by Dan Simmons
"Yeah," said Kurtz. "I thought you needed at least ninety minutes to break the ice with your local cops."
"I could've spent ninety days here and they weren't going to tell me anything," said Rigby. "They wouldn't even acknowledge that your goddamned amusement park ever existed. To listen to the Sheriff and his deputies, they never heard of Major O'Toole and barely've heard about his company that seems to rule the roost here."
"Which means that they're all on the Major's payroll," said Kurtz.
Rigby shrugged. "That's hard to believe, but that's what it sounds like. Unless they're all just cretinous small-town cowturds too stupid and too suspicious of an outside police officer to tell the truth."
"Why would they be suspicious of a B.P.D. detective?"
"Well, no peace officer likes some wiseass coming in from the outside—but I'm not some FBI puke trying to take over some local investigation. I just told them the truth—that we're investigating the shooting of Major O'Toole's niece up in Buffalo and I came down here on my day off to pick up any loose information."
"But they didn't have any loose information," said Kurtz.
"They were tight as a proctologist's dog's asshole."
Kurtz thought about that for a second.
"So," said Rigby, "you find out where your Cloud Nine is?"
"Yeah," Kurtz said. He was trying to figure out some way he could convince her to stay behind while he went up there. He couldn't. He put the Pinto in gear and headed out of town.
They'd just crossed the Allegheny River marking the south edge of town when Kurtz's phone rang.
"Yeah?"
"Joe," said Arlene, "someone just signed on to Peg O'Toole's account using her computer."
"Just a second," said Kurtz. He pulled the car into a turnout and got out. "Go ahead."
"Someone signed on from her computer at the Justice Center."
"Are you at the office?"
"No, home. But I'd set the software to copy me at both machines."
"Did you get O'Toole's password?"
"Sure. But whoever signed on using her machine did so to delete all of her e-mail."
"Did he have time to do it?"
"No. I copied it all to my hard drive before he deleted it. I think he took time to check what was there first."
"Good," said Kurtz. "Why would whoever this is use her machine to sign on for her e-mail if he had the password? Why not do it and erase her mail from his own computer?"
"I don't think whoever it was had the password, Joe. I think he—I don't think it's a woman, do you?—I think he used some software to hack it on her machine and signed on immediately."
"It's Sunday," said Kurtz. "The offices would be closed there. It makes sense. What about the e-mails?"
"She only saved a week's worth at a time," said Arlene, "and they're all parole business stuff, except for one letter to her boyfriend."
"Brian Kennedy?"
"Yes. It was e-mailed to his security company e-mail address in New York, and was time-stamped about ten minutes before your appointment with her."
"What do they say? His and hers?"
"She only saved her own mail to file, Joe. Do you want me to fax you a copy?"
"I'm busy now." He had taken several paces away from the Pinto, and now he looked back to where Rigby was frowning at him from the passenger seat. "Just tell me."
"Her e-mail just said, and I quote—'Brian, I understand your reasons for asking me to wait, but I'm going to look into this lead this afternoon. If you come on Friday as usual, I'll tell you all about it then. Love, Peg.'"
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"And she sent it just before I met with her?"
"Ten minutes before, according to the time stamp."
"Then she must have been leaving work early that afternoon for a reason. Nothing else in the mail that we can use?"
"Nothing." There was the hiss and crackle of cell static. Then Arlene said, "Anything else you want me to do today, Joe?"
"Yeah. Track down the home address and phone number of the former director of the Rochester nuthouse. I want to call him or talk to him in person."
"All right Are you in town now? The connection's lousy."
"No, I'm on the road for a few more hours. I'll call you when I get back to the office. Good work."
He folded the phone and got back in behind the wheel.
"Your stockbroker?" said Rigby.
"Yeah. He thinks I should sell when the market opens tomorrow. Dump everything."
"Always a good idea," said the cop.
They drove a mile beyond the river, turned left on a county road for three-fourths of a mile, turned right onto an unmarked gravel road, and then turned left again onto two strips of dirt that ran steeply uphill.
