Peter Pan Must Die (50 page)

The second oddity was a black metal object, half the size of a carton of cigarettes, on the ground between Gurney and the bouquet. His reaction to that was sudden and physical, yanking the handlebars to the right and twisting the throttle. The bike pivoted sharply, propelling a shower of dirt and pebbles into the darkness and accelerating along the edge of the tarn.

Had he failed to get out of the way as quickly as he did, the explosion that followed would have killed him. As it was, the only negative effect was a painful blast of dirt and small stones against his back.

In response to this attempt on his life, he called out in his best team-leader voice. “All units converge, back slope, Barrow Hill. Remote explosive. No casualties.” The idea was to increase the pressure. Make Panikos get reckless, make mistakes, lose control. Maybe hit a tree, flip into a ditch. The goal was to stop him, one way or another.

The unforgivable thing would be to let him get away.

To let the red BMW race off into the distance and disappear forever.

No. That wasn’t going to happen.
No matter what, that wasn’t going to happen again
.

He couldn’t let Panikos get too far ahead. At two hundred yards, for example, he might have the space and time he’d need to come to a sudden stop, turn, steady his weapon, and get off a good shot while Gurney was still too far away to have a chance with the Beretta.

With his attention alternating rapidly now between the ATV taillights and the rutted trail, Gurney was neither gaining nor losing ground. But with every passing second on the bike, he could feel his physical motorcycle memory returning. Like skiing after a long layoff, heading down that trail was bringing back his timing and coordination. By the time they emerged onto the paved surface of Beaver Cross,
the ATV still about a hundred yards ahead of him, Gurney felt confident enough to open up the throttle all the way.

The ATV seemed unusually fast—apparently built or modified for racing—but the BSA was faster. Within a mile, Gurney had reduced the gap between them to fifty, maybe forty yards—still too far for a pistol shot from a motorcycle. He figured he’d be close enough in another half mile or so.

Perhaps sensing the same possibility from the opposing point of view, Panikos veered off the paved road onto a roughly parallel farm track that ran along the verge of a long cornfield. Gurney did the same, in case the little man decided to head off into the cornfield itself.

Even more rutted than the Barrow Hill trail, the farm track imposed its own speed limit of twenty to thirty miles per hour, taking away the BSA’s open-road advantage and preserving Panikos’s lead—even widening it a bit, since the forks and shocks of his machine were more suited to the surface than Gurney’s.

The track and its adjacent cornfield sloped down to the relatively flatter but still severely uneven terrain of the river valley. At the end of the track, Panikos continued on into the abandoned pasture of what Gurney had been told was once the region’s largest dairy farm. Now a patchwork of large grassy hummocks and muddy rivulets, it gave the ATV a distinct advantage over the BSA, widening Panikos’s lead to the original hundred yards and then some, impelling Gurney to push the BSA at insane speeds through the equivalent of an unlit slalom course. There was a primal simplicity in hot pursuit that anesthetized fear and suppressed any reasonable calculation of risk.

In addition to the red taillights that he was zeroing in on, he began catching glimpses of other lights farther down the valley. Colored lights, white lights, some seemingly fixed in place, some moving. These at first had a disorienting effect on him. Where the hell was he? Bright arrays of lights were as uncommon in Walnut Crossing as meadowlarks in Manhattan. Then, when he saw an arc of orange lights slowly rotating, it came to him.

It was the Ferris wheel at the Summer Mountain Fair.

Panikos was still widening his lead through a wet depression of boggy land that separated the former pasture from the higher and
drier square-mile field that was home to the fair and its parking areas. For a few desperate seconds, Gurney thought he’d lost Panikos in the sea of vehicles surrounding the perimeter fence of the fair itself. But then he caught sight of the familiar taillights moving along an outer parking lane in the direction of the exhibitors’ entrance.

By the time he reached that entrance himself, the ATV had already passed through it. Three young women wearing
FAIR SECURITY
armbands, evidently in charge of controlling that admission point, looked disconcerted. One was on a walkie-talkie, the other on a cell phone. Gurney pulled up next to the third. Straddling the bike, he flashed his NYPD-Retired credentials at her as he spoke. “Did an ATV just run this gate?”

