"No shit?" Kurtz said conversationally. He turned expectantly to Jake, but the other old man just stared unblinkingly, took the Thunderbird from Adam, and helped himself to a swig.
Adam turned his head as if he was listening to Jake, but Jake's expression was as gray and expressionless as the October sky.
"Oh, yeah," added Adam, "Jake reminds me that the kids
in town used to see the Artful Dodger's ghost mostly around Halloween. That's when the Dodger would bring Cloud Nine alive againat least for one nightAll Hallow's Eve. I ain't never seen it myself, but kids I knew over the years used to say that the Dodger come back with a bunch of other ghosts from the other side and would ride all them dead rides up Cloud Nine one last time."
"The Dodger?" said Kurtz. "Cloud Nine?"
"When they was all kids, according to my dead Ellen, they used to fucking call that fucking O'Toole kid 'the Artful Dodger. " replied Adam. "You know, from that fucking Charles Dickens book. Fucking Oliver Twist ."
"The Artful Dodger," repeated Kurtz.
"Fucking aye," said Adam. "Or sometimes just 'Dodger, you know, 'cause he was all the time wearing that fucking Dodger cap not the L.A. cap, but the old fucking Brooklyn one."
Kurtz nodded. "What was that you were saying about something called Cloud Nine?"
Adam lowered the bottle and looked at Jake for a long minute. Finally Adam said, not to Kurtz but to the silent old man, "Why the fuck not? Why should we do that fucking Major a favor?"
Jake said nothing, showed nothing.
Adam turned and shrugged. "Jake don't want me to tell you, Joe. Sorry."
"Why not?"
"'Cause Jake knows that everyone who fucking goes up there in the last twenty fucking years or so to fucking find Cloud Nine gets their ass shot off, and Jake fucking likes you."
"I'll take my chances," said Kurtz. He took two twenties out of his billfold.
"Fucking liquor stores ain't open today," Adam said mournfully.
"But I bet you know somewhere else you could get some good stuff," said Kurtz.
Adam looked at Jake. "Yeah," be said at last.
He told Kurtz about the Major building an amusement park in the hills and gave Kurtz the directions. He warned him to stay away until after Halloween, after the ghost of the Artful Dodger and his pals had their last rides on the abandoned Ferris wheel and little train and dodge-em cars up there. "Wait 'til mid-November," said old Adam. "The Dodger ghost don't come around much in November according to the kids. And the other ghosts only join him on Halloween."
Kurtz stood to go, but then asked. "Do you know why just on Halloween?"
"Fuck yes I know," said old Adam. "Back when the Major was still running fucking Cloud Nine, Halloween was the last night it was open before shutting down all fucking winter. The last night was fucking free. It was the one time when everyone in the fucking town went up to that fucking amusement parksometimes it was almost too fucking cold to ride the fucking ridesand the Major always had a big fucking parade with his fucking son on a fucking floatthat little weasel, the Artful Dodger, riding up there and waving like the fucking queen of fucking England. Halloween. It was the fucking brat's birthday."
Kurtz looked over to see if the stoned kid was paying any attention, and noticed for the first time that the boy had gone, slipped away into the trees along the river. It was as if he'd never been there.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Shit , he thought. "Hey, Boo," he said. It was an old joke and he'd almostnot quiteforgotten the origin of it back at Father Baker's Friday Movie Night.
"Hey, Boo," she said back. She didn't sound happy. "You find your talkative drunks?"
"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 outsidebut I'm not some FBI puke trying to take over some local investigation. I just told them the truththat 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.