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 fairgrounds 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.