"How do you know this place is from way back then?" asked Kurtz. "It could have been abandoned a year ago. Vandals work fast."
O'Toole nodded. "But the rust and it just seems old. From the seventies at least Maybe the sixties."
Kurtz shrugged and handed the photos back. "People used to go up to Crystal Beach, on the Canadian side."
O'Toole nodded again. "But that was right on the lake, right? No hills, no woods?"
"Right," said Kurtz. "And it wasn't abandoned like that. When the time came, they tore it down and sold the rides and concessions."
The parole officer took off her glasses and stood. "Thank you, Mr. Kurtz. I appreciate your help." She held out her hand as she always did. It had startled Kurtz the first time she'd done it. They shook hands as they always did at the end of their weekly interviews. She had a good, strong grip. Then she validated his parking ticket. That was the other half of the weekly ritual.
He was opening the door to leave when she said, "And I may really give Mrs. DeMarco a call about the other thing."
Kurtz assumed that "the other thing" was the parole officer's wedding. "Yeah," he said. "You've got our office number and website address."
Later, he would think that if he hadn't stopped to take a leak in the first-floor restroom, everything would have been different But what the hellhe had to take a leak, so he did. It didn't take reading Marcus Aurelius to know that everything you did made everything different, and if you dwelt on it, you'd go nuts.
He came down the stairway into the parking garage corridor and there was Peg O'Toole, green dress, high heels, purse and all, just out of the elevator and opening the heavy door to the garage. She paused when she saw Kurtz. He paused. There was no way that a probation officer wanted to walk into an underground parking garage with one of her clients, and Kurtz wasn't keen on the idea either. But there was also no way out of it unless he went back up the stairs oreven more absurdlystepped into the elevator. Damn .
O'Toole broke the frozen minute by smiling and holding the door open for him.
Kurtz nodded and walked past her into the cool semidarkness. She could let him get a dozen paces in front of her if she wanted. He wouldn't look back. Hell, he'd been in for manslaughter, not rape.
She didn't wait long. He heard the clack of her heels a few paces behind him, heading to his right.
"Wait!" cried Kurtz, turning toward her and raising his right hand.
O'Toole froze, looked startled, and lifted her purse where, he knew, she usually carried the Sig Pro.
The goddamned lights had been broken. When he'd come in less than half an hour earlier, there had been fluorescent lights every twenty-five feet or so, but half of those were out The pools of darkness between the remaining lights were wide and black.
"Back!" shouted Kurtz, pointing toward the door from which they'd just emerged.
Looking at him as if he were crazy, but not visibly afraid, Peg O'Toole put her hand in her purse and started to pull the Sig Pro.
The shooting started.
CHAPTER TWO
or where it happened, or who did it He had the feeling that someone had been with him but he couldn't bring back any details and any attempt to do so hammered barbed spikes through his brain.
Kurtz knew the varieties and vintages of pain the way some men knew wines, but this pain in his head was already beyond the judging stage and well into the realm where screaming was the only sane response. But he didn't scream. It would hurt too much.
The hospital room was mostly dark but even the dim light from the bedside table hurt his eyes. Everything had a nimbus around it and when he attempted to focus his eyes, nausea rose up through the pain like a shark fin cutting through oily water. He solved that by closing his eyes. Now there were only the inevitable, ambient hospital sounds from beyond the closed doorintercom announcements, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, inaudible conversations in that muffled tone heard only in hospitals and betting parlorsbut each and every one of these sounds, including the rasp of his own breathing, was too loud for Joe Kurtz.
He started to raise his hand to rub the right side of his headthe epicenter of this universe of painbut his hand jarred to a halt next to the metal bedrail.
It took Kurtz two more tries and several groggy seconds of mental effort and the pain of opening his eyes again before he realized why his right arm wouldn't work; he was handcuffed to the metal frame of the hospital bed.
It took him another minute or two before he realized that his left hand and arm were free. Slowly, laboriously, Kurtz reached that hand across his faceeyes squinted to keep the nausea at bayand touched the right side of his head, just above his ear, where the pain was broadcasting like the concentric radio-wave ripples in the beginning of one of those old RKO films.
He could feel that the right side of his head was a mass of bandages and tape. But when he saw that there were only two IV's visible punched into his body and only one monitoring machine beeping a few feet away, and no doctors or nurses huddled around with their resuscitation crash cart, he figured he wasn't on the verge of checking out yet. Either that, or they'd already given up on him, issued a Do Not Resuscitate order, and gone off for coffee to leave him to die here in the dark.