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 or so, found the original access roadnow overgrown and blocked here and there by fallen treesand 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
Kurtz and Rigby approached cautiously, right hands ready to go for their respective weapons, but the place was empty enough; bird and insect soundswaning but still present on this late October daysuggested 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 awayrusted, paint missing, lightbulbs mostly gone on the struts and crossmembers, only four cars left on its flimsy wheelas 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 therein front of a tumbledown funhouse with its plywood facade broken, its garish paint faded like some ancient Italian frescothen 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."