Carnival of Death (3 page)

“That’s not very encouraging.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. You should know by now that life gives everybody a hard row to hoe. And then you die.”

Gloria thought about her stepfather and about that police chief. Life hadn’t been so hard for them, as far as she knew, but maybe they were dead. It was pleasant to think so. She hoped they’d been run over by a bus or a train or some other form of heavy transportation and flattened out like roadkill. Serve the bastards right.

Gloria was with Frances for another year or so after that conversation, and although she read many other books during that time, she kept coming back to the one about palmistry. She had it pretty much memorized by the time Frances died.

In her last illness, Frances told Gloria the future, and as she’d promised, it wasn’t pretty.

“My cousins never gave a damn about me before, but they’ll show up because they think I have money. I don’t, but they don’t know that and wouldn’t believe it if I told them so. They’ll run you off first thing, no doubt about it. I have a will, but all I really have is this house, so I’ve left that to them. Maybe they’ll be satisfied. I wish I could do something to help you, but all I can do is give you the money that’s in the metal box under the sink. It’s not much. I wish it were. You’ve been a big help to me, Gloria, so you take it and don’t tell anybody.”

Sure enough, Frances’s prophecy came true. The relatives who’d never had anything to do with Frances while she was alive appeared and started squabbling right away. They kicked Gloria out of the house and told her that if she made trouble, they’d call the cops. They told her it would be a really good idea if she left town.

Gloria had already had enough of cops, so she left town, but she left knowing a lot more than she had when she’d moved in with Frances.

Gloria found a little over three hundred dollars in the box, and she put it in her purse. Tell anybody? Fat chance. It was all she had when the cousins kicked her out. They didn’t even let her stay for the funeral.

The three hundred dollars lasted Gloria for a month, and just as she thought she might have to resort to stealing again, she happened upon Cap’n Bob’s Stardust Carnival. She saw the ads taped to telephone poles in a little town she was passing through and realized that a carnival might be just what she was looking for. What better setting for a skilled palm reader? OK, maybe not skilled, exactly, but good enough. Even Frances had said so.

Gloria wandered around a bit, enjoying the crowds, the music, and the atmosphere. Not bad at all. She asked a barker how to find the boss, and he told her to look for a portly man wearing a ringmaster’s outfit. He wouldn’t be easy to miss.

Gloria found him in about five minutes near the tent of the Seven Dwarfs. He had a big smile that looked only a little fake, and she told him she was looking for a place to ply her trade.

“And what might that be?” he asked, never losing the smile.

“I’m a palm reader.”

“You any good?”

Gloria was tempted to pad her résumé but thought it might not be wise. She said, “Pretty good.”

“Follow me,” Cap’n Bob said. He led her to a big trailer in the back of the lot, opened the door, and motioned her inside.

Gloria had a momentary flashback to her experience with the cop, but she could handle herself better now. If the cap’n gave her any trouble, he’d be sorry.

Cap’n Bob didn’t try anything funny, however. When they were inside, he put out a hand and said, “Show me.”

Gloria took his hand, pretended to study it, and gave him some of the usual baloney about his life line and his heart line, explaining what each one meant and elaborating on the shape and length of his.

“You’ll do,” the cap’n said, taking back his hand. “Do you have a costume?”

“I can come up with something.”

The cap’n seemed satisfied with that answer, and he explained the percentage of the take he’d get for allowing her to work the carnival.

“That’s to pay for your booth space and my traveling expenses,” he said. “You can rent a spot in one of my trailers or buy your own.”

“I’ll rent a spot for now.”

“I’ll put you in a trailer with one of the other performers. When do you want to start?”

“Tonight would be fine.”

“I’ll set it up,” the cap’n said, and Gloria had been with the carnival ever since. It was a good enough life, better than a lot she could think of, and she’d grown to feel as if the carnival was her home and the carnies her family. She didn’t mind the traveling, and she felt safe and happy most of the time.

Not anymore. Not since things had started happening to her, things she didn’t understand at all.

She’d developed a good line as Madame Zora. She could string most people along for ten or fifteen minutes with no trouble at all, feeding them a line of bull that they seemed eager to hear and believe. If it made them happy, what was the harm? She didn’t believe any of it herself, and there was no harm in that either.

