Joyland

ran to him, and fell on my knees beside him. “Eddie? What is it?”
    “Ticka,” he managed.
    For a moment I thought he was talking about some obscure disease engendered by tick-bites, but then I saw the way he was clutching the left side of his chest with his gloved right hand.
    The pre-Joyland version of Dev Jones would simply have yelled for help, but after four months of talking the Talk, help never even crossed my mind. I filled my lungs, lifted my head, and screamed “HEY, RUBE!” into the damp morning air as loud as I could. The only person close enough to hear was Lane Hardy, and he came fast.
    The summer employees Fred Dean hired didn’t have to know CPR when they signed on, but they had to learn. Thanks to the life-saving class I’d taken as a teenager, I already knew. The half-dozen of us in that class had learned beside the YMCA pool, working on a dummy with the unlikely name of Herkimer Saltfish. Now I had a chance to put theory into practice for the first time, and do you know what? It wasn’t really that much different from the clean-and-jerk I’d used to pop the hotdog out of the little Stansfield girl’s throat. I wasn’t wearing the fur, and there was no hugging involved, but it was still mostly a matter of applying hard force. I cracked four of the old bastard’s ribs and broke one. I can’t say I’m sorry, either.
    By the time Lane arrived, I was kneeling alongside Eddie and doing closed chest compressions, first rocking forward with my weight on the heels of my hands, then rocking back and listening to see if he’d draw in a breath.
    “Christ,” Lane said. “Heart attack?”
    “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Call an ambulance.”
    The closest phone was in the little shack beside Pop Allen’s Shootin’ Gallery—his doghouse, in the Talk. It was locked, but Lane had the Keys to the Kingdom: three masters that opened everything in the park. He ran. I went on doing CPR, rocking back and forth, my thighs aching now, my knees barking about their long contact with the rough pavement of Joyland Avenue. After each five compressions I’d slow-count to three, listening for Eddie to inhale, but there was nothing. No joy in Joyland, not for Eddie. Not after the first five, not after the second five, not after half a dozen fives. He just lay there with his gloved hands at his sides and his mouth open. Eddie fucking Parks. I stared down at him as Lane came sprinting back, shouting that the ambulance was on its way.
    I’m not doing it, I thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll do it.
    Then I leaned forward, doing another compression on the way, and pressed my mouth to his. It wasn’t as bad as I feared; it was worse. His lips were bitter with the taste of cigarettes, and there was the stink of something else in his mouth—God help me, I think it was jalapeno peppers, maybe from a breakfast omelet. I got a good seal, though, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed down his throat.
    I did that five or six times before he started breathing on his own again. I stopped the compressions to see what would happen, and he kept going. Hell must have been full that day, that’s all I can figure. I rolled him onto his side in case he vomited. Lane stood beside me with a hand on my shoulder. Shortly after that, we heard the wail of an approaching siren.
    Lane hurried to meet them at the gate and direct them. Once he was gone, I found myself looking at the snarling green monster-faces decorating the façade of Horror House, COME IN IF YOU DARE was written above the faces in drippy green letters. I found myself thinking again of Linda Gray, who had gone in alive and had been carried out hours later, cold and dead. I think my mind went that way because Erin was coming with information. Information that troubled her. I also thought of the girl’s killer.
    Could have been you, Mrs. Shoplaw had said. Except you’re dark-haired instead of blond and don’t have a bird’s head tattooed on one of your hands. This guy did. An eagle or maybe a hawk.
    Eddie’s hair was the premature gray of the lifelong heavy smoker, but it could have been blond four years ago. And he always wore gloves. Surely he was too old to have been the man who had accompanied Linda Gray on her last dark ride, surely, but . . .
    The ambulance was very close but not quite here, although I could see Lane at the gate, waving his hands over his head, making hurry-up gestures. Thinking what the hell, I stripped off Eddie’s gloves. His fingers