To his left was a strangely green area of low hills and twisting stream. Snow lay all over that area, too, but in the middle of the snow, palm trees and tropical bushes stood out, bright green, as though to prove the snow a fake. But it was the trees and bushes that were fakes, because that was an outdoor ride, the Voodoo Island jungle ride. In the summer the customers would board excursion boats holding about twenty people at a time, getting on board at a primitive-looking dock down near the side wall of the theater, and would then be taken on a trip along the winding stream that bent this way and that, cutting back on itself time after time, so that what was really a very small area was made to do a lot of work. During the trip animated mannequins along the shore would be doing jungle-type things like being chased by alligators or throwing spears at the passing boat. There was no one in sight over there now, either.
Here and there on the theater roof were projections, ventilator pipes and so on, half a dozen near the back of the building. Parker tied one end of the rope to one of these, pulled on it to be sure it was secure, and then slowly lowered the other end over the side. The rope was a good twenty feet longer than the building was high, so when he was done, there was a lot of the rope lying on the ground down there.
The candy bars he’d eaten had helped. Just getting rid of the gnawing feeling in his stomach was an improvement, but besides that, he felt stronger now, closer to his normal self. It might have been more psychological than real, but it didn’t matter. The result was the same.
Still, he was cautious when he went over the side, taking it slow and easy, working his way gradually down the back wall. He felt the strain in his arms from the beginning, but it never got to be too much to handle, and he reached the bottom without any real problem.
At the bottom, he looked both ways. The gate was his ultimate destination, and the artificially green jungle area was closer to the gate than the Island in the Sky ride and Coney Island in the opposite direction. He went to the corner of the building, looked around, and saw one guy on guard duty outside the doors. The guy was leaning against the wall there, smoking, looking at his cigarette between puffs as though trying to understand the principle of its operation. Parker waited, feeling colder again now that he was outside once more, and finally, after three or four minutes, the guy finished his cigarette, threw it into the snow, and began to walk around in the same bored way as the guy in front.
The minute the guard turned his back Parker was off. It was four or five running steps to the first of the fake shrubbery. Parker got to it, and ducked down, looking back through the plastic leaves. The guy was still mooching around over there, walking a little bit, kicking aimlessly at the snow, strolling around with his hands behind his back.
The problem now was that most of the protective shrubbery . was the other side of the stream, which was here about eight feet wide, wide enough to keep the customers in the excursion boats from seeing the mannequins too closely.
Not that the mannequins were around now. Pieces of gray canvas covered the spots where they would be attached in the summertime, but for now the dolls themselves were stored in a low concrete block structure over behind the roller coaster in Alcatraz. Parker had seen them in there yesterday afternoon. The pieces of gray canvas marking the spots where they belonged looked like bases out of baseball season, half-buried in snow.
Parker moved cautiously from plastic bush to plastic bush, skirting the edge of the stream, hurrying across the bare spots where he might be seen, getting quickly to that part of the jungle where most of the greenery was between him and the rest of the park, with the moat and the outer park fence on his other side. Now he could move with less fear of being seen, the moat and fence on his right and the hilly green jungle rising up like surrealism out of the snow on his left.
The jungle ended before the corner of the park fence. Now he had to turn leftward, with a fairly long open stretch after the end of the jungle to the corner of the next building, the Marooned! black-light ride where he’d hidden the satchel of money.
What was he going to do about the money? Last night, when it had seemed all he had to do was pick off his pursuers one at a time, he’d planned on leaving the money there till he’d cleared his escape route, then going and getting the satchel and taking it away with him, but now that was impossible. He’d be lucky if he just got himself out of here, without worrying about anything else. The bag of money would slow him down, drag him down, when he was already working at less than his normal efficiency.
So there was nothing to do but leave it there, and hope he could get back sometime in the future, and that the money wouldn’t be found by anybody in the meantime.
He was about to make his turn at the end of the jungle when a commotion started up way behind him. He ducked down behind a plastic palm tree and looked back, but no one had seen him. The commotion was too far away, shouting and vague movement of people running around. Parker edged out-away from the jungle, till he could see better, and the fuss was up around the Island in the Sky take-off point. They must have turned on the power there again, to bring their two lookouts down from the pots, probably to send up replacements, and they’d found the one Parker had taken care of. Another little locked-room mystery for them to think about. What would the cop Dunstan come up with this time? Suicide, maybe.
Now that there was so much distraction back there, it would be a good time for Parker to make his move. He went around the corner of the jungle area and began to trot toward the main gates, down at the midpoint on this side of the park. He ran past Marooned! and then past the night watchman’s office, and slowed as he approached the gates. They’d have men on duty there, he didn’t know how many or where they’d be. He moved up carefully, the fence on his right and a snack bar on his left, the gates just ahead.
They were shut, probably locked. There was no one standing near them, not in sight anyway.
Naturally not. They wouldn’t want passers-by to see people standing around in here, it might cause somebody to call the cops. So they’d be undercover somewhere handy, where they could keep an eye on the gate.
“Hey! There he is, there he is!”
Parker spun around, the two guys were boiling out of the doorway of the night watchman’s shack, tugging into their coat pockets for their guns. He turned the other way, and the shouting had brought a couple more out of the Island Earth amusement-ride section the other side of the gates. One of them over there fired his gun while running and the bullet went nowhere in particular.
He couldn’t get to the gates. They were all too close, he’d be a fat target climbing up and over.
He looked both ways, and ran to the left, away from the gates, around the snack bar. Between here and the fun house a stream ran across, with an island in the middle of it containing picnic tables, small wooden bridges leading onto the island from both sides. Parker ran that way, meaning to go through the fun house again, but as he was crossing the little island two guys came running around the left side of the fun house, so he crossed the .bridge and veered off to the right, across the main roadway with the fountain down there to his left and the gates back the other way and the Voyage Through the Galaxy black-light ride straight ahead.
