When the deluge of colors finally faded, Azimuth came to. Out the empty windshield frame he saw someone appear out of the twinkling cloud and the falling, fine, pale snow. The someone was walking toward him. He automatically started to reach for the KG-99, but it wasn’t there anymore. In the scabbard, instead, was a tropical flower with heavy, waxy red petals, a golden stamen and a perfume so rich and heady it made his mouth water.
When he looked up from the dash, the approaching man was close enough to make out. A thin black man with a snake nest of dreads and a baggy, crocheted, red, yellow and green hat. He was smoking a fat, foot-long, ganja stogie. Azimuth madly scrabbled on the floorboards at his feet for the CD’s protective case and, finding it, stared at its much faded color picture.
“Fucking Z!” he exclaimed, tearing off the headset. He hardly noticed that even without it, reggae music was still hard rocking inside his brain.
“What’s shakin’, mon?” Bob Marley asked, leaning his skinny elbows on the window frame of the driver’s door.
“You are, mon. You are.”
“Soon you be, too,” Marley said, laughing as he took a tremendous pull on the stogie, and then blew a fog of thick ganja smoke straight into the carny scout’s upturned face.
The hot smoke blinded him and made his eyes run with tears. Over the sound of his own strangled coughing, Azimuth clearly heard Bob Marley say, quite close to his ear, “You gon sit dere an’ cry like a l’il girl, or come meet de fellas in de band?”
Chapter Eleven
The Magnificent Crecca chained Jackson to one of the tent’s steel stakes, then raised a flap at the rear of the candy-striped enclosure and ducked under it. Before him was a short tunnel made of the same airtight fabric as the main tent. The passage ended in a flight of metal steps that led up to a door set in a sheet-steel wall. A heavy rubber gasket and metal plate sealed the seam between the wall and the edge of the tunnel.
As he mounted the steps, the carny master felt that special unease once again. Fighting back a combination of vertigo and nausea that accompanied absolute dread, he knocked twice on the door.
From the other side, the familiar, thready voice called for him to enter. Crecca opened the door and looked in on the Magus’s private viewing box. The twelve-by-eight-foot room sat on a trailer inside the perimeter of the main tent. The box wall that faced the crowd was made of one-way mirror glass, painted around the edges of the frame with a scene of predark clowns and lion tamers. The center of the picture window was clear; beyond it, in the bright lights of the main tent’s floods, the people of Bullard ville were filing in to their doom. Seated before the window in a fully reclined reclining chair, his metal-and-flesh legs comfortably crossed, was the steel-eyed monster.
“Don’t just stand there,” the Magus barked. “The light’s ruining my view. Come in and close the door.”
The carny master did as he was ordered. Being trapped in an airtight box with the creature was much, much worse than being in the same wag salon with him. The unusual smell given off by the Magus—scorched machine oil and fleshly decay—was a thousand times more concentrated. That, coupled with his proximity and the fact that there was nowhere to run, made Crecca go soft in the knees. Conscious of that fact that the last time he had been in the Magus’s company his body had betrayed him, the carny master made an extra effort to maintain a tight sphincter.
On the other side of the mirror window, Ryan Cawdor and his party were being ushered down to the front row by a pair of nearly naked female roustabouts. There were no seats. The audience sat on plasticized tarps spread on the ground. This made the cleanup much easier. The red-haired beauty sat next to Cawdor. On his right sat his son and a young girl from the ville. Beside the girl was the albino, then the black woman, the man in the fedora and the old one.