Peter Pan Must Die (55 page)

“My God!” cried Madeleine. “Oh my God!”

Evidently, one of the Ferris wheel’s huge structural circles of steel had rolled over the middle of the body—essentially cutting it in half.

As they stood there in the darkness between the split-second flashes of light and blasts of thunder, the rain started, and soon it was a downpour. The lightning strobes showed a shifting, stumbling mass of people. It was probable that only the darkness and the deluge were keeping them from stampeding and trampling one another.

Dwayne and the uniformed cop had apparently been driven back from Panikos’s body by the progress of the rolling Ferris wheel—which they were now following into the main concourse, seemingly drawn helplessly along after it by the terrible screams of its trapped riders.

It was a measure of the staggering hellishness of the scene—with all its sensory, mental, and emotional overload—that they could abandon a fresh homicide like that with hardly a backward glance.

Madeleine sounded like she was straining desperately to speak calmly. “My God, David, what should we do?”

Gurney didn’t answer. He was looking down, waiting for the next flash to show him the face in the black cowl. By the time the flash came, the pelting rain had washed much of the yellow paint away.

He saw what he was waiting to see. All doubt was erased. He was certain that the delicate heart-shaped mouth was the same mouth he’d seen in the security videos.

The mangled body at his feet was indeed that of Petros Panikos.

The fabled executioner no longer existed.

Peter Pan was now nothing but a pathetic bag of broken bones.

Madeleine pulled Gurney back out of the pool of spreading blood and rainwater he was standing in, kept pulling him back until they reached the crushed railing. The flashes of lightning and thunder—punctuating the terrifying thumps and rattles and metallic screeches and human wails from the still-rolling Ferris wheel—were making rational thought nearly impossible.

Madeleine’s efforts at self-control were collapsing, her voice starting to break. “God, David, God, people are
dying
—they’re
dying—
what can we
do
?”

“Christ only knows—whatever we can—but first—right now—I need to get ahold of that phone—that phone Panikos used—the detonator—before it gets lost—before it sets off something else.”

A familiar voice, raised almost in a shout amid the din, caught Gurney off-balance. “Stay with her. I’ll get it.”

Behind him, behind the remains of the railing, back where the Ferris wheel had been mounted, the wooden platform riders used for entering and exiting their seats suddenly burst into flames. In the uneven orangey light cast by the new fire, he caught sight of Hardwick making his way through the slanting rain toward the body on the ground.

When he got to it, he hesitated before bending down to reach for the gleaming pink phone, which was still in Panikos’s hand. It was too soon for rigor mortis to have stiffened the finger joints, so extricating the phone should have posed no problem. But when Hardwick tried to lift it away, Panikos’s hand and arm rose up with it.

Even in the dim firelight, Gurney could see why. One end of a short lanyard was attached to the phone, and the other end was looped around Panikos’s wrist. Hardwick grasped the phone firmly, pulling the lanyard loose. The motion raised Panikos’s arm higher. The instant the arm was fully extended, there was a loud pistol report.

Gurney heard a sharp grunt from Hardwick—as he toppled face-down onto the little corpse.

A sheriff’s deputy had been half running with the help of a flashlight along the curved concourse in the direction of the ponderously rolling Ferris wheel. At the sound of the shot he stopped abruptly, his free hand on the butt of his holstered gun, his gaze moving in a dangerously overloaded state from Gurney to the crossed bodies on the ground and back again.

“What the hell is this?”

The answer came from Hardwick himself, straining to push himself up off Panikos, his voice a hissing mix of agony and fury, forced out through clenched teeth. “This dead fucker just shot me.”

The deputy stared in understandable bewilderment. Then, as he stepped closer, the emotion went beyond simple bewilderment. “Jack?”

The answer was an indecipherable growl.

He looked over at Gurney. “Is that … is that Jack Hardwick?”

Sometimes in the midst of a battlefield apocalypse, when the assault on Gurney’s mental resources seemed most devastating, a possible path to safety would suddenly present itself. This time it appeared in the form of Deputy J. Olzewski.

