“That fucking Pedro, I can’t find him!” Who else but Francis X. Kingsbury.
“Have you tried the gym?” Chelsea said foggily.
“I tried everywhere, hell, you name it. And there’s no guards! I waited and waited, finally said fuck it and drove myself to work.” He was on the speaker phone, hollering as he stormed around the office.
“The security men never showed up?”
“Wake up, dicklick! I’m alone, comprende? No Pedro, no guards, nada.”
Dicklick? Charles Chelsea sat up in bed and shook his head like a spaniel. Do I really deserve to be called a dicklick? Is that what I get for all my loyalty?
Kingsbury continued to fulminate: “So where in the name of Christ Almighty is everybody? Today of all days—is there something you’re not telling me, Charlie?”
“I haven’t heard a thing, sir. Let me check into it.”
“You do that!” And he was gone.
Chelsea dragged himself to the kitchen and fine-tuned the coffee-maker. In less than two hours, some lucky customer would breach the turnstiles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills and be proclaimed the Five-Millionth Visitor. Officially, at least. Chelsea was fairly certain that at least one enterprising journalist would take the time to add up the park’s true attendance figures and expose the promotion for the hoax that it was. The scene was set for a historic publicity disaster; already the national newsmagazines and out-of-state papers were snooping around, waiting for poor Jake Harp to expire. In recent days Chelsea’s office had been deluged with applications for media credentials from publications that previously had displayed no interest in covering the Amazing Kingdom’s Summerfest Jubilee. Chelsea wasn’t naive enough to believe that the New York Daily News was seriously interested in a feature profile of the engineer who’d designed the Wet Willy water slide; no, their presence was explained by pure rampant bloodlust. The kidnapped mango voles, the dead scientist, the dead Orky, the nearly dead Jake Harp, flaming bulldozers, phony snake invasions, exploding cement trucks—an irresistible convergence of violence, mayhem and mortality!
Charles Chelsea understood that the dispatches soon to be filed from the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills wouldn’t be bright or warm or fluffy. They would be dark and ominous and chilling. They would describe a screaming rupture of the civil order, a culture in terminal moral hemorrhage.
And this would almost certainly have a negative effect on tourism. Oh well, Chelsea thought, I gave it my best.
He foraged in the refrigerator, unearthed a stale bagel and began gnawing dauntlessly. Hearing a knock at the door, he assumed that the pathologically impatient Kingsbury had sent a car for him.
“Just a second!” Chelsea called, and went to put on a robe.
When he opened the door, he faced the immutable, bewhiskered grin of Robbie Raccoon.
Who was holding, in his three-fingered polyester paw, a gun.
Which was pointed at Charles Chelsea’s throat.
“What’s this?” croaked the publicity man.
“Show time,” said Joe Winder.
THIRTY-TWO
The raccoon suit was musty and stifling, but it smelled reassuringly of Carrie’s hair and perfume. Even the lint seemed familiar. Through slits in the cheeks Joe Winder was able to see the procession: Bud Schwartz, Danny Pogue and the captive Charles Chelsea, entering the gates of the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills.
To affect Robbie Raccoon’s most recognizable mannerisms, Winder took floppy exaggerated steps (the way Carrie had showed him) and jauntily twirled the bushy tail. In spite of the serious circumstances, he felt a bolt of childlike excitement as the amusement park prepared to open for the Summerfest Jubilee. Outside, the trams were delivering waves of eager tourists—the children stampeding rabidly toward the locked turnstiles; the women bravely toting infants and designer baby bags; the men with shoulder-mounted Camcorders aimed at anything that moved. Fruity-colored balloons decorated every lamppost, every shrubbery, every concession; Broadway show tunes blasted through tinny public-address speakers. Mimes and jugglers and musicians rehearsed on street corners while desultory maintenance crews collected cigarette butts, Popsicle sticks and gum wrappers off the pavement. A cowboy from the Wild Bill Hiccup show tested his six-shooter by firing blanks at Petey Possum’s scraggly bottom.
“Show business,” said Joe Winder, “is my life.” The words echoed inside the plaster animal head.