Solitude Creek (27 page)

‘And they’re not saying anything!’ March snapped.

He’d thought he’d have to spread the rumor a half-dozen more times but, nope, it wasn’t necessary. The stories buzzed like locusts. One bomber, a dozen. Machine-guns. Al Qaeda. ISIS. Pakistan. Syria.

‘What’re we going to do? How do we get out?’

March shouted, ‘There’s only one way I know about. The front entrance. They don’t have emergency exits, I heard.’

‘No exits? Didn’t they think something like this could happen?’

‘We’re going to be trapped here!’

March waved his arm. ‘No, we’re not. Let’s go!’

The crowd was now moving in the general direction of the park entrance. What had started as a cluster of a hundred was swelling to three, four, five times that number. March walked with them for a ways, then stepped off the path into the bushes and let skittish cattle continue their quickening drive to what they hoped was safety.

What’s going on? Dance wondered.

She and O’Neil were back at the Global Adventure entrance, having heard reports that for some reason hundreds – no, thousands of park guests were moving in this direction. The agent and detective were outside the entrance turnstiles and fence.

The patrons clustering on the other side, waiting to exit, were edgy, anxious. Some exchanged harsh words. A shoving match or two broke out when people cut into the line ahead of the others to leave. The crush could have been relieved if the wide gate was functioning but the unsub’s steamy Chevy still blocked it.

Dance thought of the Liverpool fans clustering outside Hillsborough Stadium, the disaster her father had told her about.

Twenty-five years ago. I still have nightmares …

O’Neil and Dance walked up to the head of park security and Sergeant Ralston.

Dance asked, ‘What is all this?’

Both Herb Southern and Ralston were on their phones. Ralston said, ‘Jesus.’ Whatever he’d learned was very troubling.

Southern disconnected.

‘There’s panicking inside. A couple guests beat up one of my security guards. I don’t know why.’

Ralston hung up too. ‘Okay, this is a problem. We’re getting calls from everybody – the Sheriff’s Office, media, FBI, Homeland. Reports terrorists’re in the park. Machine-guns. Suicide vests. Fucking rumors but nine one one’s flooded, circuits’re almost overloaded.’

Dance muttered, ‘He’s doing it.’

‘Your perp?’

She nodded.

O’Neil said, ‘All it took was him telling a few people the rumor, one news report, a few blog posts, and it’s spread like fire.’

‘It’s what he does. He starts panics. And he’s real good at it.’

O’Neil said, ‘He’s going to try to get out this way, thinking we can’t check everybody.’

‘That’s pretty damn close to true,’ Sergeant Ralston muttered.

Herb Southern walked to the turnstiles, on the other side of which a crowd thirty or forty deep jostled to get out. ‘There’s no emergency!’ he shouted to the crowd. ‘You’re safe. You can stay in the park. Don’t push. Don’t push!’

Everyone ignored him.

Dance asked, ‘What’s the procedure if it
were
a terror attack?’

‘Lockdown. Get everybody off the rides and have them wait where security tells them. We have designated places of cover from gunmen and bad weather, fire.’

‘Evacuation?’

‘Not a mass evacuation,’ Southern said, staring at the growing sea of patrons. ‘Ma’am, today’s a slow day but we’ve still got thirteen thousand souls in the park at this moment. If they all head out together – well, you can imagine.’

The crowd was swelling as people from inside the park joined the other exiting patrons in bottlenecks between two gift shops, which jutted into the entrance walkway. Every face seemed terrified.

At the turnstiles serious fights were starting to break out and there were more and more instances of people shoving others aside and jumping the barriers, which led to more panic. The crowd was now fifty or sixty deep. And growing. One woman screamed as she was jammed against a fence. Her wrist had broken. Two guards got to her and managed to calm that cluster of patrons. But as soon as they did another fight broke out, more pushing, more screams. Dance watched two other patrons fall. They were trampled before guards got them to their feet. The workers’ faces were as alarmed as their guests’.

Dance said, ‘It’s on the borderline of manageable. We’ll be okay as long as nothing more sets them—’

From the distance came a half-dozen gunshots.

‘Hell,’ she muttered.

