life, Joe,” he said. “I couldn’t just shoot a man down like that. Make him surrender, and then just shoot him down. Christ, Joe, I don’t think you could do a thing like that either.”

“I wouldn’t,” O’Hara said. “If it came to that — and I say if it came to that — you know Caliato would handle it. That sort of thing doesn’t bother him, he’s done it before.”

“I don’t like it,” Dunstan said, stubbornly. “I don’t want to be in on it.”

O’Hara gave him a quick look, then glared out at the road again. “You want to come down sick? Call in, tell them you’re throwing up, I have to take you home.”

Dunstan frowned. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“Go home.”

“I’d still know about it. Joe, maybe what we ought to do is call in and tell the truth. We can say he circled back, we just saw him going into the park now.”

“What good does that do us?”

“Maybe there’s a reward. If there’s a lot of money, then there probably is a reward.”

O’Hara grimaced, facing straight ahead. “I can see Caliato standing still for that,” he said. “Do we split this great reward with him? ‘Here, Caliato, here’s twenty bucks for your trouble, thanks for watching the pigeon while we drove around the countryside.’” He shook his head. “Sometimes, Paul, you don’t make much sense.”

Dunstan didn’t have anything else to say, so he just sat there and chewed on a knuckle and watched the road unreel in front of the windshield. The siren kept howling, but you got used to that pretty soon, you no longer really noticed it. After running with the siren for a while, sometimes you’d turn it off and all of a sudden the air would be humming, you’d feel almost dizzy, as though now there was a noise and before there’d been silence.

What was he going to do? He knew he could follow O’Hara’s suggestion, he could claim sickness, nobody would question it, he had a good attendance record. He could call in now, O’Hara would drop him off at home, and he’d be out of it, from there on, it wouldn’t concern him at all.

But it would. He’d be home there all right, but he’d know about it. By his very silence he’d be a part of it. If something went wrong, now or at sometime in the future, and they caught up with O’Hara for his part in it, they’d have Paul Dunstan too, they’d snap him up in the same net, and his silence alone would convict him. That he had known where the robber was, that he had known what O’Hara and the others were going to do, and that he had not communicated that information to his superiors. That’s all it would need. If the thing went wrong somehow, having been at home wouldn’t help Dunstan at all.

He wished it hadn’t ever happened, that’s what he wished, because no matter which way he looked, it was still a mess. If he went home now he’d not only still be culpable, he wouldn’t share in the take, which meant he’d be running the risk without any chance at the profit, which was in some ways the worst option open to him. Besides the fact that O’Hara would never let him forget it. O’Hara and Caliato and Caliato’s friends would all be convinced from now on that Paul Dunstan was a coward, they’d treat him with indifference and contempt, O’Hara would probably make life impossible for him.

But to go there meant taking part in murder. Murder One. He knew that, the knowledge scraped over his nerves like steel wool, he couldn’t ignore it or turn his back on it like O’Hara. Whatever their main motivation, whatever their main goal, what they were all planning to do today was murder a fellow human being. Shoot him down while he was defenseless, and hide behind the protection of their uniforms to do it.

It was a bind, a rotten stinking bind, and no matter which way he turned he saw no way out of it. He couldn’t blow the whistle, O’Hara would really make life hell on him then. Not to mention Caliato. He had no idea what Caliato might do to him if he spoiled their chance at this robber. That wasn’t one of his options at all.

He only had the two options. He could either be sick and go home to avoid being actually present for it, thus eliminating his share of the money but keeping his share of the blame, or he could go along, thus actually being involved in the murder but also being involved in the split.

He sat there and thought about things for about five minutes, until O’Hara finally slowed the patrol car and switched off the siren, saying, “That’s far enough. We just lost him.” He glanced at Dunstan. “You want to call in sick?”

Dunstan reluctantly shook his head. “I’m in it,” he said. “I guess I have to stay in it.”

“Good man,” O’Hara said, and Dunstan had the strange feeling O’Hara was relieved, as though he’d been troubled at the thought of going on with it without Dunstan. The impression had to be wrong, but for a few seconds Dunstan was baffled by it, as though a door had suddenly opened in an invisible wall of the world, giving him a quick glimpse of an entirely different world on the other side. Different colors, different shapes, different everything. The impression faded almost immediately, like a ghost on a television screen, and left Dunstan only vaguely uneasy. He assumed he felt that way because of the decision he’d just made.

O’Hara pulled the patrol car off the road and came to a stop. He called in, announcing their position and saying they’d lost the bandit in his second car, he must have turned off somewhere along the way. They were told to hold on there a minute, and during the wait O’Hara told Dunstan, “You can’t say for sure how this thing is going to work. Maybe there’ll be a nice simple way to handle it without anybody getting hurt.”

“How?” Dunstan asked.

“How do I know?” O’Hara was impatient and irritable. “How do I know till we get there and we’re actually in the situation? It’s possible, that’s all, it’s just possible things will work out. You don’t always have to take if for granted the worst is going to happen.”

The dispatcher came back on and told them to go join a roadblock being set up over on Western Avenue. Then he said, “You want me to notify anybody?”

O’Hara said, “Of what?”

“You boys are due to get off at six.”

Dunstan looked up.

O’Hara said, “So what?” Guarded, as though already knowing what was coming.

“It ain’t gonna happen,” the dispatcher said. “Not unless somebody grabs that guy by then. The way it looks, you boys can look forward to a long night. You want me to notify anybody?”

“God damn ill”

“I agree,” the dispatcher said. “Anybody I should call?”

“No!” O’Hara said angrily, and slammed the microphone back into its clamp. He glared at Dunstan, saying, “What the hell are you grinning about?”

“Me? I’m not grinning.”

But he had been. He’d been grinning because all of a sudden a possible way out had appeared. He and O’Hara would be stuck on roadblock duty all night long, they wouldn’t ever get back to Caliato. If Caliato did anything, it would be on his own hook, Dunstan and O’Hara would have no part of it. The robber might even get away, given enough time.

But he managed to make a troubled face, for O’Hara’s benefit. “Maybe I was grinning about the way you got mad at Floyd,” he said. “He doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

“It’s nothing to grin over,” O’Hara said angrily, and slammed the car into gear and made a U-turn in the teeth of oncoming traffic.

Dunstan didn’t grin any more.

P14 Slayground

Three

CALIATO SAID, “You got your keys?”

“Sure,” Benniggio said. “What’s up?”

Caliato poked a thumb at the tollbooth building beside them. “See can you get us in there,” he said. “Without breaking any doors down.”

“A snap,” Benniggio said, and walked away, his left hand shoving his overcoat tail out of the way so he could dig down into his trouser pocket.

Caliato stood by the front bumper of the Lincoln, looking across the road at the entrance to Fun Island. He knew what the yegg inside was doing now, he was making his way around the fence, he was looking for another way out. He didn’t know yet, that guy over there, what Caliato knew, that there was no other way out. He was in a sack, that guy, all wrapped up in a sack and ready to be gathered in.

The reason Caliato knew about the winter arrangements at Fun Island was that several years ago he’d spent some time working there, in,the office. Sort of liaison with Lozini.

Lozini had summed it up one time, when he’d grinned and said, “If it’s got neon on it, we own a piece of it.” Meaning by “we” not just himself, but the whole loose-knit group that ran this town and of whom Lozini was at the moment leader. Of whom some day Caliato would be the leader.

And what Lozini had said that time was basically true. Bars, restaurants, vending machines, movie houses, almost everything in town; if it was big enough, a piece of it belonged to the boys. And that definitely meant Fun Island, a place that was tied in with the boys a hundred different ways. The vending machines, the liquor licenses in the restaurants, the linen service and garbage collection, the strippers in the Voodoo Island theater, and the printing of tickets and maps and souvenir programs — up and down and crossways, it all connected with the same group of boys.

So Fun Island was an old stamping ground for Caliato. He knew the place well, from the administrative side. And he knew that in the wintertime there was only one way to get into Fun Island and only one way to get out again, and he was looking at it. The artist running around in there now didn’t know it yet, but he was on ice. Just waiting to be picked up.

Benniggio came back, swaggering a little. “It’s open,” he said. “Nothing to it.”

“Good. Go roll down the car windows on this side, and then come in.”

Benniggio looked a little confused, but all he said was, “Sure, Cal.” That was all he was supposed to say.

Caliato went over to the open door and up the step and inside into a square office with pale yellow walls and old wooden desks and round green wastebaskets. The toll windows were covered with shutters on both sides of the room, but in the middle on the road side was a small window through which the gates of Fun Island could be seen. Caliato went over to the window and stood there looking out, his hands in his overcoat pockets, until Benniggio came in. Then, without turning his head, he said, “Shut the door. Open the shutters over there so we can see our car.”

“Sure, Cal.”

Caliato watched the Fun Island gates and listened to Benniggio moving around behind him. When he heard that Benniggio was done, he said, “Come here and watch the gates. You can sit on the edge of the desk here.”

“Okay.”

Caliato stepped away from the window, and Benniggio took his place. It was just as cold in here as it was outside, and they were both keeping their overcoats buttoned. Benniggio’s bunched around his waist when he sat on the edge of the desk. He pushed his hands into his overcoat pockets and looked uncomfortable but willing.

Caliato sat in a swivel chair at another desk, near the now-open toll window on the left. Cold air came through the opening in the glass where people were supposed to shove their money in. Just outside was the Lincoln, the windows on this side rolled down. Caliato sat there and lit a cigar and waited. A patient man, in everything.

Benniggio, not looking around from the window, said, “Cal?”

“Mm?”

“How come we’re in here? How come we don’t sit in the car? We could turn the heater on, we could be comfortable.”

Caliato took the cigar from his mouth and considered the back of Benniggio’s head. Being a patient man in all things, he didn’t mind explaining himself when there was nothing else going on. “Around the corner, Benny,” he said, “are a million cops. If they’re not all there yet, they soon will be. Some of them might go past here, their minds all excited about the armored-car robbery. And there they see two guys sitting in a parked car out in the middle of nowhere, just sitting there, no apparent reason for it. Right around the corner from a big armored-car robbery.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Benniggio. “Yeah, I see that.”

“They might wonder how come we’re here,” Caliato said. “They might stop and ask us. And they might not be any of our own.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Benniggio said, and glanced around at Caliato to say, “I don’t have that kind of mind, you know? I don’t think about things like that.”

“Keep your eye on the gate.”

“Sure.” Benniggio looked out the window again. “And I rolled the car windows down so we could hear the phone if it rings.”

“That’s right.”

Benniggio nodded, still facing the window. “Now everything’s set up,” he said. “All set.”

“All set,” Caliato agreed.

P14 Slayground

Four

TONY CHAKA sat in front of the television set and watched cartoons. He liked cartoons, they were his favorite kind of television, they were the reason he’d sprung for a color set. Rose thought he’d sprung for the color set on account of her, to be a nice thing for her, and he let her go on thinking that, it didn’t hurt her to think that, but the fact of the matter was that he bought the color set so he could see the cartoons in color.

When the phone rang beside his left elbow he frowned and squinted at the set, as though it had just gotten more difficult to see. He always squinted like that when there was a danger he was going to be forced away from the set during the cartoons, and now as the phone went on ringing he scrunched his whole face up, squinting so tight he could hardly see Bugs Bunny at all. He hunched his shoulders, too, and moved his left arm in close to his body, moving it as far as possible from the telephone.

Rose came into the room, finally, and gave him a look but didn’t say anything. They’d had it out a long time ago, about who was going to answer the phone when he was watching television, and now she could give him all the looks she wanted, but she wouldn’t say anything and she would answer the phone. It was probably for her anyway, it always was. Her mother, or one of her sisters, or one of her friends from the sodality, some gabby broad or another. At which point Rose would cup her hand around the mouthpiece of the phone, so as not to disturb him, and would say, “I’ll call you back.” Right. When the cartoons were done.

She went around the sofa now behind him and picked up the phone and said a low-voiced hello into it and then said, “Hold on a second.”

Chaka frowned twice as hard, glaring at the screen from under his eyebrows as though nothing else in the world existed.

Rose leaned down close to him, still talking low as though not to disturb him, and held the phone to her breast as she said, “Tony, it’s Mr. Lozini.”

The frown and the squint disappeared. Looking startled, he turned and snatched for the phone, saying, “Turn the sound down! Move it, will ya?”

She moved it, though still making looks, and when the sound was off and Bugs Bunny ran through a bowl of silence Chaka put the phone to his ear and gently said, “Mr. Lozini?”

A woman’s voice with a faint English accent said, “One moment for Mr. Lozini, please.”

“Sure,” he said. Rose had given him one last look and was walking heavy-footed back to the kitchen again. Chaka sat on the sofa, phone to his ear, and watched Bugs Bunny run. He’d seen this cartoon before, plenty of times before, so he didn’t really need the sound to follow the story.

“Tony?”

“Yes, Mr. Lozini!” Chaka sat up straighter and took his eyes away from the screen.

“You busy this afternoon, Tony?”

“No, sir. Everything quiet.”

“Care to make a hundred dollars?”

“You know me, Mr. Lozini.”

“It’s a simple matter. Caliato is in charge.”

“Oh, sure. Okay.”

“He’ll tell you what it’s all about.”

“Okay, Mr. Lozini.”

“Bring two more of the boys with you. Anybody who’s free. There’ll be a hundred in it for each of them, too.”

Chaka started names flipping through his head. “Will do,” he said.

“Not Rigno,” Lozini told him. “And not Taliamaze. But anyone else.”

Chaka nodded at the phone. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick two good boys.” On the screen, a talking-doll commercial was on, pointless without sound. But Chaka had seen the commercial before, too, he could almost have said the copy along with the pictures on the screen.

Lozini was saying, “You know where the Fun Island parking lot is? Right across from the main gate.”

“Sure, Mr. Lozini.”

“That’s where you’ll find Cal. Get there as soon as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

They both hung up, and Chaka went over to turn off the television set. He stood there thinking for a minute, and then went back and made two phone calls, one to Mike Abadandi and the other to Artie Pulsone. Both were free, and he told them he’d be right by to pick them up.

He went to the kitchen next and said, “I got to go out for a while. On business.”

Rose looked around at him. “You’ll be home for dinner?”

“I’ll call you. If I can.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

He went back through the house to the front hall and opened the closet door there. He put on his black-and-white-checked hunting jacket and his brown-billed cap. Leaning against the back wall was his rifle, a lever-action .30-30 carbine, a weapon he was proud of. Thirty-eight inches and six and a half pounds, adjustable open rear sight, tapered post front sight, seven-shot capacity, a good reliable weapon. He had a Firearms International .22-caliber automatic in his jacket pocket, but should he take the rifle, too? Maybe he should have asked Mr. Lozini what was the situation, except he was always tongue-tied on those rare occasions when Mr. Lozini himself called, and besides, if Mr. Lozini had wanted to tell him the situation he would have told him.

So he’d take the rifle. Be on the safe side, take it along in the car.

There was an old pink blanket on the shelf, small and tattered. He took it down and wrapped the rifle in it, disguising it slightly, and carried it out to his car, a pale green Dodge station wagon. He put it on the back seat, got behind the wheel, and backed out the driveway to the street. Then he drove away to pick up Mike and Artie.

P14 Slayground

Five

CALIATO’S CIGAR was nearly done. The perfect round lengths of gray-white ash lay like tiny barrels in the glass ashtray on the desk, and the whole room was full now of the warm aroma of cigar smoke. Caliato carefully eased another length of ash from the tip, put the cigar back in his mouth, and glanced out the side tollbooth window again.

Three police cars had gone by in the last fifteen minutes, two out Brower Road in the direction O’Hara and Dunstan had taken and one back this way, toward Abelard Road. None of the cops had so much as glanced at the Lincoln parked beside the building here.

Benniggio was still perched on the edge of the other desk, looking out the window at the gates across the way. He’d been there over half an hour now. At first he’d tried to keep a conversation going, but Caliato hadn’t felt much like talking, and it couldn’t have been easy for Benniggio anyway, having to talk to somebody while keeping his back turned, so for the last quarter-hour they’d waited in silence.

Nothing had happened across the way yet, but that was only natural. It would take the guy in there a while to find out what kind of a box he was in. Would he then try to get out again? That would be the easiest, from Caliato’s point of view. Wait till he’d tossed his suitcase back over the gate and was climbing over after it. Then step outside and pot him. Pick up the suitcase, get into the car, drive away. Leave the body there. If it ever was connected to the robbery, it would just be a fourth man, not the one O’Hara and Dunstan had reported getting away with the swag.

But Caliato doubted it would happen that way. It depended on how much of an amateur he was, that guy over there, and Caliato had the feeling he hadn’t been an amateur for a long time. If he was a pro, that guy, he wouldn’t try to leave the park at all. He’d find a cozy place in there to hole up for a day or two until the outside world cooled, and then be out and on his way.

Was there any food in there now? Maybe in the kitchens of the restaurants, some staples, some canned stuff. Not much, though, if anything. The guy probably had a two-day limit before he’d have to come out.

Not that he’d be around for two days.

He wondered if the guy was pro enough to walk out when O’Hara called him. That was Caliato’s plan, to have O’Hara and Dunstan make themselves plain in their police uniforms, have them call to the guy to surrender himself. They had a loud-hailer in their patrol car, they could make themselves heard wherever he was hiding in the park.

A pro would come out. There hadn’t been any killings, just the robbery. A pro would know enough to come out and take a prison sentence rather than stay holed up and have to be shot.

But you could never be sure. The guy might panic, having his robbery go haywire might make him act stupid and unprofessional. Or he might be wanted for murder somewhere else, it might be pointless for him to give himself up. Which was why Caliato had said yes to Lozini’s offer of three men. He could spare three hundred dollars to have three men in reserve, just in case O’Hara and Dunstan failed.

Motion made him look out of his side window, and a pale green Dodge station wagon was just arriving. It stopped out in the street, and then backed around and in beside the Lincoln, where O’Hara’s patrol car had been. Caliato watched, wondering who Lozini had sent him, and looked at the three bulky men who got out of the car.

Tony Chaka. Good. Mike Abadandi. Fair. Artie Pulsone. Good.

Caliato said, “Open the door, Benny, we’ve got company.”

Benniggio started as though he’d been asleep. “Oh! Right.” He got up from the desk and stretched, groaning, then shook his shoulders inside his overcoat and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Let me put one of them to work on the window here, okay?”

“Naturally,” Caliato said.

Benniggio went over and opened the door and they trooped in, their breath steaming. Chaka came first, Pulsone second, Abadandi third. “Hi, Benny,” Chaka said. “Hello, Mr. Caliato.”

Caliato nodded hello. He waited till Benniggio had shut the door again and then said, “Did Lozini tell you the story?”

“No, sir, Mr. Caliato, he said you’d fill us in.”

Caliato said, “Benny, get on the window again for a minute.”

Benniggio raised his eyes to heaven, but grinned to show it was just a gag. He went back over to the window, but this time didn’t sit down. He stood there with one forearm on the window sill and looked out.

Caliato said, “There was an armored-car robbery this afternoon.”

“Yeah,” said Chaka. “We heard about it on the car radio.” The other two nodded.

Caliato was interested. He said, “Do they know how much?”

“Seventy-three grand, they said.”

Benniggio glanced around, then looked out the window again.

Caliato didn’t show anything. He said, “There’s a guy across the way in the park with some of the dough. I don’t know how much. We’re supposed to take it away from him and give it to Mr. Lozini.”

They all looked willing, but not enlightened.

“He hid out in there when their car tipped over,” Caliato said. “We know he’s in there, we know he can’t get out anywhere except that gate. We’ve got two cops working with us, as soon as they get off duty they’ll come back here and see can they take him the quiet way. If they can’t, we go in there and find him.”

Pulsone said, “We keep him alive?”

“No.”

They all nodded. Abadandi said, “Any chance of us getting sticky fingers, Mr. Caliato?”

Caliato shook his head. “No. The money goes to Mr. Lozini. You’ll get your hundred each out of the bag when we get it, and the rest goes to Mr. Lozini.”

Benniggio glanced around again, and looked again out the window.

Caliato understood the principles of leadership, and one of them was never to let your troops know the full disparity between what they were getting and what you were getting. So long as Chaka and Pulsone and Abadandi thought everybody present was working on salary, they’d be happy with their C-note. But if they found out they were only getting a hundred bucks each while some of the others present were sharing the seventy-three-thousand-dollar pot among themselves, they’d be unhappy. And unhappy troops don’t function well. So Caliato told them a little white lie, and they would stay happy.

