Peter Pan Must Die (54 page)

Gurney felt a rising anger as he imagined the scene behind him, the scene that was provoking those cries of pain and terror. He let that anger drive his next words. “You’re a dead man, Panikos.”

“You talking to me?” The tone of the question was conspicuous for its lack of concern. The accent was vaguely urban, with a scruffy
attitude. The voice was ageless—childlike in an odd way—its gender no more certain than that of the body it came from.

Gurney studied what little he could see of the yellow painted face in the black cowl. The garish carnival ride lights, the cries of dismay and confusion welling up from the explosion sites, and the acrid odor of smoke blowing in the wind were transforming the creature before him into something unearthly. A miniature image of the Grim Reaper. A child actor playing the role of a demon.

Gurney replied evenly. “I’m talking to perfect Peter Pan, who shot the wrong man.”

The face in the cowl turned slowly toward him. Then the body began to follow.

“Stop where you are,” said Gurney. “Don’t move.”

“Gotta move, man.” A whiny distress had entered Black Hoodie’s voice. “How can I not move?”

“Stop now!”

The movement stopped. The unblinking eyes in the yellow face were focused now on the pocket where Gurney held the Beretta, ready to fire. “What are you gonna do, man?”

Gurney said nothing.

“You gonna shoot me?” The style of his speech, its cadence, its accent, all sounded about right for a tough street kid.

But, somehow, thought Gurney, not quite right enough. For a moment he couldn’t identify the problem. Then he realized what it was. It sounded to him like the intonation of some sort of generic street kid, not specific to any particular part of any particular city. It was like the deficiency in the speech of British actors playing New Yorkers. Their accents wandered from borough to borough. Ultimately, they were from nowhere.

“Am I going to shoot you?” Gurney frowned thoughtfully. “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

“Like what, man?” As he spoke, he began turning again as if to face Gurney head-on.

“Stop!” Gurney thrust the Beretta forward in his sweatshirt pocket, making its presence more obvious.

“I don’t know who you are, man, but you are fucking nuts.” He turned another few degrees.

“One more inch, Panikos, and I pull the trigger.”

“Who the hell is Panikos?” The tone was suddenly full of bafflement and indignation. Perhaps too full.

“You want to know who Panikos is?” Gurney smiled. “He’s the biggest fuck-up in the business.”

At that moment he noted a fleeting change in those cold eyes—something that appeared and disappeared in less than a second. If he had to label it, he’d say it was a glint of pure hatred.

It was replaced by a display of disgust. “You’re gone, man. You’re completely gone.”

“Maybe,” said Gurney calmly. “Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe, like you, I’m going to shoot the wrong man too. Maybe you’re going to catch a bullet just because you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. That kind of thing happens, right?”

“This is bullshit, man! You’re not going to shoot me in cold blood in front of a thousand people at this fucking fair. You do that, that’s the end of your life, man. No escape. Picture the fucking headline, man—‘Crazy Cop Shoots Defenseless Kid.’ That’s what you want your family to see in the paper, man?”

Gurney’s smile broadened. “I see what you mean. That’s very interesting. Tell me something. How’d you know I was a cop?”

For the second time something happened in those eyes. Not hatred this time, more like a one-second hiccough in a video before normal play resumed. “You gotta be a cop, right? You gotta be a cop. Obvious, right?”

“What makes it obvious?”

Black Hoodie shook his head. “It’s just obvious, man.” He laughed humorlessly, revealing small, sharp teeth. “You want to know something? I’ll tell you something. This conversation is bullshit. You’re too fucking nuts, man. This conversation is over.” In a quick sweeping movement, he turned the rest of the way toward Gurney, his elbows rising at the same time like the wings of a bird, his eyes wide and wild, both hands still hidden in the folds of his oversized black shirt.

Gurney pulled out his Beretta and fired.

After the pistol’s sharp report, as the slight black-clad figure fell to the ground, the first sound Gurney was aware of was Madeleine’s cry of anguish.

She was standing no more than twenty feet away, evidently on her way back from the corrals. Her expression reflected not only the natural shock of witnessing a shooting, but the dreadful incomprehensibility of her husband being the shooter and the victim being, to all appearances, a child. Hand to her mouth, she seemed frozen in place, as if the effort to make sense of what she was seeing occupied her so completely that no motion was possible.