"Are you sure you know where you're going, Joe?"
Kurtz concentrated on keeping the Pinto moving uphill through the trees, around occasional bends that gave them glimpses of the valley, river, and distant town, and then south around the mountain until the dirt track ended at an old wooden roadblock.
"End of the line," said Rigby.
"This is how old Adam described it," said Kurtz.
"Old Adam?"
"Never mind." Kurtz got out of the car, looked uphill toward where the overgrown remnants of the two-rut road continued, and began walking slowly uphill. Various faded signs on the barricade announced private land and warned against trespassing. He went around behind the Pinto, pulled a lumpy old nylon backpack from the trunk, and walked past the barricade.
"You're shitting me," called Rigby from beside the car. "Joe Kurtz is going for a hike?"
"Stay in the car if you want," called Kurtz. "I'm just going to walk up here a bit and see if I can see anything."
"Stay here and miss seeing Joe Kurtz go for a hike?" said Rigby, jogging uphill to catch up. "No way in hell."
Shit, thought Kurtz, and not for the first time that day.
They followed the dirt track two hundred yards or so up the hill through the bare and blowing trees until they were stopped by a fence. No old and rotting wood barricade here—the fence was nine feet tall, made of mesh-link steel, and had rows of unrusted concertina razor-wire atop it. Here the yellow no-trespassing signs were new and plastic and warned that the owners were authorized to use deadly force to repel trespassers.
"Authorized by who?" said Rigby, panting slightly.
Kurtz took a short-handled pair of wire cutters from the pack.
"Whoa!" said Rigby. "You're not going to do this."
Kurtz answered by testing to make sure the fence wasn't electrified and then snipping a three-foot-high line of links. He began working horizontally.
"God damn it, Joe. You're going to get us both arrested. Hell, I should arrest you. You're probably packing, too."
He was. He still had the .38 in his belt at the back, under his leather jacket.
"Go on back to the car, Rigby. I'll just be a few minutes. I just want to look at this place. You said yourself that I'm not a thief."
"No," said Rigby. "You're a damned idiot. You didn't meet with the sheriff and his boys back there. This is not a friendly town, Joe. We don't want to go to their jail."
"They won't arrest a cop," said Kurtz. He finished with the horizontal cut and bent the little door of heavy wire inward. It didn't want to bend, but eventually it opened wide enough that he could squeeze through if he tossed the pack in first and went in on his knees.
"Arrest me?" said Rigby, crouching behind him as he went through. "I'm worried that they'll shoot me." She took the 9mm Sig Sauer from her belt, worked the action, made sure a round was in the chamber, checked that the safety was on, and set the weapon back in its holster. She crouched, duckwalked through the opening as Kurtz held the wire back from the inside, and rose next to him.
"Promise me we'll make it fast."
"I promise," said Kurtz.
Above the fence they headed north along the edge of the woods for fifty yards o
r so, found the original access road—now overgrown and blocked here and there by fallen trees—and followed it higher into the forest.
Kurtz's headache pounded with every step and even when he paused to rest, the pulse of pain crashed with every heartbeat. The hurt in his skull clouded his vision and literally pressed against the back of his eyes.
"Joe, you okay?"
"What?" He turned and looked at Rigby through the pounding.
"You all right? You look sort of pale."
"I'm fine." He looked around This damned hill was turning into a mountain. The trees here were some sort of pine that grew too close together, trunks as branchless as telephone poles for their first fifty vertical feet or so, and the mass of them shut out the sky. The clouds were low and dark and seemed to be scuttling by just above the tops of those trees. It couldn't be much later than noon, but it felt like evening.
"There!" cried Rigby.
He had to follow her pointing hand before he saw it.