No harm in any of it, until a few weeks ago. Just about the time when that new security man had started to work. Matt Axton, he called himself, but Gloria knew better.

He’d arrived, and that was when things had started to happen. Gloria had started to see things, real things, not just lines in hands but things that were going to happen. She
knew
they were going to happen.

At first it was nothing much, like she knew a man was going to stumble when he left her tent, or she knew a woman was going to forget her purse. Little things that wouldn’t seem to mean much, maybe, but they gave Gloria a little bit of a hollow feeling inside.

After that, a man came in and after looking at his hand she knew that he’d lost his grandfather’s pocket watch. More than that, she knew exactly where it was. When she told him, he couldn’t believe it, but he rushed out of the tent to go home to look. Gloria knew he’d find it. She should’ve felt good about that, excited that she seemed to have the gift after all. But she wasn’t excited. She was scared. Something had happened. She’d changed, and she didn’t know why.

She remembered one particular day when a tall man walked into her tent. A woman was with him, and they were both smiling, happy to be together, having a fine time at the carnival.

“Hey,” the man said. “You must be Madame Zora.”

“Yes, I am she,” Gloria said. Among the other things she’d learned from Frances, she’d picked up a few rules of good grammar. “Please be seated.”

The man looked at the woman, and they both laughed. “Can you do us both at once?” the man asked.

Gloria didn’t smile. The hollow feeling was back, and it was worse. “Not for the single price.”

The couple laughed again, and the man said, “Didn’t expect you to.” He pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to her.

Gloria tucked the money away inside her robes. The hollowness had been replaced with something like despair. She wished the man and woman would go away, but she knew they wouldn’t.

“Tell his fortune first,” the woman said, and the man held out his hand.

Gloria was reluctant to take it, but she didn’t see any way to avoid it. When she touched it, her stomach twisted. Her pain must have showed on her face, because the woman said, quite concerned, “Is something wrong?”

Gloria tried a smile that she knew must be ghastly.
No, not with me. It’s him. He has cancer. He doesn’t know it yet, but he does. A tumor of the brain. No cure. He’ll be dead in six months.

“Please,” the woman said. “Can we help?”

Gloria straightened her face, put on what she hoped was a genuine smile, and said, “I am fine. And so are you two. I see nothing but happiness ahead. Look here at these lines…”

She traced the lines in the man’s hand, then those in the woman’s, giving them a cheerful lie about their lives. They were laughing again when they left her tent. They’d be happy for a while longer. It was all she could do for them.

When they were gone, Gloria slumped in her chair. Tonight had been the worst so far. She knew the girl—what had her name been?—Sue Jean was going to be attacked. Raped. She could see the faces of her attackers.

So she’d warned the girl, told her to go away from the carnival, knowing all the time that she wouldn’t go, knowing that something bad was going to happen.

And knowing that Matt Axton would be involved.

Knowing that Matt Axton wasn’t even his real name.

Knowing that, whoever he was, he was surrounded by darkness and that someone surrounded by an even deeper darkness was near the carnival too.

Knowing that things were going to happen, terrible things.

Even worse, not knowing what they were but certain there was nothing at all she could do about them.

So she shut the tent, went to her trailer, located the bottle of Ezra Brooks that she kept in a cabinet for special occasions, and opened it up.

She’d hardly finished her first drink when she heard a crash of thunder. Seconds later rain started to patter down on the roof of the trailer.

Then all hell broke loose outside, and to her horror, as soon as she heard the commotion, Gloria was sure she knew exactly what the trouble was.

Matt decided that he couldn’t let Sue Jean just walk away from what had happened. The wind came in gusts across the field, and lightning flashed through a cloud. Thunder followed. The rides would be shutting down because of the danger of lightning strikes, and people would begin leaving.

Matt turned back from the field to look for Sue Jean, but she was already lost in the crowds. He walked almost the length of the midway, but he couldn’t find her. He might have continued to look, but he saw that one of the other security guys, Ken, was having a problem at the ringtoss booth.

