Peter Pan Must Die (Dave Gurney, No. 4): A Novel (A Dave Gurney Novel)

Madeleine was gazing at Gurney with an expression that was at once full of great relief and great weariness—the same qualities that were in her voice. “You came through it all right,” she said. Then added, “That’s the main thing.”

“Yes.”

“And you figured it all out. Once again.”

“Yes. At least, I think so.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.” On her face was a gentle, indecipherable smile.

A silence fell between them.

In addition to a deep wave of emotional and physical exhaustion, Gurney began to feel a widespread soreness and stiffness setting in—which, after some puzzlement, he attributed to being tackled by the two cops during his efforts to knock the pink cell phone out of Panikos’s hands.

He was suddenly too tired to think, too tired to stand.

For a moment, standing there in the hospital room, Gurney closes his eyes. When he does, he sees Peter Pan—all in black, with his back to him. The little man begins turning. His face is a bilious yellow, his smile blood red. Turning. Turning toward him, raising his arms like the wings of a predatory bird.

The eyes in the bilious face are the eyes of Carl Spalter. Full of horror and hate and despair. The eyes of a man who wished he’d never been born.

Gurney recoils at the vision, tries to focus on Madeleine.

She suggests that he lie down on the hospital bed. She offers to massage his neck and shoulders and back.

He agrees and soon finds himself in a drifting state of consciousness, feeling only the warmth and gentle pressure of her hands.

Her voice, soft and soothing, is the only other reality he is aware of.

In the place between exhaustion and sleep there is a locale of deep disengagement, simplicity, and clarity where he often found a kind of serenity he found nowhere else. He imagined it might be similar to the heroin addict’s rush—a surge of pure, impervious peace.

It normally was a state of isolation from all sensory stimuli—bringing with it a blessed inability to tell where his body ended and the rest of the world began—but tonight it is different. Tonight the sound of Madeleine’s voice and the penetrating warmth of her hands has been incorporated into the cocoon.

She is talking about walking on the coast of Cornwall, about the sloping green fields, the stone walls, the cliffs high above the sea …

Kayaking on a turquoise lake in Canada …

Cycling in Catskill valleys …

Picking blueberries …

Erecting bluebird houses along the border of the high pasture …

Crossing a stile on a footpath through a Scottish Highlands farm …

Her voice is as gentle and warm as the touch of her hands on his shoulders.

He can see her on a bicycle in white sneakers, yellow socks, fuchsia shorts, and a lavender nylon jacket shimmering in the sun.

Her smile is the smile of Malcolm Claret. Her voice and his voice are one.

“There is nothing in life that matters but love. Nothing but love.”

he’d remembered from a college psychology class, Freud’s theory of accidents—the idea that these events may not really be “accidental” at all but have a purpose: to prevent or punish an action about which the person is conflicted. “I wonder, could something like that have been behind Carl’s stumbling the way he did in front of his brother?”

As if groping for some organizing structure into which he could fit the chaotic events, he raised the subject of karma. “It wasn’t just Carl whose evil actions came flying back at him. I mean, think about it. The same thing happened to Panikos when he was crushed by the Ferris wheel that he blew up. And look what happened to Mick Klemper when he came after Dad. Even Lex Bincher—he kind of went wild with that big ego trip on RAM-TV, claiming credit for the whole investigation, and it got him killed. Man, like, this karma thing is real.”

Kyle sounded so earnest, so excited by this idea, so young—sounding and looking so much like he did in his enthusiastic moments as a teenager—that Gurney felt an urge to hug him. But to act on so spontaneous an impulse, especially in public, wasn’t in his nature.

A short while later two aides came to take Hardwick back to Radiology for some additional scans. As they settled him on the rolling stretcher, he turned to Gurney. “Thanks, Davey. I’m … I’m thinking you might have saved my life … getting me here so quickly.” A rare thing for Hardwick, he said it without any ironic twist.

“Well …” Gurney muttered awkwardly, never comfortable with being thanked, “you’ve got a fast car.”

Hardwick uttered a small laugh—which ended in a stifled yelp at the pain it produced—and they wheeled him out.

