Slayground p-13 Read online

  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.

  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 o
f 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.

  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 i
nto 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!”