Ken wasn’t a big guy, but he was wiry and had a mean, squinty look. Most of the marks backed down from him without much of an argument, but not this one, a man of about thirty wearing a shirt with the sleeves pushed up to show off his muscles and his tats. He seemed convinced that the ringtoss was rigged.

Which it was, of course, though not so much that it was entirely impossible to win. Just
almost
impossible.

The mark was several inches taller than Ken, and he leaned over him, yelling in his face. A woman stood a few feet away, looking frightened. Matt figured she was with the mark.

“Ain’t no way that ring fits over those blocks! I’m taking a prize for my wife and leaving now, and don’t you try to stop me.”

Matt didn’t think a sap cap would do any good against the guy, so he reached back for the tent stake. It was gone.

What the hell?

Well, at least he still had the sap cap, even if it was a bit bloodstained. He pulled it from his pocket and put it on.

“What’s the problem, Ken?” he asked, walking up to the two men.

Ken looked happy to see Matt. “Seems this gentleman has a complaint about the game. Says he’s going to take a prize, even if he didn’t win it.”

“Damn right I am,” the mark said.

Matt looked at him. He had black, unruly hair that stuck out from beneath a Saints cap, little piggy eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and a thin blade of a mouth. No signs of corruption, no odor of the grave, just a normal ugly guy, except for the anger that distorted his features.

“My game’s on the square,” Jerry Talley said from inside the ringtoss booth. “I explained the game and showed him how it was done.”

Matt knew that Jerry demonstrated to everybody who came by how the wooden ring fit over the varnished wooden blocks. Usually the marks didn’t notice that the ring he demonstrated with wasn’t necessarily exactly like the ones he handed over when the money changed hands. The ones he gave them would still fit, but it wasn’t easy to make them do it.

“Look-a here,” Jerry said, dropping the ring he held over a block. “Works just fine. What we got here is a sore loser.”

The mark backed away from Ken and Matt. “I’m sore, all right. You’re not gonna fuck with me like this.”

Some of the crowd stopped to watch what was going on, and the mark grinned at them. Matt thought he might trash the ringtoss booth. Matt couldn’t let that happen under any circumstances, much less with people watching. And the parents wouldn’t like it if their kids heard too much cussing.

The man’s wife was getting embarrassed. “Don’t talk like that, Buford, honey,” she said. She was small with blond hair cut short and close to her head. She wore tight jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. “Let’s us go home before it starts to rain.”

“Don’t tell me how to talk,” Buford the mark said. “And rain or not, I’m not letting anybody cheat me.”

“Look, Jerry,” Matt said, “why don’t you give this man a teddy bear if that will make him feel better. We don’t want him to go home unhappy.”

It wasn’t carnival policy to give an unhappy customer anything, but in this case even Jerry could see the wisdom of it. He took hold of one of the big teddy bears dangling from a string and gave it a pull. The bear came loose and dropped down. Jerry gave it a wistful look and handed it across the counter to the mark.

Buford took the bear. “You think you can buy me off with a fucking bear?”

“Nobody’s trying to buy you off,” Matt told him, keeping his voice level. “You have what you wanted. Give the bear to your wife and go on home.”

“Fuck you,” Buford said. “Fuck her too, and fuck this bear.”

He took hold of the bear’s head and tore it from its body. Holding the head in his hand, he dropped the body of the bear and stomped it a couple of times.

“Mama,” a little boy said, “that man killed the bear!”

Buford laughed and spit on the bear carcass. Then he tossed the head to his wife.

“Hold that while I take care of business,” he said. He smiled at Ken and Matt, showing off a gold tooth.

Something was in the air that evening besides rain, Matt thought. First the attempted rape and now this goober going nuts on them. It was time to put a stop to things.

“I’ll take the high road,” Matt said to Ken. “One, two, three.”

As soon as Matt reached
three
, Ken threw himself at Buford’s legs. The man tried to jump backward, but he didn’t react fast enough. Ken hit him below the shins, taking his feet out from under him. As Buford tumbled forward, he put out his arms to break his fall. Matt grabbed the left arm and twisted it up behind the man’s back as he hit the ground. Matt landed on top of him and shoved the arm up as high as he could. Buford groaned.