Olzewski recognized Hardwick from a multiagency law enforcement seminar on special provisions of the Patriot Act. He was unaware of Hardwick’s separation from BCI, which made gaining his cooperation easier than it might have been otherwise.

In a highly abbreviated manner appropriate to the emergency, Gurney gave the deputy an outline of the situation and got his agreement to secure the immediate area around Panikos’s body, to take official custody of Panikos’s cell phone, to summon his own department’s supervisory personnel rather than the local police, to personally conduct the search for the concealed weapon that had discharged when Panikos’s arm had been raised, and to ensure that the weapon passed into the custody of the Sheriff’s Department.

Although moving Hardwick would be risky, they all agreed that waiting for an ambulance to reach him under the circumstances would be riskier.

Despite the bleeding bullet wound in his side, Hardwick himself was hell-bent to get back on his feet—which he managed to accomplish with the help of Gurney and Olzewski and an explosion of curses—and head for the gate where the emergency vehicles would be entering. As if to endorse this decision, a generator kicked in and some of the concourse lights came back on—although only at a small
fraction of their normal brightness. At least the change made movement possible beyond the illumination limits of fires and lightning flashes.

Hardwick was hobbling and grimacing, supported by Gurney on one side and Madeleine on the other, when the Ferris wheel—its upper half visible over the top of the main tent in the next concourse—began to shudder and wobble with the sounds of snapping metal and heavy objects smashing against the pavement. Then, in a kind of surreal slow motion, the huge circular structure tilted away out of sight beyond the tent—followed a second later by an earth-shaking crash.

Gurney felt nauseous. Madeleine began to cry. Hardwick uttered a guttural sound that might have been expressing emotional horror or physical pain. It was hard to tell how much of the surrounding calamity he was absorbing.

As they pressed on toward the vehicle gate, however, something changed his mind about finding a place in an ambulance. “Too many people here hurt, too much pressure on the medics, don’t want to take anybody’s place, keep anyone from getting help, don’t want to do that.” His voice was low, no more than a rough whisper.

Gurney leaned in to make sure he was hearing right. “What do you want to do, Jack?”

“Hospital. Out of the radius. Everything here’ll be swamped. Can’t handle it. Cooperstown. Cooperstown’ll be better. Straight to the ER. How about it, ace? Think you can drive my car?”

It struck Gurney as a terrible idea—transporting a man with a bullet wound fifty-five miles over winding two-lane country roads in a vehicle with no first-aid equipment. But he agreed to do it. Because entrusting Hardwick to the mercies of a crushingly overburdened emergency system in the middle of a cataclysm unlike anything the local EMTs had ever faced before seemed like an even more terrible idea. God only knew how many mangled, barely alive Ferris wheel victims, not to mention victims of the several previous explosions and fires, would have to be treated before him.

So they plodded on through the vehicle gate—which also functioned as the exhibitor’s gate—outside of which, at the edge of the entry road, Hardwick had parked his old Pontiac muscle car. Before
they got into it, Gurney took off the shirt he was wearing under his sweatshirt and tore it in three pieces. Two he folded into bulky wads and placed over the front entry wound and the rear exit wound in Hardwick’s side. He tied the third tightly around Hardwick’s waist to hold the wads in place. He and Madeleine eased him into the front passenger seat, reclining it as far as it would go.

As soon as Hardwick recovered sufficiently from the pain of the process, he took his cell phone from his belt, pressed a speed dial number, waited, and left a message in an utterly exhausted but smiling voice, presumably for Esti. “Hi, babe. Little problem. Got sloppy, got shot. Embarrassing. Got shot by a dead guy. Hard to explain. On my way to Cooperstown ER. Sherlock’s the chauffeur. I love you, Peaches. Talk later.”

It reminded Gurney to call Kyle. That call also went into voice mail. “Hey, son. Checking in. I followed our man to the fair. All hell broke loose. Jack Hardwick got shot. I’m about to drive him to the hospital in Cooperstown. Hope everything there is okay. Give me a call and fill me in as soon as you can. Love you.”

As soon as he ended the call, Madeleine got into the back seat, he got into the driver’s seat, and they were on their way.

