Slayground p-13

by Richard Stark

  “That’s good,” O’Hara said. He was sorry he hadn’t thought about asking that question himself, and surprised Dunstan had come up with it. But he supposed it just showed he was full of excitement and anticipation and Dunstan was full of apprehension. Still, it was a good thing somebody had thought to check. It wouldn’t have been pleasant if they’d started yelling through a loud-hailer in here with people from the force just the other side of the board fence.

  Caliato said, “Any time you’re ready, O’Hara.”

  “Then let’s get it over with,” O’Hara said.

  “We’ll stay back here out of sight,” Caliato said.

  “Right.”

  O’Hara and Dunstan both carried flashlights. They lit them and walked forward into the park along the main blacktop path toward the center, where in the summer a fountain was lit by colored lights. On the way, they passed the Desert Island on their left and Island Earth on their right. A snack bar on their left, amusement rides on their right. A small footbridge — they crossed over the little stream that meandered through the grounds. On their right, a black-light ride called Voyage Through the Galaxy.

  On their left, the fun house, dominated by a huge round laughing face with open gaping mouth.

  They stopped short of the concrete fountain, and looked at one another. O’Hara could see his own nervousness reflected in Dunstan’s eyes, and he hesitated just a second, as though he could mill change his mind, do things differently. But of course he couldn’t. It was way too late to change now, even if he wanted to.

  He lifted the loud-hailer to his lips, depressed the trigger.’

  ‘We know you ‘re in there, “his amplified voice suddenly roared. “You were seen climbing over the gates with the suitcase full of money. Come nut now, throw down your weapons, give yourself up. This is the police. The park is surrounded. “

  The silence echoed for a while when he was done. He lowered the loud-hailer, shone his flashlight this way and that, waited for some indication that he’d been heard.

  Nothing.

  He raised the loud-hailer to his mouth again, and suddenly light, noise, laughter poured down on him from behind, flooded over him like a shock wave. He yelped and dropped the loud-hailer and jumped forward, stumbling, almost falling into the empty concrete pool where in summer the fountain played. He turned around and stared.

  The fun house. In the middle of the silent, empty, dark, frozen park, the fun house had suddenly surged into life. All the lights were shining, yellow and white and orange and red, cartwheels of light spinning around the entrance, flashers revolving on the roof, light everywhere, flickering like a huge fire in a Roman-candle factory.

  And noise. The huge laughing face on the front of the fun house was moving in its slow mechanical circle, and from behind it came the boom of recorded laughter, huge maniacal rolling laughter. Plus music, recorded calliope music blaring from loudspeakers at the corners of the building.

  “My God!” O’Hara screamed, and turned wild-eyed to see Dunstan running like a crazy man for the darkness by the front gate.

  Eleven

  WHEN THE fun house suddenly took off, Caliato was so startled he stepped involuntarily backward and bruised his elbow on a gate post. The pain brought him back to himself, and he looked at all that coruscating light and found himself smiling with real pleasure.

  He hadn’t expected the quarry to be so unorthodox. The guy should either have given up quietly to O’Hara and Dunstan, or he should have cowered in a corner somewhere, hunched over his suitcase of money, until Caliato and his people found him. But to counterattack like this, right at the very beginning, was something Caliato hadn’t expected.

  The two cops were running this way, both of them all shook up. Caliato saw them coming, and that finished the job of getting him his own equilibrium back. Before either of them had reached him he’d turned to the others and started barking out his orders. “Abadandi and Pulsone, stay on the gate here. Chaka, get around to the back of that fun house, see if there’s any other way in there. Benny, come with me.”

  Dunstan was there, breathless and blowing as though he’d just run a mile. While the others were saying right and moving to their posts, Caliato said to Dunstan, “Get hold of yourself. We’ll want to go in after him.”

  O’Hara had showed up. “He — he — “

  “It’s just a fun house,” Caliato told him. “It isn’t an atom bomb.”

  O’Hara took a deep breath, and Caliato saw him getting hold of himself. “I know what it is,” he finally said. “But what the hell’s he doing it for? If there’s anybody around the neighborhood at all — “

  “He knows what’s up, that’s why,” Caliato said. “He saw us when we saw him, and he’s figured out what’s the story. But the point is, he had to be in that fun house to turn it on. Come on.”

  He led the way, trotting along the snowy backtop, feeling the unfamiliar weight of a gun in his overcoat pocket. The old man’s .44. He dragged it out of the pocket as he ran.

  The fun house was still going wild. Caliato said, “Be careful going in. He’ll be watching these doors.”

  “Why not wait for him to come out?” O’Hara said.

  “We’ve got to turn this racket off, that’s why.”

  They went in cautiously, through the main entrance, Benniggio in the lead, Caliato next, the two cops following. They all had guns and flashlights in their hands, though they didn’t need the flashlights yet.

  They were all inside, and nothing had happened. They were in a crazy room, with walls and floors tilted funny ways, odd-shaped furniture, all things to make you think you were leaning one way when you were leaning another, so if you weren’t careful you’d lean too far the wrong way and fall on your face.

