Funland (16 page)

Her moves were too damn good.

Dave had a last glimpse of her blue shorts; then the milling crowd blocked her from his view.

The group of spectators Joan saw in front of Jasper’s Oddities reminded her of the banjo girl’s audience. Except there were more here. And some were rushing away. And the rest weren’t standing still, listening; instead, they jumped and shouted.

She stopped running and worked her way into the crowd, squeezing between the onlookers, snapping, “Out of my way! Police. Move aside. Out of the way. Police. Move it!” Some refused to budge. They didn’t want the show stopped. She fought her urge to knock them out of the way. She stepped around them.

People elbowed her.

Someone yanked the seat of her shorts, and she felt them slip down a bit before she batted the hand away.

Then she broke through the front of the crowd.

Like entering an arena.

“Police!” she shouted, rushing forward and trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “Break it up!”

A teenage male with a bloody face was bent over, driving a knee up into the stomach of a female. The female was naked except for cut-off jeans. The blow from the kid’s knee lifted her feet off the boardwalk.

A second female, this one in a leather skirt and torn tank top, pushed herself off the wood and charged the boy. She knocked the boy off his feet, and all three tumbled into a heap.

Drawing her nightstick, Joan turned her attention to the other group of fighters.

She wished she’d seen them first.

She rushed at them.

“Police!” she yelled.

The one on top, a freak with a purple Mohawk, leapt off the body and turned on Joan. He had a knife in his right hand, a severed ear in his left.

Behind him, a kid was sprawled on the boardwalk, clutching the side of his head. Another guy, under him, apparently an accomplice of the one with the Mohawk, thrust the victim aside and started to get up.

“Both of you freeze!” she shouted.

She glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye, looked to the left, and saw the two females fleeing. Joan had thought they were victims, but she quickly changed her mind. The crowd parted to make way for them. The kid stayed put, sitting on the boardwalk and wiping the blood off his face with a white T-shirt.

Joan snapped her eyes back to the pair of shirtless males. They both had knives. They glanced at each other.

“Drop your weapons!”

The one who’d been under the victim shook his head. The one holding the ear shook his head.

Joan considered going for her sidearm.

Right, she thought. And blow away a few spectators.

“Drop ’em right now!” That was Dave’s voice. It came from just behind her.

The grinning jerk with the Mohawk haircut popped the severed ear into his mouth. He started to chew, and Joan thought: They could’ve sewn it back on, you fuck-head!

The ear flew out of his mouth and slapped gently against Joan’s right breast an instant after her shoe drove into his solar plexus. It clung to her T-shirt. She cupped her free hand over it at the same moment the toe of her shoe caught the guy under the chin. Blood and bits of broken teeth exploded from his mouth. His knife sailed into the crowd at his back. Then he slammed the boardwalk and lay motionless.

His friend spun around. One of the spectators didn’t get out of his way fast enough. He jammed his knife into the man’s stomach, shoved the squealing guy backward, and rushed through the quickly parting crowd.

“I’ve got him,” Dave said.

As Dave went after him, Joan crouched by the kid squirming on the boardwalk. “I’ve got your ear,” she said. “They’ll put it back on. You’ll be good as new.” She hoped so. He appeared to have several other wounds.

She heard sirens.

“An ambulance’ll be here in a minute. Hang on.”

“Reckon I ain’t got much choice,” the kid muttered.

She hurried forward, and knelt beside the man who’d been knifed in the stomach. He was conscious, clutching his wound, whimpering and trying to dig his heels into the boardwalk.

She placed her empty hand on his hands and gently squeezed them. “You’ll be all right. Keep that pressure on the wound. Ambulance is on the way.”

Then she left him, deciding her best immediate course of action was to check out the wounds of the kid whose ear had been taken off, administer whatever first aid she could before the ambulance arrived.

Dave hurled himself over the railing and dropped to the beach. When his feet hit the sand, he let himself tumble forward. He rolled on his shoulder, came up facing the ocean, couldn’t spot the kid running away, and pivoted in time to see the kid dashing at him from under the boardwalk.

Not in time to avoid the thrusting knife.

