Jack scrambled to his feet, rain blinding him, as the Cowboy landed, crouched, on the gondola canopy.

Scrabbling crabwise, Jack knocked into the Cowboy's left calf with his right shoulder.

The Cowboy's feet slipped out from under him. Holding on to a cable with just one hand, the other waving free as if he were doing a Highland fling, his legs dancing in air, the Cowboy dangled over the sixty foot drop.

Jack scrambled up. Supporting himself with one hand clutching a cable, Jack hammered with his free fist on the Cowboy's knuckles until the Cowboy let go and dropped a few feet to the canopy of the gondola below.

Faces-like paste masks dripping, streaked with paint-gazed at Jack and the Cowboy. The couple in the gondola across the wheel from them. Three teenaged girls, agog, in the gondola above the couple. In the gondola below, a mother covered her six-year-old son's eyes while her husband shouted something lost in the sound of the storm, a humming and hissing that could have been the racket of the Ferris wheel's engine.

Jack jumped, unsteadily, down beside the Cowboy, who lashed out at him.

Jack ducked and head butted the Cowboy in the lower back.

The Cowboy went down. Jack drove his right knee into the muscle of the Cowboy's left arm.

The Cowboy twisted one way, the other.

Jack punched the Cowboy in the face, felt something give.

Thunder and lightning.

In the flash, Jack saw the Cowboy grinning as blood spurted from his broken nose.

Jack hammered on the Cowboy's windpipe as if he were pounding on a table at a drunken dinner.

Again, he felt something give.

Jack heaved the Cowboy over the side of the gondola canopy. The Cowboy fell, bouncing and ricocheting from one strut to another, from one gondola to another, a human pinball in an indifferent pinball machine. The Cowboy landed, his back broken on the lever that made the machine go. The Cowboy was dead.

3.

The squad car's lights flashed garish red and blue on the faces of the men and women and children, eyes hollow, mouths agape, skull-like, pressing forward to watch as the cops tried to handcuff Jack with old-fashioned metal restraints.

"Son of a bitch's wrists are too big," said a young officer Jack didn't recognize. "Jesus, this guy's massive."

"You got the plastic doohickeys?" said the other young cop, equally unfamiliar to Jack.

"You got plastic?" the first young cop shouted to a third young cop, sounding like a checkout clerk at the Price Chopper.

The rain was letting up. The fair's generator gave a great gasp and started running. Lights snapped on.

The faces lost their hollow-eyed, gaping-mouth, skull-like look and once again became merely human.

The Cowboy's body, in a zip-up bag, leftover meat, was dumped into the back of a van, which cranked up its siren as it crept through the watching crowd.

The first cop was binding Jack's wrists behind his back, too tight, with zip ties, when Jack spotted Caroline in the crowd-shocked, the power of the emotions draining her cheeks of color, the only skull-like face left.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

1.

Kipp, the Pakistani from the haunted motel, sat up on the metal cot when Jack was shoved into the jail cell.

"I know you're not coming to see me," Kipp said. "They took your belt and shoelaces."

He had a yellow bruise below one eye.

Unconsciously, Jack touched his own face.

The cell reeked of disinfectant.

"What's the charge?" Kipp asked. "Drunk and disorderly?"

"Murder," Jack said.

"No shit," Kipp said. "You do it?"

"Couple of hundred witnesses watched," Jack said.

"The guy deserve it?" Kipp asked.

"He was trying to kill me," Jack said.

"Self-defense," Kipp said.

From another part of the jail came a radio call: 10-33-toll collector requires assistance.

Through the doorway leading to the bull pen, Jack saw a woman-a girl? She couldn't have been more than sixteen, dressed in a wig the color of cotton candy, a tight metallic-blue skirt made out of what looked like fish scales, and a gauzy, translucent halter that revealed her nipples.

"I was dancing," the girl whined. "I'm a ballet dancer."

She twirled.

"What'ch'you looking at?" the girl asked a male cop.

Another call came over the radio: 10-34-defective sprinkler system.

"Can you believe the shit we have to deal with?" a cop, unseen in the hallway, said.

"You sure that's what it means?" the female cop asked.

"How long you been on the job, Provenzano?" the unseen cop said.

"She got hooks," a second unseen cop said. "Didn't have to study the Patrol Manual to get her job."

"The house mouse puts in his two cents," the female cop said.

"They should stick you back on DV," the second unseen cop said.