Now Caliato said, “Abadandi, take Benny’s place at the window for a while. Watch for anything happening over at the gate. You other two sit down, take it easy. And if any cops wander by, don’t show yourselves in the windows.”

They all organized themselves, Benniggio stretching and grunting again as he came away from the window, then sitting on a folding chair in a corner, his feet sticking out.

Caliato reluctantly put out his cigar, the butt as neat and compact as when he’d first lit up. He smoked patiently, too, clean and patient and with full enjoyment. Full enjoyment came from taking your time, always taking your time.

Time. Twenty after four. O’Hara and Dunstan should be back in less than two hours, a little after six. Around him, the others were beginning to talk together, low-voiced conversation, mostly about professional football. Abadandi was perched where Benniggio had been, watching the gate across the way. Everything was ready.

Caliato put his hands in his overcoat pockets and sat back in the swivel chair to wait.

P14 Slayground

Six

AT QUARTER to six Benniggio was ahead fifty-seven bucks. He’d opened his overcoat and settled into the game, almost forgetting what they were really here for. Poker called to him in a voice louder than almost anything in the world. Except Caliato’s voice, of course, that was louder to Benniggio even than poker.

Benniggio was a young guy, but he understood things, and one of the things he understood was that he was an also-ran. He was going to be an also-ran all his life, he was never going to be on top of the heap, and by Alfred Benniggio that was just fine. At the top was the gravy, true enough, but at the top also were the decisions, the responsibilities and the cold winds. And the danger, the trouble, the problems of taking care of all the Benniggios down below. In a lot of ways, an also-ran was a very nice thing to be.

If, that, is you picked the right guy to run behind. Nobody exists without being connected to other people somewhere along the line, and if you made a mistake and connected yourself to a guy who was going to come to a bad end, then maybe you would come to a bad end too. But that wasn’t going to happen to Benniggio, no, sir. He had tied himself to a fellow named Caliato, and he’d never had a moment’s doubt or a moment’s regret. Caliato was safe, and he was going to be important, and his buddy Benniggio was going to be one step behind him all the way.

“Benny.”

Benniggio looked up at his master’s voice. He’d just been dealt the beginning of a seven-card stud hand — seven of diamonds and nine of spades down, queen of clubs up — and he turned away from it, saying, “Yeah?”

“The phone’s ringing,” Caliato told him.

Benniggio looked blank. There was a phone on the other desk, not the one where he and Tony Chaka and Mike Abadandi and Artie Pulsone were playing poker, but it wasn’t ringing. Benniggio couldn’t hear it ringing. He said, “The phone?”

“In the car,” Caliato said. He was over at the desk nearest the tollbooth window so he would be able to hear it. The others were at the desk where they could look out through the front window and see the Fun Island gates across the way.

“Oh,” Benniggio said, and got to his feet. “Fold me,” he said to the others — he would have said that even if the down cards had also been queens — and went outside and around to the Lincoln.

It was funny to hear a phone ringing in an automobile, Benniggio never got used to it. Feeling Caliato’s presence just the other side of the window behind him, he got into the back seat of the Lincoln now, opened the compartment, and took out the phone. “Hello?”

“Caliato?” The voice sounded in a hurry.

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Caliato?”

“Mr. Caliato would like to know who’s calling,” Benny said.

There was a little hesitation, and then the voice said, reluctantly, “Tell him Mr. O’Hara.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so! This is Benny.”

“I wasn’t sure who you were,” O’Hara said.

“Hold on a second.”

Benniggio cupped a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and leaned out the open window to call to Caliato, “It’s O’Hara.”

There was clear glass in the tollbooth window, with a long opening at the bottom. Benniggio saw Caliato nod and heard him say, “Ask him what he wants.” The glass made his voice sound far away.

Benniggio nodded, and leaned back in, and said into the phone, “Cal wants to know what you want.”

“I’m hung up here,” O’Hara said angrily. “They’ve got us on a roadblock. Tell him I don’t know when the hell we can get away from here, I just got away for a minute, I told them I had to go to the John.”

“Hold on.”

Benniggio cupped the phone again, leaned out again, and called, “He ain’t getting off at six. They got him on a roadblock.”

“Ask him when he’s getting off.”

“He says he don’t know.”

Caliato frowned. Benniggio, watching him, felt colder in the car than he’d been inside the building, though there was no reason for it, the building wasn’t heated. Or maybe the presence of five people in there had warmed it up. Anyway, he wished now he’d buttoned his overcoat again before coming out.

Caliato said, finally, “Tell him there’s a watchman comes on at ten. Tell him he’s straight, it’d be better if we could get this done with before he gets here.”

“Right.” Benniggio put the phone to his ear again and repeated Caliato’s message.

“Damn it,” O’Hara said. “I’ll try to get off. I’ll do what I can.”

“Okay.”

“Tell Caliato — ” A little silence. “Tell him he shouldn’t go in without us.”

“He knows that,” Benniggio said.

“Yeah. All right. Tell him I’ll call again later on when I find out for sure what’s happening.”

“I’ll do that,” Benniggio said, and hung up, and got out of the car. He glanced across at Fun Island, and there was nothing happening there, no movement, nothing. There hadn’t been, not since they’d seen the guy go in.

It would be a funny thing if the guy was gone. If they were all waiting around out here to charge in and gobble him up, and he was gone already, out some other hole, like a mouse getting away from a cat.

Except that Cal had said there wasn’t any other way out, and Cal never said things he wasn’t sure about. He never did. So the guy was still in there. And he’d keep.

Benniggio walked back into the building and shut the door behind him. Leaning against the wall near the door was Tony Chaka’s rifle, its pink blanket sagging down around it, showing a bit of the stock. When he’d mentioned it, a while ago, Cal had made him go get it out of the car. Just in case cops did get nosy, just in case any of them came by and took a look inside the two cars parked there, it would be a good idea not to have a rifle wrapped in a blanket lying on the back seat. It would be a good idea not to call attention to themselves, just in case. Which was Cal being careful again, careful and thorough, doing the kind of thing Benniggio admired him for.

Caliato looked across at him as he came in now, and said, “Anything else?”

“Naw, that was it. He’ll call again if he finds out anything.” Benniggio grinned. “He’s really worried we’ll go in without him,” he said.

Caliato frowned at him and gave a tiny headshake. Benniggio understood at once that he’d done something wrong, and felt very nervous, but he didn’t know what it was. He stood there blinking.

Caliato made a small head movement at the three guys sitting around with Tony Chaka’s playing cards in their hands, and Benniggio suddenly realized what he’d done. Those guys weren’t supposed to know that anybody was in this on shares.

Benniggio made a small nod of his own, to show he understood, and a sheepish little smile to show he was sorry and hoped there were no hard feelings. Caliato nodded back, but didn’t smile, and turned his head to look out the window, Mike Abadandi, shuffling the cards, said, “You in now! Benny?”

“Naturally,” Benniggio said, very hearty and loud. He went over and sat down in his place. “When am I not in?”

P14 Slayground

Seven

NINE-THIRTY. Caliato took another cigar out of his jacket pocket, then paused, considered, turned the rocket-shaped metal container in his hand, and finally put it back again in his pocket. He’d already smoked three cigars, his mouth was tasting brackish from the last one, it would just be a waste to light up another. He wouldn’t enjoy it. He’d be smoking it just to kill time, and that was a wasteful thing to do to a good cigar. Almost criminal.

But Christ, it was slow. By six-thirty it had been too dark in here for the others to see their cards, and they’d had to quit the poker game and find some other way to occupy their minds. They’d talked together, Abadandi and Pulsone in particular were storytellers by nature, Abadandi with recountals of seductions and near-seductions in his own past and Pulsone a teller of movie plots and third-hand war anecdotes, but as it had gotten darker and darker, to the point where they couldn’t see each other’s faces any more, the talk had died down, and now they were all just sitting there, one or two of them always with a cigarette going, sitting there in the dark like soldiers in a troopship waiting to land on some island somewhere. Waiting to land on Fun Island. When?

Caliato’s stomach rumbled. Around eight he’d sent Chaka out for pizza and coffee for everybody, and the smell of it was still in the air now, mixing with the stale smell of Caliato’s old cigars and the new smell of cigarette smoke and the faint smell of five heavy human beings wrapped up in thick clothing and stuck together in a small cold room with little ventilation for three hours. The smells all together were not terrible, but they were unpleasant. And the pizza and coffee weren’t sitting right in Caliato’s stomach. And above all, they were still here and waiting.

O’Hara had called again at quarter to nine, and that time Caliato had talked to him himself, but O’Hara hadn’t known when he’d get free. He’d sounded enraged and impatient and on the verge of foolishness, all of which had helped to cool Caliato’s own growing restlessness, reassert his belief in patience, but that booster shot, too, was fading now. He’d been sitting too long in one place, in the cold, with the same clothing on, eating bad pizza, drinking bad coffee, smoking too much, getting the first rumbling twinges of heartburn. Patience was one thing, self-torture was another. Could he offer up the discomfort of waiting to commit a crime for the souls in Purgatory? You could offer up your own discomforts, lop a day or two off some poor bastard’s sentence, but would this kind of discomfort count? He almost grinned to think about it, think about putting the question to his mother, a very religious woman. The thought made him feel good for a second, humorous, and that seemed to relieve a little of the tightness across his shoulders and the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach.

But it was getting late. Aside from anything else, aside from any question of personal comfort, there was the question of the watchman, due at ten o’clock. He’d wanted to get this thing done and out of the way before that watchman showed up, but if O’Hara didn’t get here within the next few minutes, it wasn’t going to happen. And then what?

Abruptly he got to his feet, his movement causing a stirring among the others, a shifting of position as they all roused from half-dozing to look at his dim form in the darkness.

If only they could have a light, that would help a lot. Sitting in the dark wasn’t good for a man, not for the most patient of men even. But they couldn’t risk a light, there was still movement of cops in the neighborhood. When Chaka had come back with the pizza he’d said the armored car was still down there on Abelard Road, lying on its side. The cops had a mobile power truck there, they had big lights shining on everything like a night game in the ball park across the way. There were cops and cop cars all over the place down there.

So they couldn’t take a chance on a light in this building here, and that was just one more element to add to the discomfort, to turn the screw just a little tighter.

Caliato picked his way carefully in the darkness toward the door, touching here a desk, there a shoulder, moving slowly.

Benniggio, his voice surprisingly close and loud in the darkness, said, “Anything you want me to do?”

“Just keep your eye on the gate,” Caliato told him, though they all knew by now that the guy wasn’t coming out. Not tonight anyway.

Caliato opened the door. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and went out, shutting the door behind him.

He looked across at Fun Island. Once or twice they’d seemed to see faint lights in there, and hear sounds like summertime’s music, but they hadn’t been sure, and in any case it had all stopped by now.

What was the guy doing over there? Sitting holed up in a corner someplace? Caliato wondered if he had any suspicion over there what was happening, what was going to happen. He’d seen them, of course, just as they’d seen him. Would he figure it out? Would he even question it?

They’d know that once they got inside. If they ever did.

Caliato walked around the building to the Lincoln, got into the back seat, and opened the phone compartment. He dialed Lozini’s home number, and waited.

It was Lozini’s daughter who answered in the evenings. Caliato identified himself, and a minute later Lozini came on to say, pleasantly, “I’m sorry, you’re too late for dinner.”

“We still haven’t moved,” Caliato told him. “We’re still waiting for our cops.” He told about O’Hara and Dunstan having to work overtime.

“That’s a pity,” Lozini said. “So you’re just waiting there?”

“So far.”

“You wouldn’t want to do anything without the police,” Lozini cautioned him. “We wouldn’t want this to get noisy, Cal.”

“I know that. The only question is, the night watchman.”

“What’s that?”

“They’ve got a night watchman comes on at ten o’clock at the park,” Caliato said. “What do we do when he gets here?” I “I’m afraid you’ll have to give it up, Gal.”

“That still leaves us with a problem,” Caliato said.

“I don’t see it,” Lozini said.

“Our two cops, they reported the guy got into another car and took off, and they chased him and lost him. So what happens if the night watchman at Fun Island finds him? Or even if he kills the watchman and takes off, but it later on gets out that he was the one did the killing? What if the official law finds out any way at all that their bird is in Fun Island and two of their cops lied about it?”

“Complicated,” Lozini said.

“Sure complicated. O’Hara and Dunstan get called in. One or the other of them breaks down, you can count on that. Then we’ve got trouble all the way around.”

“I don’t like this, Cal,” Lozini said. “When it was going to be a simple matter, I agreed to it. It isn’t like you to let things get complicated.”

“This got out of hand,” Caliato said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“I thought you would,” Lozini said. He might have been chuckling.

“When the watchman gets here,” Caliato said, “we take him. We don’t let him see our faces, and we don’t hurt him. We just tie him up and put him on ice someplace where he won’t see or hear anything that goes on. Then when our cops get here, we run it the way we planned, clean up afterwards, and let the watchman go again. He calls the cops, they look around, they don’t find anything, they never figure out what happened or why.”

“That sounds risky, Cal,” Lozini said carefully.

“I think it’s less risky than letting it go,” Caliato said. “But that’s up to you, of course. If you say pull out, I’ll pull out.”

There was silence on the line. The clear cold air outside was doing wonders for Caliato’s mouth and nose and stomach. That, and having a plan at last, a deadline at last. No more just waiting and waiting. If Lozini said yes, they would be waiting for a specific moment in time. Ten o’clock, no later.

Lozini sighed. “I suppose that’s best,” he said. “I can trust your discretion, Cal.”

“I hope so,” Caliato said.

“Call me when it’s over.”

“Yes, sir.”

Caliato hung up, shut the compartment, and got out of the car. He stretched, inhaled deeply, glanced over at the park, and went into the building to give the others the good news.

P14 Slayground

Eight

TEN O’CLOCK. Exactly on time, Donald Snyder turned his blue Volkswagen and drove up to the gates of Fun Island. He was always on time, whether there was a clock to punch or not, and he was proud of it.

Sixty-four years of age, Snyder had punched a clock at Westmount Foundry for thirty-eight years, until they’d retired him at sixty, and in all that time he had never once been late. He’d been absent entirely every once in a great while, brought down by flu or some such thing, but if he was going to be present at all, he would be on time.

He’d carried the same philosophy into retirement with him. He’d had a number of seasonal or part-time jobs since then, and his record of never being late was still unbroken. Even here at Fun Island, where there was neither a clock to be punched nor a boss to see what time he showed up, he was always on time. In at ten, do his rounds punctually, out at exactly six in the morning. A good job for an old man who couldn’t sleep much anyway. Gave him something to do with his time, gave him the exercise of walking around the park all night long, and gave him a little spending money to supplement his retirement income.

Now he got out of the Volkswagen, a stocky old man in a long overcoat and a nondescript hat, moving with a little winter stiffness in his joints. He went to the gates, gleaming in the Volkswagen’s headlights, pulled the key ring from his overcoat pocket, found the right key, and unlocked the gates. He swung two of them open, making a space big enough to drive the car through, then went back behind the wheel again, drove in, and stopped well clear of the gates. He switched off the engine, but left the lights on so he’d be able to see to close and lock the gates again. He got out of the car, and three men came through the gates with guns in their hands and handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces.

Snyder stared at them, refusing to believe it. They said something to him, voices muffled by the cold and the handkerchiefs, but he didn’t understand the words. He just stared.

They made angry, threatening gestures with the guns, and he saw their eyes above the handkerchiefs, cold and impatient, and finally he understood what it was they wanted — though not why, that was incomprehensible — and slowly he raised his hands up over his head.

Two of them held the guns on him while the third came around behind him and patted him all over, finding his Colt .44 revolver in his right overcoat pocket. His own gun, had it for years, always carried it on this job, never used it once. Not for real. Used to do some target-shooting with it, some plinking, shot some rats back in the old days when he lived near the city dump where the new apartment houses were now, but he’d never fired that gun once at a human being. Never even pointed it at a human being. Hadn’t thought of it when he’d seen the masked men with guns coming at him. And now they’d taken it away from him.

He was old, but until just this moment he’d never felt old. Never felt feeble, or useless, or doomed. Not until now. “You people can’t do this,” he said, and hated to hear the new note in his voice. He’d never been querulous before either.

One of them said, “Let’s go into your office. Come on, move!”

He obeyed, his hands still up. He moved slowly, them behind him, prodding his shoulders to make him hurry. Two of them following him, the other staying back with his car and the gates. “There’s no money here this time of year,” he said, but they didn’t answer him.

The door to his office was broken into. It was closed most of the way, but the lock had been broken. “Look at that,” he said. “You fellows do that? What would you do a thing like that for?”

One of them had a flashlight, and shone it on the broken place on the door. The other one said, “Still in there, you think?”

“Only one way to find out,” the first one said, and pushed at Snyder with his gun barrel again. “Open the door, old man,” he said. “Go in there, turn on the light. Don’t do any sudden movements, and don’t turn around.”

Snyder obeyed orders. He stepped in and switched on the light, seeing at once that someone had been in here. Things disturbed, things moved around. A coffee cup on the floor, a map open on the desk, a chair moved over by the window.

They waited a few seconds, then came in after him. “Sit down,” one of them said, and he sat down. “Put your hands behind you,” and he put his hands behind himself.

They tied him to the chair, roughly and well. Then they took adhesive tape and taped shut his mouth. One of them went into the John and came back with two small wads of toilet paper and stuck them in Snyder’s ears, and the other one put adhesive tape over his ears to keep the paper in.

He submitted to it all, but when he saw they meant to tape his eyes, he tried to fight it, lunging backward, waving his head back and forth. Somehow that was a different kind of thing, much worse, much more frightening. He didn’t want his eyes taped.

But they did it. One of them held his head, and the other one put the tape on, and then he was in darkness and silence. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t hear them. He was helpless, his brain straining inside its prison of bone to know what they were doing.

His feet. Through his feet pressed against the floor he could hear the vibrations. They were walking around, doing things around him in the office. Not touching him, but moving around. Faintly he thought he could hear them talking. Through his closed eyelids and the thickness of tape he could sense a dark reddish orange, meaning the light was still on.

Fire? He suddenly thought of fire, was suddenly terrified that they meant to burn the place down and him in it. He didn’t know why anybody would do a thing like that, he had no rational reason for thinking of it, but once the thought hit him he became convinced, and his heart pounded in terror, and he reared around in the chair, struggling to escape.

A hand closed on his shoulder, and just stayed there. Not squeezing hard, not hurting. Just staying there, a steady pressure, somehow reassuring. Snyder calmed down, and the hand patted his shoulder and went away. But he was less frightened after that.

A minute later the vibrations stopped, the reddish orange went to black, he had the sensation that the door had been closed. He was alone. He knew he was alone.

P14 Slayground

Nine

CALIATO STOOD looking out the window at Fun Island. He watched Chaka and Abadandi and Pulsone cross the street, watched them gather in the old man. One of them waved the all-clear, and Caliato said, “Okay. Let’s go over there.”

“Right,” Benniggio said. He opened the door and stepped back for Caliato to go first.

Caliato was glad to be getting out of this room at last. Six hours he’d been in here, doing nothing, and that was too long. He stepped outside, inhaled the cold night air, and waited for Benniggio to carefully close the door again and lock it behind them.

“Tomorrow,” Caliato said, “we’ll have to send somebody to clean up our mess in there.”

“Okay, Cal,” Benniggio said. “I’ll remember.”

“Good.”

They started across the road, and behind them the phone rang. “Hell,” Caliato said under his breath. Would it be Lozini, changing his mind? More probably O’Hara, getting ever more frantic. Caliato said, “Go on over there, see they don’t scare the old man too much. See they do things right.”

“Okay, Cal.”

“Shut those gates, but don’t lock them. I’ll be right there.”

“Right.”

Caliato went back to the Lincoln, got into the back seat, opened the phone compartment, put the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

O’Hara. “We’re still stuck here. What are we gonna do about the night watchman?”

“We’ve already done it,” Caliato said, and told him the new plan.

O’Hara said, “You mean you’re going into the park?”

“That’s right. So don’t call here any more, there won’t be anybody to answer the phone.”

“But you’re not going to do anything, are you? You’ll just stay in by the gate till we get there.”

“I’ve told you that. How much longer you going to be?”

“Christ, it ought to be soon, Caliato, I swear it ought to be soon. We’re not the only ones bitching, everybody here is teed off. No roadblocks are going to catch anybody by this time.”

“Even if there was anybody to catch.”

“Even if,” O’Hara agreed. “There’s talk about keeping them up till midnight, but that’s just stupid.”