As the blade sped toward him, he twisted sideways. Instead of plunging into his chest, it ripped across him. He didn’t feel pain, but he heard a tearing sound and felt a streak of warmth along his ribs.

He grabbed the attacker’s wrist. With his other hand he smashed the back of the elbow. He heard a pop, felt the joint go. The guy cried out and dropped the knife.

Dave threw him down on the sand. Kneeling, he yanked the broken arm up behind his back. The kid screamed, but didn’t resist. In seconds, Dave had him cuffed.

Jingles sat with her back against a piling, deep in the shadows beneath the boardwalk. Her stomach ached from catching that jerk-off’s knee. It seemed to help, sitting curled up this way, hugging her legs to her breasts.

“How long’s it been?” Lorna asked.

“Who knows? An hour?” Maybe even longer, Jingles thought. It seemed like ages ago that she’d heard the sirens. She’d peed herself when the kid smashed her, and her damp shorts hadn’t been uncomfortable at first. After a while, though, they’d started making her skin feel hot and itchy. It seemed as if she’d been living with that forever. “Maybe a couple hours,” she added.

“I bet the cops’ve cleared out by now,” Lorna said.

“So what?”

“Maybe we oughta get going.”

“Oh, right. I’m sure. Case you hadn’t noticed, I’m missing something. That rotten dickhead.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“I don’t know.” Jingles stood up, and let go of her belly long enough to pluck the damp seat of her cut-offs away from her rump. Turning around, she peered through the dark forest of pilings. She saw segments of bright, sunlit beach. A few people were wandering by. “How about you go out and find me a top?” she suggested.

“What, like grab a bikini off someone?”

“Or a towel.”

“Just like that, huh? Then the cops nail me and you’re still under here with your tits in the breeze.”

Jingles stepped back behind the post and met Lorna’s eyes. “You got any money?”

“I left my purse in the car.”

“Yeah, me too. Shit. Those shops up there, they’re loaded with stuff. How about going up and lifting me something?”

“Get real. Look at me.” She plucked at the front of her clinging tank top. “Where’m I gonna stash you a blouse or whatever, huh?”

Jingles shook her head. She could see right through the thin fabric of her friend’s top. Nothing could be hidden under the skirt either. It was way too short.

“You don’t gotta stash it anywhere,” Jingles explained.
“Wear
it. Grab a blouse, put it on, they’ll think it’s yours.”

“Forget it. Look at me. You think I can waltz into some shop and get away with
anything?”

“Guess not,” Jingles admitted. Lorna was right. Eyes would be on her the whole time because of her shaved head and clothes that revealed so much of her body. People had stared at her
before
the fight. Now her lower lip was split and puffy. Now a strap of her top was broken, leaving her right shoulder bare, the strap hanging down so that her breast was partly uncovered. Everybody would watch her. For one reason or another.

“One look at me,” Lorna said, “a damn shopkeeper’d send for the cops.”

“Not if it’s a guy,” Jingles said.

“No way. Forget it.”

“Then how about going to the car?” she asked.

“Woody locked it.”

“So break a window.”

“He’d kill me.”

“He ain’t gonna kill nobody. He’s probably behind bars. So you smash a window and get the purses and buy me—”

“You think I’m nuts? Break into the car in broad daylight?”

“I’d do it for you.”

“Easy for you to say, since you ain’t.”

“Gimme your shirt, I’ll go out and grab something.”

“Yeah, no thanks. Leave me here alone? You get picked up, and I’m stuck. Huh-uh. I can just see me trying to hitch a ride back to Three Corners, my…” Her eyes went wary. “Don’t even think about it. I can take you.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Come on, we’re pals. I’m gonna stick with you. We’ll figure something.”

Even if she could manage to get Lorna’s shirt, there’d be hell to pay later on. Lorna wouldn’t rest until she got even. Woody’d be in on the payback too.

“Look,” Lorna said. “How about we wait till dark? Then we jump whoever comes by, and get you something to wear. Good idea?”

“That’s
hours.”

“You got any better ideas?”

Jingles shook her head. “Guess not.”