Then, over the loudspeaker: ‘
Emergency evacuation. All guests. There are terrorists in the park. Suicide bomber in the park. This is not a drill. Everyone evacuate immediately!
’

‘That’s not procedure!’ Southern snapped, his face in shock.

‘
All guests, this is an emergency. Evacuate at once. There is a suicide bomber in the park.
’

‘It’s him. He got into the security command post somehow.’

O’Neil snapped: ‘Get a team there now!’

Ralston lifted his radio, made a call.

The security man was on his phone. ‘Derek, what’s going on? … Is he in the CP? … Okay, find out. Cut the power to the PA system.’

‘
Evacuate! Evacuate immediately. We have shooting victims! If you’ve been wounded, seek cover immediately. Medical teams are on the way!
’

Southern explained to Dance and O’Neil, ‘We’ve got a network of underground tunnels – where our security office is. We take sick guests out that way, pickpockets, people’re drunk. It’s the command post too. He’s in there. He’s going to try to get out through the tunnels. There’s an exit to a parking lot on the far edge of the property … Oh, Jesus … Look!’

A wave of a thousand, two thousand people was now charging the exit.

‘Get back, it’s all right!’ the security head yelled to them. Pointless, as before.

Parents had abandoned strollers and were carrying their screaming children. The people waiting at the turnstiles turned back and saw the tide approaching.

The screams rose and those behind the patrons in front began scrabbling over the others to get to the turnstiles. Some began running through the broken gate, climbing over the unsub’s Chevy. One man fell on his back and lay still.

Dance, O’Neil and Southern ran forward, holding their palms up to stanch the flow of human bodies, shouting that there was no attack.

But the crowd had no rational mind. Safety, escape – those were the only things that mattered.

A creature … not human …

‘They’re going to be crushed,’ Dance said.

O’Neil: ‘The gate. We have to get it open. Now!’

He, Ralston and a half-dozen park workers ran to the unsub’s car and, by using pure muscle, pulled it back – five feet, ten, twenty. They then grabbed the gate and swung it open. It screeched on the concrete.

O’Neil leaped aside as the tide, twenty bodies wide, swarmed through the open space. Others continued to push through or leap over the turnstiles.

A mother, holding a young child of about four, staggered through the gate, then turned toward an empty part of the parking lot and stumbled in that direction. Dance noticed that her arm was badly broken. She got about ten steps toward a bench, then eased her daughter to the asphalt and collapsed. Dance ran to help.

She had just gotten to the woman when there was a shattering of glass and dozens of people leaped onto the sidewalk. They’d broken a large window of one of the gift shops and were fleeing out of the park through the gap. This herd soon swelled to several hundred.

They were bearing down on Dance, the woman and her child. Even though they were out of the park, panic had seized them and they were sprinting madly.

‘Get up!’ Dance cried to the groggy mother, scooping up the child by the waist. The crowd was forty feet away, thirty.

The woman suddenly gripped Dance’s collar. Unbalanced by her awkward crouch, the agent fell backward. She landed hard, still clasping the child. Stunned, she looked up to see a wall of a hundred patrons stampeding directly for them. To judge from their feral eyes, not a single one even saw them, let alone had any intention of turning aside.

As a matter of pride, Antioch March would have preferred to start the panic without firing any shots.

What a lovely idea. Words alone causing so much destruction and chaos. In fact, he would have preferred to start the madness by merely asking questions, not using fake texts from a fake wife.

‘Who do you think those guards are looking for?’

‘Have you heard anything in the news about any terrorist threats here?’

Subtlety, finesse. Let the victims use their own imagination.

Stampedes, he’d learned, can begin with nothing more than a hint, as insubstantial as a moth’s wing, that you won’t get what you desire. Or that what you fear will destroy you. Thanks, Dad … Desire and fear were the keys to success in sales, his father had told him.

March was presently hiding in the trunk of a Nissan Altima, which was still parked in one of the garages at Global Adventure World. He was quite hot in the ski mask and cloth gloves.