Two more hours. “See if you can cut it shorter than that,” Caliato said.

“You know I’ll do my best.”

“Right. Flash your headlights at the gates when you get here, so we’ll know it’s you.”

“Will do.”

Caliato hung up and went across the street, to where Pulsone was on guard at the gates. Caliato went in and Pulsone pointed to the lit doorway where the others were. Caliato went down there and found the watchman trussed up right, except he was jerking around like a fish on a line. Caliato looked at him, looked at Benniggio, said, “I told you to see he didn’t get scared too much.”

“Nobody did nothing to him, Cal,” Benniggio said. “He was quiet, and then he started jumping around like that.”

“We don’t want him kicking off with a heart attack,” Caliato said, and went over and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. He stood there, feeling the old muscles bunching under his hand, and gradually the old man calmed down.

Benniggio said, “He was in here, our bird was. Busted the door in.”

“You search the place?”

Tony Chaka said, “Nothing here, Mr. Caliato. He didn’t leave no marks.” He held up an old long-barreled Colt .44 revolver. “This was on the old guy,” he said. “You want it?”

Caliato was about to say no, but then he stopped to think that he was the only one here who wasn’t armed. Under normal circumstances it was best he not be armed, that’s one of the reasons he carried Benniggio with him wherever he went, but this time was maybe special. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, and took the gun from Chaka and put it in his overcoat pocket. He took his other hand off the old man’s shoulder and said, “We’ll go back to the gate. We’ll wait there.”

“Right.”

They went out, shutting off the light and closing the door, and walked back to where the Volkswagen’s lights still gleamed. Caliato told Abadandi to turn off the VW lights, and Abadandi did, and darkness settled down on them. It had been a cloudy day and now it was a cloudy night, no stars, no moon. There were widely spaced streetlights out on Brower Road, one of them casting feeble light past the gates, enough to make out shapes in the darkness, nothing more.

Benniggio said, “What now, Gal?”

“Now we wait again,” Caliato said. “We stand here in the open air and we wait.”

P14 Slayground

Ten

‘TEN-FIFTEEN. O’Hara hunched over the wheel of the prowl car as it tore along Brower Road toward Fun Island. He didn’t dare use the siren, it might cause another patrol to investigate, but there was very little traffic along Brower Road at night anyway, and what there was got out of the way of a police squad car with or without its siren going.

He’d gotten back to the roadblock ten minutes ago, after his last phone call to Caliato from a booth outside a closed nearby gas station, to discover he’d just wasted five minutes of free time. They’d been relieved as often o’clock. Dunstan gave him the news, pulling a long face, as though what he’d really wanted was to stay on roadblock duty all night long.

Which was maybe true. Dunstan was a coward, O’Hara knew that, and afraid of this business about the armored-car loot. He hadn’t tried to argue against it since that one time right at the beginning this afternoon, but he hadn’t been enthusiastic either. He hadn’t shared any of O’Hara’s impatience and frustration as hour after hour went by and still they had to stick around at a roadblock set up to capture a figment of O’Hara’s own imagination.

Which might have even made things worse, actually; knowing that Dunstan wasn’t really sharing his own feelings, it had forced him in a way to be nervous and frustrated for both of them.

Well, the frustration was over now, the impatience and nervousness were almost done with. They were finally on their way to Fun Island. And Caliato was still there, and hadn’t gone after the money.

Rationally, O’Hara knew it made more sense for Caliato to split with him and Dunstan. It gave him protection for afterwards, and it gave him a safe front for when they went in to get the guy with the money. He understood that, and he believed it, but at the same time he knew that Caliato was a hood, and hoods couldn’t be trusted, and seventy-three thousand dollars was a lot of money, and lucky breaks like this don’t happen without something going wrong, and the easiest thing to go wrong would be for the hood to get greedy for all the money and therefore double-cross O’Hara.

It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t going to happen, but the fear was there. He couldn’t help it, the fear was there. And it didn’t help matters when he tried to think about what he’d do if it did happen, and realized there was nothing he could do, not a damn thing. Blow the whistle on Caliato? How could he do that without blowing the whistle on himself? Or how about complaining to Caliato’s boss, Lozini? He could see himself doing that, going to one hood to complain about how he’d been treated by another hood, he could just feature himself doing something like that.

But it wasn’t necessary. They’d gotten off duty at goddam last, Caliato was still there, the guy with the money was still there, everything was still going to work out.

One quarter of seventy-three thousand is eighteen thousand, two hundred fifty. Eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.

How much was eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars? In understandable terms, how much was it? It was his salary for two years and three weeks, with sixty bucks left over. Two years and three weeks. Standing around at the roadblock this evening, he’d thought back two years and three weeks, he’d tried to work it out exactly where he’d been and what he’d been doing two years and three weeks ago today, and he realized that was a hell of a long time. Two years ago was forever.

All those paychecks, sitting there in one lump sum in a suitcase he’d seen thrown over a fence. To think of it.

The last stretch of Brower Road had no traffic at all. O’Hara stood on the accelerator and they leaped down the roadway, till Dunstan said, nervousness in his voice, “There’s still icy spots, Joe. Take it easy a little.” He could be heard trying to grin through his words as he added, “We want to live to spend the money, don’t we?”

That was true. In any case, they were just about there. O’Hara eased his foot off the accelerator, and the fences unreeling on both sides — gray board around the park on his left, chain link around the parking lotion his right — gradually slowed down. Ahead his lights picked out the tollbooth building and, across the way, the main gates to the park. He tapped the brakes, and noticed a second car beside Caliato’s Lincoln, a pale green Dodge station wagon. He frowned at it. What was that for?

Dunstan said, “There’s somebody else here, Joe.”

“I see that.” O’Hara slowed the car almost to a stop, angled it off the road, came to a stop blocking both other cars.

Dunstan was looking at the wagon. “Who do you suppose it is?”

“We’ll find out,” O’Hara said.

They got out of the car, O’Hara tugging his black gloves to a firmer fit on his hands, and he saw Caliato coming toward him from the Fun Island entrance. He stood waiting, unsure of himself and therefore putting on a swaggering front. As Caliato got closer, O’Hara jerked his head toward the Dodge and said, “I see we got company.”

“Extra soldiers,” Caliato said. “If we need them.”

“We’re spreading the pot around a little thin, aren’t we?”

Caliato grinned. “They’re on salary,” he said. “Three of them, at a hundred bucks a man.”

“Oh,” O’Hara said. “That’s okay, I guess.”

Dunstan had come around, and stood silent and awkward beside them. He was making it obvious how uncomfortable he was to be here.

Caliato said, “The point is, they don’t know about us being on shares. They think we’re turning it all over to Mr. Lozini.”

Dunstan said, “We aren’t, are we?”

Caliato smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s all ours. But we don’t want to tell the other boys that, it could make them jealous.”

“I’ve got you,” said O’Hara.

“Good. You’ve got a loud-hailer, haven’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Bring it along,” Caliato said.

“Right.”

O’Hara turned toward the car, but Dunstan said, “I’ll get it.” As though trying to make up for his poor attitude.

They waited while Dunstan got out the loud-hailer, and then all three went across the street and through the open gate into the park. One of Caliato’s new troops was standing there, a heavy-set thug O’Hara didn’t recognize. He grinned and nodded at O’Hara and Dunstan, and shut the gate after them O’Hara found it uncomfortable to have somebody like that grin and nod at him that way, as though they were in cahoots, partners, members of the same club. Even though they were “What we’ll try first,” Caliato was saying, “is you and Dunstan go up the main drag here, to about the middle of the park, where we’ll be sure he can see you. Then you announce the place is surrounded, we know he’s there, the jig is up, he better surrender, all that stuff. Then we’ll see what happens.”

O’Hara nodded. “Right,” he said.

Dunstan said, “What about the site of the robbery? It’s just the other side of that fence, down a ways. Is anybody still there?”

Caliato shook his head. “No,” he said, “they all cleared out. The armored car’s gone, everything’s gone. I just had one of the boys go around and check five minutes ago.”

“That’s good,” O’Hara said. He was sorry he hadn’t thought about asking that question himself, and surprised Dunstan had come up with it. But he supposed it just showed he was full of excitement and anticipation and Dunstan was full of apprehension. Still, it was a good thing somebody had thought to check. It wouldn’t have been pleasant if they’d started yelling through a loud-hailer in here with people from the force just the other side of the board fence.

Caliato said, “Any time you’re ready, O’Hara.”

“Then let’s get it over with,” O’Hara said.

“We’ll stay back here out of sight,” Caliato said.

“Right.”

O’Hara and Dunstan both carried flashlights. They lit them and walked forward into the park along the main blacktop path toward the center, where in the summer a fountain was lit by colored lights. On the way, they passed the Desert Island on their left and Island Earth on their right. A snack bar on their left, amusement rides on their right. A small footbridge — they crossed over the little stream that meandered through the grounds. On their right, a black-light ride called Voyage Through the Galaxy.

On their left, the fun house, dominated by a huge round laughing face with open gaping mouth.

They stopped short of the concrete fountain, and looked at one another. O’Hara could see his own nervousness reflected in Dunstan’s eyes, and he hesitated just a second, as though he could mill change his mind, do things differently. But of course he couldn’t. It was way too late to change now, even if he wanted to.

He lifted the loud-hailer to his lips, depressed the trigger.’

‘We know you ‘re in there, “his amplified voice suddenly roared. “You were seen climbing over the gates with the suitcase full of money. Come nut now, throw down your weapons, give yourself up. This is the police. The park is surrounded. “

The silence echoed for a while when he was done. He lowered the loud-hailer, shone his flashlight this way and that, waited for some indication that he’d been heard.

Nothing.

He raised the loud-hailer to his mouth again, and suddenly light, noise, laughter poured down on him from behind, flooded over him like a shock wave. He yelped and dropped the loud-hailer and jumped forward, stumbling, almost falling into the empty concrete pool where in summer the fountain played. He turned around and stared.

The fun house. In the middle of the silent, empty, dark, frozen park, the fun house had suddenly surged into life. All the lights were shining, yellow and white and orange and red, cartwheels of light spinning around the entrance, flashers revolving on the roof, light everywhere, flickering like a huge fire in a Roman-candle factory.

And noise. The huge laughing face on the front of the fun house was moving in its slow mechanical circle, and from behind it came the boom of recorded laughter, huge maniacal rolling laughter. Plus music, recorded calliope music blaring from loudspeakers at the corners of the building.

“My God!” O’Hara screamed, and turned wild-eyed to see Dunstan running like a crazy man for the darkness by the front gate.

P14 Slayground

Eleven

WHEN THE fun house suddenly took off, Caliato was so startled he stepped involuntarily backward and bruised his elbow on a gate post. The pain brought him back to himself, and he looked at all that coruscating light and found himself smiling with real pleasure.

He hadn’t expected the quarry to be so unorthodox. The guy should either have given up quietly to O’Hara and Dunstan, or he should have cowered in a corner somewhere, hunched over his suitcase of money, until Caliato and his people found him. But to counterattack like this, right at the very beginning, was something Caliato hadn’t expected.

The two cops were running this way, both of them all shook up. Caliato saw them coming, and that finished the job of getting him his own equilibrium back. Before either of them had reached him he’d turned to the others and started barking out his orders. “Abadandi and Pulsone, stay on the gate here. Chaka, get around to the back of that fun house, see if there’s any other way in there. Benny, come with me.”

Dunstan was there, breathless and blowing as though he’d just run a mile. While the others were saying right and moving to their posts, Caliato said to Dunstan, “Get hold of yourself. We’ll want to go in after him.”

O’Hara had showed up. “He — he — “

“It’s just a fun house,” Caliato told him. “It isn’t an atom bomb.”

O’Hara took a deep breath, and Caliato saw him getting hold of himself. “I know what it is,” he finally said. “But what the hell’s he doing it for? If there’s anybody around the neighborhood at all — “

“He knows what’s up, that’s why,” Caliato said. “He saw us when we saw him, and he’s figured out what’s the story. But the point is, he had to be in that fun house to turn it on. Come on.”

He led the way, trotting along the snowy backtop, feeling the unfamiliar weight of a gun in his overcoat pocket. The old man’s .44. He dragged it out of the pocket as he ran.

The fun house was still going wild. Caliato said, “Be careful going in. He’ll be watching these doors.”

“Why not wait for him to come out?” O’Hara said.

“We’ve got to turn this racket off, that’s why.”

They went in cautiously, through the main entrance, Benniggio in the lead, Caliato next, the two cops following. They all had guns and flashlights in their hands, though they didn’t need the flashlights yet.

They were all inside, and nothing had happened. They were in a crazy room, with walls and floors tilted funny ways, odd-shaped furniture, all things to make you think you were leaning one way when you were leaning another, so if you weren’t careful you’d lean too far the wrong way and fall on your face.

There were several doors leading out. Caliato said, “Split up. The first thing we do is find the main switch. But everybody take it easy, he’s got to be inside here someplace.”

They each went through a different door, moving with cautious haste, looking all around, all of them distracted by the booming laughter and the calliope music and the whirling lights.

Caliato found himself in a semi-dark narrow passageway. The floor seemed to roll and squirm uncomfortably under his feet, as though mice were moving back and forth under the rubber mat. The walls were of different substances, all of which had a distasteful feel to them, some slimy, some sticky, some an uncomfortable furry feel. When Caliato looked at his fingertips, he was surprised to see them still clean.

Spiders and bats and other things hung from the ceiling on thin black wires, some of them dipping and rising in regular motion, others just hanging in one place, turning lazily. Caliato, a neat man, almost finicky, found this passage almost nauseating, and when one of the bat figures brushed his forehead with its furry wings, he recoiled as though from an electric shock.

The end of the passage was a black curtain, vaguely repellent to the touch, as though made of snake bellies. Caution was replaced in Caliato with disgust, the need to get away from here, out of this rotten place. He pushed through into another room, and suddenly saw himself a dozen times. He saw the long-barreled .44 in his right hand, the unlit flashlight in his left. Over and over, a dozen times.

The strange thing was, he had a white circle on his chest every time.

His senses were being battered from too many directions, the noise and the lights and the crazy room with its tiled floors and then the place with the bats and spiders and now himself in endless repetition in dozens of doorways. He wasn’t rattled completely, the way O’Hara and Dunstan had been outside, but he was just rattled enough to take a second and look down at his chest, as though expecting to see a white circle there. There was none, and when he looked up, there were a dozen other men in the room with the dozens of himself. Those other men had guns too, just as all his own selves had guns.

He knew it was all up, he knew he was going to die in here, and his thought was What a waste. The future he had, the potential he had, all gone. What a waste. Who would have thought his story would end like this?

He raised his gun, even though he knew it was useless. Still, he was the first to fire, shooting at one of the men in front of him at random — they were all identical — and that one suddenly disappeared in a cascade of crashing glass.

P14 Slayground

PART THREE

P14 Slayground

One

PARKER SHOT the chest without the white circle on it. All the overcoated men in all the mirrors staggered back, their guns and flashlights falling. They fell against a mirror, and leaned there for a long second, and then toppled forward, only to bounce their heads against other mirrors and wind up crumpled over and over again on the floor.

Parker moved cautiously forward, not wanting to get caught in the maze of mirrors, but at the same time wanting to get the dead man’s gun.

Except he wasn’t going to get it. People were shouting at each other, not far away. Getting closer. Parker retraced his steps, moving slowly, knowing it was no good to hurry through the mirrored labyrinth.

Two men burst through the entrance at the far end, a cop and another one in an overcoat. The one in the overcoat dropped to his knees beside the dead man, shouting, “Call” but the cop held his pistol out at arm’s length and began methodically shooting mirrors.

Everywhere Parker looked, there was the reflection of a cop with his gun aimed at him. Given enough time, the cop would work his way through the mirrors and find the man. Parker tucked his own gun away in his jacket pocket and moved away, running his hands along the mirrors, finding the narrow channels through the glass. He didn’t have a good enough or a close enough shot at those two over there with the dead man, not when he had only four bullets left.

They were blundering after him now, bumping into mirrors and one another, the cop still plugging away with his service revolver, the other guy shouting names, calling for help.

Parker’s hands pushed against cloth. He stepped through the black-draped doorway into a room with distorting mirrors. There was a clear path through them to a dark doorway on the far side. Parker trotted down the room, flanked by tall Parkers, fat Parkers, long-necked Parkers, dwarf Parkers. He stepped through the doorway as a shout sounded behind him, and then the roar of a gunshot in a confined space. He heard the bullet ricochet off something in front of him, and he bent forward and hurried through the darkness.

The orientation he had given himself was beginning to pay off already. He knew where he was now, he didn’t need light to guide him. He was in a long passage shaped like a giant barrel lying on its side. He had come in one end of the barrel and would go out the other, in the meantime moving with his feet widely spread on the curving floor and his arms stretched out to the sides, his fingertips now and then glancing off the walls.

He reached the end of the barrel and stepped out onto normal flat floor. His hand touched a waist-high chain on his left. He ducked under it, went to one knee beside the barrel opening. He took out his pistol again, while with his other hand he stroked the curved side of the barrel. His hand found a metal box attached to a vertical length of pipe. On the top of the box was a switch. He held his thumbs against the switch, held the pistol ready in his other hand, and waited.

He could faintly hear them, still out in the room with the distorting mirrors. Then suddenly there was silence. He waited, listening to the silence, and became aware of the sound of breathing. It sounded close, far too close.

How had they gotten so close? Had they managed to come in behind him after all? He’d set this up so carefully, there shouldn’t be any way for them to come through from the opposite direction.

Were they in the barrel? Had they started through the barrel without him hearing? How could they do it so silently?

He almost pushed the switch, but something about the sound of the breathing didn’t ring true. There was something strange about it, something artificial. It was too loud, like somebody breathing right into his ear.

Then a soft voice said, “What do you think?”

“If we go through the doorway,” a second voice said, just as soft, “we’re exposed. We got to be careful.”

They were still the other side of the barrel, they had to be, but they sounded as though they were sitting on his shoulders. It had to be the barrel itself doing it, amplifying their voices like a huge megaphone.

Would it do the same thing in the opposite direction? Parker didn’t make a move, didn’t make a sound. He waited, listening.

The first voice said, “What are we gonna do? We stand here, and he gets away.”

“You go through first,” the second voice said. “Stay low, no matter what happens. I’ll cover you.”

“Why you? Why don’t you go in and I cover?”

“Because I’ve been trained for this kind of thing.” That last said with a hint of contempt in the voice. So that would be the cop, and it would be the one in the overcoat who would be coming through.

Unfortunate. It would have been better if they’d both stayed excited, both just run straight ahead. But he’d do what he could, and see what happened.

The first voice was saying, “Okay. But for Christ’s sake, cover me. I don’t want what Cal got.”

“I’ll cover you, don’t worry. I don’t want anybody else dead.”

“Except him.”

“You’re right.”

“Should I go on my hands and knees?”

Parker grimaced. It was getting worse and worse. The only good part of it was hearing them make the plans.

“Go any way you want. But let’s get going.”

“Right.”

Parker heard the small thumps when somebody entered the other end of the barrel. He waited, his thumb straining against the switch. He didn’t want the guy too close to this end, not too close to the other end. In the middle, in the middle.

The small thumps of shoes and swishes of cloth marked the guy’s progress. Parker listened, waited, listened, waited.

Around midpoint.

His thumb pushed the switch, and as the lights came up he rolled under the chain, back out in front of the barrel, looking for his target.

The barrel was rolling. Bands of fluorescent tubes, pink and white and green and yellow, behind thick plate glass inside the barrel, lit up the guy in the overcoat, rolling and tumbling as the barrel lumbered around and around. He looked like a bulky sack of laundry, rolling over the glass protecting the lights.

Parker wanted a sure shot, but the guy was too indistinct, the lighting in there was too crazy, and as he moved his head back and forth, moved the gun back and forth, the cop on the far side shouted, “Stay down! There he is, stay down!” And started shooting through the barrel at Parker.

The guy in the barrel began to squeal like a pig. He curled himself up tight, knees up against his chest, head down in against his knees, arms wrapped around his head, making himself a black ball that rolled and bumped inside the turning barrel.

It was impossible. The cop had all the ammunition in the world over there, he could keep shooting and Parker could never get set for the one shot that had to be good.

So he got out of there. He jumped to the side again, out of the direct line of fire, and ran across a big bare room full of obstacles — treadmills and places where jets of air from the floor would lift female customers’ skirts — to a flight of wooden stairs. Behind him the barrel was still going around and around. Far away outside, the laughter and music at the front of the fun house was still carrying on.

