Peter Pan Must Die: A Novel

by John Verdon

  Other people on the concourse were in a state of confusion, some backing away, some angling for a better view, asking one another what had happened.

  Shouting “Police!” several times, Gurney pulled out his wallet and flipped it open with his free hand, raising it over his head to display his NYPD credentials and reduce the possibility of an armed citizen intervening.

  As he was approaching the body on the ground to confirm the neutralization of any danger and to check vital signs, a harsh voice behind him broke through the anxious jabbering of the onlookers. “Hold it right there!”

  He stopped immediately. That tone was one he’d heard too many times on the job—a brittle layer of anger enclosing a jittery attitude. The safest path was to do absolutely nothing except comply with all instructions quickly and accurately.

  An obvious cop in plain clothes came up on Gurney’s right side, gripped his right forearm tightly, and removed the pistol from his hand. At the same time, someone behind him took the wallet from his raised left hand.

  A few moments later, presumably after examining the ID, the edgy voice announced, “Goddamn—the man we’ve been looking for.” Gurney recognized it now as the voice of the uniformed cop moonlighting in the fair security operation.

  He walked around in front of Gurney, looked at him, looked down at the body on the ground, looked back at Gurney. “What the hell is this? You shot this kid?”

  “He’s not a kid. He’s the fugitive I told you about at the gate.” He was speaking loudly and clearly, wanting as many witnesses to his description of the situation as possible. “You better check his vitals. The wound should be between the right shoulder and right pleural cavity. Have the EMT check ASAP for arterial bleeding.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” The cop looked down at the body again. Bewilderment was creeping into his hostility without diminishing it. “He’s a kid. No weapon. Why’d you shoot him?”

  “He’s not a kid. His name is Petros Panikos. You need to contact BCI in Sasparilla and FBI Regional in Albany. He was the hit man in the Carl Spalter murder.”

  “Hit man? Him? You fucking kidding me? Why’d you shoot him?”

  Gurney gave him the only acceptable legal answer. It also happened to be true. “Because I believed my life was in imminent danger.”

  “From who? From what?”

  “If you take his hands out of his pockets, you’ll find a weapon in one of them.”

  “Is that a fact?” He looked around for the plainclothes guy, who seemed to be concluding a triage dispute with someone on his walkie-talkie. “Dwayne? Hey, Dwayne! You want to pull the boy’s hands out of his pockets? So we can see what he’s got? Man here says you’re gonna find a gun.”

  Dwayne said a few final words into the walkie-talkie, clipped it back on his belt. “Yes, sir. No problem.” He knelt by the body. Black Hoodie’s eyes were still open. He appeared to be conscious. “You got a gun, boy?”

  There was no response.

  “We don’t want nobody to get hurt now, right? So I’m just going to check here, see if maybe you have a gun here you might’ve forgot.” As he patted the front pocket area of the thick black sweatshirt, he frowned. “Feels like you might have something in there, boy. You want to tell me what it is, so nobody gets hurt?”

  Black Hoodie’s eyes were on Dwayne’s face now, but he said nothing. Dwayne reached into both pockets simultaneously, grasped the concealed hands, and slowly pulled them both out into the light.

  The left hand was empty. The right hand held an incongruously girlish pink cell phone.

  The uniformed cop gave Gurney an exaggerated look of mock sympathy. “Oooh, that’s not good. You went and shot that little boy because he had a phone in his pocket. A harmless little phone. That’s not good at all. We got a serious ‘imminent danger’ question here. Hey, Dwayne, check the kid’s vitals, get a call in for the EMTs.” He looked back at Gurney, shaking his head. “Not good, mister, not good at all.”

  “He’s carrying. I’m sure of it. You need to do a closer check.”

  “Sure of it? How the hell could you be sure of it?”

  “You work inner-city homicide for twenty-plus years, you get a good sense for who’s carrying.”

  “That a fact? I’m impressed. Well, I guess he was carrying, all right. Just wasn’t carrying a gun,” he added with an ugly grin. “Which kinda changes the lay of the land in an unfavorable way for you. Be hard to call this shooting righteous, even if you were still a police officer—which, of course, you’re not. I’m afraid you’re going to need to come with us, Mr. Gurney.”

