Standing before the garish display — that childishly drawn yet vaguely fiendish Aladdin face, with its lumpy nose and prissy mouth, towering over me — I felt like a child again, a child too young to handle the bizarre thrills of Riverview. That the immense park lay shrouded in darkness had not been as disturbing as seeing this one attraction aglow in the night...
The door in the fence beside the minaret ticket booth stood open, and I lugged my duffel bag down a cobblestone path through Aladdin’s overgrown front yard to the stairway that lay flat against the facade and led up past the pointing beard to a doorway in Aladdin’s right shoulder. This door was open, too — and nobody asked for a ticket. Hadn’t had a bargain like this since I got those shiny pennies.
I’d been through this place with a date, a time or two, but didn’t remember the layout. Immediately I was in a maze of screen doors; all the damn things looked identical and I hit dead end after dead end, until finally I was in a hall of mirrors — looking skinny and fat in various ones, and not particularly intelligent in any.
Soon I was passing through a room with a slanted floor, having to hold on with my free hand to a railing to keep from pitching onto my ass. Then I was in a dark corridor, and tinny speakers emitted snake charmer music, telegraphing the lighted-up wall recess in which a fake cobra lunged at me; I didn’t even react to that cheap shit, but I flinched when a scimitar-wielding dummy Arab appeared on the other side of me... damn near went for the .38...
This corridor emptied me into one of those rooms with a floor of round metal disks that rotated as you stepped on them. I had to use all my concentration to make it across without a tumble, and when I entered the adjacent corridor, another dark one, somebody grabbed me from behind, one arm looping powerfully around me, while the other arm came around and a hand deftly fished the .38 out from under my shoulder.
I didn’t have time to struggle — I was simply dragged bodily through a doorway into a little bare room with unpainted wooden walls and slatted flooring, and nothing in it but a big switchbox on one wall. The cubbyhole was barely big enough for all three of us: me, the guy behind me with his arms looped around my chest, and Jackie Payne, who was tied into a wooden chair, a handkerchief gag in her mouth.
She was conscious and her eyes were wide with alarm and concern and a hundred other things. The rope — greasy carny cord — cut tightly against her pink sweater and matching slacks... it was the same outfit she’d been wearing when I picked her up off the street corner on Sheridan... the ropes making smudgy stains, and obviously hurting her, her wrists behind her, her ankles tied together, not to the chair. Her feet were bare, which led me to think she’d been snatched out of her apartment. Her left sweater sleeve was yanked back and the tracks and bruises on her slender white arm were painfully apparent.
The guy shoved me past her, into a corner of the shack-sized room, and positioned himself opposite me, with Jackie in between, giving me my first good look at him — actually, my second good look, because not long ago I’d had another memorable view of him, when he and his partner were heading right at me, about to run me down in that maroon coupe in Little Hell.
This was the tall, lanky one, with the harelip scar through his mustache. Hatless, he had neatly combed longish brown hair, his eyes brown and cold, his cheek bones rather sharp — he was like a pale Apache; I put him in his late twenties, though there was experience in that hard face. He wore a glen plaid brown suit that had a tailored look and a silk green-and-brown striped tie; he was a natty son of a bitch, for a guy training my own .38 on me. Well, the elevator operator’s .38.
“You don’t have to die,” he said.
This was not the voice I’d heard on the telephone: so there was at least one more of them... probably the other mustached assassin, the smaller, round-faced one.
“Sooner or later, we all do,” I said.
That snake charmer music was still playing, distantly, over scratchy speakers.
The mustache curled into a small smile. “Well... it can be sooner, if you insist. You got what I want?”
He meant the Drury notebooks.
I hefted the duffel bag.
“That’s it?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“It’s not gym clothes,” I said. Truthfully.
Her eyes agonized now, Jackie — tied tight in her chair — was looking back and forth between us, as if she were following a tennis match with life-and-death consequences. Maybe she was.
As he pointed the .38 at me with one hand, he reached his other hand into a suitcoat pocket. Then he tossed something, which clunked on the wooden floor at Jackie’s feet. A pocket-knife — a good-size one.
“You give me what’s in that bag,” he said, “and I’ll just go. And by the time you cut the little junkie loose, I’ll be long gone. You’ll have what you want, I’ll have what I want.”
“Where’s your partner?”
