Chris Grabenstein - Fun House

Geeze-o, man.

It’s Becca.

“Boss?” I say to Ceepak because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the last ten minutes of Becca’s life listening to this cuckoo bird bragging about how freaking smart she is.

“Forbus? Bonanni?” Ceepak barks to our backups. “Run her in.”

“What?” Layla protests. “If you think I’m leaving before-” I may not have mentioned it, but Officer Nikki Bonanni won this New Jersey state female bodybuilding championship last winter. She deadlifts Layla off that stool with one hand while Forbus works on the FlexiCuffs. They have Layla hogtied in like five seconds.

“You try to stop me, you’ll start a bloodbath!”

Fortunately, the commercials blasting through the outdoor speakers are so loud, they drown her out. Forbus and Bonanni hoist Layla Shapiro between them and start jogging toward the dump-truck end of the pier. Layla’s kicking and screaming the whole way, but no one can hear her over the Coors beer song.

“I worked inside the Fun House one summer,” I say to Ceepak. “There’s an employee’s entrance around back.”

“Can we access it without crossing a camera’s field of vision?”

“Yeah.”

Ceepak slips his Glock out of its holster. I do the same.

He gives me the hand-chop “go” signal.

Hunkered down, we trot around the production trailer, move swiftly but quietly behind the cheering crowd.

“All right, Soozy and Becca,” I hear Chip Dale. “Give me a new clock. On your mark, get set … go!”

More cheers.

Becca is following Soozy into the killing zone.

Ceepak and I head into the shadows offered by the line of shuttered arcades across from the brightly lit Fun House. I do a hand chop to the left and we loop around the slide exit just as Mike and his partner Dave zoom down to the finish line. The halogen lamp illuminating them is so blazingly bright, it keeps us hidden in the darkness fifteen feet away.

“Okay, that’s the time to beat.…”

I push open a gate to a service road, a strip of potholed asphalt just wide enough for a delivery truck to squeeze through. I have my gun up now in both hands as we dash past dumpsters and abandoned golf carts and storage tanks and all the functional crap amusement parks keep hidden from public view. The “employees only” entrance to the Fun House is dead ahead.

“Danny?” This from Ceepak, behind me. “Down.”

I duck behind a dumpster.

Ceepak points to his eyes with two fingers, swings them around to face the door we were running toward.

Now I see the guy Ceepak already saw. The man turns around and his face is illuminated by the soft glow of a handheld device of some sort. Maybe an iPod. Maybe the world’s tiniest TV. He’s clearly watching the Fun House telecast, keeping an eye out for any trouble.

My eyes adjust to the darkness.

I can see that the guy is wearing a wet suit and flippers. At his feet is a duffel bag and two scuba tanks. On his hip, that H amp;K USP.45.

“That’s most likely the Mandrake shooter,” whispers Ceepak.

I nod. It makes sense. When the hit went bad, he ran back to his Port-A-Potty and changed into his wet suit. A lot of surfers wear them. Then he scuba-dived up to the boardwalk, swam a mile and more under water so he could gain access to the pier with a bag full of weapons. He knew we’d have metal detectors and heavy security out front, so he climbed the pilings with his gear slung over his shoulder, came in via the water route.

“I could take him,” I say because, yes, I am that good with my Glock.

“Negative,” says Ceepak. Now he taps his ear and I look back to the scuba commando, who maybe used to be a Navy S.E.A.L. He’s wearing a military communications device. Earpiece. Microphone rigged up to his mouth. He taps his chest to activate it.

“Seven minutes,” we hear him whisper. “Roger that. Execute and extricate.”

I turn to Ceepak. His eyes are narrow slits. Mine are about to explode with panic.

Seven minutes till they kill Becca?

“Do you still know your way through the Fun House?” Ceepak asks.

“Yeah.”

“Then you need to be the one to go in.”

I nod. He’s right.

“Grab some camera gear if you can. Act like you’re a crew member.”

That’ll work. I’m already dressed like one.

“I’ll cover this shooter and take him out the instant you take down the player inside.”

Again I nod. If he shoots this bad guy before I nail the one inside, Becca dies when scuba man stops communicating the countdown.

“Six minutes thirty seconds,” we hear the guy say with ice in his voice.

Ceepak gives me the sharpest hand chop he has ever given me.

I’m up.

Moving on tiptoe. Fast.

Back up the alley. To the gate. Around to the front of the Fun House.

I see bundles of cable piled in a rolling bin. Grab one.

I move even faster, make for the big clown-mouth entrance. And-BOOM! — it hits me.

The guy inside is Sean, the grip in the knit cap who didn’t know what a half-apple was. It has to be. Like Layla said, TV production jobs are hard to come by. You don’t get on a union crew without knowing basic crap like what the hell a half-apple is-unless maybe the people who really hired you have ways of pulling strings to get you into any place you need to be.

It’s how Sean made it past security tonight: he had a bright orange crew badge. And his teammate out back stowed his weapons for him in a prearranged drop zone, or maybe they met up out in the alley. That would explain why Jimbo didn’t have his smoke machine upstairs in the second maze. Why Sean, his P.A., was A.W.O.L.

Sean would also have been with Jimbo’s crew at Big Kahuna’s when Paulie left with Mandy. He could have alerted his partner, the outside guy, the man on the motorcycle. Sean didn’t stick with Jimbo’s crew when they tailed Mandy and Paulie. He peeled off, met up with his partner.

Together, they did Paulie in Mandy’s Mustang.

Now he’s going to kill Becca.

I run into first maze and see a dozen me’s reflected back in brightly lit silver-framed mirrors.

The passageways are tight.

I drop the stupid coil of wire.

I’m in. Nobody cares who I am or what I’m doing, because the live TV feed is coming from further up ahead, the two camera crews attached to Soozy and Becca, maybe the one with Mike and Dave, breathlessly waiting to see how quickly their competitors complete the course.

Fortunately, when we worked here, Jess and I used to play “mice in the maze.” First guy to reach the end didn’t win a chunk of cheese, just an after-work beer at the Frosty Mug.

Up ahead, I hear laughter and squeals. The happy kind. Soozy and Becca. They might be on the second floor already. Maybe in the area called The Side Show. Audio-animatronic mannequins in a bathtub crack corny jokes as you wander past them in the dark. A clown dummy cackles at you.

I enter a black-lit hallway decorated with glowing clown faces and whirling swirls. Next comes a rolling tunnel, The Barrel Of Laughs. It’s like walking through a psychedelic toilet-paper tube with a spinning clown face at the far end to make you queasy.

“Fuck me. Another maze?” I hear Soozy shout.

Becca giggles. “Come on, girl. We can win this thing!”

I step out of the rolling corridor and onto the oscillating floor where we used to blast air up pretty girls’ skirts.

Next I’m in the hall of mirrors. The frames are clown faces. Their wide-open mouths distort my reflection. First I’m fat, then I’m stretched thin, now I’ve got a huge head and very little body, next my chest balloons up to the size of an elephant’s.