They sat and waited, several feet apart, each with her back against a piling. After a while Lorna stretched out on the sand.

Jingles listened to the waves washing in against the shore, footsteps passing overhead, distant sounds of calliope music, the faint, far-off roar of the Hurricane.

There was nothing much to look at: the sand in front of her; some discarded bottles, bags, and rags probably left behind by winos; pilings as thick as telephone poles; the foundations of some buildings.

Not many foundations. She supposed that most of the buildings just rested on pilings. Where there were no foundations, the area under the boardwalk stretched into almost total darkness.

She didn’t like staring into the dark area.

She turned her eyes to the nearby foundation. She guessed it belonged to the Funhouse, since it was right next to the Oddities place and it was two stories high. That big, it probably needed a foundation.

The cinder-block wall rose all the way up to the planking of the boardwalk. The gray blocks were decorated with crude artwork, the kind of stuff Jingles had seen, and sometimes drawn, on the walls of bathroom stalls. Among the sketches of sex organs were cartoonlike drawings of skulls, spiders, snakes, mutilated bodies. Words scribbled around and over the pictures mostly referred to sex acts, but others were more disturbing. She read such phrases as “Suk my blood” and “Rip her up,” “Beware!” and “Satan Rules.”

One phrase, “Inter my parler,” was scrawled on the wall above a patch of crisscrossed boards near the middle of the foundation.

Jingles supposed that the planks covered a hole in the cinder blocks. Some of the winos had probably broken through the foundation, hoping to take shelter inside the abandoned Funhouse, and the boards had been put up to keep them out.

After dark, she thought, this place is probably crawling with bums.

We’ll be gone by then. Soon as the sun goes down, we’re out of here.

But before the sun went down, the fog came in. The area of darkness in front of Jingles spread closer. She found that she could no longer see the artwork and slogans on the cinder-block wall—which was just as well, since much of the graffiti made her nervous. But the afternoon’s heat was stolen away.

Shivering, Jingles eased away from the post. On hands and knees, she looked toward the beach. Out beyond the boardwalk, the air looked gray and misty.

A few people walked by. She could see them all right.

The fog was heavy enough to block out the sun, but not so thick that it would offer cover for their escape.

The sand seemed a lot warmer than the air, so Jingles crawled to her place behind the piling and lay down. She crossed her arms under her face for a pillow. That was better. The chilly air still crept over her back, but her front felt good, nestled in the sand.

She looked to the right. Lorna was still sprawled there, sleeping. She turned her head the other way.

She squinted through the faint light at the patch of boards on the Funhouse’s foundation.

If she could pry some of those boards away…

Nice and warm inside.

She gritted her teeth to stop their clicking.

Wait in there till dark. Safe and cozy.

Jingles pushed herself up. On her knees, she brushed the sand off her skin. Then she crawled over to Lorna and shook the girl awake.

Lorna rolled onto her side, curled up, and hugged herself. “God, it’s freezing!”

“Come on.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

Lorna followed Jingles to the boarded area of the foundation. “What’re we doing?”

“I think we can get in.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You rather freeze?”

Jingles dug her fingers under the end of a plank and pulled.

She expected resistance.

Figured the boards were nailed into the cinder blocks.

But the entire patch of crisscrossed wood swung toward her like a door.

It
is
a door!

Christ.

Through the opening in front of her was total darkness. But she felt heat swelling out.

“I don’t like this,” Lorna muttered.

I don’t either, Jingles thought. An actual door. A secret door. She didn’t like it at all.

But the heat felt wonderful.

“It’s warm,” she said. “Come on.”

Jingles stepped into the darkness. Lorna entered after her.

Jingles pulled the door shut.

“Yeah,” she said. The warmth seemed to seep into her skin. Her shivering stopped. She sighed. “This is great, huh?”

Then she felt hands all over her.

Sixteen

After taking a shower, Dave removed the sodden bandage that had been applied at the emergency room. The cut, about two inches below his right nipple and nearly four inches long, was cross-hatched with stitches so it resembled a zipper. Though the blade had sliced through his skin, it hadn’t penetrated to the muscle tissue.

If he’d been a little slower turning aside…