Dan Simmons: Hard as Nails

"You grew up around Buffalo, didn't you, Mr. Kurtz?"

He didn't react, but he felt the skin tighten on his face. O'Toole knew his personal history from the dossier on her desktop, and she'd never ventured into his pre-Attica history before. What'd I do ?

He nodded.

"I'm not asking professionally," said Peg O'Toole. "I just have a minor mystery—very minor—that I need solved, and I think I need someone who grew up here."

"You didn't grow up here?" asked Kurtz. Most people who still lived in Buffalo had.

"I was born here, but we moved away when I was three," she said, opening the bottom right drawer of her desk and moving some things aside. "I moved back eleven years ago when I joined the Buffalo P.D." She brought out a white envelope. "Now I need the advice of a native and a private investigator."

Kurtz stared flatly at her. "I'm not a private investigator," he said, his voice flatter than his gaze.

"Not licensed," agreed O'Toole, evidently not intimidated by his cold stare or tone. "Not after serving time for manslaughter. But everything I've read or been told suggests you were an excellent P.I."

Kurtz almost reacted to this. What the hell is she after ?

She removed three photographs from the envelope and slid them across the desk. "I wondered if you might know where this is—or was?"

Kurtz looked at the photos. They were color, standard snapshot size, no borders, no date on the back, so they'd been taken sometime in the last couple of decades. The first photograph showed a broken and battered Ferris wheel, some cars missing, rising above bare trees on a wooded hilltop. Beyond the abandoned Ferris wheel was a distant valley and the hint of what might be a river. The sky was low and gray. The second photo showed a dilapidated bumper-car pavilion in an overgrown meadow. The pavilion's roof had partially collapsed and there were overturned and rusted bumper cars on the pavilion floor and scattered outside among the brittle winter or late-autumn weeds. One of the cars—Number 9 emblazoned on its side in fading gold script—lay upside down in an icy puddle. The final photograph was a close-up of a merry-go-round or carousel horse's head, paint faded, its muzzle and mouth smashed away and showing rotted wood.

Kurtz looked at each of the photographs again and said, "No idea."

O'Toole nodded as if she expected that answer. "Did you used to go to any amusement parks around here when you were a kid?"

Kurtz had to smile at that His childhood hadn't included any amusement park visits.

O'Toole actually blushed. "I mean, where did people go to amusement parks in Western New York in those days, Mr. Kurtz? I know that Six Flags at Darien Lake wasn't here then."

"How do you know this place is from way back then?" asked Kurtz. "It could have been abandoned a year ago. Vandals work fast."

O'Toole nodded. "But the rust and… it just seems old. From the seventies at least Maybe the sixties."

Kurtz shrugged and handed the photos back. "People used to go up to Crystal Beach, on the Canadian side."

O'Toole nodded again. "But that was right on the lake, right? No hills, no woods?"

"Right," said Kurtz. "And it wasn't abandoned like that. When the time came, they tore it down and sold the rides and concessions."

The parole officer took off her glasses and stood. "Thank you, Mr. Kurtz. I appreciate your help." She held out her hand as she always did. It had startled Kurtz the first time she'd done it. They shook hands as they always did at the end of their weekly interviews. She had a good, strong grip. Then she validated his parking ticket. That was the other half of the weekly ritual.

He was opening the door to leave when she said, "And I may really give Mrs. DeMarco a call about the other thing."

Kurtz assumed that "the other thing" was the parole officer's wedding. "Yeah," he said. "You've got our office number and website address."

Later, he would think that if he hadn't stopped to take a leak in the first-floor restroom, everything would have been different But what the hell—he had to take a leak, so he did. It didn't take reading Marcus Aurelius to know that everything you did made everything different, and if you dwelt on it, you'd go nuts.

He came down the stairway into the parking garage corridor and there was Peg O'Toole, green dress, high heels, purse and all, just out of the elevator and opening the heavy door to the garage. She paused when she saw Kurtz. He paused. There was no way that a probation officer wanted to walk into an underground parking garage with one of her clients, and Kurtz wasn't keen on the idea either. But there was also no way out of it unless he went back up the stairs or—even more absurdly—stepped into the elevator. Damn .

O'Toole broke the frozen minute by smiling and holding the door open for him.

Kurtz nodded and walked past her into the cool semidarkness. She could let him get a dozen paces in front of her if she wanted. He wouldn't look back. Hell, he'd been in for manslaughter, not rape.

She didn't wait long. He heard the clack of her heels a few paces behind him, heading to his right.

"Wait!" cried Kurtz, turning toward her and raising his right hand.

O'Toole froze, looked startled, and lifted her purse where, he knew, she usually carried the Sig Pro.

The goddamned lights had been broken. When he'd come in less than half an hour earlier, there had been fluorescent lights every twenty-five feet or so, but half of those were out The pools of darkness between the remaining lights were wide and black.

"Back!" shouted Kurtz, pointing toward the door from which they'd just emerged.

Looking at him as if he were crazy, but not visibly afraid, Peg O'Toole put her hand in her purse and started to pull the Sig Pro.

The shooting started.

When Kurtz awoke in the hospital, he knew at once that he'd been shot, but he couldn't remember when or where it happened, or who did it He had the feeling that someone had been with him but he couldn't bring back any details and any attempt to do so hammered barbed spikes through his brain.

Kurtz knew the varieties and vintages of pain the way some men knew wines, but this pain in his head was already beyond the judging stage and well into the realm where screaming was the only sane response. But he didn't scream. It would hurt too much.

The hospital room was mostly dark but even the dim light from the bedside table hurt his eyes. Everything had a nimbus around it and when he attempted to focus his eyes, nausea rose up through the pain like a shark fin cutting through oily water. He solved that by closing his eyes. Now there were only the inevitable, ambient hospital sounds from beyond the closed door—intercom announcements, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, inaudible conversations in that muffled tone heard only in hospitals and betting parlors—but each and every one of these sounds, including the rasp of his own breathing, was too loud for Joe Kurtz.

He started to raise his hand to rub the right side of his head—the epicenter of this universe of pain—but his hand jarred to a halt next to the metal bedrail.

It took Kurtz two more tries and several groggy seconds of mental effort and the pain of opening his eyes again before he realized why his right arm wouldn't work; he was handcuffed to the metal frame of the hospital bed.

It took him another minute or two before he realized that his left hand and arm were free. Slowly, laboriously, Kurtz reached that hand across his face—eyes squinted to keep the nausea at bay—and touched the right side of his head, just above his ear, where the pain was broadcasting like the concentric radio-wave ripples in the beginning of one of those old RKO films.