Other people on the concourse were in a state of confusion, some backing away, some angling for a better view, asking one another what had happened.

Shouting “Police!” several times, Gurney pulled out his wallet and flipped it open with his free hand, raising it over his head to display his NYPD credentials and reduce the possibility of an armed citizen intervening.

As he was approaching the body on the ground to confirm the neutralization of any danger and to check vital signs, a harsh voice behind him broke through the anxious jabbering of the onlookers. “Hold it right there!”

He stopped immediately. That tone was one he’d heard too many times on the job—a brittle layer of anger enclosing a jittery attitude. The safest path was to do absolutely nothing except comply with all instructions quickly and accurately.

An obvious cop in plain clothes came up on Gurney’s right side,
gripped his right forearm tightly, and removed the pistol from his hand. At the same time, someone behind him took the wallet from his raised left hand.

A few moments later, presumably after examining the ID, the edgy voice announced, “Goddamn—the man we’ve been looking for.” Gurney recognized it now as the voice of the uniformed cop moonlighting in the fair security operation.

He walked around in front of Gurney, looked at him, looked down at the body on the ground, looked back at Gurney. “What the hell is this? You shot this kid?”

“He’s not a kid. He’s the fugitive I told you about at the gate.” He was speaking loudly and clearly, wanting as many witnesses to his description of the situation as possible. “You better check his vitals. The wound should be between the right shoulder and right pleural cavity. Have the EMT check ASAP for arterial bleeding.”

“Who the fuck are you?” The cop looked down at the body again. Bewilderment was creeping into his hostility without diminishing it. “He’s a kid. No weapon. Why’d you shoot him?”

“He’s not a kid. His name is Petros Panikos. You need to contact BCI in Sasparilla and FBI Regional in Albany. He was the hit man in the Carl Spalter murder.”

“Hit man? Him? You fucking kidding me? Why’d you shoot him?”

Gurney gave him the only acceptable legal answer. It also happened to be true. “Because I believed my life was in imminent danger.”

“From who? From what?”

“If you take his hands out of his pockets, you’ll find a weapon in one of them.”

“Is that a fact?” He looked around for the plainclothes guy, who seemed to be concluding a triage dispute with someone on his walkie-talkie. “Dwayne? Hey, Dwayne! You want to pull the boy’s hands out of his pockets? So we can see what he’s got? Man here says you’re gonna find a gun.”

Dwayne said a few final words into the walkie-talkie, clipped it back on his belt. “Yes, sir. No problem.” He knelt by the body. Black Hoodie’s eyes were still open. He appeared to be conscious. “You got a gun, boy?”

There was no response.

“We don’t want nobody to get hurt now, right? So I’m just going to check here, see if maybe you have a gun here you might’ve forgot.” As he patted the front pocket area of the thick black sweatshirt, he frowned. “Feels like you might have something in there, boy. You want to tell me what it is, so nobody gets hurt?”

Black Hoodie’s eyes were on Dwayne’s face now, but he said nothing. Dwayne reached into both pockets simultaneously, grasped the concealed hands, and slowly pulled them both out into the light.

The left hand was empty. The right hand held an incongruously girlish pink cell phone.

The uniformed cop gave Gurney an exaggerated look of mock sympathy. “Oooh, that’s not good. You went and shot that little boy because he had a phone in his pocket. A harmless little phone. That’s not good at all. We got a serious ‘imminent danger’ question here. Hey, Dwayne, check the kid’s vitals, get a call in for the EMTs.” He looked back at Gurney, shaking his head. “Not good, mister, not good at all.”

“He’s carrying. I’m sure of it. You need to do a closer check.”

“
Sure
of it? How the hell could you be
sure
of it?”

“You work inner-city homicide for twenty-plus years, you get a good sense for who’s carrying.”

“That a fact? I’m impressed. Well, I guess he was carrying, all right. Just wasn’t carrying a gun,” he added with an ugly grin. “Which kinda changes the lay of the land in an unfavorable way for you. Be hard to call this shooting righteous, even if you were still a police officer—which, of course, you’re not. I’m afraid you’re going to need to come with us, Mr. Gurney.”