“Damn right! Kid on a camo four-by-four. You after him?”

He hesitated for half a second at the word “kid” before realizing that, seen fleetingly, Panikos would give that exact impression.

“Yes, I am. What was he wearing?”

“Wearing? Jeez … I … maybe some kind of shiny black jacket? Like one of those nylon windbreaker things? I’m not really sure.”

“Okay. Did you see which way he went?”

“Yeah, freakin’ little creep! Right through there.” She pointed at a makeshift alleyway between one of the main tents and a long row of RVs and motor homes.

Gurney passed through the gate, headed into narrow passage, and proceeded to the far end of it, where it connected with one of the fair’s main concourses. The carefree look of the ambling crowd seemed to preclude any recent encounter with a speeding ATV—meaning that Panikos had probably slipped through one of the many spaces between the motor homes and could now be anywhere in the fairgrounds.

Gurney pivoted the BSA and sped back up the alley to the gate area, where he saw that the three young women had now been joined in their consternation by a sour-faced cop—no doubt one of the locals moonlighting in the security detail.

Gray-haired and paunchy, stretching a uniform that might have fit him ten years earlier, he eyed the BSA with a blatant combination of envy and contempt.

“What’s the problem here?”

Gurney showed his ID. “The guy who ran your gate a couple of
minutes ago is armed and dangerous. I have reason to believe he shot out a tire on my car.”

The cop was eyeing the ID like it was a North Korean passport. “You carrying?”

“Yes.”

“That card says you’re retired. You got your carry permit on you?”

Gurney flipped quickly to the section of his wallet that displayed the permit. “There’s a time factor here, Officer. The guy on the ATV is a serious—”

The cop cut him off. “Remove that from your wallet and hand it to me.”

Gurney did so, his voice rising. “Listen to me. The guy on the ATV is a fugitive murder suspect. Losing him now would not be a good thing.”

The cop examined the permit. “Slow down
 … Detective
. You’re a long way from the Rotten Apple.” He wrinkled his nose unpleasantly. “This fugitive of yours have a name?”

This was not a can of worms Gurney had planned to open, but now he saw no alternative. “His name is Petros Panikos. He’s a professional killer.”

“He’s a
what
?”

The three young women assigned to mind the gate were standing in a row behind the cop, wide-eyed.

Gurney was straining to maintain his patience. “Petros Panikos killed seven people in Cooperstown this week. He may have caused the death of a police officer half an hour ago. He’s in your fairgrounds right now. Is this getting through to you?”

The cop put his hand on the butt of his holstered gun. “Who the hell are you?”

“My ID told you exactly who I am—David Gurney, Detective First Grade, NYPD-Retired. I also told you I’m in pursuit of a murder suspect. Now I’m going to tell you something else. You’re creating an unnecessary obstruction to his capture. If your obstruction results in his escape, your career is over. You hear what I’m saying, Officer?”

The muddy hostility in the cop’s eyes was sharpening into something more dangerous. His lips drew back, revealing the tips of clenched yellow teeth. He took a slow step backward. With his hand
tightening on his gun, the movement was far more threatening than a step forward. “That’s it. Get off the bike.”

Gurney looked past him and spoke to the row of gaping young women in a loud, deliberate voice. “Call your head of security! Get him out here to this gate—NOW!”

The cop turned around, raising his free hand in a
stop
gesture. “You don’t need to call anybody. Nobody. No call. I’m taking care of this myself.”

It struck Gurney that this might be his only chance. Risk be damned—losing Panikos was not an acceptable option. He gave the throttle a quick twist, pulled the handlebars down to the right, spun the machine in a one-eighty, and, with the rear tire smoking, shot back down into the alleyway behind the motor homes. Halfway to the main concourse, he made a sharp turn in between two of the big vehicles and found himself threading his way through a maze of RVs of all shapes and sizes. He soon emerged onto one of the fair’s narrower concourses, along which exhibitor tents displayed everything from wildly colored Peruvian hats to chain-sawed bear sculptures. He abandoned the BSA in a half-hidden space between two of the tents, one selling Walnut Crossing sweatshirts and the other straw cowboy hats.

