Madeleine pulled Gurney back out of the pool of spreading blood and rainwater he was standing in, kept pulling him back until they reached the crushed railing. The flashes of lightning and thunder—punctuating the terrifying thumps and rattles and metallic screeches and human wails from the still-rolling Ferris wheel—were making rational thought nearly impossible.

Madeleine’s efforts at self-control were collapsing, her voice starting to break. “God, David, God, people are dying—they’re dying—what can we do?”

“Christ only knows—whatever we can—but first—right now—I need to get ahold of that phone—that phone Panikos used—the detonator—before it gets lost—before it sets off something else.”

A familiar voice, raised almost in a shout amid the din, caught Gurney off-balance. “Stay with her. I’ll get it.”

Behind him, behind the remains of the railing, back where the Ferris wheel had been mounted, the wooden platform riders used for entering and exiting their seats suddenly burst into flames. In the uneven orangey light cast by the new fire, he caught sight of Hardwick making his way through the slanting rain toward the body on the ground.

When he got to it, he hesitated before bending down to reach for the gleaming pink phone, which was still in Panikos’s hand. It was too soon for rigor mortis to have stiffened the finger joints, so extricating the phone should have posed no problem. But when Hardwick tried to lift it away, Panikos’s hand and arm rose up with it.

Even in the dim firelight, Gurney could see why. One end of a short lanyard was attached to the phone, and the other end was looped around Panikos’s wrist. Hardwick grasped the phone firmly, pulling the lanyard loose. The motion raised Panikos’s arm higher. The instant the arm was fully extended, there was a loud pistol report.

Gurney heard a sharp grunt from Hardwick—as he toppled face-down onto the little corpse.

A sheriff’s deputy had been half running with the help of a flashlight along the curved concourse in the direction of the ponderously rolling Ferris wheel. At the sound of the shot he stopped abruptly, his free hand on the butt of his holstered gun, his gaze moving in a dangerously overloaded state from Gurney to the crossed bodies on the ground and back again.

“What the hell is this?”

The answer came from Hardwick himself, straining to push himself up off Panikos, his voice a hissing mix of agony and fury, forced out through clenched teeth. “This dead fucker just shot me.”

The deputy stared in understandable bewilderment. Then, as he stepped closer, the emotion went beyond simple bewilderment. “Jack?”

The answer was an indecipherable growl.

He looked over at Gurney. “Is that … is that Jack Hardwick?”

Chapter 62

A Trick of the Mind