Gurney noticed that Hardwick had returned and positioned himself at the inside edge of the growing circle of gawkers, not far from Madeleine, who now appeared less frozen but no less fearful. Hardwick’s eyes had taken on an icy malamute stillness that signaled danger—the particular danger that arises from indifference to danger. Gurney got the feeling that if he were to give a small nod in the direction of the antagonistic cop, Hardwick would calmly put a nine-millimeter round in the man’s sternum.

It was then that a sound of humming caught Gurney’s attention—a humming barely audible amid the growing clamor of the fire and medical equipment moving in all directions through the fairgrounds.
As he strained to make out the source of this incongruous sound, it grew stronger, with a more noticeable pattern. And then the pattern became recognizable.

It was “Ring Around the Rosies.”

Gurney recognized the melody first, its source second. It was coming from the slightly parted lips of the wounded person on the ground—the slightly parted lips in the center of the painted rust-red smile. Blood, just a bit redder than the smile, was beginning to soak through the shoulder area of the black hooded sweatshirt and stain the dusty pavement. As everyone who could hear it stood staring, the humming was gradually transformed into the actual words:

As he sang, he slowly raised the pink cell phone that had been left in his hand.

“Jesus!” cried Gurney to the two cops as the truth hit him. “The phone! Grab it! That’s the detonator! Grab it!”

When neither of them seemed to understand what he was saying, he hurled himself forward, taking a wild kick at the phone—as the two cops launched themselves at him. His foot reached the phone, sending it skittering across the concrete, just as he was tackled.

But Peter Pan had already pushed the
SEND
button.

Three seconds later there was a rapid-fire series of six powerful explosions—sharp, near-deafening blasts—not the muffled reports of the earlier incendiaries.

Gurney’s ears were ringing—to the exclusion of all other sounds. As the cops who’d tackled him were struggling to their feet, there was a tremendous impact on the ground very close by. Gurney looked around wildly for Madeleine, saw her grasping the railing, evidently stunned. He ran toward her, extending his arms. Just as he reached her, she screamed, pointing over his shoulder to something behind him.

He turned, stared, blinking, not registering for a moment what his eyes were seeing.

The Ferris wheel was unmoored from its supports.

But it was still turning.

Still turning. Not rotating in place on its axle—the steel supports of which appeared to have been blasted away—but rolling ponderously forward in a cloud of gagging dust, away from its cracked concrete base.

Then the lights went out—everywhere—and the sudden darkness immediately amplified and multiplied the screams of terror all around, near and far.

Gurney and Madeleine grabbed each other as the monstrous wheel rolled by, smashing the railing that had enclosed it, silhouetted by a lightning flash in the low clouds, its wobbling structure emitting not only the shrieks of its riders but also the awful sounds of metal twisting against metal, scraping, snapping like steel whips.

The only illumination Gurney could see in the fairgrounds now was being provided by the intermittent lightning and the scattered fires, fanned and spread by the wind. In a Fellini-esque scene of hell on earth, the untethered Ferris wheel was rolling in a kind of nightmarish slow motion toward the central concourse—mostly in darkness, except when it was caught in the blue-white strobe of a lightning flash.

Madeleine’s fingers were digging into Gurney’s arm. Her voice was breaking. “What in the name of God is happening?”

“It’s a power failure,” he said.

The absurdity of the understatement struck them both at the same instant, provoking a shared burst of crazy laughter.

“Panikos … he … he mined the place with explosives,” Gurney managed to add, looking around wildly. The darkness was filled with acrid smoke and screams.

“You killed him?” cried Madeleine, as one might ask in desperation if the rattlesnake in front of them was safely dead.

“I shot him.” He looked toward the place where it happened. He waited for a flash of lightning to direct him to the black form on the ground, realizing as he did so that the spot was in the path the Ferris wheel had followed. The thought of what he might see gave him a surge of nausea. The first flash got him fairly close, with Madeleine still glued to his arm. The second flash revealed what he didn’t want to see.