On an impulse, he bought one of each, then stopped in a restroom farther along on the same concourse to cover the dark, short-sleeved shirt he was wearing with the light gray sweatshirt. He moved the Beretta from his ankle holster to the sweatshirt pocket, and checked his appearance in the restroom mirror. The change, along with the brim of the cowboy hat shielding his eyes, convinced him he’d be less recognizable, at least at a distance, either by Panikos or the troublesome cop.

It occurred to him then that Panikos might be taking similar steps to blend in with his surroundings—and that raised an obvious question. As Gurney began searching the crowd for the little man, what characteristics was he looking for?

His height—which had been estimated at between four-ten and five-two—would put him in the range of most middle-schoolers. Unfortunately, middle-schoolers probably comprised at least several hundred of the approximately ten thousand visitors at the fair. Were there other criteria that could narrow the profile? The security videos had been useful in establishing certain facts, but for the purpose of
generating a likeness independent of the original context, their value was limited—since so much of Panikos’s hair and face had been covered with sunglasses, headband, scarf. His nose had been visible and distinctive, as well as his mouth, but little else—little that would facilitate the quick scanning of faces in a moving crowd.

The stressed security girl at the gate said she thought he was wearing a black jacket, but Gurney gave that little weight. She hadn’t sounded sure, and even if she had, pressured eyewitness reports like that were more often dead wrong than anywhere near right. And whatever he might have been wearing when he ran the gate, Panikos could have altered his appearance as quickly and easily as Gurney just had. So, for the moment at least, he was looking for a short, thin person with a sharp nose and a childlike mouth.

As if to underscore the insufficiency of that description, an excited cluster of at least a dozen kids—ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, maybe twelve-year-olds—crossed the concourse just ahead of him. Perhaps half of them would fall outside the size parameters either because of their height or pudginess, but Panikos could easily blend in with the other half.

In fact, suppose he
had
blended in. Suppose Panikos was among them, right there in front of him. How could Gurney pick him out?

It was a discouraging challenge—particularly since the whole group had evidently visited one of the fair’s face painters, obscuring their features under the visages of what Gurney assumed were comic-book superheroes. And how many similar little groups might there be—all circulating through the fairgrounds at that moment, with Panikos as a potential hanger-on?

It was then that he noticed what the members of this particular group were doing. They were approaching other fairgoers, adults primarily, with bunches of flowers. He picked up his pace and followed them onto the larger concourse to observe more closely what was happening.

They were selling the flowers—or, more accurately, giving a free bunch to anyone who would make a minimum ten-dollar donation to the Walnut Crossing Flood Relief Fund. But the thing that captured his attention—one hundred percent of his attention—was the appearance of these bouquets.

The flowers were rust-red mums, and the stems were wrapped in yellow tissue—seemingly identical to those left by Panikos on the rock by the tarn.

What did this mean? Processing the implications, Gurney came quickly to the conclusion that the flowers by the tarn had most likely come from the fair, which meant that Panikos had been there prior to his visit to Barrow Hill, which raised an interesting question:

Why?

Surely he hadn’t gone to the fair originally for the purpose of acquiring a bouquet to bring to Gurney’s property—since he would’ve had no way of knowing such a thing would be available there and a local florist would have been a more obvious source in any event. No, he’d gone to the fair for some other reason, and the mums had been secondary.

So what was the primary reason? It sure as hell wasn’t for the rustic amusement, cotton candy, and cow-flop bingo. Then why on earth …?

The ringing of his phone interrupted his train of thought.

It was Hardwick, highly agitated. “Shit, man! Are you all right?”

“I think so. What’s going on?”

“That’s what I want to know! Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m at the fair. So is Panikos.”

“Then what the hell’s happening at your place?”

“How do you know—?”

“I’m out on the county route, approaching your turnoff, and there’s a fucking convoy—two trooper cruisers, a sheriff’s car, and a BCI SUV—all heading up your road. Fuck’s going on?”