Death looked at his feet. Sammy bubbled with rage. If you couldn't trust your own people, you were lost. There were already enough people around the park looking for a way to wrong-foot him.

"Death, I'm talking to you. For Christ's sake, don't be such a G.o.dd.a.m.ned baby. You shut down the G.o.dd.a.m.ned rides and send those glue-sniffers home. I want a wrecking crew here by lunchtime."

Death Waits looked at his feet some more. His floppy black wings of hair covered his face, but from the snuffling noises, Sammy knew there was some crying going on underneath all that hair.

"Suck it up," he said. "Or go home."

Sammy turned on his heel and started for the door, and that was when Death Waits leapt on his back, dragged him to the ground and started punching him. He wasn't much of a puncher, but he did have a lot of chunky silver skull-rings that really stung. He pasted a couple good ones on Sammy before Sammy came to his senses and threw the skinny kid off of him. Strangely, Sammy's anger was dissipated by the actual, physical violence. He had never thrown a punch in his life and he was willing to bet the same was true of Death Waits. There was something almost funny about an actual punch-up.

Death Waits picked himself up and looked at Sammy. The kid's eyeliner was in smears down his cheeks and his hair was standing up on end. Sammy shook his head slowly.

"Don't bother cleaning out your locker. I'll have your things sent to you. And don't stop on your way out of the park, either."

He could have called security, but that would have meant sitting there with Death Waits until they arrived. The kid would go and he would never come back. He was disgraced.

And leave he did. Sammy had Death Wait's employee pa.s.s deactivated and the contents of his locker -- patchouli-reeking black tee-shirts and blunt eyeliner pencils -- sent by last-cla.s.s mail to his house. He cut off Death Waits's benefits. He had the deadwood rides shuttered and commenced their destruction, handing over any piece recognizable as coming from a ride to the company's auction department to list online. Anything to add black to his bottom line.

But his cheek throbbed where Death had laid into him, and he'd lost his fire for the new project. Were fatkins a decent-sized market segment? He should have commissioned research on it. But he'd needed to get a plan in the can in time to mollify the executive committee. Plus he knew what his eyes told him every day: the park was full of fatkins, and always had been.

The ghost of Death Waits was everywhere. Sammy had to figure out for himself whom to fire, and how to do it. He didn't really know any of the goth kids that worked the rides these days. Death Waits had hired and led them. There were lots of crying fits and threats, and the kids he didn't fire acted like they were next, and if it hadn't been for the need to keep revenue flowing, Sammy would have canned all of them.

Then he caught wind of what they were all doing with their severance pay: traveling south to Hollywood and riding that G.o.dd.a.m.ned frankenride in the dead Wal-Mart, trying to turn it into goth paradise. Judging from the message-boards he surfed, the whole thing had been Death Waits's idea. G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

It was Boston all over again. He'd pulled the plug and the machine kept on moving. The h.o.a.rdings went up and the rides came down, but all his former employees and their weird eyeliner pervert pals all went somewhere else and partied on just the same. His attendance numbers were way down, and the photobloggers posting shots of black clouds of goths at the frankenride made it clear where they'd all gone.

*Fine*, he thought, *fine. Let's go have a look.*

The guy with the funny eyebrow made him immediately, but didn't seem to be suspicious. Maybe they never figured out what he'd done in Boston. The goth kids were busy in the market stalls or hanging around smoking clove and patchouli hookahs and they ignored him as a square and beneath their notice.

The ride had changed a great deal since his last fated visit. He'd heard about The Story, of course -- the dark-ride press had reported on it in an editorial that week. But now The Story -- which, as he could perceive it, was an orderly progression of what seemed to be someone's life unfolding from childhood naivete to adolescent exuberance to adult cynicism to a nostalgic, elderly delight -- was augmented by familiar accoutrements.

There was a robot zombie-head from one of the rides he'd torn down yesterday. And here was half the sign from the coffin coaster. A bat-wing bush from the hedge-maze. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had stolen the deconstructed ride-debris and brought it here.

By the time he got off the ride, he was grinning ferociously. By tomorrow there'd be copies of all that trademarked ride-stuff rolling off the printers in ten cities around the United States. That was a major bit of illegal activity, and he knew where he could find some hungry attack-lawyers who'd love to argue about it. He jumped on the ride again and got his camera configured for low-light shooting.