  There were several doors leading out. Caliato said, “Split up. The first thing we do is find the main switch. But everybody take it easy, he’s got to be inside here someplace.”

  They each went through a different door, moving with cautious haste, looking all around, all of them distracted by the booming laughter and the calliope music and the whirling lights.

  Caliato found himself in a semi-dark narrow passageway. The floor seemed to roll and squirm uncomfortably under his feet, as though mice were moving back and forth under the rubber mat. The walls were of different substances, all of which had a distasteful feel to them, some slimy, some sticky, some an uncomfortable furry feel. When Caliato looked at his fingertips, he was surprised to see them still clean.

  Spiders and bats and other things hung from the ceiling on thin black wires, some of them dipping and rising in regular motion, others just hanging in one place, turning lazily. Caliato, a neat man, almost finicky, found this passage almost nauseating, and when one of the bat figures brushed his forehead with its furry wings, he recoiled as though from an electric shock.

  The end of the passage was a black curtain, vaguely repellent to the touch, as though made of snake bellies. Caution was replaced in Caliato with disgust, the need to get away from here, out of this rotten place. He pushed through into another room, and suddenly saw himself a dozen times. He saw the long-barreled .44 in his right hand, the unlit flashlight in his left. Over and over, a dozen times.

  The strange thing was, he had a white circle on his chest every time.

  His senses were being battered from too many directions, the noise and the lights and the crazy room with its tiled floors and then the place with the bats and spiders and now himself in endless repetition in dozens of doorways. He wasn’t rattled completely, the way O’Hara and Dunstan had been outside, but he was just rattled enough to take a second and look down at his chest, as though expecting to see a white circle there. There was none, and when he looked up, there were a dozen other men in the room with the dozens of himself. Those other men had guns too, just as all his own selves had guns.

  He knew it was all up, he knew he was going to die in here, and his thought was What a waste. The future he had, the potential he had, all gon
e. What a waste. Who would have thought his story would end like this?

  He raised his gun, even though he knew it was useless. Still, he was the first to fire, shooting at one of the men in front of him at random — they were all identical — and that one suddenly disappeared in a cascade of crashing glass.

  PART THREE

  One

  PARKER SHOT the chest without the white circle on it. All the overcoated men in all the mirrors staggered back, their guns and flashlights falling. They fell against a mirror, and leaned there for a long second, and then toppled forward, only to bounce their heads against other mirrors and wind up crumpled over and over again on the floor.

  Parker moved cautiously forward, not wanting to get caught in the maze of mirrors, but at the same time wanting to get the dead man’s gun.

  Except he wasn’t going to get it. People were shouting at each other, not far away. Getting closer. Parker retraced his steps, moving slowly, knowing it was no good to hurry through the mirrored labyrinth.

  Two men burst through the entrance at the far end, a cop and another one in an overcoat. The one in the overcoat dropped to his knees beside the dead man, shouting, “Call” but the cop held his pistol out at arm’s length and began methodically shooting mirrors.

  Everywhere Parker looked, there was the reflection of a cop with his gun aimed at him. Given enough time, the cop would work his way through the mirrors and find the man. Parker tucked his own gun away in his jacket pocket and moved away, running his hands along the mirrors, finding the narrow channels through the glass. He didn’t have a good enough or a close enough shot at those two over there with the dead man, not when he had only four bullets left.

  They were blundering after him now, bumping into mirrors and one another, the cop still plugging away with his service revolver, the other guy shouting names, calling for help.

  Parker’s hands pushed against cloth. He stepped through the black-draped doorway into a room with distorting mirrors. There was a clear path through them to a dark doorway on the far side. Parker trotted down the room, flanked by tall Parkers, fat Parkers, long-necked Parkers, dwarf Parkers. He stepped through the doorway as a shout sounded behind him, and then the roar of a gunshot in a confined space. He heard the bullet ricochet off something in front of him, and he bent forward and hurried through the darkness.

  The orientation he had given himself was beginning to pay off already. He knew where he was now, he didn’t need light to guide him. He was in a long passage shaped like a giant barrel lying on its side. He had come in one end of the barrel and would go out the other, in the meantime moving with his feet widely spread on the curving floor and his arms stretched out to the sides, his fingertips now and then glancing off the walls.

  He reached the end of the barrel and stepped out onto normal flat floor. His hand touched a waist-high chain on his left. He ducked under it, went to one knee beside the barrel opening. He took out his pistol again, while with his other hand he stroked the curved side of the barrel. His hand found a metal box attached to a vertical length of pipe. On the top of the box was a switch. He held his thumbs against the switch, held the pistol ready in his other hand, and waited.

  He could faintly hear them, still out in the room with the distorting mirrors. Then suddenly there was silence. He waited, listening to the silence, and became aware of the sound of breathing. It sounded close, far too close.

  How had they gotten so close? Had they managed to come in behind him after all? He’d set this up so carefully, there shouldn’t be any way for them to come through from the opposite direction.

  Were they in the barrel? Had they started through the barrel without him hearing? How could they do it so silently?

  He almost pushed the switch, but something about the sound of the breathing didn’t ring true. There was something strange about it, something artificial. It was too loud, like somebody breathing right into his ear.