Getting out of the park itself had been relatively easy, thanks to the massive herd of gazelle fleeing the terrorist lion. He’d even caught a fast glimpse of his beloved Kathryn, staring with wide eyes at the surging crowd, not seeing him. But the rest of his getaway – escaping from the area – was more of a problem. As the crowd surged out, March had diverted into the garage, where he began looking for a certain type of car. Finally he found what he sought: a rental (with a big trunk) that had a hotel valet ticket, good for three more days, on the dash. That meant the family had already checked in and wasn’t leaving Orange County for a while; therefore, no luggage in the trunk in the immediate future. Sure, maybe Billy or Suzy had bought some souvenirs but, if so, they’d probably lost them in the crush.

He’d jimmied the door, popped the trunk – found it empty, good. Then climbed in, along with the shopping bag containing his gym bag and gun, and closed it. True, he might have to shoot his way out of this, if the driver and family did decide to toss something back here. But he didn’t have a lot of options.

Would there be roadblocks, would they open the trunk?

Again, no choice.

He assessed the situation. He’d lost one of the burner phones on the sprint to the Chevy in Tustin, which’d have some information on it he would rather they didn’t have but nothing critical. No prints. He’d worn gloves whenever he used the unit. He wished he’d gotten Prescott’s computer. But a fast look had revealed nothing obviously incriminating on the laptop. No, no direct leads to him. Even brilliant Kathryn Dance would be hard pressed to connect those dots.

Now, an hour after the panic, he heard the grit of footsteps approach and the click of the locks. He gripped the gun. But the trunk didn’t pop. Then doors opening and closing. Somber voices. Adults. A third door closed. A teenage boy, he deduced from the kid’s tone.

The engine started and they were driving, but very stop-and-go; the lines to exit would be long, of course. The car radio was on but he couldn’t hear much. Man, it was hot. He hoped he didn’t faint before the family got to their destination.

More conversation. He could discern the woman’s, though not the man’s, voice. A matter of pitch, maybe.

‘Police there. A roadblock.’

The man muttered something angrily. Probably about the delay, the congestion.

March wiped sweat from his eyes and gripped his pistol.

The car squealed to a stop.

He could hear an indistinct voice from outside, asking questions. A female voice. Was it Kathryn Dance’s?

No, these were line officers. Not the Great Strategist, the woman so intent on capturing him … and the Get.

Wiping sweat.

Silence.

Trunk inspection? Shoot the cop, commandeer the car and drive like hell.

No option.

Footsteps.

But then the car started forward again. The radio grew louder. The boy said he was hungry. The man – father, surely – muttered something unintelligible. The mother said, ‘At the hotel.’

After forty minutes they made several turns and stopped. The radio went silent and the car was put in park. Doors opened and closed.

The valet took charge of the car and drove for five minutes, up a series of ramps. Then he parked. Closed the door, locked it and left.

March gave it five minutes and, when he heard nothing outside, pulled the emergency release cord, climbed out as quickly as he could and looked around the garage.

Empty. And no CCTV.

He walked back and forth, stumbling like a drunk, to revive the circulation in his legs. Once, he had to sit down and lower his head to his shaking knees.

Then on his feet again and into the hotel itself. A Hyatt. He went into the restroom in the lobby and examined himself in the mirror. He didn’t look too bad. The glistening head, which he’d shaved the minute he’d heard his description on the radio several days ago, showed a bit of stubble. Like Walter White on
Breaking Bad
. He opened the Global Adventure shopping bag and pulled out his gym satchel. From this he retrieved the blond wig, which he’d been wearing since the shaving, at least when he was out in public.

Porn star meets
Mad Men …

March pitched into the trash the wig, baseball cap and the worker’s jacket he’d worn at Stan Prescott’s apartment and when he’d first broken into the theme park. (He’d stripped them off as he’d stood in the interminable queue near the Tornado Alley roller-coaster, and donned a souvenir jacket that he’d bought. Nobody noticed the quick change: everyone was watching the flamboyant ride, racing overhead.)

He now dumped the Global jacket and shopping bag, too.

Then outside into the lobby. He got a look at the TV in the bar, reporting on the event at the theme park. No pictures of him, no artist’s rendering, no reference to Solitude Creek.

In the gift shop he bought a windbreaker, sunglasses and a tote – into which went his gym bag.