Slayground p-13 Read online

  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.

  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 l
east 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 t
ime 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.