Deborah snapped me out of my pathetic fugue by slapping her hands on the steering wheel. "Goddamn it," she said. "I just don't fucking trust her."
I felt better: Common sense was winning. "So you're not going?" I said.
Deborah shook her head and started the engine. "No," she said. "Of course I'm going." And she put it in gear and pulled out into traffic. "But I don't have to go alone."
I suppose I should have pointed out that since I was right there beside her, she was not technically alone. But she was already accelerating to a speed at which I began to fear for my life, so I simply grabbed for my seat belt and buckled it on extra tight.
THIRTY-SIX
I have always regarded it as an acute mental defect that some people think it's perfectly safe to drive at high speeds while talking on a cell phone. But Deborah was one of those people, and family is family, so I didn't say anything to her when she pulled out her phone. As we roared up onto I-95 she had one hand on the wheel while she dialed a number with the other. It was only one digit, which meant it was speed dial, and I had a pretty good idea who it would be, which was confirmed when she spoke.
"It's me," she said. "Can you find Buccaneer Land? Yeah, north. Okay, meet me outside the main gate, ASAP. Bring some hardware. Love you," she said, and hung up.
There were very few living people Debs loved, and even fewer she would admit it to, so I was sure I knew who she had called.
"Chutsky's meeting us there?" I said.
She nodded, sliding the phone back into its holster. "Backup," she said, and then happily for my peace of mind she put both hands on the wheel and concentrated on weaving through the traffic. It was about a twenty-minute drive north up the highway to the spot where Buccaneer Land lay moldering, and Deborah made it in twelve minutes, flying down the off-ramp and onto the back road that leads up to the main gate at a rate of speed that seemed to me to be several very big steps beyond reckless. And since Chutsky was not there yet, we could have gone at a more reasonable pace and still had plenty of time to hang around waiting for him. But Debs kept her foot down until the gate was in sight, and then she finally slowed and pulled off the road beside what used to be the main gate to Buccaneer Land.
My first reaction was relief. Not just because Debs hadn't killed us, but because Roger, the twenty-five-foot-tall pirate I remembered so well from my childhood, was still there guarding the place. Most of his bright paint job had worn off. Time and weather had removed the parrot from his shoulder, and his raised sword was half-gone, but he still had his eye patch, and there was still a bright and wicked gleam in his remaining eye. I climbed out of the car and looked up at my old friend. As a child I had always felt a special kinship with Roger. After all, he was a pirate, and that meant he was allowed to sail around on a big sailboat and chop up anybody he wanted, which seemed like an ideal life to me back then.
Still, it was very strange to stand in his shadow again and remember what this place had been like once upon a time, and what Roger the Pirate had meant to me. I felt I owed him some kind of homage, even in his dilapidated state. So I stared up at him for a moment, and then said, "Aaarrhhh." He didn't answer, but Debs looked at me strangely.
I stepped away from Roger and looked through the chain-link fence that surrounded the park. The sun was setting, and in the last light of the day there wasn't much to see from here; the same clutter of gaudy signs and rides I remembered, now battered and greatly faded after so many years of neglect in the cruel Florida sunlight. Looming over everything was the tall and extremely unpiratical tower they had named the Mainmast. It had a half dozen metal arms hanging off it, each with a caged car dangling from the end. I had never understood what it had to do with buccaneers, no matter how many signs and flags they'd draped on it, but Harry had just patted my head when I asked him and said they got a deal on it, and anyway it had been fun to ride up to the top. There was a great view from up there, and if you closed one eye and muttered, "Yo, ho, ho," you could almost forget that the thing was so modern-looking.
Now the whole tower seemed to lean slightly to one side, and all the cars but one were either missing or shattered. Still, I wasn't planning on riding to the top today, so it didn't seem important.
From the fence where I stood I couldn't see much more of the park, but since there was nothing else to do but wait for Chutsky, I let the nostalgia in. I wondered if there was still water in the artificial river that wound through the park. There had been a pirate ship ride on that river: Roger the Pirate's pride and joy, the wicked ship Vengeance. It had cannons that really fired sticking out of each side. And on one bank of the river, they had one of those rides where you sit inside a fake log and ride down a waterfall. Beyond it, on the far side of the park, there was the Steeplechase. Just like with the tower, the connection between a Steeplechase and pirates had always escaped me, but the ride had been Debs's favorite. I wondered if she was thinking about it.
I looked at my sister. She was pacing back and forth in front of the gate, glancing up the road and then into the park, then standing still and folding her arms, and then snapping back into a walk, back and forth again. She was clearly about to pop from the nervous anticipation, and I thought this might be a good time to calm her down a little and share a family memory, so as she paced by me I spoke to her back.
"Deborah," I said, and she whipped around to look at me.
"What?" she said.
"Remember the Steeplechase?" I asked her. "You used to love that ride."
She stared at me as if I had asked her to jump off the tower. "Jesus Christ," she said. "We're not here to walk down memory fucking lane." And she spun back around and stalked away to the far side of the gate.
Obviously, my sister was not quite as overwhelmed by fond recollection as I was. I wondered if she was becoming less human while I became more so. But of course, there was the strange and very human moodiness that had been afflicting her lately, so it didn't seem likely.
In any case, Debs clearly thought that pacing and grinding her teeth was more fun than sharing happy memories of our youthful frolics in Buccaneer Land. So I let her stomp around while I looked through the fence for five more long minutes until Chutsky arrived.
And he finally did arrive, steering his car up behind Deborah's and climbing out holding a metallic briefcase, which he put down on the hood of his car. Deborah stormed over and gave him a typically warm and loving greeting.
"Where the fuck have you been?" she said.
"Hey," Chutsky said. He reached to give her a kiss, but she pushed past him and grabbed for the briefcase. He shrugged and nodded at me. "Hey, buddy," he said.
"What have you got?" she said, and he took the case from her and popped it open.
"You said hardware," he said. "I didn't know what you were expecting, so I brought a selection." He lifted out a small assault rifle with a folding stock. "Heckler and Koch's finest," he said, holding it up, then laid it on the hood and reached back into the case and came out with a pair of much smaller weapons. "Nice little Uzi here," he said. He patted one affectionately with the steel hook he had nowadays instead of a left hand, and then put it down and took out two automatic pistols. "Couple of standard service models, nine-millimeter, nineteen shots in the mag." He looked at Deborah fondly. "Any one of 'em a whole lot better than that piece of shit you carry around," he said.
"It was Daddy's," Deborah said, lifting up one of the pistols.
Chutsky shrugged. "It's a forty-year-old wheel gun," he said. "Almost as old as me, and that ain't good."