Madeleine’s fingers were digging into Gurney’s arm. Her voice was breaking. “What in the name of God is happening?”

“It’s a power failure,” he said.

The absurdity of the understatement struck them both at the same instant, provoking a shared burst of crazy laughter.

“Panikos … he … he mined the place with explosives,” Gurney managed to add, looking around wildly. The darkness was filled with acrid smoke and screams.

“You killed him?” cried Madeleine, as one might ask in desperation if the rattlesnake in front of them was safely dead.

“I shot him.” He looked toward the place where it happened. He waited for a flash of lightning to direct him to the black form on the ground, realizing as he did so that the spot was in the path the Ferris wheel had followed. The thought of what he might see gave him a surge of nausea. The first flash got him fairly close, with Madeleine still glued to his arm. The second flash revealed what he didn’t want to see.

“My God!” cried Madeleine. “Oh my God!”

Evidently, one of the Ferris wheel’s huge structural circles of steel had rolled over the middle of the body—essentially cutting it in half.

As they stood there in the darkness between the split-second flashes of light and blasts of thunder, the rain started, and soon it was a downpour. The lightning strobes showed a shifting, stumbling mass of people. It was probable that only the darkness and the deluge were keeping them from stampeding and trampling one another.

Dwayne and the uniformed cop had apparently been driven back from Panikos’s body by the progress of the rolling Ferris wheel—which they were now following into the main concourse, seemingly drawn helplessly along after it by the terrible screams of its trapped riders.

It was a measure of the staggering hellishness of the scene—with all its sensory, mental, and emotional overload—that they could abandon a fresh homicide like that with hardly a backward glance.

Madeleine sounded like she was straining desperately to speak calmly. “My God, David, what should we do?”

Gurney didn’t answer. He was looking down, waiting for the next flash to show him the face in the black cowl. By the time the flash came, the pelting rain had washed much of the yellow paint away.

He saw what he was waiting to see. All doubt was erased. He was certain that the delicate heart-shaped mouth was the same mouth he’d seen in the security videos.

The mangled body at his feet was indeed that of Petros Panikos.

The fabled executioner no longer existed.

Peter Pan was now nothing but a pathetic bag of broken bones.