There was a prolonged silence in the room, broken by Hardwick. “Could have been even worse, maybe a lot worse,” he growled, coming back to life, “if Dave didn’t stop the little bastard when he did.”

To this observation there were somber nods of agreement.

“Plus,” added Hardwick, “in the middle of all that horrible shit, he managed to solve the Spalter murder case.”

Esti looked startled. “Solved … how?”

“Tell her, Sherlock.”

Gurney ran through the scenario with Carl as the tragic villain who initiated the plot that fatally backfired.

“So his plan was to eliminate his brother, take control of Spalter Realty, liquidate the assets for his own use?”

Gurney nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

Hardwick added his own nod. “Fifty million bucks. Just about right to buy the governor’s mansion.”

“And he figured we’d never get him for the hit? God, what an arrogant bastard!” She glanced curiously at Gurney. “You have a strange look on your face. What’s that about?”

“Just thinking that a hit on his brother could’ve been a major plus in Carl’s campaign. He could’ve positioned it as the mob’s effort to scare him out of politics—their effort to keep a man of integrity from taking over the state government. I wonder if that might have been part of his plan all along—to position his brother’s murder as proof of his own virtue?”

“I like it,” said Hardwick, with a cynical glint in his eyes. “Ride that fucking corpse like a white horse—straight to his inauguration!”

Esti changed the subject. “So Klemper and Alyssa were just rotten little vultures trying to cash in, after the fact, at Kay’s expense?”

“You could say that,” said Gurney.

“Actually,” added Hardwick with some relish, “more like one rotten little vulture named Alyssa and one idiotic vulture-fucker named Mick the Dick.”

After gazing at him for several long seconds with the pained fondness one might have for a charmingly incorrigible child, Esti took his hand again and squeezed it. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be intercepting and diverting traffic—idiots heading toward the fairgrounds from the interstate.”

“Shoot the bastards,” he suggested helpfully.

There was some more discussion after she left, discussion that drifted into theories of guilt and self-destruction, all of which appeared to be putting Hardwick to sleep.

After a stunned silence, her first question was a big one. “Can you prove that the person you shot is actually Panikos?”

“Yes and no. We can definitely prove that the person I shot is the same person who set off the series of explosions—and whose concealed gun discharged and shot Jack. The sheriff’s people have custody of his body, his gun, and his cell phone—which he was using as a remote detonator. The nearest cell tower records will show that he called a series of numbers in that same location. And I have no doubt that the times of those calls will relate precisely to the times of the explosions—which can be verified through fairgrounds security recordings. If we have any luck, the bomb fragments at the fair will include bits of cell phone detonation systems, and the systems will match those that were used at Bincher’s house. And we’ll almost certainly get a match between the incendiary chemical formulas used at the fair and at Bincher’s. If the concealed weapon on Panikos’s body was used elsewhere, that could open another door. Linking the body and its DNA back to the Panikos identity in Europe will be a job for Interpol and their interested partners. In the meantime, pre-autopsy photos of his face, which was intact at last sight, can be compared to the features captured on the security videos from Axton Avenue and Emmerling Oaks.”

As Esti was nodding slowly in an evident effort to absorb and remember all of this, Gurney concluded, “I’m one hundred percent convinced that the body belongs to Panikos. But from a purely practical cover-my-ass legal perspective, it doesn’t matter. We can prove that the body belongs to an individual who was willfully responsible for the deaths of God only knows how many people in just the past couple of hours.”

“Actually, it’s not only God who knows. The latest count is between fifty and a hundred.”

“What?”

“That’s the latest as I was leaving for my traffic assignment. The number is expected to rise. Severe burns, two collapsed buildings, a fatal dispute in the parking lot, kids who got trampled. And the big one was the collapsing Ferris wheel.”

“Fifty to a hundred?” whispered Madeleine, horrified.

“Christ.” Gurney leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He could see the Ferris wheel tipping, slowly falling, disappearing behind the tent. He could hear the shocking crash, the screams piercing the awful din.