He made the top of the stairs, and there were suddenly more shots. He looked back, and the cop was through the barrel and shooting again. The guy in the overcoat blundered out, too, bumping into the cop, sending a bullet into the ceiling.

There was a doorway ahead of Parker. It led out to an open area on the front of the fun house, a kind of balcony directly in front of the huge laughing face, up on the second floor. But there was another way out, too, a curtained opening three feet high in a side wall, and that was where he headed.

There was a chrome bar at waist-height across above the opening. Parker reached down, grabbed that with both hands, and swung through the curtain, feet first. He let go the bar and swept through into darkness.

A chute, metal, curving, was what he was on, a spiral that ran down inside the building. Parker rode it down, his arms folded across his chest, hands pressed against jacket pockets, to be sure he lost neither the pistol nor the flashlight.

The bottom. Lights, all different colors. More distorting mirrors, more fun-house gimmicks. But also a side door, with the dull red EXIT sign over it, tucked away in a corner.

Parker ran to that door, pushed it slowly open. He looked out, and this was the rear of the building, away from most of the light and most of the noise. Ahead, vaguely seen in the darkness, was the Voodoo Island band shell. A ways off to the left was the Land of Voodoo black-light ride, and off to the right was the fountain at the center of the park. There was no one in sight.

He stepped outside and carefully closed the door behind him, not wanting the rectangle of light to attract attention. He started away, headed for the band shell since that was the nearest structure, and suddenly darkness fell. Darkness and silence.

He looked back, surprised. They’d found the master switch and turned the fun house off again. There was no light now anywhere.

Good. He didn’t need light, not right now. He turned away again and trotted through the darkness toward the band shell.

P14 Slayground

Two

PARKER STOOD at the window and watched the flashlights bob, out there by the fountain in the middle of the park. He cautiously raised the lower half of the window and then he could hear the voices, though he couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying.

But he didn’t have to know the exact words, he could pretty much tell what the conversation was about. Apparently he’d lucked out. It looked as though he’d got their leader on the first try, back at the fun house. That was why they were being so disorganized now, they hadn’t worked it out yet who was going to be leader in the dead man’s place. That was why they weren’t pressing him now, keeping him moving.

But he should keep himself moving, anyway. He had to take advantage of the break he’d been given, chop away at them while they had no leader. And the first thing to do was find out how many of them there were in here, just exactly what the odds were against him.

He was in New York Island now. One of the ranks of stores had a second floor, containing administrative offices. The staircase was hidden behind a mirror in the women’s clothing boutique and wasn’t likely to be found by people in a hurry. That was why Parker had come here from the fun house, but now it seemed there was no necessity to hide out for a while. It would maybe be better to scout the enemy while he was regrouping his forces.

Parker was using no lights, not even a flashlight, so when he left the window and went downstairs he moved fast but with caution. To break a leg now, even to sprain an ankle, would be the end. He had to be able to move, to keep moving around. That was the biggest edge he had, that he was only one man, traveling light, mobile, not limited to a base of operations.

He closed the mirrored door carefully behind himself when he got to the first floor, then moved through the shop and out the front door to the street. He moved along the fake cobblestones to the right, past the shops, coming closer to the fountain.

They were still there, talking away. They weren’t arguing exactly, but they hadn’t yet come to an agreement. Two of them were doing most of the talking, and they seemed to be the ones Parker had seen at the fun house, the cop and the guy in the overcoat. When Parker got closer, he could hear that the guy in the overcoat wanted to report to somebody — Lozini, the name sounded like — wanted to call this Lozini and tell him the situation and ask what they should do next. But the cop didn’t want any part of that. He wanted to press on right now, get Parker, get it over with. He was vague on some of his reasoning, telling the other guy he knew what the reasons were, as though he didn’t want the others present to hear what he had to say. The guy in the overcoat kept saying, “Yeah, I know, I know what you mean. But I still say we ought to call, it could still work out the same. You think he’ll call it off?”

“I say let’s not cause ourselves trouble,” the cop said. “There’s only the one guy, let’s go and get him and quit standing around talking.”

Besides those two talkers, there were two others, neither of whom said much of anything. One of them was apparently the other cop who’d tried that crap with the loud-hailer when they’d first come in, and the other one seemed to be the guy in the black and white hunting jacket Parker had seen carry something out of the station wagon this afternoon.

Was that all of them? Could they have been dumb enough to leave the front gate unguarded?

It didn’t seem possible, but the thing to do was go and see, so Parker moved away again, left them still talking things over, and headed for the main gate. He went to the band shell first, around that, then around the Land of Voodoo black-light ride, then around Marooned! — the black-light ride where his money was stashed — then past the little office where he’d waited for them to come in, and finally to the gates.

And they were guarded. Two guys, one leaning his back against a gate and the other leaning against the night watchman’s Volkswagen. They were both smoking, the small dull red dots marking them in the darkness. Though they could be seen anyway, silhouetted against the faint light from a streetlight somewhere outside the park.

Could they both be taken? That would be the simplest. Go get the satchel of money, come back, shoot both of these guys, take off.

No. They were pros, those two, nobody would sneak up on them that easily. They looked casual, standing there, leaning, smoking, but they were so fixed that they could watch each other’s back. No, the odds weren’t good. They weren’t the ones to go after yet, not yet.

He faded back again, past the little office, around that building and between it and Marooned! to the Desert Island snack bar. After that he had an open stretch to cross, the four guys arguing at the fountain down to his left and the two guys guarding the gate to his right, but the night was dark enough to cover him. He trotted across to the Island Earth area, past its black-light ride — Voyage Through the Galaxy — and on into Pleasure Island. He passed the carousel, went through Hawaii and Alcatraz and finally to Treasure Island, and there were no more of the invaders. Just six, the four at the fountain, and the two by the gates. And he had four bullets left.

Those at the fountain had apparently settled the question of whether or not to call Lozini. They would not. They were discussing tactics now, and blaming each other for the delay so far.

Up at the rear of Treasure Island was the black-light ride called Buccaneer! Parker went up there, feeling his way along in the darkness, found the side entrance he’d forced before, and went in. Once inside he switched on his flashlight, and there was everything as he remembered it. The little pirate ships stacked up to his left, near the control panel. The water running through the metal trough winding back and forth inside the building past the displays. Parker went along the narrow catwalk to the display where he’d altered the wiring earlier today, and plugged it in, then went back to the front again and looked outside.

They were still down there, still talking things over. They seemed to think they had forever. They took hours to come in here after him, and once inside, all they did was stand around and talk.

It was time to get them moving again. Parker went to the control panel and threw the master switch.

Once again, lights and music. Sea-shanty music this time, and deep bass laughter, and recorded comments like “Heave ho, me hearties” and “Make ‘em walk the plank!” And the usual whirling lights outside, clamoring for attention.

They’d get it, too. Parker went out the side door, and saw the flashlights bobbing in this direction. Off to his right the high shape of the pirate ship in its own small lake loomed white and ghostly out of the darkness. Parker ran for that, crouched low, got to the gangplank, ran up it, and ducked behind the railing on deck.

He peered around the edge of the railing, and saw two of them rush inside. Only two? Where were the rest?

He ought to get farther away from here. There was another gangplank on the other side of the ship, and he headed for it, moving slowly and cautiously across the deck and around the main cabin.

He glanced back, over at Buccaneer! The two had gone inside now. How long would it take? Sooner or later one of them would touch the wrong thing. If he was also touching the water at the same time — There was a sudden yowl from inside the building, like a hound who’d just been shot. Parker looked, and the lights across the face of the building were flickering, the music was suddenly dragging, speeding up, dragging, speeding up. The yowl stretched out, and slowly died away.

He nodded, and turned for the gangplank again, and there was suddenly somebody standing there, half-visible in the flickering light from Buccaneer!

The cop.

There wasn’t time for anything. Parker reached to his jacket pocket for his gun, but the cop jumped forward, throwing his arms around him, trying to wrestle him to the ground. Parker got a foot around his ankle, shoved him off-balance, and the cop fell back, but came in again right away, swinging a long right at Parker’s forehead.

Parker went in under the punch, driving both hands at the cop’s belly, and the cop grabbed him again, trying for a bear hug, wrestling him around.

The cop was strong, and besides that, he’d panicked. Parker could hear the strangled breath in his ear, he could hear how frightened the cop was. So much that he’d forgotten his gun, he wasn’t even trying for it. So much that he wasn’t even shouting to his friends, wasn’t making any noise at all except for that panicky loud breathing.

The two of them were shoving and swaying back and forth across the deck, and as they did so, darkness suddenly fell again, as the light and sound of Buccaneer! abruptly cut off. In pitch-darkness Parker and the cop kept wrestling, struggling with one another, and then suddenly there was nothing beneath Parker’s feet any more, the whole world was turning upside-down, and the two of them crashed into the icy water beside the ship.

The shock of the cold water broke their grip. Parker almost lost consciousness for a second, but managed to keep awake, to keep in motion. He’d lost the cop somewhere, but that didn’t matter. He struggled to his feet in knee-deep water, put his hand out, felt the wooden side of the ship, waded heavily the other way and came out to snow-covered blacktop.

Behind him the cop was suddenly shouting. “He’s here! Over this way! He’s here!”

Parker ran heavily away, already starting to shake inside the wet clothes.

P14 Slayground

Three

HE WAS shivering so much he could hardly stand, the tremors shaking him back and forth like a drunk. His clothing was heavy with icy water, weighing him down. He felt dizzy, faint, he had a compelling urge to just drop, fall down where he was and forget everything. Close his eyes, quit fighting, let the shivering take him, just lie there like a wounded cat until they came to put him out of his misery.

But he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t stop. To keep his teeth from chattering he had his jaw clenched so tight the ache of it ran through his head as though he’d been beaten with nightsticks. But he kept moving, kept putting one foot in front of the other, though his shoes now felt like blocks of ice weighing down his feet.

He was in New York Island again, staggering along the fake cobblestones past the little shops. There was no one chasing him right now, but he didn’t know how long he had. He had to get to ground, he had to get dry, he had to get warm, he had to survive.

It was pitch-black here, there was no choice but to switch on the flashlight, whatever the danger. He did it in quick sweeps, I on and off, just enough to orient himself each time. He was looking for the women’s dress boutique again, and the offices up on the second floor.

But before he found that store, his light flickered over a sign: MEN’S AND BOYS’ WEAR. He turned that way, found the door, kicked it open, went inside.

He took a chance on keeping the flashlight on for longer periods of time now, and went quickly through the store. Very little stock was left, but there was some. Socks and underwear, short-sleeved shirts, summer-weight zipper jackets, thin slacks. No winter clothing, no shoes, no suits.

But it was better than nothing. He found an empty cardboard carton in the back of the store, filled it up with goods he thought he could use, and then left that store.

The women’s boutique was diagonally across the street. He looked around, saw nothing but the darkness, heard nothing anywhere, and ran across and into the shop. He went down the narrow aisle to the mirror, opened it, went upstairs.

The office had windows on two walls, with shades and curtains. He drew the shades, then switched on the flashlight, put it on the floor, partially covered it with a sheet of paper from the desk. It gave a very small light, but it was enough to see by.

There was a bathroom next door, with a long hand towel on a roller. Parker opened the roller and removed the long foot-wide ribbon of towel, then stripped off his wet clothing and dried himself. It was still cold in here, almost as cold as outside, but once he was dry the shivering began to ease a little, he could relax his jaw without his teeth chattering.

He dressed in the summer clothing he’d brought, putting on three pairs of socks, two pairs of slacks, two polo shirts and one of the lightweight zipper jackets. He hung his own clothing around on chair backs and doorknobs, and it was then he discovered his pistol was gone.

He stood there with his hand in the empty jacket pocket, holding the jacket up by the neck with his other hand, both hands cold and wet from contact with the jacket. The pistol was gone. Four shots. Gone.

It must have fallen out in the struggle with the cop, either on the ship or when they fell into the water. More likely then, falling into the water, the pistol getting jolted out of his pocket, lying now in the knee-deep water around the pirate ship in the darkness. Gone for good.

He put the jacket over a chair back. He still had the two knives, and these he set on the desk. He’d need them for sure now.

What was happening outside? He picked up the flashlight, switched it off, carried it over to the window. He pulled the shade aside and looked out, but there was nothing to see, no lights bobbing around. Were they calling off the hunt until morning? It would be smart, if they kept on moving around in the dark like this he could pick them off one at a time. If he had a gun.

They wouldn’t know he was unarmed now, that was the only edge he had left.

He wished he could go out and take a look for them, find out for sure what they were up to, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t wear his shoes yet, and he had no others. The clothing he had on wasn’t enough to keep him warm inside this building, and it was even colder outside.

The soaking he’d taken had drained his energies more than he liked to admit. He still shivered from time to time, still found himself on the verge of losing his balance. His arms and legs seemed heavier than usual, and he was having trouble thinking, concentrating his thoughts. He needed time to recuperate, time to get ready again, so he hoped they really were doing the smart thing out there, pulling back to the gate to wait till morning.

He stood watching at the window for nearly five minutes, and saw nothing at all. He opened the window briefly, to try to listen for conversation, but the cold breeze coming in made him close it again. The absence of light out there was enough anyway. If they were still hunting for him, he’d see their flashlights. And probably see them switch on the lights in different buildings.

But they’d be careful about that now. They’d walked into his electric booby trap at the Buccaneer! ride, and they’d be a hell of a lot more cautious now, knowing he’d been setting up surprises for them while waiting for them to come in.

He didn’t know whether the Buccaneer! trap had killed anybody or not, but it had caught at least one guy, and even if he was still alive he wouldn’t be in any shape to hunt for anybody for a while. So out of the original seven, that left five out there. All of them armed, all of them wary now, and more than likely willing to wait to come after him in daylight.

All right. He’d take the respite, he could use it, and worry about tomorrow when it got here. He left the window at last, re-crossed the room, and went downstairs to the dress shop.

Draperies had been used as the principal decoration inside the shop, unlined cotton draperies in colorful prints. Parker took them all down from the walls and windows and carried them upstairs. It took two trips. The third time he went down he got a chair and a metal wastebasket from near the cash register and carried them over to the stairs. He went up two steps, pulled the mirror-door shut, and leaned the chair so its back legs were on a step and its top was against the door. Then he put the wastebasket on the chair seat. If anyone pulled this door open now, chair and wastebasket would both go crashing.

When he was satisfied with the arrangement, he went back upstairs again. Moving around helped, but it was still cold in here, and he was still weak and a little disoriented.

He covered both windows with draperies, putting them up with thumbtacks from a desk drawer, putting three of the thin draperies over each window. Then he turned on the flashlight again and tried the light switch, but the power in here was off. He would have liked to go downstairs and turn it on, but he didn’t know what lights or sounds were already in an On position and would begin to blare his position the minute he switched on the electricity.

He searched the office, and in the closet found a small electric heater. Again he regretted the lack of current, but there was nothing to be done about it. He left the heater where it was, and kept on searching, and in a bottom desk draw, tucked away behind a lot of manila envelopes as though it had been forgotten there, was a bottle of store-brand whiskey, about one-quarter full.

There was nothing else useful anywhere. There was a carpet on the floor, and Parker sat down on it and wrapped himself in the last two draperies. They smelled of dust, making him sneeze, but they started to get him warm.

He opened the bottle and turned off the flashlight. He sat in the dark like an Indian brave, wrapped in bright print draperies, and drank the whiskey, and that helped too. When the bottle was empty he put it down and lay back on the floor and closed his eyes and went to sleep.

P14 Slayground

Four

“ARE YOU LISTENING?”

It was one of those dreams where he knew he was dreaming.

In the dream he stood at the foot of a sheer rock cliff, and up at the top somebody was standing and bellowing. He was too far away to make out what he looked like, but his words were loud and clear.

“I HOPE YOU’RE LISTENING. I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR WHAT I’M SAYING, BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND WHY IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN AND WHO’S GOING TO DO IT TO YOU.”

His back hurt, in the dream, and in the dream he wasn’t exactly standing, he was lying down, lying on his back on something hard. An uncomfortable dream, full of aching backs and loud noises, and he thought, I’m having this kind of dream because I’m in a bad situation.

“MY NAME IS LOZINI. DOES THAT NAME MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?”

He opened his eyes, and in vague diffuse light he looked at the ceiling. The light was very dim, like being at the bottom of a tank of water in an aquarium, and when he turned his head he saw the draperies covering the windows, saw the light filtering through the different colors, very little getting through into the room. But outside it would be full daylight.

“LOZINI. THE NAME SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING, BECAUSE I OWN THIS TOWN. THIS IS MY TOWN AND YOU PULLED A JOB HERE IN MY TOWN WITHOUT CLEARING IT WITH ME.”

Parker sat up. He was wrapped in draperies, his clothing was hanging around on chairs and doorknobs. He pushed the draperies to one side and got to his feet. His back and neck were stiff, his bones ached, his muscles didn’t want to work.

“BUT THAT’S NOT WHY I’M HERE. THAT’S NOT WHY I’M GOING TO GET YOU. THAT’S NOT WHY MY MEN HAVE ORDERS NOT TO KILL YOU BEFORE I CAN GET MY HANDS ON YOU.”

He limped over to the window facing the center of the park, knelt down there painfully, and pushed the draperies out of the way. He lifted a corner of the shade and looked out.

The fountain area was full of men, fifteen or twenty of them. The sun was shining today, a bright cold morning sun casting long shadows on the snowy ground. The men looked like a shape-up waiting for work, standing around in leather or cloth jackets, some of them wearing hunting caps, a few with sunglasses on against the brightness of the sun on the snow. They had their hands in their jacket pockets, or their arms were folded, and they were just standing around waiting, impassive, neither in a hurry to get on with it nor wishing themselves somewhere else. Just a bunch of guys waiting to go to work.

They were all watching their leader, a stocky white-haired man in a black overcoat, standing out in front of them, his back to them, the loud-hailer to his mouth. The two cops were with him, all suited up in their tight uniforms and knee-high boots and snappy hats and opaque sunglasses, like the military guard for a pocket Mussolini. They were watching the old man, too, but they were less impassive, they were both moving around, shuffling their feet, looking this way and that, moving their hands and heads into different positions. One of them seemed impatient, in a hurry to get to the manhunt. Would that be the one Parker had wrestled with last night? The other one, younger-looking and thinner, gave off an aura of apprehension, as though he didn’t like being out there in all that sunlight, maybe didn’t like being involved in this setup at all. Parker looked at that one, and he was interested. That cop might come in handy later on.

The old man with the loud-hailer was still bellowing. “I’LL TELL YOU WHY I’M GOING TO GET YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH, AND WHY YOU’RE GOING TO BE SORRY YOU EVER SET FOOT IN THIS TOWN. BECAUSE LAST NIGHT YOU GUNNED DOWN A MAN I LOVED LIKE MY OWN SON. LAST NIGHT YOU GUNNED DOWN A MAN A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER THAN YOU’LL EVER BE. AND I’M GOING TO AVENGE THAT MAN, I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU PAY. IF YOU’VE GOT ANY BULLETS LEFT IN THAT GUN OF YOURS, THE SMART THING FOR YOU TO DO IS PUT A BULLET IN YOUR HEAD, BECAUSE IT’LL BE A HELL OF A FASTER DEATH THAN I’LL GIVE YOU, AND THAT’S A PROMISE.”

The preamble was done. The old man lowered the loud-hailer from his mouth, then tossed it to one of the cops, the thin nervous one. The cop stood there holding it in both hands, like an inexperienced father with a new baby. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he just stood there looking at it in his hands while the old man got into the middle of his fifteen helpers, like a football coach in the middle of his team just before the start of a game, and began to give them orders. Parker could see him gesturing down there, looking up and pointing one way or another, then bending back down into the group again. His men stood impassively, listening to him, nodding from time to time.

Parker let go the window shade and draperies and pushed himself to his feet again. So today it was worse. Last night he’d had seven to contend with, today he had fifteen or twenty. There was no point taking an exact count, it was obvious he’d set the old man off on a vendetta, and that meant that even if he had an incredible streak of luck and put this whole bunch out of action, the old man would just get to a telephone and call up another army. Last night it had seemed as though the thing to do was out-survive them, maneuver them until he could finish off all seven, but today that strategy was no longer any good. The name of the game now was Get Out. There was no other way to live through this.

And he was in rotten shape to survive, stiff and creaking like an old man from the combination of being soaked in icy water and then sleeping on the floor in an unheated room. His joints cracked when he moved, every part of him ached, he moved like a cripple.