Eva showed up on Perry's doorstep that night after dinner. Lester and Suzanne had gone off to the beach and Perry was alone, updating his inventory of tchotchkes with a camera and an old computer, getting everything stickered with RFIDs.

She had the kids in tow. Ada spotted the two old, lovely baseball mitts on the crowded coffee table and made a bee-line for them, putting one over each hand and walking around smacking them together to hear the leathery sound, snooping in drawers and peering at the business-end of an arc-welder that Perry hastily snapped up and put on a high shelf, which winked once to let him know that it had tracked the movement and noted the location of the tool.

The little boy, Pascal, rode on his mother's hip. Eva had clearly had a bit of a cry, but had gotten over it. Now she was determined, with her jaw thrust out and her chin up-tilted.

"I don't know what to do about him. He's been driving me crazy since he retired. You know he had an affair?"

"He told me."

She laughed. "He tells *everyone*. He's boasting, you know?

Whatever. I know why he did it. Mid-life crisis. But before that, it was early-adulthood crisis. And adolescent crisis. That guy doesn't know what to do with himself. He's a good man, but he's out of his f.u.c.king mind if he's not juggling a hundred b.a.l.l.s."

Perry tried out a noncommittal shrug.

"You're his buddy, I know. But you have to see that it's true, right?

I love him, I really do, but he's got a self-destructive streak a mile wide. It doesn't matter how much he loves me or the kids, if he's not torturing himself with work, he's got to come up with something else to screw up his life. I thought that we were going to spend the next twenty years raising the kids, doing volunteer work, and traveling. Not much chance of that though. You saw how he was looking at Suzanne."

"You think he and Suzanne --"

"No, I asked him and he said no. Then I talked to *her* and she told me that she wouldn't ever let something like that happen. Her I believe." She sat down and dandled the little boy until he gurgled contentedly. Perry heard Ada going crazy in the kitchen with a mechanical sphincter he'd been building. "Rides are a lot of fun, Perry. Your ride, it's amazing. But I don't want to ride a ride for the rest of my life, and Landon is a ride that doesn't stop. You can't get off."

Perry was at a loss. "I've never had a relationship that lasted more than six months, Eva. I've got no business giving you advice on this stuff. Kettlewell is pretty amazing, though. It sounds like you've got him pretty wired, right? You know that if he's busy, he's happy, and when he's slack, he's miserable. Sounds like if you keep him busy, he'll be the kind of guy you want him to be, even if you won't have much time to play with him."

She unholstered a t.i.t and stuck it in the boy's mouth and Perry looked at the carpet. She laughed. "You are such a geek," she said. "OK, fine. I hear what you're saying. So how do I get him busy again? Can you use him around here?"

"Here?" Perry thought about it. "I don't think we need much empire building around here."

"I thought you'd say that. Perry, what the h.e.l.l am I going to do?"

There was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, a shriek of surprise, then a small "oops."

"Ada!" Eva called. "What now?"

"I was playing ball in the house," Ada said in the same small voice. "Even though you have told me not to. And I broke something. I should have listened to you."

Eva shook her head. "Plays me like a G.o.dd.a.m.ned cello," she said. "I'm sorry, Perry. We'll pay for whatever it was."

He patted her arm. "You forget who you're talking to. I love fixing stuff. Don't sweat it."

"Whatever -- I'll buy you one and you can use it for parts. Ada! What did you break, anyway?"

"Made of seash.e.l.ls, by the toaster. It's twitching."

"Toast-making seash.e.l.l robot," Perry said. "No sweat -- it was due for an overhaul, anyway."

"Christ," she said. "Toast-making *seash.e.l.l* robot?"

"Kettlewell is why we gave up making that kind of thing," he said.

"Have you seen him?"

"I've seen him."

"How penitent was he?"

He thought back to Kettlewell's long puss on Francis's terrace. "Yeah, pretty penitent. He's pretty worried, I'd say."

She nodded. "All right then. Maybe he's learned a lesson. Ada! Stop breaking things and get your shoes back on!"

"We going back to Daddy?"