Gurney had come to the same conclusion nearly four hours earlier on the concourse by the Ferris wheel, but it was reassuring to see another mind arrive at the same place. With Jonah as the intended victim, all the twisted pieces of the case straightened out. Jonah was somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate physically, which made him the perfect challenge for Panikos. In fact, his mother’s funeral may well have been the only event that was capable of guaranteeing his presence in a predictable place at a predictable time, which is why Panikos killed her. Jonah’s seated position at graveside solved the line-of-sight problem from the Axton Avenue apartment. Carl couldn’t have been hit as he stepped past Alyssa, but he could easily have been hit by a bullet intended for Jonah as he stumbled to the ground in front of him. That scenario also explained the inconsistency that had troubled Gurney from the outset: How did Carl manage to travel ten or twelve feet after a bullet had destroyed the motor center of his brain? The simple answer was that he didn’t. And finally, the absurd outcome—in which “the Magician” shot the wrong man, making a potential laughingstock of himself in the very circles where his reputation mattered—explained his subsequent deadly efforts to keep that ruinous fact a secret.

The next question followed naturally.

Kyle asked it, uneasily. “If Jonah was the real target, who hired Panikos to kill him?”

From a simple cui bono perspective, it seemed to Gurney that the answer was obvious. Only one person would have benefited significantly from Jonah’s death, and he would have benefited very significantly indeed.

The expressions on their faces showed that the answer was equally obvious to everyone in the room.

“Slimy piece of shit,” muttered Hardwick.

“Oh, God.” Madeleine looked as if her view of human nature had absorbed a body blow.

They all stared at one another, as if wondering if there could be an alternative explanation.

But it seemed that there was no escaping the loathsome truth.

The man who’d bought the hit that killed Carl Spalter must have been none other than Carl Spalter himself. In his effort to do away with his brother, he’d brought about his own terrible demise—slow death in full knowledge of his full responsibility.

It was both horrifying and ludicrous.

But it had about it a terrible, undeniably satisfying symmetry.

It was karma with a vengeance.

And it finally provided an adequate explanation of that look of dread and despair on the face of the dying man in the courtroom—a man already in hell.

As Hardwick put it slowly but determinedly, “Tragic Cain-and-Abel shit aside, we need to figure out where we stand. A giant law enforcement clusterfuck is about to begin, with every participant doing his best to be a fucker, not a fuckee.”

Gurney nodded his agreement. “Where do you want to start?”

Before Hardwick could answer, Esti appeared at the door—out of breath and looking fearful, relieved, and curious in rapid succession.

“Hey! Peaches!” Hardwick’s rough whisper was accompanied by a soft smile. “How’d you manage to get away down there with all hell breaking loose?”

She ignored the question, just hurried over to the side of his bed and squeezed his hand. “How are you doing?”

He gave her a twisted little smile. “No problem. Slippery bullet. Went right through me without hitting anything that matters.”

“Good!” She sounded alarmed and happy at the same time.

“So tell me, how’d you get away?”

“I didn’t really get away—not officially—just took a detour on my way to a traffic assignment. Would you believe it—we have more idiots coming into the area now than trying to get out of it. Disaster lovers, gawkers, jerks!”

“So they’re putting investigators on traffic assignments?”

“They’re putting everybody on everything. You can’t believe what a mess it is down there. And lots of rumors flying around.” She looked significantly over at Gurney, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. “There’s talk about a crazy hit man blowing everything up. There’s talk about an NYPD detective shooting a kid. Or maybe shooting the crazy hit man? Or some unidentified midget?” She looked back at Hardwick. “One of the deputies told me that the midget was Panikos, and that he’s the one who shot you—and somehow he did this after he was already dead. You see what I mean? Everybody’s talking, nobody’s making sense. And on top of all that, there’s a jurisdictional pissing match between the county-level sheriff’s people, the local people, the state people, maybe soon the feds. Why not? More the merrier, right? And this is all happening while crazy people in the parking lot are ramming one another, every asshole trying to get out first. And even crazier assholes trying to get in, maybe take pictures, put them on Facebook. So that’s the way it is down there.” She looked back and forth between Hardwick and Gurney. “You guys were there. What’s with the kid? You shot him? He shot you? What on earth were you doing there to begin with?”

Hardwick looked at Gurney. “Be my guest. Talking’s getting rough for me right now.”

“Okay. I’ll make it fast, but I need to start at the beginning.”