He checked out his clothes, and they were still damp, it hadn’t been warm enough in here last night to really dry them. The shoes were still wet, the jacket was still wet, its pockets were even soggy.

But he couldn’t stay here much longer. They were obviously going to start working their way through the park, checking out every building, and it wouldn’t do to be caught on the second floor of a building, with only one staircase. And he couldn’t travel outside without shoes or a winter jacket.

All right. He still had a few minutes. He left shoes and jacket where they were and went into the bathroom. The hot water wouldn’t run hot, but at least there was water. He was surprised they hadn’t shut it off for the winter, but maybe the pipes were insulated enough to keep them from freezing and this office might occasionally be used in the winter. He washed up, and felt a little better. He drank some water and felt it hit his empty stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling.

He went back to the office and pulled on his shoes. He kept on the three pairs of socks, making the shoes a painfully tight fit, but at least the coldness and the dampness didn’t penetrate through to his skin. Then he put on his jacket, over the summer jacket and the shirts he was wearing, another tight fit. He felt the damp cold of the jacket against his wrists and the back of his neck, and was immediately colder all over, but there was nothing to be done about that.

He put the two knives in his hip pockets, then put on the gloves he’d taken from the night watchman’s office. They were only slightly damp, they’d dried better than the shoes and jacket.

Now he was ready. He went downstairs, moved the chair and wastebasket out of the way, cautiously opened the mirror-door. Nobody around. He stepped out and shut the mirror-door behind him.

There was no one in the fake cobblestone street. He went out of the dress shop and stood in the doorway a minute. The sun was bright without warmth. He could faintly hear noises, starting up and then stopping, and then starting up again and stopping again. It took him a minute to figure out what was going on, and then he understood. They were turning on the electricity everywhere, going from building to building, from ride to ride, from exhibit to exhibit, switching on the power and then turning off whatever records or tapes would start to play. Light, but no sound. If he survived until tonight, but failed by then to get out of here, there would be no respite. The park would be brightly lighted tonight, from end to end. And now, in the daytime, the interiors of all the buildings would be lit up. No dark corners, or very few.

It was getting tougher.

Down to his right was the fountain, the center of the park. Up to his left was the rest of New York town, and past that a Coney Island amusement-ride section and an outdoor turnpike auto ride.

He turned to the left. After a couple of steps, he began to trot.

P14 Slayground

PART FOUR

P14 Slayground

One

PARKER WAS coming down out of the Coney Island amusement area, crossing the line between New York island and Voodoo Island, intending to circle around the theater building, when a sudden voice cried, “There he is! Back of the snake house, back of the Voodoo theater!”

Parker stopped, in the open, looking around, seeing no one. Then he heard a shot, and something small and angry shattered itself into the snowy blacktop near his right foot, and he looked up.

Cables stretched over his head. From these cables were suspended potlike conveyances, big enough to carry four people. The pots started at ground-level back behind the theater, at the rear of the Voodoo Island section, lifted high into the air on the cables, and swung out over the park, high over the fountain, and came down over on the far side, at the rear of the Hawaii section.

What they’d done, they’d turned on the electricity for the pots and sent two guys up to be lookouts, one over this side of the park and one over the other side. When both pots were in the right position they’d turned the electricity off again, and now they were both up there, watching over the side. Aerial surveillance, like in the Army.

Parker looked up, and the guy was outlined against the sky up there, leaning over the edge of the pot, pointing a gun down at him. But shooting downward at a target is the toughest kind of shooting there is, and his second bullet thudded into the ground good two feet away.

The guy was too excited, he was completely exposing himself.

If Parker had a gun of his own, that bastard would be dead now. A silhouette against the sky, showing himself from the middle of the chest upward. As easy as a shooting gallery, for anyone with a gun.

The third bullet was closer. Parker turned and ran, heading for the theater.

Above him the voice was calling again: “He’s headed for the theater! He’s goin’ into the theater!”

There was nothing else to do. Wherever he went he could be seen by the guy in the pot. Inside the building, maybe eventually he could get out again on the far side, where the bulk of the theater would be between him and the observer. After that, who knew what would be possible? Maybe nothing.

He yanked open a side exit door he’d left an inch ajar yesterday afternoon. All those preparations he’d made were going to come in handy now. If anything would save him, it would be the fact he’d been given an afternoon to get everything ready in here.

The place was in darkness, they hadn’t reached this one yet in their passion for turning everything on. Parker used his flashlight, made his way up on the stage, then went up the iron ladder to the catwalk along the left wall. The ropes holding the backdrops were still tied to the railing, as he’d left them, the weights lined up along the outer edge of the catwalk.

Moving around had eased some of the stiffness in his joints, but he still wasn’t as limber as he should be. He was having trouble making himself move as quickly or with as much agility as he needed, as much as he would normally be able to give. He stretched and bent and moved around on the catwalk, trying to work the rest of the stiffness out while waiting for them to get here.

Doors crashed open. A long thin rectangle of daylight lay halfway down the center aisle of the theater. Men came in, hustling, breathing hard, shouting to one another. Somebody shouted to others outside, “Watch all the doors, watch them all!” Somebody else shouted, “Get the lights on! Where the hell do you switch the lights on?”

“Up on stage,” somebody called. “Left side of the stage, there’s a big control panel there.”

Flashlights came bobbing, the men vague shapes behind them. Half a dozen, maybe more. They came up and milled around onstage, shouting to each other to get the damn lights on, somebody shouting he was on his way to do it.

Parker raced along the catwalk, kicking off the iron weights and yanking the slipknots on the ropes. He didn’t know if anybody was directly under the catwalk or not, but if they were, a twenty-pound weight dropping on their heads would put them out of action for a while. In any case, there were three or tour of them standing around onstage, and the backdrops with their weighted bottoms to keep them straight weighed hundreds of pounds, and they were dropping toward the stage like huge guillotines, one after the other, from the front to the rear, slicing down through the air with loud shushes, the weighted bottoms crashing onto the stage, the drops continuing to fall, the canvas piling up like starched laundry, finally the metal pipes, as long as the stage was wide and very heavy, i budding down, the ropes whistling through the pulleys under i lie theater roof, the rope ends released from the weight cages over at the catwalk, the ropes pulling completely through and I ailing to the stage like dead brown snakes. And under them all, there would have to be a couple of bodies.

Parker grabbed the ropes on the last two, yanked the slipknots free and held onto the ropes, and was yanked up into live air, rode up through darkness toward the ceiling, his shoulders and back grinding with pain, not wanting to be forced through this. He heard the pulleys whining and spinning over his head, coming quickly closer, and he knew he had to let go in time or the ropes would pull his hands into the pulleys, maybe break his fingers.

It was all very fast. Up into the air, shooting upward as though out of a cannon, hearing the pulleys, letting go, flailing in darkness as his momentum continued upward, pausing in midair, in darkness, arms waving desperately around, because if they didn’t touch something solid within the next two seconds he would fall thirty-six feet to the stage floor and die, and then his left forearm hitting metal, sliding down it, his hand touching the metal, palm of his hand, fingers closing on it, grabbing it as though it were trying to get away. A metal bar. His other hand lunged over, latched on, and he hung there, swaying.

There was commotion far below him, shouting and shrieking and moaning and confusion. Through it all, people screamed, “Lights! Lights!” and Parker almost screamed the same thing with them. Because now he wanted some light of his own, he needed light even more than they did down there on the stage.

The light came at last, in waves. They turned on the power, then brought up each bank of lights in turn, the footlights at the front of the stage, the rows of spotlights above the stage, the rows across the front of the small balcony out front. And work lights, house lights, lights in the wings. Every light in the theater was turned on, and Parker looked up over his head to see where he was.

There was an open grillwork up here, suspended about two feet below the ceiling. The pulleys were all lined up on this grill-work, made of black metal pipes. It was to one of these pipes that Parker was clinging.

He didn’t have his usual strength, and he kept forgetting that and then being annoyed at it all over again. He tried to pull himself up, chin himself and then get up on top of the grid, but his arms wouldn’t do it. He strained, pulling, feeling the pressure in his shoulders and forearms, and he just couldn’t do it. His body hung there from his arms, and he couldn’t make it move upward an inch.

But he couldn’t just hang here. In the first place, this too was draining his strength, it wouldn’t be too long before his hands wouldn’t be able to hold on any longer, and that would be the end. And in the second place, even if he could hold on, sooner or later somebody down below would look up and see him. What great target practice he’d make, hanging up here like mistletoe. They could shoot him down one toe at a time. That old man, that Lozini with the loud-hailer, that might be just what he’d want to do.

He hung there half a minute longer, and then began to move. By kicking his feet forward and back, he could make himself swing. It increased the strain on his hands and forearms and shoulders, but he could hold on for a little while, and he was hoping that was all he’d need.

He kept kicking his feet out in front of him, then doubling them up behind, then kicking out front again, and the swing got wider and wider, and at last on one swing forward his feet kicked out and hit metal. He swung back harder, forward harder, touched metal again, bent his knees, kicked, swung back the other way so far he rapped his ankles against a crossbar back there, swung forward again, this time held his feet higher so they wouldn’t hit the metal bar in front, stretched full-length at the top of the swing, and his ankles landed on the bar and stayed there.

Now he was horizontal under the grid, his hands holding to one crosspiece and his ankles hooked over another. Another one pressed down across his waist.

He rested a minute, grateful to have his ankles take some of the weight, and then began to move his hands slowly to the left. He inched his way until his left hand touched the bar that ran perpendicular to that one, coming along beside him on the left. He transferred his hands to that one, slid them forward a bit at a time, bowing in the middle as his hands came closer to his feet. He paused at one point to inch his feet farther up onto the bar, moving one foot at a time, until the bar was no longer across his ankles but almost up to his knees. Then he inched his hands along the other bar some more.

It took another couple of minutes, but finally he got himself up on top of the grid, sitting there, his feet dangling, leaning forward on his hands, resting on the next bar over. He felt worn out, he felt as though he’d been running on a treadmill for a week straight.

He looked down, and it looked as though he’d done pretty well. There were two guys lying on the stage, one face-up and one face-down. The one face-down seemed to be dead. At any rate, they hadn’t cleared the backdrops off him, they were still covering his head and part of his back. His legs were bent in odd ways, not the way living bodies bend.

The other one, face-up, was lying near the front of the stage. They’d cleared the stuff off him and moved him, that was obvious. It looked as though his eyes were shut, and they’d put him with his legs together and his arms at his sides. He was lying at attention down there.

There were two more men onstage, both of them standing and moving around. They were shouting orders, sometimes both at the same time, and they sounded angry and upset. Parker heard them yelling over and over that the bastard was still in the theater someplace, so find him. Shouts occasionally came back from other parts of the theater, so people were out there looking.

Parker didn’t notice him at first, but there was also somebody on the catwalk. He finally called attention to himself by leaning over the railing and calling down to the two guys onstage, shouting, “He was up here, but he ain’t here now!”

One of the guys onstage yelled to him, “What are your exits from there?”

“None. Just that ladder I came up.”

“There’s gotta be something else!”

“There isn’t. Marty, I looked all over here, and there’s nothing.”

“What about up above you?”

They both looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. Then-were no lights way up under the ceiling, only dim illumination upward from the stage. Parker was in dark clothing, he blended with the shadows above the grid.

The guy on the catwalk looked down again. “There’s no ladder from here,” he announced, “and nowheres up there to go.”

“So how did he get off there?”

“The only thing I can figure, Marty, he came down the ladder real quick and went right through us in the confusion.”

“Nobody went through us!”

“He had to, Marty, there’s no other way. Between the time he dropped all that crap on our heads and when we got the lights turned on, he came down the ladder and got through us. It wouldn’t have been that tough, we were running around like a bunch of jerks for a minute there.”

“All right,” Marty called, grudging and reluctant but giving in. “Come on down, then. He’s still got to be in the theater someplace.”

Parker began to move. He had very little space between the grid and the ceiling, so he moved sitting down, sliding slowly along the bars, heading for the rear wall of the theater. He moved slowly, not wanting to make any noise, not wanting to call attention to himself, and also because of his tiredness. His arms and legs didn’t want to work, they didn’t want to do anything but hang there.

The last crossbar was close enough to the rear wall so he could sit on it and rest his back against the wall and relax at last. His feet were propped against the next bar, his forearms were resting against his knees, and he lowered his head until it leaned against his arms. Sitting like that, cramped up but at least not having to hold himself in place, he rested and looked down between his legs at the stage below.

The old man was there now, he was marching back and forth on the stage like a ham actor, his white hair gleaming in all the light. He kept his hands in his overcoat pockets most of the time, every once in a while pulling one hand out in an impatient gesture and holding it up against his forehead like an Indian to shield his eyes as he glared out toward the body of the theater.

Parker sat up there for twenty minutes, slowly getting some strength back, while down below they searched the same corners of the theater over and over again. They kept shouting to each other that he had to still be inside the building, he couldn’t have gotten out, every door was being watched. But as time went on, the shouts got more defensive, louder and harsher, as though they were trying to convince themselves of something they no longer believed.

Only once did anyone come even near Parker, and that was when yellow-white sunlight suddenly sliced down from a hole in the roof about fifteen feet away from where he was sitting. It was a trap door being opened over there by somebody standing on the roof.

The sunlight was lost by the time it reached the garishly lit stage, and almost none of it extended over to where Parker was sitting. He didn’t react, he just stayed there and watched the opening. If legs started to come down, he would then have to move, he’d have to rouse himself and do something about the guy coming in. Otherwise, the only thing to do was sit without moving, and wait, and watch.

Nobody came through. Nothing at all happened for half a minute, and then a voice called from up there, “Mr. Lozini!”

The old man looked up, squinting, shielding his eyes with both hands. “Hah?”

“I’m up on the roof!”

“I see ya!”

“There’s nobody up here! No tracks in the snow or nothin.”

“Then whadaya stickin around up there for? Get the hell down here!”

There was a very short pause, but a pause, before the guy on the roof answered flatly, “Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”

So tempers were getting short, impatience and frustration were building. That had to be good, it had to make them sloppier. If they were mad at each other, they couldn’t be at their most attentive.

The trap door closed again after that, and Lozini went back to shouting at people closer to hand.

A couple of times, while moving around down there on the stage, Lozini came directly under Parker, and he considered the possibility of finding something to drop on the old man. Something metal, something fairly heavy, it would be as good as a bullet dropped from this height, and sometimes when you got rid of a group’s leader the group lost heart and went away.

But not this time, this time it would be a bad idea. He could kill Lozini, but in doing so he’d let the others know where he was. They’d look up and see him, and they’d see he had no way out, he was trapped there, and they’d have no desire at all to go away. Not until they’d finished the job.

So he did nothing. He watched Lozini moving around beneath him, he felt the aches in his shoulders and hands and back and legs gradually fading, and he did nothing.

Lozini finally began to yell that somebody must have let him out, that somebody must have been careless at one of the exits and let the bastard get away. People were sent to take other people’s places on guard duty, the first guards were called in, Lozini screamed at them, they defended themselves, they insisted nobody had left the theater, the guy they were looking for had not slipped through their door.

Lozini began to yell for the cops, and somebody shouted that they were down by the gates getting into their patrol car. Lozini screamed to send the bastards up here, where the hell did they think they were going? Then everybody stood around and waited, Lozini marched back and forth on the stage, his people stood in the aisles watching him, his other people stood guard at all the exits. Nobody did any looking any more. Without anybody saying it out loud, they’d all accepted the fact that they weren’t going to find their man in this building, whether he was here or not.

The cops came in at last. Parker heard them before he saw them. The heavier one came shouting and complaining down the aisle. Didn’t Lozini know he and his partner were on duty? Didn’t he know they had to get out on the streets and move around every once in a while?

“You two belong here!” Lozini yelled at them, pointing at them from the stage. “You screwed up and that’s why Cal’s dead and that means you two stay here until we find that guy!”

The heavier cop came stomping up onto the stage, followed a few paces back by the younger cop, the diffident hesitant one. The first one yelled, “What do you mean we screwed up! We didn’t do a goddam — “

“You gave the son of a bitch seven hours to set up in here, that’s what you did. Seven hours! If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. You gave the son of a bitch seven hours!”

“What could we do, for Christ’s sake? They put us on that goddam roadblock, we couldn’t get — “

“Yd of got off! You think Yd of stood around that roadblock for seven hours? That’s what’s wrong with the goddam cops, not a one of you’s got the brains of a pissant! You couldn’t figure out — “

“Now, wait a minute, Lozini, you can’t — “

“Don’t you tell me what I can do and what I can’t do, you son of a bitch, you’re nothing but one of my two-dollar Boy Scouts, and if you were found with your head busted open in some vacant lot tomorrow morning nobody’d even look twice. So you just watch what the hell you say to me, boy.”

The cop stood swaying, and Parker watched him, wondering which way he’d go. Cops tend to have pride where their brains ought to be, and right now it was going to be a battle between this cop’s pride and his brains, with the pride telling him he was a cop in a uniform and he shouldn’t let any hood like Lozini chew him out in front of a bunch of other hoods no matter what the situation or the relationship between them, and with the brains telling him Lozini was just as mad as he looked about the death of his protege Gal and wouldn’t think twice about taking it out on a cop, particularly one that he half-blamed for Gal’s death in the first place.

This time, brains won out. When the cop finally spoke; it was much quieter, so quiet Parker could barely make out the words. “All right,” he said. “You’re upset, I know that. I’m just as sorry about Cal as you are, I respected him as a man, I liked to think he was maybe a friend of mine. Maybe a smarter man than me would have got himself off duty last night, I don’t know. I doubt it, I don’t think anybody got himself off duty last night, but maybe it could have been done. But it wasn’t my decision that we come in here anyway, after the seven hours, it was Cal’s. And yours. I’m sorry about what happened to Cal, but I’m not taking any of the blame for it.”

“Oh, you’re not. You son of a bitch, you’ll tell me what you will take and what you won’t take.”

“Any man here will,” the cop said, “if you push him hard enough. Dunstan and me, we’ve got to spend some time on patrol, because if we stay in here all day, sooner or later the captain’s gonna miss us and start people looking for us, and maybe they’ll even look here, and I don’t think you’d like that. So that’s why we have to leave for a while. We’ll be back within an hour.”

Lozini didn’t answer anything for a minute. When the cop had turned reasonable it had pulled some of the sting of Lozini’s bad temper, too. He was trying to stay hot and angry, but it wasn’t working too well. Finally, down there, he shrugged and said, “I don’t give a damn. Do what you want. But before you go, I got a cop-type problem here for you.”

The cop looked around, obviously puzzled. “Sure,” he said. “What is it?”

“We got us what they call in the mystery books a locked room,” Lozini said. “What my wife reads every night in bed, mysteries about locked rooms. A nice detective problem.” He made a broad gesture, including the whole theater in its sweep.

“Here’s a theater building,” he said. “We got all the exits watched, every exit has been watched since before the last time we knew for sure the guy was in the building. We’ve searched the place from top to bottom, we’ve looked in every room, I even sent a guy up on the roof. We can’t find him. He isn’t here. So how did he get out? And if he didn’t get out, if he’s still in here, where is he?”

The cop looked at his partner, and back at Lozini. “How do I know? I don’t know anything about locked-room mysteries. Maybe there’s someplace you didn’t look.”

“We looked everywhere.”

“Then he got out in the confusion.”

“My boys say they weren’t confused, they say they never stopped watchin the doors.”

“Then he wasn’t in here at all, maybe.”

“He was in here because he dropped all these pipes and things on our heads. And besides that, we know he was in here because George out there in that Island in the Sky thing saw him come in.”

The other cop took a hesitant half-step forward and said, “Maybe he’s one of us.”

They all looked at him. Lozini said, “Hah?”

“That’s one of the ways they solve it in the mystery stories,” the cop said. His voice sounded nervous, as though he was sorry now he’d started talking. “The way it works,” he went on, “the guy everybody’s looking for doesn’t really exist, he’s actually one of the searchers. Like the guy would be somebody that works for you, and he got in on this robbery, and he spent last night in the park here, and today he made a lot of confusion in the theater here and then just joined everybody else and went around helping to look for himself.”

There was silence. Everybody looked at the cop — Dunstan, the other cop had called him — and Parker saw the cop squirm under all the attention. He acted as though he was going to say something more, but he never did.

Finally Lozini spoke. “That’s either a stroke of genius,” he said quietly, “or the goddamnedest piece of shit I ever heard in my life.” He took a step closer to the apron of the stage. “I know every man I called this morning,” he said, “and I don’t see anybody here I didn’t call. You guys that were on the doors before. Did anybody at all go out? One of us, or anybody.”