"You want to see domestic violence?" the female cop said. "Come here, Mouse. After all, compliance says we're one happy family."

"If you was my daughter," the second unseen cop said, "I'd take you across my knee."

"As if," the female cop said. "Like all old guys, you're just searching for TLGF. The Last Great Fuck."

"Which ain't you, babe," the second unseen cop said.

"Amen," the female cop said.

"Last Thursday," the second unseen cop said, "at Mitch's poker game, Paris Hilton here keeps spreading her knees and giving us all a peek at her kapak, we lower our cards while we're looking, she sees what we're holding."

The female cop's laugh was low, lovely.

"If you wasn't half a fag," the female cop said, "I would've taken more than your money."

"Excuse me," the girl in the cotton-candy wig said. "Cell me already. My feet hurt."

"What happened to you?" Jack asked Kipp.

"You don't read the newspapers?" Kipp asked.

"Not lately," Jack said.

"Yeah," Kipp said. "Killing. Being killed. It's a time-consuming hobby. Any of this got to do with Hussein? His dead girlfriend?"

"Somewhat," Jack said.

He sat on the cot across the room from Kipp. The mattress was so thin Jack felt the metal strips supporting it. From somewhere in the building, someone was singing "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

"What did I miss in the papers?" Jack asked.

"Motel burned down," Kipp said.

"Electrical fire?" Jack asked.

"More like cotton balls smeared with Vaseline," Kipp said. "Who the fuck knows? My take: Anything but an accident."

"Anyone hurt?" Jack asked.

"Some bad burns," Kipp said, "but nobody killed. We're all in our skivvies, standing around, don't know what to do, watching the fire burn everything we own when the red-white-and-blues show up-"

"Red-white-and-blues?" Jack asked.

"Immigration," Kipp said.

"Convenient," Jack said.

"Ain't it?" Kipp said. "With three big, yellow school buses. They load everyone on board. Everyone's illegal, right? Even if they're not. I got a green card. One of the feebs pushes me toward the bus. I say, You pushed the wrong guy. He says, Join the party, Osama and pushes me again harder. I take a swing. Deck him. He starts to cry-imagine that-big, bad government man, sitting on his ass in the motel parking lot, fire burning behind him, big, black billows of nasty-smelling smoke rolling around him, just his head showing above the smoke like it's a balloon, floating there, his body covered in this black-wasn't even smoke. It was, like, oily. You could feel it on your skin. Taste it. Then, the smoke kind of settles, you know, around our ankles. I'm thinking What kind of fire is this?"

"They used an accelerant," Jack said.

"Whatever," Kipp said. "The red-white-and-blue sitting, bawling, the smoke just drifts down his back. Looked like Batman. Like he was wearing a big, black, glossy cape. The Dark Knight defending the homeland from us aliens! You see that movie? A real psycho protecting real Americans. You go to any movie today, the go-to guys for villains-that'd be me. My brothers. My cousins. Maybe a slinky Asian chick to keep you watching when you get bored with the explosions and the blood."

"That's when they arrested you?" Jack asked.

"You bet'cha," Kipp said. "Real gentle, too."

"Resisting?" Jack guessed. "Assaulting an police officer?"

"For starters," Kipp said. "Dipshit charges compared to murder, but I bet you're out of here before me."

"So I guess you won't be enrolling in a prelaw course at Columbia Community," Jack said.

"You want to tell me about Hussein and his girlfriend and what you been up to?" Kipp asked.

"No," Jack said.

A guard unlocked the cell door.

"Slidell," the guard said.

"Norman," Jack said, recognizing him. "Where you been keeping yourself?"

"The wife decided I was spending too much time at Mama's," the guard said. "So I bought a flat-screen TV and watch junk all night. Wife says, You don't get AIDS from a porn movie. She watches with me. Likes to talk about the guys' equipment. Trying to make me feel inadequate, I ask her. No, hon, she says. I'm satisfied. But it's like looking at travel ads. Sometimes you want to dream about a place you never been. What the fuck you step into this time, Jack? Playing tag on the Ferris wheel with some guy who can't keep his balance...."

"That's what they're saying?" Jack asked. "He fell?"

"That's the story, Morning Glory," the guard said. "Sciortino's waiting to drive you home."

"Knew you'd be out of here before me," Kipp called after Jack, who called back over his shoulder, "I'll see what I can do."