The mass of vehicles fleeing the immediate area of the fairgrounds created a kind of high-pressure traffic that felt surreal in a place where cows as a rule far outnumbered cars, and the rare moments of obstruction were caused by slow-moving hay wagons.

By the time they reached the county route, the line of thunderstorms had passed to the east in the direction of Albany, and media helicopters were moving in, raking the valley with their searchlights—evidently hunting for the most photogenic bits of catastrophe they could find. Gurney could almost hear the breathlessly creative RAM-TV news report on “the panicky flight into the night from what some suspect may have been a terrorist attack.”

Once free of the temporary congestion, Gurney drove as fast as he dared, and then some. With the speedometer reading between fifty and a hundred most of the way, he made it to the Cooperstown ER in about forty-five minutes. Amazingly, along the way not one word was spoken. The harrowing combination of the excessive speed, Gurney’s aggressive approach to curves, and the barely muffled roar of the big V8
seemed to freeze out any possibility of conversation en route—no matter how large and urgent the open issues and unanswered questions.

Two hours later, the situation was quite different.

Hardwick had been examined, probed, scanned, needled, stitched, bandaged, and transfused; put on an IV drip of antibiotics, painkillers, and electrolytes; and admitted to the general hospital for further observation. Kyle had arrived unexpectedly and had joined Gurney and Madeleine in Hardwick’s room. The three of them were sitting in chairs by Hardwick’s bed.

Kyle filled everyone in on everything that had occurred from the arrival of the police at the house up to the removal of Klemper’s body and the abrupt suspension of the initial investigatory process when they, along with all other police and emergency personnel in a fifty-mile radius, had been called to the fairgrounds—leaving a large area outside the house taped off as a designated crime scene. At that point, having overheard enough of the police communications to have a sense of the disaster in progress, Kyle had replaced the flat on the car with the spare and headed for the fairgrounds himself. It was then that he checked his phone and found his father’s message about driving to the Cooperstown hospital.

When he finished his narrative, Madeleine let out a nervous laugh. “I guess you figured if a madman was blowing up the fair, that’s where your father would be?”

Kyle looked uncomfortable, glanced at Gurney, said nothing.

Madeleine smiled and shrugged. “I’d have made the same assumption.” Then she asked a question of no one in particular in a deceptively casual tone. “First it was Lex Bincher. Then Horace. Then Mick Klemper. Who was supposed to be next?”

Kyle looked again at his father.

Hardwick was lying back against a pile of pillows, restful but alert.

Gurney finally offered a reply so oblique, it was hardly a reply at all. “Well, the main thing, the important thing, the only thing that matters, is that it’s all over.”

Now they all stared at him—Kyle curious, Hardwick skeptical, Madeleine baffled.

Hardwick spoke slowly—as though speaking faster might hurt. “You gotta be fucking kidding.”

“Not really. The pattern is finally clear,” said Gurney. “Your client, Kay, will win her appeal. The shooter is dead. The danger has been neutralized. The case is over.”

“Over? You forget about the corpse on your lawn? And that we have no proof that the midget you shot is really Peter Pan? And that those promotion ads on RAM-TV promising your big Spalter case revelations are going to have every cop involved in it out for your ass?”

Gurney smiled. “I said the
case
was over. The complications and conflicts will take time to resolve. The resentments will fester. The recriminations will linger. It will take time for the facts to be accepted. But too much of the truth has come out at this point for anyone to rebury it.”

Madeleine was gazing at him intently. “Are you saying that you’re done with the Spalter murder case?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“You’re walking away from it?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“You’ve never walked away from a puzzle with a major piece still missing.”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re doing it now?”

“No, I’m not. Quite the opposite.”

“You mean it’s over because you’ve solved it? You know who hired Peter Pan to kill Carl Spalter?”

“The fact is, nobody hired him to kill Carl.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed. This whole case has been a comedy—or tragedy—of errors from the very beginning. It’s going to end up being a great teaching tool. The chapter in the criminal investigation textbook will be titled ‘The Fatal Consequences of Accepting Reasonable Assumptions.’ ”