Peter Pan Must Die

Also by John Verdon

Think of a Number

Shut Your Eyes Tight

Let the Devil Sleep

There was a time when he dreamt of being the head of a great nation. A nuclear power
.

As the president, he would have his finger on the nuclear trigger. With a twitch of that finger he could launch nuclear missiles. He could obliterate huge cities. He could put an end to the human stink. He could wipe the rotten slate clean
.

With maturity, however, had come a more practical perspective, a more realistic sense of what was possible. He knew that the nuclear trigger would never be within his reach
.

But other triggers were available. One day at time, one trigger-pull at a time, much could be accomplished
.

As he thought about it—and through his teenage years he’d thought about little else—a plan for his future slowly took shape. He came to know what his specialty would be—his art, his expertise, his field of excellence. And that was no small thing, since previously he had known almost nothing about himself, had no sense of who or what he was
.

He had so few memories of anything before he was twelve
.

Only the nightmare
.

The nightmare that came again and again
.

The circus. His mother, smaller than the other women. The terrible laughter. The music of the merry-go-round. The deep, constant growling of the animals
.

The clown
.

The huge clown who gave him money and hurt him
.

The wheezing clown whose breath smelled like vomit
.

And the words. So clear in the nightmare that their edges were as jagged as ice smashed against stone. “This is our secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll feed your tongue to the tiger.”

In the rural Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, August was an unstable month, lurching back and forth between the bright glories of July and the gray squalls of the long winter to come. It was a month that could erode one’s sense of time and place. It seemed to feed Dave Gurney’s confusion over where he was in his life—a confusion that had begun with his retirement from the NYPD three years earlier, after twenty-five years on the job, and had intensified when he and Madeleine had moved out to the country from the city where they’d both been born, raised, educated, and employed.

At that moment, a cloudy late afternoon in the first week of August, with low thunder grumbling in the distance, they were climbing Barrow Hill, following the remnant of a dirt road that linked three small bluestone quarries, long abandoned and full of wild raspberry brambles. He was trudging along behind Madeleine as she headed for the low boulder where they normally stopped to rest, doing his best to take her frequent advice:
Look around you. You’re in a beautiful place. Just relax and absorb it
.

“Is that a tarn?” she asked.

Gurney blinked. “What?”

“That.” She inclined her head toward the deep, still pool that filled the broad hollow left years ago by the removal of the bluestone. Roughly round, it stretched from where they sat by the trail to a row of water-loving willow trees on the far side—a glassy expanse perhaps two hundred feet across that mirrored the weeping branches of the trees so precisely, the effect resembled trick photography.

“A
tarn
?”

“I was reading a wonderful book about hiking in the Scottish Highlands,” she said earnestly, “and the writer was forever coming upon ‘tarns.’ I got the impression that it was some kind of rocky pond.”

“Hmm.”

His nonresponse led to a long silence, broken finally by Madeleine. “See down there? That’s where I was thinking we should build the chicken coop, right by the asparagus patch.”

Gurney had been staring bleakly at the reflection of the willows. Now he followed her line of sight down a gentle slope through an opening in the woods formed by an abandoned logging road.

One reason that the boulder by the old quarry had become their habitual stopping place was that it was the only point on the trail from which their property was visible—the old farmhouse, the garden beds, the overgrown apple trees, the pond, the recently rebuilt barn, the surrounding hillside pastures (long untended and full this time of year with milkweed and black-eyed Susans), the part of the pasture by the house that they mowed and called a lawn, the swath up through the low pasture that they mowed and called a driveway. Madeleine, perched now on the boulder, always seemed pleased at this uniquely framed view of it all.

Gurney didn’t feel the same. Madeleine had discovered the spot herself shortly after they’d moved in, and from the first time she had shown it to him all he could think of was that it was the ideal location for a sniper to target someone entering or leaving their house. (He had the good sense not to mention this to her. She did work three days a week in the local psychiatric clinic, and he didn’t want her thinking he was in need of treatment for paranoia.)

The need to build a chicken coop, its projected size and appearance, and the site where it should be built had become daily topics of conversation—obviously exciting to her, mildly irritating to him. They had acquired four chickens in late May at Madeleine’s urging and had been housing them in the barn—but the idea of moving them up to new quarters by the house had taken hold.

“We could build a nice little coop with an enclosed run between the asparagus patch and the apple tree,” she said brightly, “so on hot days they’d have shade.”

“Right.” The word came out more wearily than he’d intended.

The conversation might have deteriorated from there had Madeleine’s attention not been diverted. She tilted her head.

“What is it?” asked Gurney.

“Listen.”

He waited—not an unusual experience. His hearing was normal, but Madeleine’s was extraordinary. A few seconds later, as the breeze rustling the foliage subsided, he heard something in the distance, somewhere down the hill, perhaps on the town road that dead-ended into the low end of their pasture “driveway.” As it grew louder, he recognized the distinctive growl of an oversized, undermuffled V8.

He knew someone who drove an old muscle car that sounded exactly like that—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO—someone for whom that brash exhaust note was the perfect introduction.

Jack Hardwick.

He felt his jaw tightening at the prospect of a visit from the detective with whom he had such a bizarre history of near-death experiences, professional successes, and personality clashes. Not that he hadn’t been anticipating the visit. In fact, he’d known it was coming from the moment he’d heard about the man’s forced departure from the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And he realized that the tension he felt now had a lot to do with what had happened prior to that departure. A serious debt had been incurred, and some kind of payment would have to be made.

A formation of low dark clouds was moving quickly over the far ridge as though retreating from the violent sound of the red car—now visible from where Gurney was sitting—as it made its way up the mowed pasture swath to the farmhouse. He was briefly tempted to stay on the hill until Hardwick left, but he knew that would accomplish nothing—only extend the period of discomfort before the inevitable meeting. With a small grunt of determination he got up from his place on the boulder.

“Were you expecting him?” asked Madeleine.