  Gurney noticed that Hardwick had returned and positioned himself at the inside edge of the growing circle of gawkers, not far from Madeleine, who now appeared less frozen but no less fearful. Hardwick’s eyes had taken on an icy malamute stillness that signaled danger—the particular danger that arises from indifference to danger. Gurney got the feeling that if he were to give a small nod in the direction of the antagonistic cop, Hardwick would calmly put a nine-millimeter round in the man’s sternum.

  It was then that a sound of humming caught Gurney’s attention—a humming barely audible amid the growing clamor of the fire and medical equipment moving in all directions through the fairgrounds. As he strained to make out the source of this incongruous sound, it grew stronger, with a more noticeable pattern. And then the pattern became recognizable.

  It was “Ring Around the Rosies.”

  Gurney recognized the melody first, its source second. It was coming from the slightly parted lips of the wounded person on the ground—the slightly parted lips in the center of the painted rust-red smile. Blood, just a bit redder than the smile, was beginning to soak through the shoulder area of the black hooded sweatshirt and stain the dusty pavement. As everyone who could hear it stood staring, the humming was gradually transformed into the actual words:

  Ring around the rosies,

  Pocket full of posies,

  Ashes, ashes,

  All fall down.

  As he sang, he slowly raised the pink cell phone that had been left in his hand.

  “Jesus!” cried Gurney to the two cops as the truth hit him. “The phone! Grab it! That’s the detonator! Grab it!”

  When neither of them seemed to understand what he was saying, he hurled himself forward, taking a wild kick at the phone—as the two cops launched themselves at him. His foot reached the phone, sending it skittering across the concrete, just as he was tackled.

  But Peter Pan had already pushed the SEND button.

  Three seconds later there was a rapid-fire series of six powerful explosions—sharp, near-deafening blasts—not the muffled reports of the earlier incendiaries.

  Gurney’s ears were ringing—to the exclusion of all other sounds. As the cops who’d tackled him were struggling to their feet, there was a tremendous impact on the ground very close by. Gurney looked around wildly for Madeleine, saw her grasping the railing, evidently stunned. He ran toward her, extending his arms. Just as he reached her, she screamed, pointing over his shoulder to something behind him.

  He turned, stared, blinking, not registering for a moment what his eyes were seeing.

  The Ferris wheel was unmoored from its supports.

  But it was still turning.

  Still turning. Not rotating in place on its axle—the steel supports of which appeared to have been blasted away—but rolling ponderously forward in a cloud of gagging dust, away from its cracked concrete base.

  Then the lights went out—everywhere—and the sudden darkness immediately amplified and multiplied the screams of terror all around, near and far.

  Gurney and Madeleine grabbed each other as the monstrous wheel rolled by, smashing the railing that had enclosed it, silhouetted by a lightning flash in the low clouds, its wobbling structure emitting not only the shrieks of its riders but also the awful sounds of metal twisting against metal, scraping, snapping like steel whips.

  The only illumination Gurney could see in the fairground
s now was being provided by the intermittent lightning and the scattered fires, fanned and spread by the wind. In a Fellini-esque scene of hell on earth, the untethered Ferris wheel was rolling in a kind of nightmarish slow motion toward the central concourse—mostly in darkness, except when it was caught in the blue-white strobe of a lightning flash.

  Madeleine’s fingers were digging into Gurney’s arm. Her voice was breaking. “What in the name of God is happening?”

  “It’s a power failure,” he said.

  The absurdity of the understatement struck them both at the same instant, provoking a shared burst of crazy laughter.

  “Panikos … he … he mined the place with explosives,” Gurney managed to add, looking around wildly. The darkness was filled with acrid smoke and screams.

  “You killed him?” cried Madeleine, as one might ask in desperation if the rattlesnake in front of them was safely dead.

