He hated them all and wanted to be rid of them. The carving knives on the table beckoned to him, but no… too crude. Surely someone with his brain could think of a way to dispose of the three of them without drawing suspicion. Perhaps—

A shout interrupted his thoughts. Brad was on his feet, leaning over the table, jabbing his finger at Kent's face.

"Stop sweating! I can hear you sweating and it makes me sick!"

"I make you sick?" Kent said, leaping to his feet. "Listen, Twinkle-toes, if anybody around here makes people sick it's you and your pretty-boy clothes and incessant whining."

Brad's jaw dropped. "What? What are you implying?"

"I'm not implying a goddamn thing! I'm telling you you're—"

"Here!" Dragovic shouted.

He'd grabbed two of the knives and now he slid them down the table. They rotated lazily along their course and stopped between Brad and Kent.

Brad stopped, eyes wide.

"Look at him!" Kent laughed. "What a pussy!"

"Pussy?" Brad's face contorted with rage. His hand flashed out and snatched up one of the knives. "I'll show you who's a pussy!"

He leaped at Kent and they both went down beyond the far end of the table, out of Luc's line of sight. He heard thumping and thrashing and grunts and cries, saw Kent's bloody hand appear, watched it feel around, find the other knife, then disappear again.

Luc didn't stand, didn't move beyond turning his head toward Dragovic. It sounded as if Brad and Kent were killing each other, and he prayed that was the case. That would leave only Dragovic.

The Serb's eyes were on the battle playing out on the floor in front of him. He watched it avidly, grinning like a shark who smells blood and is waiting to feed on both the victor and the vanquished.

Then the thrashing stopped and a gasping and very bloody Kent Garrison struggled to his feet. Luc saw Dragovic pick up one of the two remaining knives and palm the handle upside down, rising and approaching Kent with the blade hidden against the underside of his forearm.

"Are you all right?"

Kent grinned. "Better than you'll be!"

Without warning, he slashed at Dragovic. But the Serb seemed to have expected it. He ducked back, then whipped his own blade across Kent's throat. Blood sprayed across the table as Kent dropped from view with a bubbling groan.

Luc's mind raced at light speed. Perfect! Kent gets blamed for killing Brad, Dragovic gets blamed for killing Kent, and I kill Dragovic in self-defense. He made no conscious decision: he was suddenly up on the table with a knife in his hand and in full charge toward Dragovic as the Serb turned toward him…

21

Between the traffic jam at the Midtown Tunnel and the overturned tractor-trailer at the Springfield Boulevard overpass on the LIE, Jack felt almost lucky to reach Monroe in two hours.

His tentative plan was to drive across the grass in the darkness and pull right up to the tent, duck under the flap, splash Scar-lip with gas, light a match, and send it back to hell. Then, during the ensuing panic and confusion, look for Nadia.

But as he took the narrow road out to the marsh, he began to feel a crawling sensation in his gut.

Where were the tents?

Slewed his car to a halt on the muddy meadow and stared in disbelief at the empty space before his headlights. Jumped out and looked around. Gone. Hadn't passed them on the road. Where—?

Heard a sound and whirled to find a gnarled figure standing on the far side of his car. In the backwash from the headlights he could make out that the man was old and grizzled and unshaven, but not much more.

"If you're looking for the show," the man said, "you're a little late. But don't worry. They'll be back next year."

"Did you see them go?"

"Course," he said. "But not before I collected my rent."

"Do you know where—?"

"M'name's Haskins. I own this land, y'know, and you're on it."

Jack's patience was fraying. "I'll be glad to get off it; just tell me—"

"I rent it out every year to that show. They really seem to like Monroe. But I—"

"I need to know where they went."

"You're a little old to be wantin' to run off with the circus, ain't you?" he said with a wheezy laugh.

That did it. "Where did they go?"

'Take it easy," the old guy said. "No need for shouting. They're makin' the jump to Jersey. They open in Cape May tomorrow night."

Jack ran back to his car. South Jersey. Only a couple of possible routes for a caravan of trucks and trailers: the Cross Bronx Expressway to the George Washington Bridge would take them too far north; the Beltway to the Verrazano and across Staten Island would drop them into Central Jersey. That was the logical route. But even if he was wrong, the only way to Cape May was via the Garden State Parkway. Jack gunned for the Parkway, figuring sooner or later he'd catch up to them.

WEDNESDAY

1

Took Jack another two frustrating hours just to reach Jersey. Midnight had come and gone and Cape May was still better than a hundred miles away. The limit on the parkway along here was sixty-five. Jack set the cruise control on seventy and kept his foot off the gas pedal. If he had his way he'd be doing ninety, but that would put a cop on his tail and he'd had enough cops already for one day.

Some day. When was it going to end? He was pretty sure the Berzerk had cleared his system, but his aches and pains seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Especially his head. He'd had the radio on earlier and some station had played "You Keep Me Hanging On." Now it kept droning through his frazzled brain, Diana Ross's voice like a power saw hitting a nail.

And worst of all, he saw a good chance this whole trip might be for nothing. Had no idea how often or how much a rakosh ate, but if it had fed on Bondy first, then Gleason, he might still have a chance of finding Nadia alive. A slim one, but he had to give it a shot. Might have a hard time living with himself if he didn't.

He'd figured a train of freak show trucks and trailers would be next to impossible to miss, but he damn near did. He was too intent on an all-news station's big breaking story as he flashed by the New Gretna rest area…

"… mass murder in midtown: gangland figure Milos Dragovic, known in many quarters as 'the Slippery Serb,' is dead, apparently of stab wounds, along with three top executives of a pharmaceutical firm. The four were found locked in a conference room in the GEM Pharma offices in midtown by a cleaning crew a short while ago. This is not Dragovic's first appearance in the news today. He was—"

Jack was a good hundred yards past the rest stop, congratulating himself on how well that stunt had worked, when something familiar about the motley assortment of vehicles clustered in the southern end of the parking lot registered in his consciousness.

He slowed, found an official use only cutoff, and made an illegal U-turn across the median onto the northbound lanes. Half a minute later he pulled into the rest area and found a parking spot near the Burger King/ Nathan's/TCBY sign where he had a good view of the freak show vehicles.

At this hour on a Wednesday morning in May, the rest area was fairly deserted. Except for a few couples straggling back from Atlantic City, Oz's folk had the lot pretty much to themselves. But why this rest area of all places? This was the only one Jack knew of that had a State Police barracks for a neighbor.

He slumped in the seat. Bad thought: if Oz was traveling with someone he'd abducted, this would be the last place he'd stop. Sick foreboding settled on Jack like a wet tarp.

But he'd come this far…