"There!" cried Rigby.

He had to follow her pointing hand before he saw it.

Above the bare trunks of the deciduous trees up the hill and just visible through the wind-tossed branches, rose the semicircle of a Ferris wheel minus most of its upper cars.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The amusement park was much larger than Kurtz had imagined, covering four or five acres of level land—a sort of shelf notched into the steep slope a couple of hundred yards below the brow of the wooded hill. The actual amusement park land had probably been leveled or extended out from the original slope by bulldozers and other heavy equipment, but it was impossible to tell exactly where now that tall trees had grown up over the decades of abandonment.

Kurtz and Rigby approached cautiously, right hands ready to go for their respective weapons, but the place was empty enough; bird and insect sounds—waning but still present on this late October day—suggested that there was no lurking human threat.

From their vantage point at the center of what had once been a sort of midway, Kurtz could see the huge Ferris wheel fifty yards away—rusted, paint missing, lightbulbs mostly gone on the struts and crossmembers, only four cars left on its flimsy wheel—as well as the overgrown bumper car pavilion, some tumbled ticket booths with bushes and small trees grown up inside, a Tilt-a-Whirl with all of its hooded cars ripped off their tracks and scattered in the surrounding weeds, and a line of empty, broken booths that could have housed shooting galleries and other suckers' games.

"Is this it?" asked Rigby. "The place you saw in Peg O'Toole's snapshots?"

Kurtz nodded.

They walked along the overgrown shelf of land between the taller trees, pausing here and there—in front of a tumbledown funhouse with its plywood facade broken, its garish paint faded like some ancient Italian fresco—then next to a beautiful merry-go-round or carousel Kurtz could never remember which went in which direction, although these shattered horses and camels and giraffes had once rotated counter-clockwise.

"What a shame," said Rigby, touching the shattered face of one of the painted horses. They had actually been carved by hand from wood, although the heads were hollow. Vandals had shattered all of the animals' faces, broken their legs, ripped most of them from their poles, and tossed them into the weeds, which had then grown up and around and through them.

They walked past the bumper car pavilion. The flat roof had fallen in and the once-white floor was covered with puddles and plaster. Most of the heavy bumper cars had been dragged out and thrown here and there, some pushed down the hillside, one even wedged in the lower branches of a tree. Kurtz could see the 9' of the Cloud Nine insignia in fading gold paint on some of the rusted cars. He matched up one tumbled car with the memory of the photo Parole Officer O'Toole had shown him. The weeds and trees seemed taller than he remembered from the photograph.

"Well," said Kurtz when they paused by the Ferris wheel, "the old news articles said that the Major had built this place to keep the youth of Neola busy. It looks as if they've been busy enough over the last few decades, although I don't think it was vandalism that the Major had in mind."

Rigby wasn't listening. "Look," she said. "Someone's replaced most of the gas engine that powers the Ferris wheel. And those chains and pulleys are new."

"I noticed that," said Kurtz. "The motor in the center of the carousel has been worked on as well. And did you notice the new bulbs on the wheel?"

Rigby walked around the base of the Ferris wheel. "Weird. Most of them are broken or missing, but it looks like someone is replacing… what?… one out of ten of the lights?"

"And there are newer electrical cables in the weeds as well," said Kurtz. He pointed to a flat area of battered buildings about a hundred feet up the midway road. "I think they all head that way."

They followed the heavy electrical cable from the Ferris wheel toward the tumbledown funhouse complex. Rigby pointed out several places where the new cable had been covered over with humus or dirt as if for concealment.

To the rear of the rotting funhouse, all but hidden by the peeling facades and trees behind it, someone had fashioned a shack out of new lumber. The sides were still unfinished, but the roof was shingled and plastic kept the weather out. The top of the funhouse facade had bent backwards here, and a huge, inverted clown face hung over the shack and almost touched the small porch. On that porch, covered with plastic wrapped tightly by bungee cords, was an oversized new gasoline-powered electrical generator. Jerry cans of gasoline were lined up nearby.

Rigby checked out the shack and pointed to several covered toolboxes. She lifted a large, yellow power naildriver—the completely portable kind with its massive magazine of nails.

"You think it works?" she asked, holding the heavy thing in both of her pale hands.

"One way to find out," said Kurtz.

Rigby aimed back into the shack and squeezed the trigger.

BWAP. The five-inch nail ripped through the plastic sheeting and embedded itself in the plywood wall ten feet farther in.

"It works," said Rigby.

They spent some time in the shack—found nothing more personal than a moldy cot in the back minus any bedding—and then strolled down the hill to the center of the overgrown midway.

"The newspaper articles Arlene found said that there was a kiddie-locomotive up here somewhere," said Kurtz.

"We'll find it later," said Rigby. She dropped onto a lush patch of grass near the carousel, just where the hill began to rise again, and patted the grass next to her. "Sit down a minute, Joe."

He sat four feet from her and looked out through the trees at the view of the Allegheny River and the town of Neola a mile or so below them to the north. With the remaining fall foliage in the hills surrounding the community and a couple of white church spires visible, Neola looked more like some quaint New England village than a raw, Western New York industrial town.

"Let's talk a minute," said Rigby.

"All right," said Kurtz. "Tell me how it is that the DEA, FBI, AFT and other agencies have suspected the Major and SEATCO of being part of a heroin ring for years and yet the Major's still a free man and Neola still seems to be getting money from the heroin trade? Why haven't the alphabets been all over this place like hair on a gorilla?"

"I didn't mean talk about that."

"Answer the question, Rig."

She looked out and down at the town. "I don't know, Joe. Paul didn't tell me everything about the DEA briefing."

"But you think Kemper knows."

"Maybe."

Kurtz shook his head. "What the hell keeps law enforcement off a heroin ring, for fuck's sake?" He looked back at Rigby King. "Some sort of national security thing?"

The sun had peeked out and was illuminating their part of the hillside now, making the still-green grass leap out from the dull, autumn background in vibrant color. Rigby took off her corduroy jacket, despite the cold breeze blowing in. The press of her nipples was visible even through the thick, pink material of the Oxford cloth shirt. "I don't know, Joe. I think the feds and feebies have been wise to the Major since long before nine-eleven. Can we talk about what I want to talk about?"

Kurtz looked away from her again, squinting through his Ray Charles sunglasses at Neola now glowing white in the moving shafts of October sunlight. "CIA?" he said. "Some sort of quid pro quo bullshit between them and the Major's network? Arlene's clipped articles said that this SEATCO also traded with Syria and places like that, as well as with Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand…"