  “I shot him.” He looked toward the place where it happened. He waited for a flash of lightning to direct him to the black form on the ground, realizing as he did so that the spot was in the path the Ferris wheel had followed. The thought of what he might see gave him a surge of nausea. The first flash got him fairly close, with Madeleine still glued to his arm. The second flash revealed what he didn’t want to see.

  “My God!” cried Madeleine. “Oh my God!”

  Evidently, one of the Ferris wheel’s huge structural circles of steel had rolled over the middle of the body—essentially cutting it in half.

  As they stood there in the darkness between the split-second flashes of light and blasts of thunder, the rain started, and soon it was a downpour. The lightning strobes showed a shifting, stumbling mass of people. It was probable that only the darkness and the deluge were keeping them from stampeding and trampling one another.

  Dwayne and the uniformed cop had apparently been driven back from Panikos’s body by the progress of the rolling Ferris wheel—which they were now following into the main concourse, seemingly drawn helplessly along after it by the terrible screams of its trapped riders.

  It was a measure of the staggering hellishness of the scene—with all its sensory, mental, and emotional overload—that they could abandon a fresh homicide like that with hardly a backward glance.

  Madeleine sounded like she was straining desperately to speak calmly. “My God, David, what should we do?”

  Gurney didn’t answer. He was looking down, waiting for the next flash to show him the face in the black cowl. By the time the flash came, the pelting rain had washed much of the yellow paint away.

  He saw what he was waiting to see. All doubt was erased. He was certain that the delicate heart-shaped mouth was the same mouth he’d seen in the security videos.

  The mangled body at his feet was indeed that of Petros Panikos.

  The fabled executioner no longer existed.

  Peter Pan was now nothing but a pathetic bag of broken bones.

  Madeleine pulled Gurney back out of the pool of spreading blood and rainwater he was standing in, kept pulling him back until they reached the crushed railing. The flashes of lightning and thunder—punctuating the terrifying thumps and rattles and metallic screeches and human wails from the still-rolling Ferris wheel—were making rational thought nearly impossible.

  Madeleine’s efforts at self-control were collapsing, her voice starting to break. “God, David, God, people are dying—they’re dying—what can we do?”

  “Christ only knows—whatever we can—but first—right now—I need to get ahold of that phone—that phone Panikos used—the detonator—before it gets lost—before it sets off something else.”

  A familiar voice, raised almost in a shout amid the din, caught Gurney off-balance. “Stay with her. I’ll get it.”

  Behind him, behind the remains of the railing, back where the Ferris wheel had been mounted, the wooden platform riders used for entering and exiting their seats suddenly burst into flames. In the uneven orangey light cast by the new fire, he caught sight of Hardwick making his way through the slanting rain toward the body on the ground.

  When he got to it, he hesitated before bending down to reach for the gleaming pink phone, which was still in Panikos’s hand. It was too soon for rigor mortis to have stiffened the finger joints, so extricating the phone should have posed no problem. But when Hardwick tried to lift it away, Panikos’s hand and arm rose up with it.

  Even in the dim firelight, Gurney could see why. One end of a short lanyard was attached to the phone, and the other end was looped around Panikos’s wrist. Hardwick grasped the phone firmly, pulling the lanyard loose. The motion raised Panikos’s arm higher. The instant the arm was fully extended, there was a loud pistol report.

  Gurney heard a sharp grunt from Hardwick—as he toppled face-down onto the little corpse.

  A sheriff’s deputy had been half running with the help of a flashlight along the curved concourse in the direction of the ponderously rolling Ferris wheel. At the sound of the shot he stopped abruptly, his free hand on the butt of his holstered gun, his gaze moving in a dangerously overloaded state from Gurney to the crossed bodies on the ground and back again.

  “What the hell is this?”

  The answer came from Hardwick himself, straining to push himself up off Panikos, his voice a hissing mix of agony and fury, forced out through clenched teeth. “This dead fucker just shot me.”

  The deputy stared in understandable bewilderment. Then, as he stepped closer, the emotion went beyond simple bewilderment. “Jack?”

  The answer was an indecipherable growl.

  He looked over at Gurney. “Is that … is that Jack Hardwick?”