There was a ragged response, all no.

“And the guys I sent to take your places,” Lozini said, “I sent, and I know who they are. You guys go ask them did anybody at all go out since they took over.”

There was a rustle and shuffle of motion, dying out, and then Lozini looked over at the young cop and said, “That’s the kind of thing my wife would like, she’d go for that. I think you’re wrong, but I think you got brains, that’s a very interesting solution. You got a lotta brains for a cop.”

The cop sort of bobbed his head and shuffled, but didn’t say anything.

They waited a couple of minutes until all the messengers had come back, all with the same answer. Nobody had gone out.

Lozini nodded. “Right,” he said. “That’s what I figured.” He looked at the young cop again. “Any more ideas?”

“No, sir. No.” The answer was more croaked than spoken.

“Don’t be afraid, kid,” Lozini said. “That was a very smart idea, very nice. It could of been right. You sure you don’t have any more?”

The cop shook his head.

“Too bad,” Lozini said. He looked at the other one. “What about you? Any ideas?”

“Just leave men on guard at all the doors here,” the older cop said, “and start looking around the rest of the park again. That way, if he’s still in he can’t get out, but if he’s out maybe you’ll find him again.”

“That kind of thing I can figure out for myself,” Lozini told him. “It’s this other stuff I wanted you guys for, like what your partner come up with.” He turned away from the cop, back to the front of the stage again. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go back to what we were doin before. We’re gonna turn on every light in the park, and then we’re gonna start at one end and sweep right down to the other end, and somewhere in this pile of shit we’re gonna find that son of a bitch, and before we put him out of his misery we’ll ask him how he worked this stunt, gettin out of here.” He turned back to the cops. “You two get back as soon as you can.”

The older cop said, “We will. Within the hour.”

P14 Slayground

Two

PARKER MOVED. The stiffness had set in again, his joints creaked at every motion of his arms or his legs.

The inside of the theater was empty now, had been empty for about five minutes. But it was still brightly lighted down there, and he knew the exits were all being watched from the outside.

He made himself move. The first thing to do was get himself down out of here, and in order to get anywhere at all he was going to have to crawl along the pipes on hands and knees, a little bit at a time, making the creaky muscles work, with the ceiling inches above his back.

He was heading for where he’d seen the sunlight angle through when the trap door had been opened, and after a little searching around he found it. He pushed up, and it wasn’t locked, and he lifted the trap door a little and raised his head until he could see out onto the roof, see the snow there, the new footprints in it, the blue sky beyond. The air smelled cold and clean.

At first everything looked safe, but then Parker looked to the left, and hanging in the air was the lookout in the Island in the Sky pot, the one who’d first hollered to everybody that Parker was going into the theater. He was maybe five feet higher than the theater roof and about ten feet away from the edge. He could look right over here and see everything, it would be as easy as looking into a living room from a dining room.

He was being conscientious about his job, too, moving around in an endless circle inside the waist-high pot, a metal basket-like thing similar to the baskets people ride in when they travel by balloon. His concentration was on the ground, looking all around at the paths and building entrances down there, but he’d be able to see somebody walking around on the theater roof. He’d hardly be able to miss it.

Parker kept the trap door just barely open, just enough to be able to watch the lookout. There was a knee-high wall around the edge of the roof, and it was maybe seven or eight feet from the trap door. Parker waited, moving his shoulders and his legs, trying to get more limber while he watched the lookout’s movements, and when he felt he was ready, and the lookout was facing the other way on his circuit, Parker came quickly up out of the opening and ran awkwardly the three steps to the edge of the roof and dropped flat again behind the wall. Now he was out of the lookout’s sight, and he could study the roof and find the other entrance to it that the first guy had used.

It was easy enough to see. It was a small construction on the roof, about the size of two phone booths back to back, with a black metal door on this side. It was near the front of the building, but well out in the visible middle area. The lookout moved around in his circuit too fast for Parker to be able to get to that door, open it, and get down out of sight before the guy had come around and seen him.

Parker looked up over the top of the low wall, and the guy was just going around and around on his circuit. He’d seen Parker once, and now, like a tourist hitting a jackpot on the Las Vegas nickel slots, he was going to stay there until he either found Parker again or ran out of nickels.

What an easy shot he’d be. If Parker were to move about halfway along this wall, to the closest point to the lookout, they’d be maybe twelve feet apart. Four yards. The simplest easiest shot in the world, for a man with a gun.

Except that a gunshot now would make this rooftop damn crowded. But what the hell, if he was going to wish for a gun he might as well wish for a silencer, too. Even a potato, that makes a good silencer.

There was maybe a way. It was chancy, but everything was going to be chancy until he got himself out of here. And if it didn’t work he’d just have to move very fast and hope for the best. Because one way or another he had to get down, and that staircase over there was his only way. He’d flown up to the grid, but he wasn’t likely to fly back down again. The rear wall of the theater was brick, and if he was in better physical shape he could probably climb down it, but right now he wouldn’t trust his fingers and toes.

But he was going to have to trust his arm. His arm and his eye. Not for strength, though, for accuracy.

It was the only possibility, so it had to be tried, and that was the end of it. Parker began to move, crawling along next to the wall, getting to the point where he’d be closest to that guy in midair over there. Snow was melting beneath him, the wetness seeping through the two pairs of summer pants he was wearing, seeping through his gloves. He moved faster, wanting to get this part done and over with before the cold and the wet made him even less reliable to himself than he already was.

He got to the right point, and looked over the top of the wall to be sure, and there he was, right over there, out and up from here. It was like lying on the floor in a fairly small room and looking at somebody on a upper bunk on the opposite wall. He seemed almost close enough to touch. Just about twelve feet.

Parker took off his right glove. He flexed his arm, but the movement he’d done since first starting into motion again had worked most of the new stiffness out of his shoulders and the arm now felt pretty good. His fingertips were cold, and he breathed on them, flexed his fingers, breathed on them some more. Finally he reached down and behind him and took out one of his two knives from his hip pocket. He held the point between thumb and forefinger, and looked over the wall again.

This time he was counting, doing a slow count, and from the time the guy over there had reached the point on the circuit where he was angled too much away to readily notice anything over here till he’d had his back turned completely and was back around again to where this spot was once more within his range of vision was about a count often. Maybe ten seconds, probably a little longer because his count had been very slow. So he had ten seconds to stand up, set himself, aim, and let fly.

Watching the guy over there, running the count again, double-checking himself, he began to think of other possibilities. He was safe where he’d been, or so it seemed. They hadn’t been able to find him. What if he just stayed there, just sat it out until they finally gave up and went away?

That was a nice thought, and he was tempted. It was an easy way to handle it. But it wouldn’t work. In the first place, that old man Lozini wasn’t going to give up very soon. He’d be capable of staying in this park for days, for a week or more, and how long could Parker cling to that grid of pipes up there, without food or sleep? If he fell asleep he would probably also fall out of the grid. And in the second place, if Lozini became convinced he was nowhere else in the park, he’d have the theater searched again, he might bring in more lights, it might occur to him to look under the roof. It might even occur to him to set the place on fire, burn it down and see what came out. Parker would put nothing past Lozini, an old man bent on revenge.

So he couldn’t wait it out, he had to keep in motion. Already he was in much worse shape physically than he’d been when he came in here. The longer he stayed, the worse shape he’d be in, and sooner or later he’d no longer be able to handle the situation properly, he’d start making stupid mistakes, bumbling physically, thinking sloppily, and then they could just walk over and step on him and be done with it.

He watched the guy over there, moving around and around, and he knew which circuit he was going to move on, and braced himself, and when the instant came he got his knees under himself, and came up, one hand on the top of the wall. He stood, in profile to his target, left arm up in front for balance, knife held back behind his right ear. He knew the spot in the air he was going to throw the knife at, he knew how long it would take that guy’s head to reach that spot, he knew how much ahead of time he should throw.

He had a couple of seconds to spare. He stood cocked on the theater roof, waiting, all his attention concentrated on that moving head over there, four yards away. The second came, he threw, and at the end of the motion, dropped flat again behind the wall.

There was no shout, no yell, no scream, no sound at all. Nothing happened.

Parker raised his head, he looked across the way.

Nobody there.

He came up on his knees again, and there was still no one in sight. It was as though the pot was empty over there.

He’d hit him, and the guy had dropped inside. Had he hit him full on, just under the ear, just behind the jaw, the spot he was aiming for, or had it been a glancing blow, was the guy just knocked out for a while? Maybe only for a few seconds.

Parker looked away to his right, and far away across the park was the other airborne sentinel, watching the ground. Too far away to have noticed anything happening over here. Too far away to use the other knife on, but also too far away to be a menace right now.

He pulled his right glove back on, got to his feet, brushed the snow off his jacket and trousers. Then he trotted across the roof and pulled the black metal door open and went down the stairs.

P14 Slayground

Three

LOOKING DOWN at the stage from the rear of the balcony, Parker saw the body still lying there under the canvas and pipes. The other one, the wounded one, had been carried away early on in the search. If nothing else, Parker was keeping them all occupied.

Behind the balcony was a small projectionist’s booth, containing two large old movie projectors looking like robots built by ants. There was also a closet full of cleaning supplies, and a pair of rest rooms, and in a carton in a corner a pile of True Detective magazines.

The staircase down from the balcony was wide and carpeted. Downstairs there was an office, and in a small colorful carton on top of a filing cabinet in the office a dozen candy bars: chocolate with peanuts. Parker ate two of the candy bars and stuffed the rest into his jacket pockets.

There was a window in the office opening out onto the front of the theater, but the Venetian blinds were closed. Parker stood against the wall beside the window, moved the blinds slightly, and looked out through a narrow slit at an angle over toward the entrance. He watched, and after a minute a guy walked into sight, ambling along in a slow and bored manner. He stopped, he looked around, he turned and walked slowly back the way he’d come.

The guard. One guy, apparently, all alone. But there’d be other guards at the side exits, and one holler from this one would bring the others running.

Parker searched the office, hoping to find a gun, but there wasn’t one. There was nothing helpful at all. He left the office and walked down the center aisle of the theater and went up onstage and searched the corpse there, but he didn’t have a gun either. If he’d had one, somebody had taken it with him. The corpse had no weapons at all.

Now what? There were three exits from the theater, the main one up at the head of the aisle, in front of which he’d seen the bored guard walking, plus one on either side wall, down near the stage. Both of these were metal double doors, with push bars to .open them, and on the other side of each set there would be at least one guy on guard duty, armed and ready to make a noise. There were no other ways out of the building except a couple of windows flanking the main entrance, right in view of the guy on duty there.

Well, no. There was another way out. Maybe.

Besides the canvas and pipes and corpse, the stage was also littered with ropes, all the long thick brown ropes that had held up the backdrops before Parker had turned them into weapons. He now took one of these ropes, with a length of about sixty feet, and untied it from the pipe to which it was still attached. He coiled it, and the result was loosely the shape and weight of an automobile tire. He hooked it over his left shoulder and went down from the stage and walked up the aisle to the rear of the theater, and then back up the stairs all the way to the roof. He walked across the roof to the back wall and looked over the edge. There was no exit on this side, and there was no guard down there. There was no one down there at all.

Looking out from here, he could see straight ahead of him the outer wall of the park. In fact, from up here he could see over the wall, see another parking lot beyond it, empty and snow-covered. Outside, free and clear. He could see it, but he couldn’t get to it.

To the right from here he could see the spot where the Island in the Sky pot ride started, and beyond it New York Island, with the Coney Island amusement-ride section. Nobody in sight over there, no buildings of any size for him to be hiding in.

To his left was a strangely green area of low hills and twisting stream. Snow lay all over that area, too, but in the middle of the snow, palm trees and tropical bushes stood out, bright green, as though to prove the snow a fake. But it was the trees and bushes that were fakes, because that was an outdoor ride, the Voodoo Island jungle ride. In the summer the customers would board excursion boats holding about twenty people at a time, getting on board at a primitive-looking dock down near the side wall of the theater, and would then be taken on a trip along the winding stream that bent this way and that, cutting back on itself time after time, so that what was really a very small area was made to do a lot of work. During the trip animated mannequins along the shore would be doing jungle-type things like being chased by alligators or throwing spears at the passing boat. There was no one in sight over there now, either.

Here and there on the theater roof were projections, ventilator pipes and so on, half a dozen near the back of the building. Parker tied one end of the rope to one of these, pulled on it to be sure it was secure, and then slowly lowered the other end over the side. The rope was a good twenty feet longer than the building was high, so when he was done, there was a lot of the rope lying on the ground down there.

The candy bars he’d eaten had helped. Just getting rid of the gnawing feeling in his stomach was an improvement, but besides that, he felt stronger now, closer to his normal self. It might have been more psychological than real, but it didn’t matter. The result was the same.

Still, he was cautious when he went over the side, taking it slow and easy, working his way gradually down the back wall. He felt the strain in his arms from the beginning, but it never got to be too much to handle, and he reached the bottom without any real problem.

At the bottom, he looked both ways. The gate was his ultimate destination, and the artificially green jungle area was closer to the gate than the Island in the Sky ride and Coney Island in the opposite direction. He went to the corner of the building, looked around, and saw one guy on guard duty outside the doors. The guy was leaning against the wall there, smoking, looking at his cigarette between puffs as though trying to understand the principle of its operation. Parker waited, feeling colder again now that he was outside once more, and finally, after three or four minutes, the guy finished his cigarette, threw it into the snow, and began to walk around in the same bored way as the guy in front.

The minute the guard turned his back Parker was off. It was four or five running steps to the first of the fake shrubbery. Parker got to it, and ducked down, looking back through the plastic leaves. The guy was still mooching around over there, walking a little bit, kicking aimlessly at the snow, strolling around with his hands behind his back.

The problem now was that most of the protective shrubbery . was the other side of the stream, which was here about eight feet wide, wide enough to keep the customers in the excursion boats from seeing the mannequins too closely.

Not that the mannequins were around now. Pieces of gray canvas covered the spots where they would be attached in the summertime, but for now the dolls themselves were stored in a low concrete block structure over behind the roller coaster in Alcatraz. Parker had seen them in there yesterday afternoon. The pieces of gray canvas marking the spots where they belonged looked like bases out of baseball season, half-buried in snow.

Parker moved cautiously from plastic bush to plastic bush, skirting the edge of the stream, hurrying across the bare spots where he might be seen, getting quickly to that part of the jungle where most of the greenery was between him and the rest of the park, with the moat and the outer park fence on his other side. Now he could move with less fear of being seen, the moat and fence on his right and the hilly green jungle rising up like surrealism out of the snow on his left.

The jungle ended before the corner of the park fence. Now he had to turn leftward, with a fairly long open stretch after the end of the jungle to the corner of the next building, the Marooned! black-light ride where he’d hidden the satchel of money.

What was he going to do about the money? Last night, when it had seemed all he had to do was pick off his pursuers one at a time, he’d planned on leaving the money there till he’d cleared his escape route, then going and getting the satchel and taking it away with him, but now that was impossible. He’d be lucky if he just got himself out of here, without worrying about anything else. The bag of money would slow him down, drag him down, when he was already working at less than his normal efficiency.

So there was nothing to do but leave it there, and hope he could get back sometime in the future, and that the money wouldn’t be found by anybody in the meantime.

He was about to make his turn at the end of the jungle when a commotion started up way behind him. He ducked down behind a plastic palm tree and looked back, but no one had seen him. The commotion was too far away, shouting and vague movement of people running around. Parker edged out- away from the jungle, till he could see better, and the fuss was up around the Island in the Sky take-off point. They must have turned on the power there again, to bring their two lookouts down from the pots, probably to send up replacements, and they’d found the one Parker had taken care of. Another little locked-room mystery for them to think about. What would the cop Dunstan come up with this time? Suicide, maybe.

Now that there was so much distraction back there, it would be a good time for Parker to make his move. He went around the corner of the jungle area and began to trot toward the main gates, down at the midpoint on this side of the park. He ran past Marooned! and then past the night watchman’s office, and slowed as he approached the gates. They’d have men on duty there, he didn’t know how many or where they’d be. He moved up carefully, the fence on his right and a snack bar on his left, the gates just ahead.

They were shut, probably locked. There was no one standing near them, not in sight anyway.

Naturally not. They wouldn’t want passers-by to see people standing around in here, it might cause somebody to call the cops. So they’d be undercover somewhere handy, where they could keep an eye on the gate.

“Hey! There he is, there he is!”

Parker spun around, the two guys were boiling out of the doorway of the night watchman’s shack, tugging into their coat pockets for their guns. He turned the other way, and the shouting had brought a couple more out of the Island Earth amusement-ride section the other side of the gates. One of them over there fired his gun while running and the bullet went nowhere in particular.

He couldn’t get to the gates. They were all too close, he’d be a fat target climbing up and over.

He looked both ways, and ran to the left, away from the gates, around the snack bar. Between here and the fun house a stream ran across, with an island in the middle of it containing picnic tables, small wooden bridges leading onto the island from both sides. Parker ran that way, meaning to go through the fun house again, but as he was crossing the little island two guys came running around the left side of the fun house, so he crossed the .bridge and veered off to the right, across the main roadway with the fountain down there to his left and the gates back the other way and the Voyage Through the Galaxy black-light ride straight ahead.

That was where Parker headed, with six of them now running after him, a couple of them firing, a couple more shouting, bringing the rest of them on the run.

P14 Slayground

Four

VOYAGE THROUGH the Galaxy. Only now it was just a barn. There were work lights on all over the place, leaving no shadows, the moons and planets and stars no longer seeming to hang in interstellar space. The building, a hollow shell, was a tall square, with the flimsy-looking track for the rockets the customers rode on twisting around up and down inside the building like a miniature indoor roller coaster.

This was the room Parker had strung with wires, and once inside he slowed down and moved more cautiously, remembering where he’d put the wires and avoiding them. Even with the lights on, the thin black wires couldn’t be seen at all unless you got very close and knew exactly where to look.

There was a red exit sign glowing across the way, over a pair of black metal doors with the usual push bar, and they were what Parker headed toward, moving with swift caution through the wires. And he was almost to those doors when the entrance behind him slammed open and they burst in.

There was one in front of the rest, and he came in running hard. Parker, his hands on the push bar, looked back and saw the guy run two paces at top speed before the first wire got him in the neck. His shoulders seemed to jerk back, his head ducked down as though to bounce his chin off his chest, and his legs continued to run for another half-step. Then they jerked up into the air, he seemed to lie horizontally in midair for just a second like something in a magician’s act, and then he crashed down backward onto the floor, clutching at his throat. He lay there, thrashing, squawking, grabbing at his throat, and the others began to pile in behind him.

Parker saw no more. He shoved open the doors and ran back out into the sunlight.

The Pleasure Island carousel was dead ahead. He ran around that to the right, hearing somebody start to shout again behind him. He ran hard, past the Hawaiian restaurant and the submarine ride, feeling his muscles loosening up more and more with the exercise, and the wax museum was just ahead and to his left.

He was going to have to go to ground again, he couldn’t just keep running until he wore himself out and they caught up with him, and for the moment there was no one in sight behind him. He veered to the left and ran into the wax museum and stopped just inside the door, keeping the door open barely enough so he could look out. He was breathing hard, but was warmer now from the running.

He watched, and saw a bunch of them run into view, over there by the underwater ride. It was unlikely he could ever lure one or two of them into one of those submarines, but if the unlikely happened he was ready. The hatches could be locked from the outside simply by turning a handle, and the length of pipe he’d put handy there would break the underwater portholes and fill the ship with water. It would be a nice way to get ride of a couple of them, but it was unlikely he could set it up.

For right now, all he wanted to do was keep out of their sight and catch his breath. So he stood there and watched through the crack in the door as they milled around the submarine ride for a minute and then moved off toward the fake mountain where the bobsled ride was.

Then something that looked like the kind of cart golfers ride in, with a yellow body and a pine-and-yellow-striped canvas canopy, came driving up from the direction of the Hawaiian restaurant, with one of the hoods at the wheel and old man Lozini sitting beside him. Lozini had the cops’ loud-hailer in his lap, and as they rode past the wax museum he put it to his mouth and his voice bellowed, “Come back here! Don’t run around like a bunch of damn fools! You lost him again!”

The cart came to a stop just beyond the wax museum, in the middle among the submarine ride, the bobsled ride, the wax museum and the Alcatraz Island mess-hall restaurant. Lozini called through the loud-hailer, “Get over here! Everybody get over here!”