Above the bare trunks of the deciduous trees up the hill and just visible through the wind-tossed branches, rose the semicircle of a Ferris wheel minus most of its upper cars.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
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The amusement park was much larger than Kurtz had imagined, covering four or five acres of level land—a sort of shelf notched into the steep slope a couple of hundred yards below the brow of the wooded hill. The actual amusement park land had probably been leveled or extended out from the original slope by bulldozers and other heavy equipment, but it was impossible to tell exactly where now that tall trees had grown up over the decades of abandonment.
Kurtz and Rigby approached cautiously, right hands ready to go for their respective weapons, but the place was empty enough; bird and insect sounds—waning but still present on this late October day—suggested that there was no lurking human threat.
From their vantage point at the center of what had once been a sort of midway, Kurtz could see the huge Ferris wheel fifty yards away—rusted, paint missing, lightbulbs mostly gone on the struts and crossmembers, only four cars left on its flimsy wheel—as well as the overgrown bumper car pavilion, some tumbled ticket booths with bushes and small trees grown up inside, a Tilt-a-Whirl with all of its hooded cars ripped off their tracks and scattered in the surrounding weeds, and a line of empty, broken booths that could have housed shooting galleries and other suckers' games.
"Is this it?" asked Rigby. "The place you saw in Peg O'Toole's snapshots?"
Kurtz nodded.
They walked along the overgrown shelf of land between the taller trees, pausing here and there—in front of a tumbledown funhouse with its plywood facade broken, its garish paint faded like some ancient Italian fresco—then next to a beautiful merry-go-round or carousel Kurtz could never remember which went in which direction, although these shattered horses and camels and giraffes had once rotated counter-clockwise.
"What a shame," said Rigby, touching the shattered face of one of the painted horses. They had actually been carved by hand from wood, although the heads were hollow. Vandals had shattered all of the animals' faces, broken their legs, ripped most of them from their poles, and tossed them into the weeds, which had then grown up and around and through them.
They walked past the bumper car pavilion. The flat roof had fallen in and the once-white floor was covered with puddles and plaster. Most of the heavy bumper cars had been dragged out and thrown here and there, some pushed down the hillside, one even wedged in the lower branches of a tree. Kurtz could see the '9' of the Cloud Nine insignia in fading gold paint on some of the rusted cars. He matched up one tumbled car with the memory of the photo Parole Officer O'Toole had shown him. The weeds and trees seemed taller than he remembered from the photograph.
"Well," said Kurtz when they paused by the Ferris wheel, "the old news articles said that the Major had built this place to keep the youth of Neola busy. It looks as if they've been busy enough over the last few decades, although I don't think it was vandalism that the Major had in mind."
Rigby wasn't listening. "Look," she said. "Someone's replaced most of the gas engine that powers the Ferris wheel. And those chains and pulleys are new."
"I noticed that," said Kurtz. "The motor in the center of the carousel has been worked on as well. And did you notice the new bulbs on the wheel?"
Rigby walked around the base of the Ferris wheel. "Weird. Most of them are broken or missing, but it looks like someone is replacing… what?… one out of ten of the lights?"
"And there are newer electrical cables in the weeds as well," said Kurtz. He pointed to a flat area of battered buildings about a hundred feet up the midway road. "I think they all head that way."
They followed the heavy electrical cable from the Ferris wheel toward the tumbledown funhouse complex. Rigby pointed out several places where the new cable had been covered over with humus or dirt as if for concealment.
To the rear of the rotting funhouse, all but hidden by the peeling facades and trees behind it, someone had fashioned a shack out of new lumber. The sides were still unfinished, but the roof was shingled and plastic kept the weather out. The top of the funhouse facade had bent backwards here, and a huge, inverted clown face hung over the shack and almost touched the small porch. On that porch, covered with plastic wrapped tightly by bungee cords, was an oversized new gasoline-powered electrical generator. Jerry cans of gasoline were lined up nearby.
Rigby checked out the shack and pointed to several covered toolboxes. She lifted a large, yellow power naildriver—the completely portable kind with its massive magazine of nails.
"You think it works?" she asked, holding the heavy thing in both of her pale hands.
"One way to find out," said Kurtz.
Rigby aimed back into the shack and squeezed the trigger.
BWAP. The five-inch nail ripped through the plastic sheeting and embedded itself in the plywood wall ten feet farther in.
"It works," said Rigby.
They spent some time in the shack—found nothing more personal than a moldy cot in the back minus any bedding—and then strolled down the hill to the center of the overgrown midway.
"The newspaper articles Arlene found said that there was a kiddie-locomotive up here somewhere," said Kurtz.
"We'll find it later," said Rigby. She dropped onto a lush patch of grass near the carousel, just where the hill began to rise again, and patted the grass next to her. "Sit down a minute, Joe."
He sat four feet from her and looked out through the trees at the view of the Allegheny River and the town of Neola a mile or so below them to the north. With the remaining fall foliage in the hills surrounding the community and a couple of white church spires visible, Neola looked more like some quaint New England village than a raw, Western New York industrial town.
"Let's talk a minute," said Rigby.
"All right," said Kurtz. "Tell me how it is that the DEA, FBI, AFT and other agencies have suspected the Major and SEATCO of being part of a heroin ring for years and yet the Major's still a free man and Neola still seems to be getting money from the heroin trade? Why haven't the alphabets been all over this place like hair on a gorilla?"
"I didn't mean talk about that."
"Answer the question, Rig."
She looked out and down at the town. "I don't know, Joe. Paul didn't tell me everything about the DEA briefing."
"But you think Kemper knows."
"Maybe."
Kurtz shook his head. "What the hell keeps law enforcement off a heroin ring, for fuck's sake?" He looked back at Rigby King. "Some sort of national security thing?"
The sun had peeked out and was illuminating their part of the hillside now, making the still-green grass leap out from the dull, autumn background in vibrant color. Rigby took off her corduroy jacket, despite the cold breeze blowing in. The press of her nipples was visible even through the thick, pink material of the Oxford cloth shirt. "I don't know, Joe. I think the feds and feeb
ies have been wise to the Major since long before nine-eleven. Can we talk about what I want to talk about?"
Kurtz looked away from her again, squinting through his Ray Charles sunglasses at Neola now glowing white in the moving shafts of October sunlight. "CIA?" he said. "Some sort of quid pro quo bullshit between them and the Major's network? Arlene's clipped articles said that this SEATCO also traded with Syria and places like that, as well as with Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand…"
"Joe," said Rigby. She scooted closer, grabbed his upper arm and squeezed it painfully.
Kurtz looked at her.
"Listen to me, Joe. Please."
Kurtz removed her fingers from his arm. "What?"
"I don't give a shit about SEATCO or this Major or any of the rest of this. I care about you."
Kurtz looked at her. He was still holding her wrist. He let it go.
"You're lost, Joe." Rigby's large brown eyes seemed darker than usual.
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about you. You're lost. Maybe you lost yourself in Attica. Maybe before—but I doubt that, not with Sam in your life. It's probably when she was killed that you…"
"Rigby," Kurtz said coldly, "maybe you'd better shut up."
She shook her head. "I know why you're here, Joe." She jerked her head toward the Ferris wheel, weeds, woods, and shifting clouds. The sunlight still fell on them, but the shadows were moving faster up, around and over the hill. "You think that the parole officer—O'Toole—was your client. She showed you the photographs of this place. She asked if you knew where this place was. You're acting like she hired you, Joe. You're not only trying to solve her shooting—and yours—but solve everything."
"You don't know what you're talking about." Kurtz shifted another couple of feet away from her on the soft grass. The wind was banging some broken piece of plywood on the funhouse up the hill behind them.
"You know I do, Joe. That's all you have left anymore. The work. The cases you make up for yourself to solve, even if you hire yourself out to some Mafia vermin to get the work. Or to that Farino bitch. It's better than nothing, because that's your only alternative right now… work or nothing. No feelings. No past No love. No hope. Nothing."