  Chapter 62

  A Trick of the Mind

  Sometimes in the midst of a battlefield apocalypse, when the assault on Gurney’s mental resources seemed most devastating, a possible path to safety would suddenly present itself. This time it appeared in the form of Deputy J. Olzewski.

  Olzewski recognized Hardwick from a multiagency law enforcement seminar on special provisions of the Patriot Act. He was unaware of Hardwick’s separation from BCI, which made gaining his cooperation easier than it might have been otherwise.

  In a highly abbreviated manner appropriate to the emergency, Gurney gave the deputy an outline of the situation and got his agreement to secure the immediate area around Panikos’s body, to take official custody of Panikos’s cell phone, to summon his own department’s supervisory personnel rather than the local police, to personally conduct the search for the concealed weapon that had discharged when Panikos’s arm had been raised, and to ensure that the weapon passed into the custody of the Sheriff’s Department.

  Although moving Hardwick would be risky, they all agreed that waiting for an ambulance to reach him under the circumstances would be riskier.

  Despite the bleeding bullet wound in his side, Hardwick himself was hell-bent to get back on his feet—which he managed to accomplish with the help of Gurney and Olzewski and an explosion of curses—and head for the gate where the emergency vehicles would be entering. As if to endorse this decision, a generator kicked in and some of the concourse lights came back on—although only at a small fraction of their normal brightness. At least the change made movement possible beyond the illumination limits of fires and lightning flashes.

  Hardwick was hobbling and grimacing, supported by Gurney on one side and Madeleine on the other, when the Ferris wheel—its upper half visible over the top of the main tent in the next concourse—began to shudder and wobble with the sounds of snapping metal and heavy objects smashing against the pavement. Then, in a kind of surreal slow motion, the huge circular structure tilted away out of sight beyond the tent—followed a second later by an earth-shaking crash.

  Gurney felt nauseous. Madeleine began to cry. Hardwick uttered a guttural sound that might have been expressing emotional horror or physical pain. It was hard to tell how much of the surrounding calamity he was absorbing.

  As they pressed on toward the vehicle ga
te, however, something changed his mind about finding a place in an ambulance. “Too many people here hurt, too much pressure on the medics, don’t want to take anybody’s place, keep anyone from getting help, don’t want to do that.” His voice was low, no more than a rough whisper.

  Gurney leaned in to make sure he was hearing right. “What do you want to do, Jack?”

  “Hospital. Out of the radius. Everything here’ll be swamped. Can’t handle it. Cooperstown. Cooperstown’ll be better. Straight to the ER. How about it, ace? Think you can drive my car?”

  It struck Gurney as a terrible idea—transporting a man with a bullet wound fifty-five miles over winding two-lane country roads in a vehicle with no first-aid equipment. But he agreed to do it. Because entrusting Hardwick to the mercies of a crushingly overburdened emergency system in the middle of a cataclysm unlike anything the local EMTs had ever faced before seemed like an even more terrible idea. God only knew how many mangled, barely alive Ferris wheel victims, not to mention victims of the several previous explosions and fires, would have to be treated before him.

  So they plodded on through the vehicle gate—which also functioned as the exhibitor’s gate—outside of which, at the edge of the entry road, Hardwick had parked his old Pontiac muscle car. Before they got into it, Gurney took off the shirt he was wearing under his sweatshirt and tore it in three pieces. Two he folded into bulky wads and placed over the front entry wound and the rear exit wound in Hardwick’s side. He tied the third tightly around Hardwick’s waist to hold the wads in place. He and Madeleine eased him into the front passenger seat, reclining it as far as it would go.

  As soon as Hardwick recovered sufficiently from the pain of the process, he took his cell phone from his belt, pressed a speed dial number, waited, and left a message in an utterly exhausted but smiling voice, presumably for Esti. “Hi, babe. Little problem. Got sloppy, got shot. Embarrassing. Got shot by a dead guy. Hard to explain. On my way to Cooperstown ER. Sherlock’s the chauffeur. I love you, Peaches. Talk later.”