They came. Parker counted this time, and counting Lozini, there were fourteen of them. Plus the cops, who weren’t present now.

Lozini didn’t bother with the loud-hailer once they were all gathered around him, but Parker could still hear him plainly. He started by demanding, “Who saw him last?”

There was a little shuffling around, a little discussion, and finally one of them decided he was the one. Lozini asked him where he’d last seen Parker, and he pointed over toward the submarine ride, saying, “Over there, comin around behind the restaurant.”

“Headed which way?”

“Just up here somewhere.”

“What was everybody doin over by that hill over there?”

“It’s a fake,” somebody said. “That’s all fake snow on there, it’s a bobsled ride or something. The mountain’s hollow inside, we figured he went in there.”

“Did he?”

“We don’t know, you called us back before we could look it over.”

“Because you were all runnin to the same place. He doesn’t have to be inside that fake mountain. What’s that over there?”

“The Alcatraz restaurant.”

“He could of got to there, too. Or over to that wax museum. He could of circled around this Hawaii restaurant here and got on inside there. I want two men to check out the mountain, two that restaurant there, two this restaurant over here, and two that wax museum. I want four men down at that fountain in the middle there. From down there you can see down every path all the way to the fence. Sooner or later he’s gonna move again, and he’ll have to cross one of those paths. If you see him, fire one shot, at him or in the air or any place you damn please. And holler. And take off after him. I don’t want to lose that son of a bitch again, he’s cost me too many men. All right, get moving.”

They got moving, and Lozini and his driver headed away again, back toward the fountain. Parker saw two men coming this way, and he moved away from the door and deeper into the building.

Lozini’s people hadn’t got around to switching the electricity on in this building yet, so once he was out of the direct line of the front door Parker switched on the flashlight, and then he could move along pretty fast.

The route through the wax museum twisted like a conga line among the life-size wax displays, all of them behind a velvet rope and all of them involving murderers of one kind or another. There were scenes of execution by electric chair, gas chamber, beheading with both ax and guillotine, hanging and firing squad. There were murders in the act of commission, murderers in the moment of being captured, and a couple of trial scenes. Everything was realistic except the glassy expression of all the eyes and the color of the blood, which was too shiny and red, looking more like fingernail polish than anything out of human veins.

Parker knew what he wanted. In order to have an even shot at getting out of this park, he had to have a gun. Otherwise, he’d just run around in here like a rat in a maze, and though he might win all the battles, sooner or later he’d lose the war. But with a gun, there was a chance.

And now he had a chance at a gun. Two men were coming in here, and they both would have guns. What he wanted was to get behind them, was to hide in such a way that they’d go on by him and expose their backs. And he thought he knew how to do it.

But first he had a weapon to pick up. He hurried by the place where he planned to wait for them, and went on to a display that showed three knife-wielding men cutting down a fourth man over a table on which a deck of cards and a lot of chips were scattered. Two of the knives were wax, but the third was one Parker had left here yesterday afternoon, one of the knives from the box he’d found in the gift shop. He took it out of the wax hand now and slipped it into his hip pocket, where the one he’d used had been, and as he was turning away from the display the lights came on.

He had to hurry. He switched off his flashlight and put it away in his jacket pocket as he trotted back along the winding route to a courtroom scene, one of the more elaborate displays, complete with jury. He picked up one of the jurors, the body surprisingly light, and carried it over to where the defendant and his attorneys were sitting at a table, staring with horror at a sheet-covered body a policeman had just wheeled out in front of the judge’s bench. There were a couple of extra chairs at the table, and he put the juror in one of them, adjusting one arm to rest the elbow and forearm on the table and keep him from falling over.

He could hear them coming, moving slowly through the building, checking out the possible hiding places. He went back to the jurors’ box, climbed over the side, took the missing juror’s place, third from the left in the back row. He folded his arms and made himself as comfortable as he could, because he wouldn’t be able to move while they were in sight.

He could hear them talking to one another as they came on. One of them was saying, “You see who that’s supposed to be? That don’t look like him at all. He didn’t have a skinny face like that.”

“How would you know? I tell you the truth, I don’t like this place.”

“My father knew him, they were buddies from the old days. They went to school together or something, I think my mother’s still got pictures of the two of them. I’ll show you sometime. He didn’t look like that at all.”

“Come on, Ed. For Christ’s sake, let’s get this over with. I told you, I don’t like it in here.”

“What’s to don’t like? They’re all just statues. Look.”

Something crashed.

“I don’t think you oughta start busting things up, Ed. I understand Mr. Lozini owns a piece of this place.”

“Yeah, and screw him, too. I thought that was maybe the guy we’re looking for, okay? He’s in here making believe he’s a statue, like in a Bob Hope movie.”

“I hope to Christ he isn’t. Will you come on?”

“Do you suppose they put tits on these dummies?”

“Ed, what if he is in here?”

“By now? There’s a back door, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So if I was him, and I heard us come in the front way, I’d be long gone out the back way. Right?”

“I don’t know, Ed. There’s weird things about that guy. Like what he pulled at the theater.”

“He went down a rope from the roof.”

“How’d he get up there? Where was he when we looked for him?”

“How do I know? Hold it, let me see where this door leads.” A brief silence, and then,” Whadaya know, it’s a fake. Look, the handle was wax. The door’s wood, the handle’s wax.”

“You gonna tell Mr. Lozini you thought that handle was the guy, too?”

“Look, Tommy, never mind this Mr. Lozini crap. We’re in here bustin our nuts because this boy Caliato got bumped. And what’s in it for us?”

“A hundred each.”

“Big deal. You got a guy already killed four guys in here and sent two more to the hospital, and we’re goin up against him for a hundred bucks each. We got a lot of brains, buddy, that’s what we got.”

They came into sight, walking along very slowly, not looking at one another as they talked but looking around at the displays on both sides instead. Ed was tall, lanky, with a bony long-nosed face and bushy brown hair. Tommy was shorter, stockier, with a black mustache, wearing a cloth cap. Tommy was saying, “You want to tell Mr. Lozini no? You want to tell him thanks, you’d rather not come to work?”

“I’m not crazy that way, either. Hey, whadaya think they got under the sheet?”

“Just don’t bust anything, will ya?”

Ed stepped over the velvet rope, walked up onto the display. He glanced casually at the jury, then walked up and lifted the sheet covering the body in front of the bench. “It’s a fake,” he said. “Look, it’s just wires to make the shape.” He flung the sheet down again, and looked back at the jury. “Whadaya think, Tommy, is our guy one of them? Sittin right there, big as life?”

Parker didn’t move. Like the rest of the jury, he was looking at the sheet. He wanted to blink, but he didn’t dare. His eyes started to burn, and then Ed glanced at Tommy, and Parker squeezed his eyes shut for a second, lubricating the eyes, and opened them again before Ed looked back.

Ed was saying, “You think he’s all set to throw another knife? We turn our backs and pow! You think so, Tommy?” He was grinning, enjoying himself.

Tommy wasn’t enjoying any of it. “Will you quit being so goddam childish? I told you I don’t like this place, I wanna get out of here.”

Ed looked at him in amused surprise. “Does it really get to you?”

“Do you mind? I had a very superstitious upbringing, do you mind? I wanna get the hell out of here.”

“Sure, Tommy,” Ed said, with elaborate concern. “We’ll move right along. Those thirteen jurors there are all just a bunch of wax dummies anyway.” He walked back down and stepped over the rope again.

Tommy was about to move on, when he suddenly said, “Thirteen? Thirteen jurors?”

Wide-eyed and innocent, Ed said, “Sure. That’s what I counted, thirteen, Don’t all juries have thirteen?”

“He is there, Ed!” Tommy shouted, suddenly crouching and aiming his gun in Parker’s general direction. “Juries only have twelve! Shoot their heads off, Ed, he’s got to be one of them!”

Parker was about to make a dive over the back of the jury box, but Ed started to laugh. “Oh, you’re a beauty,” he cried, laughing and shaking his head. “Tommy, you’re a goddam wonder!”

Tommy glared at him in belated suspicion, then frowned angrily at the jurors. “Twelve,” he said. “There’s only twelve there.”

“Come on, buddy,” Ed said. “Let’s get out of here before the boogie man gets us.”

“You rotten bastard, I oughta shoot your head off!”

“Aw, can’t you take a joke? Come on, buddy, don’t lose your sense of humor.”

“You’re a goddam pain in the ass, Ed, you’ve always been a goddam pain in the ass and you always will be a goddam pain in the ass.”

Ed lost his own sense of humor. “Just watch it what you say there, pal,” he said. “Don’t lose your cool.”

“Then don’t play around any more.”

“That’s all right by me. I won’t play around, and you won’t shoot off at the mouth.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, sullen but not wanting to push it. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

They moved on, finally getting out of sight, and after a little silence Ed started his chipper conversation going again. Tommy was sulking, and answered in monosyllables, but Ed carried the conversation for both of them.

Parker waited till the voices told him they were two or three turnings away, and then he climbed down out of the jury box and moved after them. The route was carpeted, he could move without sound.

Up ahead, Ed was still talking away, and Tommy was beginning to get over his mad. Parker hurried, and as he strode along he took his two knives from his hip pockets, holding them in his hands down by his sides.

When he saw them, Ed had stopped to investigate a medieval poisoning scene full of women with low-cut gowns. Tommy was standing on the carpet, looking nervously around, but no longer asking Ed to hurry.

Ed was the one to take care of first. Parker stood just around the bend, just out of sight, and listened till the conversation told him Ed was finished studying the female wax figures. He looked around the bend and saw Ed climbing over the velvet rope again, his back to Parker. Parker stepped out in view. They both had their backs turned. He set himself, his right hand holding one of the knives up behind his ear, and then threw.

This was a closer target than the other one, and more stationary. Parker finished the throwing movement and stepped quickly back out of sight again, switching the other knife to his right hand.

He heard it hit, and heard Ed grunt, and heard Ed fall. If he had Tommy figured right, he would just stand there now, unable to think for a few seconds, too paralyzed by fear to do anything sensible. A few seconds was all Parker would need.

He stepped out again, and Ed was face-down on the carpet, his left leg stuck up in the air behind him, left ankle hooked over the velvet rope he’d been stepping over when the knife hit him. And Tommy was staring down at him in disbelief, just the way Parker had thought.

But before he could get set again, Tommy moved. He didn’t look around, he didn’t fire any shots, he didn’t yell. All he did was run. He turned and ran like hell in the opposite direction.

Parker threw anyway, even though it was no good. The knife missed, and went on, and hit a masked executioner holding an ax, in the middle of his chest. He tottered, and fell over backward.

Then Tommy yelled. He veered away from the display where the executioner had fallen over, almost running into the rope on the other side, but veered again and rounded a turn and was out of sight.

Parker ran forward to Ed, and plucked from his hand a Colt Commander automatic in .38 caliber, a gun with a nine-cartridge clip., He ejected the clip from the handle and it was full. He shoved it back in, put the gun on the floor, and turned the body over. He searched it, but Ed had carried no extra clips on him. Going up against one man, he apparently hadn’t thought he’d need it.

Tommy was out of the building by now, and spreading the alarm. But that hardly mattered. It was a new ball game. Parker had a gun.

P14 Slayground

Five

THE TRICK now was to lead them one way and go another. Parker had an idea for a way to end it, to get himself out of this park and away from these people, and now that he had a gun it was possible, but before he could work it he’d have to hole up for half an hour or so. Something else that he was waiting for had to happen first, and then he could move.

He didn’t follow Tommy, but went back the other way. By climbing over the velvet rope and going through the displays, through the black curtain between displays, he could go directly to the front entrance, getting there just as Tommy was bursting out on the other side of the building. Parker heard him hollering back there, and looked out the half-open doorway, and saw two guys running around toward the rear of the wax museum. He was about to step out when two more appeared, from the Hawaiian restaurant across the way. The loud-hailer sounded, and they waved their arms — meaning the loud-hailer had been hailing them, and they’d heard and understood — and then they came running this way, toward the entrance Parker was hidden behind.

He had a gun now. Shoot them on the street? No, the idea was to stop leading an accurate trail. Parker waited, hidden by black draperies just to the side of the entrance.

He let the first one run into the building, then stepped out quickly as the second one barreled through the doorway, and stuck the gun barrel hard into his stomach, and pulled the trigger. It made a very small noise; only three people heard it. One of them was falling to the ground, one was Parker, and the third was trying to turn around and defend himself before Parker could get to him and do the same thing.

No noise, that was the most vital thing. Parker lunged forward, like a duelist with a sword in his hand instead of a pistol, trying to use the same silencing method as before. But this one, in a panicky scramble, managed to shove Parker’s gun hand to one side, and Parker had to continue the lunge, pushing off with the balls of his feet, driving his shoulder into the guy’s midsection, so that they both toppled over, the other guy backward, landing heavily on his back, Parker on top of him.

They were about equally matched for size and weight. The shock of landing on his back with Parker on top of him had made the other guy drop his own gun, but now he had the wrist of Parker’s gun hand in his grip and was holding it out away from the two of them, and trying to get his breath together to shout.

He couldn’t shout. Parker, trying for an advantage, trying to do something useful with his other hand, could do nothing for the moment except butt at the other guy’s mouth, feeling the teeth sharp and abrasive against his forehead, having to do something, anything, to keep the guy quiet. While his left fist was kidney-punching, the only thing it was in position to do effectively.

The guy twisted his head back and forth, trying to keep away from the butting, and then made his mistake. He let go of Parker’s wrist because he was tormented by the butting, he let go and tried to push Parker’s head away, and Parker brought the gun in quickly against the guy’s side, up near the armpit, and fired once.

The guy thrashed, like a fish on a schooner’s deck, and then stopped. Parker rolled off him and got to his feet and went over to look out the half-open doorway again, and now the space out front was deserted.

He stepped out, keeping close to the front of the building. Ahead of him was the snow-covered blacktop path marking the line between park sections, all crisscrossed now with footprints, and he knew that path was open and clear down to the right all the way to the central fountain, and that one of Lozini’s men would be down there by the fountain watching the path, waiting for Parker to try and cross it, heading from Alcatraz to Hawaii. And on the other side of the Alcatraz section there was another straight open path separating it from Treasure Island, and that path would also be watched.

He wanted to get back close to the gate again, but to move to where he could see the gate he would have to cross a minimum of three of those open spokes radiating out from the fountain — from Alcatraz to Hawaii to Pleasure Island to Island Earth. They knew he was in the Alcatraz section now, or they would know it very soon, once Tommy quit hollering out there on the other side of the building and started to make some sense, and with Parker limited to one-eighth of the park, it wouldn’t take them long to find him.

There was one possibility, down to the right, closer to the fountain. Parker went that way, moving fast, keeping low, keeping to the edge of the path. Ahead of him was another outdoor water ride like the fake jungle over in Voodoo Island, this one a miniature mock-up of San Francisco Bay, dominated by a larger-than-scale Alcatraz Island. It was a gunboat ride, in which the customers during the summer could watch escaping prisoner dolls swimming to freedom, see smugglers, and be “almost” crushed by collapsing Golden Gate Bridge, all the while riding in flat-bottomed boats that looked like no gunboats ever seen anywhere in the world.

The ticket booth and entrance were on this side, with the bulk of the Alcatraz mock-up between Parker and the fountain. He went out onto the wooden dock area and saw the boats tied up in a small service area to his left. He went over and released one of the boats.

There were two streams meandering through Fun Island, both connected to the moat enclosing the park, one traveling through the back half of the park and the other through the front half. The water in this gunboat-ride area also flowed into Treasure Island, where it supported the pirate ship, into New York Island, where it became the Coney Island area’s Atlantic Ocean, and back the other way into Hawaii, where it served the submarine ride. Between these ride areas it was fairly narrow but not too winding, and where it crossed from one area into another, there was a wooden footbridge along the main radial path.

There was increasing commotion back at the wax museum now. It would take them a while to work their way through that building and convince themselves he was none of the figures in there, but then they’d check out the rest of the Alcatraz area, working close and complete, so by then he’d better be somewhere else.

There was a kind of picket fence arrangement across the stream where it came into the gunboat-ride area. Parker tried lifting this, but for some reason it was padlocked and he couldn’t get it up, so what he finally did was drag one of the boats up onto the wooden dock. It was heavy, too heavy to lift but not too heavy to pull. He dragged it around the picket fence and then shoved it into the water again on the other side, climbing in after it.

The stream was about two feet below the general level of the land, so that one would have to be pretty close to it to see the boat in it. Parker crouched on the floor in the front of the boat, keeping his head below ground-level, and pushed off.

He’d chosen the same direction as the slow natural movement of the stream, so that when the impetus of his first push was gone, the boat still kept moving very slowly along. The stream curved very gradually to the right, so he had to keep pushing away from the left bank, and slowly they left the gunboat ride behind and approached the curved wooden footbridge marking the border between Alcatraz and Hawaii. That was the path being watched by one of Lozini’s men. Once on the other side of it, he would be out of the territory where they expected to find him.

The boat was just sliding under the bridge when he heard people coming, hurrying up from the area of the fountain. The boat was completely under the bridge now, and Parker reached up to one of the support beams and held himself where he was. Until they’d gone by, he couldn’t move any farther.

But they didn’t go by. Footsteps thudded on the bridge, and stopped, and a voice said, “Right here. The bridge is raised up a little, you can see better.”

“Yeah, and he can see me better, too.”

“Don’t be stupid. Before he could get close enough to do you anything, you could see him. Look around. How could he get near you?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You got a better gig than the guys in the wax museum. You want to switch with one of them?”

“Okay, I’m happy here.”

“Good boy. See you later.”

Footsteps went off the bridge. A receding voice said, “Remember. You see him, you fire once.”

A voice right overhead said, “Right.”

Parker listened. The guy was standing up there. He was moving back and forth a little, Parker could see him vaguely through the cracks between the boards. He heard him light a cigarette, using a lighter, heard the snap of the lighter shutting again.

He couldn’t move. If he let the boat drift out from under the bridge, toward the Hawaiian submarine ride, the guy on the bridge would have to see him. If he killed the guy on the bridge, other people would see that. There was nothing to do but wait.

It was about ten minutes. From time to time he heard orders shouted back and forth, far away, but nobody came close to the bridge. The guy up there, restless, kept walking back and forth and chain-smoking. He’d work on a cigarette for only a minute or two, then flip it into the water. Then right away Parker would hear the lighter grind again, and snap shut, and then more pacing, and then another long butt snapped into the water. All on the same side, the Alcatraz side, which was good. It wouldn’t be good to have him comparing the look of the stream on both sides of the bridge, because on the Alcatraz side most of the skim ice on the surface had been broken up by the passage of the boat, while on the Hawaii side the ice was still intact. A thoughtful man, looking at the stream on both sides, might figure it out that there had to be a boat underneath the bridge. But the guy up there” stayed mostly on the Alcatraz side. Besides, he acted more bored and sullen than thoughtful.

Parker was just beginning to wonder if maybe he shouldn’t take some action after all — it might be possible to float out on the Hawaii side and shoot the lookout down, with no one else knowing exactly where the shot came from — when he heard the grinding of a small gasoline engine. It was the cart Lozini was riding around in, and it came roaring up and clattered onto the bridge and stopped. Parker heard Lozini shout over the engine sound, “What the hell are you doing over here?”

“March told me to stay here on account of — “

“March told you! What the hell does March know? I don’t want that son of a bitch goin through behind you when you’re lookin the other way. Get back down by the fountain and keep your eyes open.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”

“How do we know he didn’t get through down this side already?”

“I been watching both ways, Mr. Lozini. I swear he didn’t get through.”

Lozini’s answer was softer, and Parker couldn’t make out the words, but he was apparently mollified. Then the cart roared away again, headed toward the wax museum, and Parker heard footsteps go off the bridge toward the fountain.

He waited another couple of minutes, to be sure everybody was far enough away, and then pushed off again. The boat drifted out into the Hawaii section, and now the stream ran straight at first and then curved to the left, and came to the submarine ride.

This one was easier to get through, the boat gliding past the submarines to another of those picket fences. But this time the fence wasn’t locked, and when Parker pulled on the rope hanging beside it, the fence lifted out of the way and he floated on through and lowered the fence again behind him.

Now the stream was barely wider than the boat, but it was a short distance to the moat running along just inside the fence. Parker turned the boat to the right when he reached the moat, but there was no movement to the water here and he had to pull the boat along, crouching on the bottom and reaching out to the right-hand bank and hauling it through the water.

He moved slowly, but finally he got to the other stream, the one crossing the front half of the park, and turned into it. The movement of the water was against him now, so he had to pull harder, dragging the boat along, its momentum ending quickly after each heave.

