Tommy was bursting out on the other side of the building. Parker heard him hollering back there, and looked out the half-open doorway, and saw two guys running around toward the rear of the wax museum. He was about to step out when two more appeared, from the Hawaiian restaurant across the way. The loud-hailer sounded, and they waved their arms — meaning the loud-hailer had been hailing them, and they’d heard and understood — and then they came running this way, toward the entrance Parker was hidden behind.
He had a gun now. Shoot them on the street? No, the idea was to stop leading an accurate trail. Parker waited, hidden by black draperies just to the side of the entrance.
He let the first one run into the building, then stepped out quickly as the second one barreled through the doorway, and stuck the gun barrel hard into his stomach, and pulled the trigger. It made a very small noise; only three people heard it. One of them was falling to the ground, one was Parker, and the third was trying to turn around and defend himself before Parker could get to him and do the same thing.
No noise, that was the most vital thing. Parker lunged forward, like a duelist with a sword in his hand instead of a pistol, trying to use the same silencing method as before. But this one, in a panicky scramble, managed to shove Parker’s gun hand to one side, and Parker had to continue the lunge, pushing off with the balls of his feet, driving his shoulder into the guy’s midsection, so that they both toppled over, the other guy backward, landing heavily on his back, Parker on top of him.
They were about equally matched for size and weight. The shock of landing on his back with Parker on top of him had made the other guy drop his own gun, but now he had the wrist of Parker’s gun hand in his grip and was holding it out away from the two of them, and trying to get his breath together to shout.
He couldn’t shout. Parker, trying for an advantage, trying to do something useful with his other hand, could do nothing for the moment except butt at the other guy’s mouth, feeling the teeth sharp and abrasive against his forehead, having to do something, anything, to keep the guy quiet. While his left fist was kidney-punching, the only thing it was in position to do effectively.
The guy twisted his head back and forth, trying to keep away from the butting, and then made his mistake. He let go of Parker’s wrist because he was tormented by the butting, he let go and tried to push Parker’s head away, and Parker brought the gun in quickly against the guy’s side, up near the armpit, and fired once.
The guy thrashed, like a fish on a schooner’s deck, and then stopped. Parker rolled off him and got to his feet and went over to look out the half-open doorway again, and now the space out front was deserted.
He stepped out, keeping close to the front of the building. Ahead of him was the snow-covered blacktop path marking the line between park sections, all crisscrossed now with footprints, and he knew that path was open and clear down to the right all the way to the central fountain, and that one of Lozini’s men would be down there by the fountain watching the path, waiting for Parker to try and cross it, heading from Alcatraz to Hawaii. And on the other side of the Alcatraz section there was another straight open path separating it from Treasure Island, and that path would also be watched.
He wanted to get back close to the gate again, but to move to where he could see the gate he would have to cross a minimum of three of those open spokes radiating out from the fountain — from Alcatraz to Hawaii to Pleasure Island to Island Earth. They knew he was in the Alcatraz section now, or they would know it very soon, once Tommy quit hollering out there on the other side of the building and started to make some sense, and with Parker limited to one-eighth of the park, it wouldn’t take them long to find him.
There was one possibility, down to the right, closer to the fountain. Parker went that way, moving fast, keeping low, keeping to the edge of the path. Ahead of him was another outdoor water ride like the fake jungle over in Voodoo Island, this one a miniature mock-up of San Francisco Bay, dominated by a larger-than-scale Alcatraz Island. It was a gunboat ride, in which the customers during the summer could watch escaping prisoner dolls swimming to freedom, see smugglers, and be “almost” crushed by collapsing Golden Gate Bridge, all the while riding in flat-bottomed boats that looked like no gunboats ever seen anywhere in the world.
The ticket booth and entrance were on this side, with the bulk of the Alcatraz mock-up between Parker and the fountain. He went out onto the wooden dock area and saw the boats tied up in a small service area to his left. He went over and released one of the boats.
There were two streams meandering through Fun Island, both connected to the moat enclosing the park, one traveling through the back half of the park and the other through the front half. The water in this gunboat-ride area also flowed into Treasure Island, where it supported the pirate ship, into New York Island, where it became the Coney Island area’s Atlantic Ocean, and back the other way into Hawaii, where it served the submarine ride. Between these ride areas it was fairly narrow but not too winding, and where it crossed from one area into another, there was a wooden footbridge along the main radial path.
There was increasing commotion back at the wax museum now. It would take them a while to work their way through that building and convince themselves he was none of the figures in there, but then they’d check out the rest of the Alcatraz area, working close and complete, so by then he’d better be somewhere else.
There was a kind of picket fence arrangement across the stream where it came into the gunboat-ride area. Parker tried lifting this, but for some reason it was padlocked and he couldn’t get it up, so what he finally did was drag one of the boats up onto the wooden dock. It was heavy, too heavy to lift but not too heavy to pull. He dragged it around the picket fence and then shoved it into the water again on the other side, climbing in after it.
The stream was about two feet below the general level of the land, so that one would have to be pretty close to it to see the boat in it. Parker crouched on the floor in the front of the boat, keeping his head below ground-level, and pushed off.
He’d chosen the same direction as the slow natural movement of the stream, so that when the impetus of his first push was gone, the boat still kept moving very slowly along. The stream curved very gradually to the right, so he had to keep pushing away from the left bank, and slowly they left the gunboat ride behind and approached the curved wooden footbridge marking the border between Alcatraz and Hawaii. That was the path being watched by one of Lozini’s men. Once on the other side of it, he would be out of the territory where they expected to find him.
The boat was just sliding under the bridge when he heard people coming, hurrying up from the area of the fountain. The boat was completely under the bridge now, and Parker reached up to one of the support beams and held himself where he was. Until they’d gone by, he couldn’t move any farther.
But they didn’t go by. Footsteps thudded on the bridge, and stopped, and a voice said, “Right here. The bridge is raised up a little, you can see better.”
“Yeah, and he can see me better, too.”
“Don’t be stupid. Before he could get close enough to do you anything, you could see him. Look around. How could he get near you?”
