Parker went up the metal ladder to the catwalk, where the ropes and counterweights were. Nine backdrops and canvas flats were suspended above the stage now, each of them weighing two or three hundred pounds. Parker tied the ropes with slipknots to the railing waist-high beside the catwalk, then removed the metal weights from their wooden racks tied to the ropes. Each weight was about twenty pounds, a piece of iron shaped somewhat like a gold ingot. He lined them all along the edge of the catwalk, then climbed back down the ladder to the stage and went over to the main control board. He tried all the switches, and discovered two trap doors in the stage floor. He’d expected there might be one or two, having seen magic acts advertised out front.
The theater had nothing else to offer him, so he went back outside. It was almost fully night now, the buildings all merely black hulks against the pale snow. He was turning on the lights in each building when going in, and turning them off again on the way out, leaving the entire park in darkness. They’d see the intervals of light outside, if they were looking through the entrance, but it wouldn’t tell them anything.
To his left was the snake house. He’d already been in there, and it was empty, the cages standing open. The cages might prove handy eventually, but so far he didn’t see how.
Ahead was the band shell, even more useless than the snake house. Back behind the theater was the entrance to the outdoor jungle ride. There might be useful things there, but it was too dark now to look for them. That left the only other thing in the Voodoo Island section, another black-light ride, this one called Land of Voodoo. Parker walked across the crunching snow and kicked in the door to the Land of Voodoo.
Seven o’clock. Parker stepped into the watchman’s office and turned on the radio. He was just in time to hear the news announcer describe the seven-state manhunt being undertaken in the search for the lone bandit who escaped from today’s daring daylight robbery of a Merchant Bank’s armored car on Abelard Road near the ball park. All city police were working extra shifts, roadblocks were being set up all over the damn place, there was even a special phone number citizens could call if they wanted to confuse the issue. The two captured robbers, neither as yet identified, were unconscious still in Schumann Memorial Hospital, where they were both under tight police guard. “If their buddy tries to get them away from us again,” the chief of police was quoted as saying, “we’ll be ready for him.”
Parker shook his head and switched off the radio. The rest of the world had some strange Robin Hood ideas sometimes. He wouldn’t risk his neck to drag Grofield and Laufman out of the hospital now even if he could, and neither of them would expect him to. They were on their own now, to work things out the best way they could.
And so was Parker. He wouldn’t expect Grofield or Laufman or anybody else to come in here now and give him a hand. He’d walked into this himself, it was up to him to walk back out again himself. He understood that, and he didn’t worry about it. There was a telephone on the desk, but he hadn’t even bothered to check and see if it was working. There was no one to call.
It didn’t occur to him to call Claire. There was no point telling her he was in the middle of a mess, because there was nothing she’d be able to do about it. He would either get back to her or he wouldn’t. In the meantime, he had no space in his mind for anything but what was taking place right here.
He sat at the desk and studied the park map again. Had he covered everything, seen everything, considered every possibility?
The Land of Voodoo and Marooned! black-light rides both used boats traveling through channels of water, so he’d made electrical preparations with them just like the one in the Buccaneer! ride. He’d seeded the knives around in all eight sections of the park, retaining only two, their sheaths now attached to his belt and tucked partway down into his hip pockets. He’d checked out all the buildings and several of the outdoor attractions. There was nothing left to do now but wait.
He’d turned on the gooseneck lamp on the desk, but now he folded the map again and switched it off. There was an electric heater on the floor, he’d turned that on before, and in addition to heat it gave off an orange-red glow, enough light to move around by.
He carried the chair from the desk over to the window. Sitting there, he could just see the gates. He rested one elbow on the window sill and waited.
Eight o’clock. Parker was used to the dull red light from the electric heater, it was plenty to see by. He crossed the little office and turned on the radio and waited for the announcer to tell him why nobody had come through those goddam gates yet. But the announcer had no information on that subject. The only news he had about the robbery was that one of the robbers in Schumann Memorial Hospital, the one thought to have been the driver of the getaway car, was not expected to live. The other one was expected to live.
Parker turned off the radio again and went back through the red darkness and sat down in the chair and looked out through the white darkness to the yellow and gray darkness at the main gate. So Laufman was going to die. And Grofield was going to live. Well, Grofield had never been inside the pen, it would be a new experience for him.
Parker had only been inside once, and that was nine years ago, and it had been a simple prison farm in California on a simple vag charge, but it had wound up with his fingerprints on file for the first time in his life, and because of some other things that had happened, those fingerprints were now connected with a couple of murder charges, so even if it was legitimate law he was waiting for here and not hoods, it wouldn’t be very good.
Thinking about Grofield had made him think of prison, and that had made him think of his own single experience that way, and now he went from that to the death of his wife, Lynn, which had been involved in that whole mix-up that time nine years ago, and from that he got to thinking about other people he knew that were dead now, and how few died of old age. Dent, any day now, was going to be an exception.
There was a fellow named Salsa, very pretty but very tough. One time in Galveston when Parker had been staying briefly with a weird girl named Crystal, Salsa had said to him, “Your woman wishes to photograph me unclad.” He’d been asking Parker’s permission, and Parker had said, “What do I care?” That was shortly before Salsa was dead, in a job they were all doing together on an island. A real island, not a fun island.
Now he stirred and sat up and stretched his arms up in the air and shook his head. “I’m getting like Dent,” he said out loud. Sitting here thinking about dead people, as though his own life was over now.
It was having nothing to do. It was stupid that they didn’t come in. They should have come in a long time ago, in daylight. Now they not only had given him time to booby-trap the whole damn park against them, they’d given him darkness to hide in. They were just making it tough. Unless they weren’t coming in? Was that a possibility, any way at all? Parker leaned forward again, his elbows and forearms on the window sill, and brooded out at the silent empty gate, seen at an angle from here, and he thought about it. Possibility one: they were just going to wait out there until he came out again. Possibility two: for some reason, they’d changed their minds and gone away and there was no reason why he couldn’t just pick up the satchel and leave.
Possibility two was a fantasy, and he knew it, and he pushed it to one side. But what about possibility one? Could they really mean to lay siege to him here, just wait outside until he came out?