He was now in Pleasure island, and the stream opened into a large concrete-sided pool. Heavy mesh screens guarded both ends of the pool, but they were raised now. In the summer the pool was full of porpoises, but now it was empty.

It was easier going through the pool, the current against him was less strong there, but on the other side it got tough again. He pulled, and the stream angled to the left, and up ahead was another footbridge, this one showing the line between Pleasure Island and Island Earth.

Parker got past this bridge without any trouble, went on a few yards farther, and then in the shadow of the Voyage Through the Galaxy black-light-ride building he got out of the boat and pulled it up out of the water after him. He turned it over and left if facedown by the rear wall of the building, where it might not cause anybody to wonder how come it was there. If he’d just let it float away again it might have tipped Lozini and his people to what had happened.

There was a smaller footbridge here, not on a line of sight from the fountain. Parker took it, going over to the other main building in the Island Earth section, a round concrete structure with a huge dome. This was the Trip to the Moon, and when Parker went inside now he found it all lit up. He walked up the ramp that circled inside the building and went through one of the double doors into the theater.

He was now in a round room almost the same circumference as the building, with the inside of the domed roof for its ceiling. Theater seats ran all the way around, facing complicated projection machinery in the middle. The seats had half-reclining backs, because in the summer movies were shown on the domed ceiling, a trip to the moon, with the idea being that the people in the theater were all in a spaceship of the future heading up from earth to the moon.

Parker went across the theater to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He went through there and into a small office with two curving walls, one the theater wall and the other the outer wall of the building. There was a long window in the outer wall. Parker went over to it, and down to his right were the gates. There was no one in sight, but he knew they were well guarded. But maybe that didn’t matter.

He leaned against the wall beside the window and watched the gates. Very soon now, the hunted was going to become the hunter.

P14 Slayground

Six

THE COPS walked in, and Parker moved.

They didn’t drive in, they left their car outside. He would have preferred it the other way, but it didn’t matter, things could still work out.

He hurried, out of the office and across the theater and down the long ramp to the outside. The cops had still been waiting at the gates for somebody to come unlock and let them in, so Parker had time, but he wanted to be sure. He left the Trip to the Moon building, went across the little bridge, went around to the rear of the Voyage Through the Galaxy black-light-ride building, and went inside.

This was where he’d strung the wires and he moved now with caution across the brightly lighted floor, the rails of the ride curving and winding above him like a mammoth modern sculpture, the suns and moons hanging from the ceiling and looking shabby and dirty and old in the bright light. Parker made his way to the front entrance, and looked out, and the cops were coming this way, walking up the main path from the gates toward the fountain.

He was counting on the cops not knowing all of Lozini’s men, and he was counting on their not ever having had a close look at him. He waited till they were almost opposite him now, and then he stepped outside, being careful to stay close to the front of the building, out of sight of the watcher up by the fountain. “Hey,” he called.

The cops glanced over at him.

Parker said, “Mr. Lozini wants to see you. In here.” And he stepped back again, pushing the door open and standing to one side of it for the cops to go in first.

They didn’t hesitate. There was no reason for them to be suspicious, Lozini had to be somewhere, probably inside a building, and why not this one. They came across, the heavier cop first, saying, “He’s still loose, huh? I hoped you’d have him by now.”

“They’ve got him trapped up in Alcatraz,” Parker said.

The other cop, Dunstan, said, “That’s what they told us at the gate.”

The two cops went on into the building and Parker went in after them, shutting the door and taking out the automatic. “I’m him,” he said.

They didn’t get it at first, they were looking around the room — the galaxy inside a barn — and the older cop said, “Where’s Lozini?” He turned to look at Parker, and then he saw the gun.

Parker saw his face change. “Don’t reach for anything,” he said.

The younger cop now saw what was happening, and his face went white. He froze, staring at the gun in Parker’s hand.

The other cop wasn’t going to be that easy. His hand was poised near the gun on his right hip, and he said, “You can’t shoot. You’d bring them all down here on your neck.”

“You reach,” Parker told him, “and I don’t have anything to lose.”

Nothing is more effective than the truth. The cop’s arm gradually lost its tension, the bunched muscles around his mouth began to ease, and his eyes shifted around as his mind went from attack to figuring. He said, “What does this gain you? You’re going to take everybody prisoner?”

“Just you two,” Parker told him. “Get out of your uniform.”

The cop frowned. “What?”

“I don’t want to have to get blood on it,” Parker told him. “Just get out of the uniform, don’t delay things, don’t argue with me, and you’ll be all right.”

“You son of a bitch, I’m not taking anything off, What the hell do you think this is?”

“Take off the hat,” Parker said, and to the other one he said “When he falls, turn him over quick on his back. Remember, I don’t want any blood on the uniform.” He held the automatic up at arm’s length, aimed at the older cop’s forehead.

The cop blinked. He said, “What are you doing?” and he sounded less sure of himself all of a sudden.

“If I shoot you in the head,” Parker told him, “there probably won’t be that much blood. You,” he said to the other one, “after you get him on his back, go over to the doorway. Anybody that comes, tell him your partner was shooting at a rat, it didn’t mean anything.”

The young cop said, “Joe, he means it, he really means it.”

The other one said, “What the hell good does it do you? What are you trying for?”

“I’m getting out of here,” Parker told him. “Start undressing now, or I do it for you when you’re down.”

The cop licked his lips, and threw a glance at his partner. That was where the problem was, he didn’t want to be humiliated in front of the younger man. But there was no soft quick way to handle it, and to run things with the cops’ roles reversed wouldn’t be any good.

The cop was going to do it, he wouldn’t get himself shot, so Parker didn’t do any more talking. He just stood there with the gun aimed, and after a few more seconds of looking around and trying to think of something to say, the cop finally gave an angry shrug and said, “All right. For right now, you’re running the show.” He unzipped his jacket. “I’ll see you again,” he said. “And then I’ll be running the show.”

Parker knew it was easier for the cop to strip in front of his partner if he could talk tough at the same time, so he didn’t answer him, he just stood there and waited. The cop kept making tough promises all the time, but he got the uniform off and draped over a wooden railing to the left, and when he was down to underwear and socks and shoes, Parker said, “Down on the floor. Face-down.”

The cop did it, grunting, and looked like somebody about to do his morning calisthenics.

Parker said to the other one, Dunstan, “There’s some wires tied across over there. Go get one and untie it and bring it over here.”

Dunstan was in a hurry to do anything Parker wanted, but while his nervousness made him eager to please, it also made him stupid, and he had to trip over a wire before he could find one. But then he untied the ends and brought the wire over, looking as though he were doing a pantomime, making believe to carry something.

Parker said, “Tie his wrists behind his back. And his ankles. And do a good job.”

“All right.”

It took too long, because Dunstan was fumbling so much, but when he finally said he was done Parker checked and it was a good job. The wire wasn’t cutting into the cop’s skin, but it was tight enough to hold.

He did the gag himself, taking off one of the summer shirts he was wearing and ripping it into lengths. One piece he stuffed into the cop’s mouth, the other one he tied around his mouth and head to keep him from spitting the first one out.

Next he had Dunstan stand in the frisk position, facing a wall, feet well back, leaning forward with arms outstretched and hands supporting his weight against the wall; not to search him, simply to put him out of the play. Dunstan now would first have to get his balance before he could do anything else, so in the unlikely event he was thinking of trying anything, Parker now had him safely defused.

It didn’t take long to switch clothing, shucking out of his jacket and all the summer clothing he’d picked up from the men’s shop in New York Island, then putting on the police uniform. The cop was a little shorter than he was, but also stockier, which helped to equalize things. The sleeves of the Ike jacket were noticeably short, but other than that, everything gave the appearance of a pretty good fit.

Once he had the uniform on, he said to Dunstan, “Okay, stand up again.” When Dunstan turned to face him he said, “This is what’s going to happen. We’re going outside together, the two of us. We’re going down to the gates, and wait for somebody to unlock them, and then we’re going out to your car, and we’re going to take a little ride. You behave yourself and nothing will happen to you, and after you drop me you’ll be able to come back here and take care of your friend. But I’m going to have a gun on you all the time, and if you try anything when we go outside you’re going to be the first casualty. I may be the second, but you’ll be the first. You follow that?”

“You won’t have any trouble from me,” Dunstan said. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with this from the beginning, it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, whether you get caught or you get away or what. I won’t try to stop you or make any trouble — “

“All right,” Parker said, and Dunstan’s mouth snapped shut. He looked very helpful, eager, wanting to know what he should do. Parker told him, “What we’re going to do, because the guys on the gate would see I’m the wrong guy, I’m going to be wounded and you’re going to have to do the talking. And your job is to get the two of us out of this place.”

Dunstan was nodding all the way through Parker’s instructions, and when Parker was done he said, “I understand. Don’t worry, I know what to do.”

“All right, that’s good.” Parker nodded at the gun on Dunstan’s hip. “Now there’s that,” he said. “I want you to take it out very slow, using thumb and forefinger only, and holding it only by the butt. Go ahead.”

Dunstan did it, moving so slowly Parker almost told him to speed it up. But sweat was breaking out on Dunstan’s face now, the idea of drawing his gun with Parker armed and standing in front of him was shaking him up so much he was liable to faint, so Parker waited him out, and when Dunstan finally held the gun out to him Parker took it, flipped open the chamber, and shook the cartridges out. Then he gave the gun back to Dunstan and told him, “Put it back in your holster.” When Dunstan started trying to do it while holding the gun with thumb and forefinger, he said, “No, you can hold it the regular way now.” Dunstan made a nervous embarrassed laugh and put the gun away.

Parker now had two guns of his own, the automatic he’d taken from Ed and the Smith & Wesson Police Positive .38 revolver now in a holster at his belt. He had the holster flap open and tucked in behind the revolver butt so he could get at the gun in a hurry, and now he opened the zipper of his Ike jacket and tucked the automatic inside the waistband of his trousers. He closed the Ike jacket again and picked up the shirt he’d already ripped partway for the other cop’s gag. He separated the rest into two long strips and tied them both around his head, obscuring most of the right side of his face, including his right eye. When he put the cop’s hat on, he tilted it forward and to the left, covering more of his face.

Dunstan watched him nervously, and finally said, “What if somebody asks us what happened?”

“We thought we saw somebody in here, so we came in after him and I tripped over a wire and laid my head open. You’re taking me home, and after I get the wound cleaned and put a bandage on it we’ll both be back.”

Dunstan nodded, too quickly. He was like a beginning actor with stage fright on opening night. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do’ my best.”

“That’s good,” Parker said. He went over and put his arm around Dunstan’s shoulders, and Dunstan recoiled wide-eyed, as though afraid he was about to be strangled.

Parker held his shoulder, didn’t let him go. “I hurt myself,” he said. “Remember? I need you to help me to the car.”

“Oh,” Dunstan said. “Oh, yes, all right.” He reached his left hand up to grasp Parker’s left wrist and put his right arm around Parker’s waist.

Parker said, “Don’t let that hand get too close to the gun.”

“Oh, no! I didn’t even think of that!”

Parker was sure that was true. “Let’s go,” he said.

P14 Slayground

Seven

THE TWO cops came out of the Voyage Through the Galaxy building, the one leaning heavily for support on the other, his head covered in what looked like impromptu bandages. His head lolled forward as they moved out into the sunlight and turned toward the gates.

To Parker’s right as they moved slowly along was the fun house, where he’d counterattacked first last night. It had been a long time since last night. Next after the fun house was the little island with picnic tables, and off beyond that was Marooned!, the black-light ride where he’d hidden the satchel full of money.

He didn’t like leaving here without the money, he didn’t like it for a lot of different reasons. In the first place, it meant he’d expended all this effort, first on the armored-car job and then in here, for no profit. In the second place, they would have to know, Lozini and his people, that although their quarry had gotten away he hadn’t managed to take the cash with him, and they would now take this park apart looking for the seventy-three thousand. It didn’t seem to him the money was hidden very well for that kind of search.

But there wasn’t any choice. This whole operation was iffy enough as it was, trying to pass himself off as somebody else in front of people who knew the guy he was supposed to be. To try carrying a satchel out as well, when one of the things everybody in here was looking for was a satchel full of money, just wasn’t going to be possible.

Some other time. A few months from now, maybe, or maybe next summer, he could come back and see if his money was still there. And if it wasn’t, he knew who to collect from.

Lozini.

“Hey!”

It was a voice behind them, and it had to be for them. Parker felt Dunstan hesitate, but he said under his breath, “Keep moving,” and Dunstan moved forward again.

“O’Hara! Hey, O’Hara, where the hell are you going?”

Parker could hear the putt-putt now, the sound of the little cart Lozini had been riding around in all morning. The gates were maybe a dozen paces away, too far to walk before Lozini could catch up.

Parker said to Dunstan, “Remember the story.”

“I remember.” Dunstan’s whisper was shaky and scared.

“Make it work,” Parker told him.

Then Lozini’s cart came wheeling around from behind them, the tires squeaking on the snow as the driver brought it to a stop, and Lozini was leaning out of the cart and saying, “What the hell happened? O’Hara?”

Dunstan said, quickly and nervously and way too loud, “He fell down. Joe fell down, back in that building back there. He tripped over a wire.”

“That son of a bitch has this whole place booby-trapped. We found two more rides he set up to electrocute people, would you believe that? O’Hara, how’s your head?”

Dunstan seemed to be waiting for Parker to answer, but Parker was keeping his head down. He pressed Dunstan’s shoulder and Dunstan suddenly blurted, “Joe feels awful, Mr. Lozini. I wanna get him out of here, I wanna get him home and look at the wound and clean it up and all, and then we’ll come back.”

“That’s a goddam shame,” Lozini said. “Put him on the back here, I’ll take you over to the car.”

“No. thanks, Mr. Lozini,” Dunstan said, but Parker pulled him toward the cart, and he said, “Uh, maybe it’d be good for Joe.”

“You don’t want him to walk.”

There was a padded seat on the back of the car, facing rearward. Parker and Dunstan sat on it, Parker slumping heavily, and the driver started the cart up again.

Lozini said, “What were you two doing in there anyway?”

“We thought we saw somebody in there. But I guess we didn’t.”

“We’re supposed to have him bottled up back in Alcatraz,; but I don’t know. We’ve gone through that part pretty good and we haven’t turned him up yet.”

“He’s pretty shifty, I guess,” Dunstan said, laughing nervously.

“He’s a rotten bastard,” Lozini said, “and when I get my hands on him I’ll kill him myself.”

They stopped at the gates, and Lozini yelled for his people to hurry up and open them. Parker stayed slumped, listening, his hand near the gun on his hip, and after a minute the cart moved forward again and they drove out of the park.

Lozini was half-turned in the front seat, facing backward, and now he said, “How bad a cut you got, O’Hara?” and reached out to touch Parker’s head. His hand brushed the hat, it slipped backward, and Lozini shouted, “Hey!”

Parker came up with the revolver, pointed at Lozini’s throat. Low and quick he said, “Holler, and it’s your last noise.”

But Lozini wouldn’t sit still. He shouted, and jumped backward off the cart, landing rolling on the street. A second later the driver jumped off the other way, and the cart veered to the right, slowing to a stop.

Dunstan was yelling, “I didn’t do it!” but Parker paid him no attention. Dunstan wasn’t going to be a problem.

Parker jumped off the still-moving cart and fired at Lozini, but the old man was still rolling away across the snowy blacktop, his overcoat streaked now with white. The bullet missed, and there wasn’t time to try again.

Parker turned in a fast half-circle, and the cart driver was running like hell in the opposite direction. But a couple of guys, still puzzled, not sure yet what was happening, had started hesitantly out from the main gates of Fun Island.

Parker turned again and raced across the street toward the police car, reaching into his pocket for O’Hara’s keys. Behind him Lozini was shouting.

There were three other cars parked beside the toll building. Parker fired three times, and they all had flat tires.

Someone fired from across the street, and a windshield to Parker’s right developed a starred hole. He turned and emptied O’Hara’s gun, hitting no one but making them all take cover. Lozini had wound up behind the stalled cart, still shouting for Parker’s blood.

Parker got into the police car and started the engine. The sound agitated them across the street again, and the windshield was hit four times. Lozini was jumping up and down and screaming, “The tires! The tires!”

Parker threw the car into gear and aimed for Lozini, but the old man got around behind the cart again. The left corner of the police car’s rear bumper nicked the cart, sending it spinning, and then Parker was accelerating down Brower Road.

When he looked in the rear-view mirror he saw a couple of them back there, standing in the middle of the street like FBI agents at the pistol range, firing after him, but none of the bullets came into the car. Others were running for the cars, and that looked like Lozini up again, limping now, probably still screaming. Dunstan was standing around like a wallflower, not knowing what to do with his hands.

It took Parker ten minutes to get to where the second car was stashed. He left O’Hara’s gunbelt and holster and the empty gun in the police car. The hat had fallen off back in front of Fun Island, and he’d long since removed the bandages from his head.

He switched to the other car. It contained extra clothing for himself and Grofield and Laufman, but he could change later on. For the first hour, he just drove.

P14 Slayground

Eight

PARKER TURNED in at the driveway where the rural mailbox said Willis. It wasn’t his idea, using that name, but this wasn’t his house, it was all Claire’s. He’d given her the money, but she’d bought it, it was in a name of hers, and she was the one who lived here. He stayed here when he wasn’t working, but Claire lived here. There was a difference, and they could both feel it.

The name Willis on the mailbox bothered Parker a little, but it really shouldn’t. It was a common enough name, after five years a woman who used that name wasn’t going to lead the law to Parker, who was wanted under it, but it bothered him because it was an illogical thing to do and he tried not to do illogical things. He’d stopped being Charles Willis two years before he’d met Claire, but he’d told her about the name and that was why she was using it. In order to force herself some way into his life even before he knew her, to make their relationship with one another have roots that extended into the period of time when they didn’t know of one another’s existence. It was a small illogic, and it would have no ill effects, and in a way it pleased Parker that she should want to feel like that, but he couldn’t help, every time he came back from a job, looking at that name on the mailbox and being troubled for just a minute about its evidence that all was not rationality.

Claire had recently had overhead doors installed in the two-car attached garage, to replace the old-fashioned doors in pairs that had opened outward. Now Parker reached into the glove compartment of the Pontiac — his own car, waiting for him where he’d left it at the Newark Airport parking lot — and pressed the button on the little box in there, and one of the doors lifted, and he drove in.

Claire’s Buick wasn’t there, so she was shopping or someplace. Parker pressed the button that shut the garage door again, walked across the empty space that Claire’s car would occupy, and went through the connecting door into the house. He went into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and a cup of instant coffee, and carried them through the bedroom and opened the glass door and went out onto the back porch. It was briskly cold here, but the sun was shining and he was warmly dressed and he wasn’t minding the cold any more. He sat down on a chair on the porch and looked out at the ice on the lake in the sunlight, and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee. There were no snowmobiles out there today, but over on the other side of the lake he could see the tiny black figures of children skating. Across the middle of the lake went two boys on bicycles, with a skidding, sliding dog trying to keep up with them.

Only about a fifth of the houses around the lake were occupied year-round, that was one of the reasons Claire had picked this house. The houses on both sides were among those used strictly as summer cottages. This was a good place for a man who didn’t want to be noticed, and who didn’t want his comings and goings paid attention to.

Parker sat out there about half an hour after he finished the coffee and sandwich, and then the glass door slid open behind him — the house was half old-fashioned rustic, half modernized country — and Claire came out, saying, “I saw your car.”

“Hello,” he said, and she bent over him to kiss his lips. He was usually very interested in sex in the time right after a job, but this one had used up his body for a while. Tomorrow, maybe. For now, while she kissed him, he simply leaned up and stroked her hair.

She straightened and looked at him, a quizzical smile on her face. “Something wrong?” She was tall and slender and good-looking, the way a fashion model is tall and slender and good-looking, but with more than the usual fashion model’s individuality in her face.

“I’m tired,” he said.

“Feel like telling me about it?”

“Sure.”

She pulled over a chair and sat down and he told her about it, and when he was done, she said, “All of that, and you didn’t even get the money. You must be disgusted.”

“I know where it is,” he said. He stretched, and the muscles were aching again. He’d have to go to bed soon, sleep for a while. “Some day I’ll go back and get it,” he said, and got up yawning, and the two of them went into the house.

The end.

Table of Contents

P14 Slayground

PART ONE

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

PART TWO

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

PART THREE

One

Two

Three

Four

PART FOUR

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight