Carnival of Death (2 page)

She screamed again.

This time Earl didn’t hit her. He stood up and twitched his head at Harry and George, and they fell on her like a load of lard. Harry put his mouth over hers while George slobbered all over her tits. Earl zipped up and looked toward the carnival.

The moon was hidden behind the thickening clouds, and with the carnival lights at his back, Matt Cahill couldn’t see anything other than the dark silhouette of a man standing in the field near the trailers where the carnies stayed during the day.

While Matt wasn’t expecting trouble, he knew that the man hadn’t been the one who’d screamed. Someone else had to be close by.

A damp breeze moved across the field and bent the tops of the few weeds that grew there. The man didn’t move, so Matt headed in his direction.

When Matt got within twenty yards, the man still hadn’t moved. Matt wondered if there was something wrong with him.

“Hey,” Matt said. “Is there a problem here?”

The man moved then, walking in Matt’s direction. Matt could see that he was holding something in his hand. A knife. Now that the man was closer, Matt saw that he wasn’t really a man at all, just a kid. A big kid, to be sure, but still a kid.

“Problem?” the kid said, giving Matt a little grin. “What makes you think there’s a problem?”

Matt wished the light were better, but as far as he could tell, there were no maggots squirming around in the kid’s eyes, no lesions opening in his skin. No smell of death rolled off him.

“Someone screamed,” Matt said, looking beyond the kid. He saw a heap of something twisting around on the ground. “Let’s go see what’s over there.”

The kid lost the grin, and he didn’t look around to see what Matt was talking about. “Nothing’s over there.”

He was cocky and seemed unafraid, but Matt didn’t find that strange. After all, he had a knife and Matt didn’t.

“I’ll just check it out for myself if you don’t mind,” Matt said, moving to the side so he could go around the kid without getting too close to the knife. “Just doing my job.”

The kid wasn’t going to let Matt get away with that. He moved fast, but Matt was faster. He whipped off the cap and slapped it against the kid’s wrist as the knife sliced upward. The kid yelled and the knife went spinning away.

Matt didn’t see where it landed, but the kid must have, because he took four running steps and reached down for something. By the time he reached it, Matt had caught up. Matt planted a foot on the kid’s ass and shoved. The kid did a somersault, came to his feet, and turned around so fast that Matt had trouble believing it. That was one agile kid. He came at Matt, holding the knife low, angling it upward.

Matt swung the cap again, but this time the kid was ready for him. Instead of trying to avoid the cap, the kid went for it with the knife. He stuck the blade into the cloth and snatched the cap out of Matt’s hand. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the cap spinning away. It landed twenty yards beyond the kid, near the squirming mass that Matt had seen earlier. Except that it wasn’t just a squirming mass.

It was a pile of bodies. The one on the bottom was a girl, and as Matt glanced that way, she got an arm and a hand free. She took hold of the ear of one of the boys on top of her and gave it a hard yank. She must have tried to pull it right off his head, and she came close to succeeding. He squealed like a hog being castrated with a rusty knife and rolled away from her. She beat her fist on the other one’s face.

Matt had no time to see any more. He had the kid with the knife to worry about, and the kid was coming right at him.

Matt wished for his ax, and he felt something cold and hard touch his hand. A tent stake. It wasn’t his ax, but it would do. He didn’t stop to think who might be behind him to help out. It didn’t matter.

Matt’s fingers closed around the stake just as the kid slashed with the knife. Matt slipped to the side and brought the stake down on the kid’s wrist. The stake worked a lot better than the sap cap.

The kid’s wrist cracked like pond ice, and he howled as he sank to his knees. Matt kicked him in the face, not too hard, and the kid flipped over backward.

Matt looked around to see who’d handed him the tent stake. No one was there. He’d thought it might have been one of the other security guys, Ken, maybe, or Fred. It wouldn’t have been like them to run away, however.

Matt didn’t let it bother him. He could figure it out later. He stuck the stake in his back pocket and ran to help the girl.

She didn’t need him. The boy whose ear she’d almost removed was lying on his side in the fetal position, whimpering. The sap cap had landed near the girl, and she’d somehow gotten hold of it. She swung it back and forth, whacking the other boy across the face. Blood flew from his nose and smashed lips as Matt watched.

Matt took hold of the boy’s shirt and pulled him away from her before she brain-damaged him. The boy was as limp as boiled pasta. Matt tossed him aside.

“I’ll take my cap,” he said, putting out his hand.

The girl dropped it and covered her breasts with her arm. “I need to get dressed.”

Matt nodded and picked up his cap. There were splotches of blood on it, so he stuck it in the pocket with the tent stake and turned his back so the girl could cover up while he thought about what he was going to do. One thing Cap’n Bob had insisted when he hired Matt was that the cops should never be called.

“We handle our own problems,” the cap’n had said.

He was a portly man with a seemingly sincere smile that invited trust. For some reason, Matt didn’t find it effective. There was something about the cap’n that bothered him, but not enough to keep him from taking the job.

“The cops are not our friends,” Cap’n Bob had continued. “We take care of our troubles on our own and in our own way. We don’t want anybody meddling in our business. Especially cops.”

That was fine by Matt. The carnies were a little strange, most of them, but certainly no more strange than Matt himself. Like Matt, a lot of them had secrets, and they knew how to keep them. In fact, Matt hadn’t even told Cap’n Bob his real name. He’d said he was Matt Axton and that he’d like to be paid in cash. Cap’n Bob had no problem with that.

Some secrets were easier to keep than others, however. Attempted rape was serious business, and Matt didn’t like the idea of letting the three kids off the hook.

“You can turn around now.”

Matt turned and saw that the girl had put on her pants and shirt. She looked about fifteen, but she was probably older, seventeen or eighteen maybe. Matt had trouble judging the age of anybody under thirty.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Sue Jean. I want to get out of here.”

Matt looked at the three young men who’d attacked her. The one whose ear she’d almost removed was still lying curled up on his side, but he’d stopped whining. The one who’d been whacked across the face with the sap cap was making snuffling sounds as he tried to crawl away. The one with the cracked wrist sat cradling his arm and glaring at Matt.

Three teenage punks who’d thought they could get away with something, Matt thought. He still didn’t see any signs of corruption on them. He also didn’t see any sign of whoever had handed him the tent stake. Where the hell had he gone? There wasn’t anyplace to go. No time to worry about it. Right now Matt had other problems.

“You think we should call an ambulance?” Matt asked. “Or the cops?”

“I don’t care who you call, but I’m not staying here,” Sue Jean told him. “I need to get away from this place. That old woman told me to. I should’ve listened to her. Then this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What old woman?”

“That fortune-teller, whatever her name is. She told me to leave, but I had to have a snow cone.”

Maybe those rumors Matt had heard were true, but he couldn’t keep from grinning. Madame Zora wouldn’t appreciate being called an old woman.

Sue Jean started walking.

“Hold on,” Matt said. “Don’t you want to press charges against these three?”

Sue Jean didn’t slow down. “I don’t care about them. They didn’t hurt me.”

Matt started after her. If she didn’t care, maybe he shouldn’t care. Cap’n Bob almost certainly wouldn’t, not as long as the culprits had suffered some damage. Which they had. Matt still thought he should try.

When he caught up with Sue Jean, he said, “Do you know who those guys are?”

“Assholes.”

“Yeah, I figured that out for myself. But I meant aside from that.”

“I know who they are. Just some guys from school. What difference does it make?”

Matt thought it over. OK, maybe it didn’t matter. The kids weren’t hurt badly except for the one with the knife, who probably had a broken wrist. Well, it would heal. They’d get over what had happened, and they could find their own way home. He was sure they could come up with some clever way to explain their injuries rather than telling anybody they’d been trying to rape one of their classmates. And Cap’n Bob didn’t want the cops coming around. Matt didn’t want them any more than the cap’n did.

But the whole thing bothered him. So he tried again. “They wanted to hurt you. They might try to hurt someone else.”

Sue Jean gave a short laugh. “Them? They’re drunk or they wouldn’t have bothered me. I think they learned an important lesson.”

Matt hadn’t smelled any liquor, but maybe the girl was right about the lesson. They’d sure gotten their asses kicked.

As he and Sue Jean got back to the midway, Matt turned back to look for them. He didn’t see them anywhere.

He also didn’t see the lollipop wrapper that the breeze blew across the bent tops of some weeds. It caught for a moment on the jagged edge of a leaf and then slipped away to move on.

Madame Zora’s real name was Gloria Farley, and she was scared witless. She’d been scared before, but never like this, not even when she’d been arrested that time in a little northern Mississippi town for shoplifting. She’d been eighteen years old and two days away from the home she’d fled the day after her stepfather had come into her bedroom for the first time.

She wouldn’t have tried shoplifting if she’d known of any other way to get free food at the supermarket, but she didn’t think they’d give it to her. She was trying to slip out with a couple of cans of tuna and five candy bars when they grabbed her. The candy bars had probably been a bad idea. Not much nutrition in a candy bar.

She’d thought that if she cried enough and acted younger than her age, she wouldn’t go to jail, but Mississippi was tough on shoplifters, at least in that part of the state, and she went to the pokey all right. It turned out that the chief of police wasn’t a whole lot different from her stepfather when it came to methods of interrupting sleep, and after she got out of jail a couple of days later because the supermarket manager decided not to press charges, she promised herself she’d never go back in.

Not long after that she met a woman named Frances Devore, a woman who was old and getting frail but who still had an active and inquiring mind. She and Gloria had both been in a public library in another little town in Mississippi, which, in spite of what some people thought, did indeed have a literate population.

Gloria was there because it was warm and had comfortable chairs. Frances was there to read the magazines and be around people for a change instead of being cooped up in her house. She’d struck up a conversation with Gloria that had begun with her asking why Gloria wasn’t in school. Gloria had told her the truth, more or less, glad to have a sympathetic listener, and Frances got interested.

She was looking for somebody who’d help her out a little bit, keep house for her, do her shopping, drive her to the doctor, and fix a few meals.

“I could give you a roof over your head and your own room,” she said, “and I’ll keep you out of trouble.”

It sounded like a good deal to Gloria, who went home with Frances and stayed for six years, until the old lady died. Frances had an eclectic library of her own and didn’t mind if Gloria read the books that were there. In fact, she encouraged it. Frances didn’t have TV, so when Gloria wasn’t doing her chores, she read. She read novels and biographies and self-help books, books about Greek and Norse mythology, Shakespeare. She’d discovered that she loved to read. Whenever a book interested her, she picked it up and read it, and she was interested in a lot of things.

One day Frances saw Gloria with a book on palmistry and said, “You could learn to read palms in about five minutes.”

“It’s all a fraud,” Gloria said.

Frances sniffed. “Of course it is, or at least the kind in that book is. But palmistry’s real enough, if you have the gift. Some people really can see a person’s future in those lines.”

“Ha,” Gloria said, but she read the book, studied the charts, learned about the shapes of hands, and memorized all the lines and what they meant. After a while she tried out her new skills on Frances.

“Not bad,” Frances said when Gloria had finished. “You almost had me believing you a time or two. You have a way of sounding convincing.”

“I don’t have the gift, though,” Gloria said.

“No, you don’t, and that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t know the future. It never holds anything good, not even for a pretty young girl like you, and especially not for an old woman like me.”