  Then a soft voice said, “What do you think?”

  “If we go through the doorway,” a second voice said, just as soft, “we’re exposed. We got to be careful.”

  They were still the other side of the barrel, they had to be, but they sounded as though they were sitting on his shoulders. It had to be the barrel itself doing it, amplifying their voices like a huge megaphone.

  Would it do the same thing in the opposite direction? Parker didn’t make a move, didn’t make a sound. He waited, listening.

  The first voice said, “What are we gonna do? We stand here, and he gets away.”

  “You go through first,” the second voice said. “Stay low, no matter what happens. I’ll cover you.”

  “Why you? Why don’t you go in and I cover?”

  “Because I’ve been trained for this kind of thing.” That last said with a hint of contempt in the voice. So that would be the cop, and it would be the one in the overcoat who would be coming through.

  Unfortunate. It would have been better if they’d both stayed excited, both just run straight ahead. But he’d do what he could, and see what happened.

  The first voice was saying, “Okay. But for Christ’s sake, cover me. I don’t want what Cal got.”

  “I’ll cover you, don’t worry. I don’t want anybody else dead.”

  “Except him.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Should I go on my hands and knees?”

  Parker grimaced. It was getting worse and worse. The only good part of it was hearing them make the plans.

  “Go any way you want. But let’s get going.”

  “Right.”

  Parker heard the small thumps when somebody entered the other end of the barrel. He waited, his thumb straining against the switch. He didn’t want the guy too close to this end, not too close to the other end. In the middle, in the middle.

  The small thumps of shoes and swishes of cloth marked the guy’s progress. Parker listened, waited, listened, waited.

  Around midpoint.

  His thumb pushed the switch, and as the lights came up he rolled under the chain, back out in front of the barrel, looking for his target.

  The barrel was rolling. Bands of fluorescent tubes, pink and white and green and yellow, behind thick plate glass inside the barrel, lit up the guy in the overcoat, rolling and tumbling as the barrel lumbered around and around. He looked like a bulky sack of laundry, rolling over the glass protecting the lights.

  Parker wanted a sure shot, but the guy was too indistinct, the lighting in there was too crazy, and as he moved his head back and forth, moved the gun back and forth, the cop on the far side shouted, “Stay down! There he is, stay down!” And started shooting through the barrel at Parker.

  The guy in the barrel began to squeal like a pig. He curled himself up tight, knees up against his chest, head down in against his knees, arms wrapped around his head, making himself a black ball that rolled and bumped inside the turning barrel.

  It was impossible. The cop had all the ammunition in the world over there, he could keep shooting and Parker could never get set for the one shot that had to be good.

  So he got out of there. He jumped to the side again, out of the direct line of fire, and ran across a big bare room full of obstacles — treadmills and places where jets of air from the floor would lift female customers’ skirts — to a flight of wooden stairs. Behind him the barrel was still going around and around. Far away outside, the laughter and music at the front of the fun house was still carrying on.

  He made the top of the stairs, and there were suddenly more shots. He looked back, and the cop was through the barrel and shooting again. The guy in the overcoat blundered out, too, bumping into the cop, sending a bullet into the ceiling.

  There was a doorway ahead of Parker. It led out to an open area on the front of the fun house, a kind of balcony directly in front of the huge laughing face, up on the second floor. But there was another way out, too, a curtained opening three feet high in a side wall, and that was where he headed.

  There w
as a chrome bar at waist-height across above the opening. Parker reached down, grabbed that with both hands, and swung through the curtain, feet first. He let go the bar and swept through into darkness.

  A chute, metal, curving, was what he was on, a spiral that ran down inside the building. Parker rode it down, his arms folded across his chest, hands pressed against jacket pockets, to be sure he lost neither the pistol nor the flashlight.

  The bottom. Lights, all different colors. More distorting mirrors, more fun-house gimmicks. But also a side door, with the dull red EXIT sign over it, tucked away in a corner.

  Parker ran to that door, pushed it slowly open. He looked out, and this was the rear of the building, away from most of the light and most of the noise. Ahead, vaguely seen in the darkness, was the Voodoo Island band shell. A ways off to the left was the Land of Voodoo black-light ride, and off to the right was the fountain at the center of the park. There was no one in sight.

  He stepped outside and carefully closed the door behind him, not wanting the rectangle of light to attract attention. He started away, headed for the band shell since that was the nearest structure, and suddenly darkness fell. Darkness and silence.

  He looked back, surprised. They’d found the master switch and turned the fun house off again. There was no light now anywhere.

  Good. He didn’t need light, not right now. He turned away again and trotted through the darkness toward the band shell.

  Two

  PARKER STOOD at the window and watched the flashlights bob, out there by the fountain in the middle of the park. He cautiously raised the lower half of the window and then he could hear the voices, though he couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying.

  But he didn’t have to know the exact words, he could pretty much tell what the conversation was about. Apparently he’d lucked out. It looked as though he’d got their leader on the first try, back at the fun house. That was why they were being so disorganized now, they hadn’t worked it out yet who was going to be leader in the dead man’s place. That was why they weren’t pressing him now, keeping him moving.