Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-Three

“That’s enough, Mr. Malek—stop right there!” The familiar voice came from a cluster of bushes some twenty feet east of the tracks. I spun around and saw a shadowy figure emerge from the foliage with a gun in his hand.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Rob Taylor—or should I say Schneider?” My voice had turned suddenly hoarse.

“It is Taylor,” he snapped, moving slowly toward me, a revolver trained on my midsection. The earnest, engaging youth I had come to know these last few weeks had transmogrified into a hard-edged avenger who now seemed far older than his years.

“Taylor translates to Schneider in German, correct, Rob?” I licked my lips.

“It does when you spell it T-A-I-L-O-R,” he answered curtly. “I’m surprised you have a working knowledge of German.”

“I don’t, but I had some help. So, here we are,” I said, working to keep my voice calm and swallowing to generate saliva in a desert-dry mouth. “As you can see, someone very carelessly put things on the track that could do some real damage, Rob.”

“How did you find out?” he sputtered, moving to within a yard of me.

“I didn’t until just a little while ago,” I told him, gauging the distance between us and maintaining eye contact. “All along, I figured it was either the guy whose name apparently is Whitnauer or possibly your boss, Fred Metzger.”

Rob cut loose with a joyless laugh, keeping the revolver trained on me with a steady hand. “That’s really funny,” he said, “funnier than you could possibly know.”

“I was not trying to be a comedian.”

“First, there’s Whitnauer. I know you figured out he called himself Samuel White.”

“Perhaps by overhearing some of my telephone conversations through the paper-thin walls of the administration building?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Snap Malek, right you are. Mr. Whitnauer, by the way, is no longer with us.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he had an accident a few days back. He was very helpful to me early on, as I guess you are aware.”

“By putting a live round into a rifle, the round that killed a young and innocent actor.”

“Yeah, for which he got well rewarded,” Rob said bitterly. “But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more money, the greedy bastard.”

“And if he didn’t get it, I suppose he threatened to tell his story to the police.”

“So he claimed when he called me at the fair about a week or so back. At first I didn’t believe him, because I figured if he did talk, it would go hard on him, too. But he was an ignorant man, illiterate, actually. And I couldn’t be sure…

“Mr. Malek, get out of my way now. I’m going to put the material back on the tracks,” Rob said, gesturing with the gun.

“Indulge this old newspaperman’s curiosity, Rob. Tell me what happened to Whitnauer.”

“Let’s just say I paid him a visit in his... hotel room, which I would describe as a pigsty. I told him I was bringing more money, but when I got there, I started by giving him a pint of cheap booze.”

“Which he was glad to see?”

“Damned right. The guy was a pathetic tosspot. He drank right from the bottle, drained it in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“And then…?”

“Do you even have to bother asking?” Rob smirked.

“You strangled him?”

“Nope.” He wiggled the revolver aimed in my direction as if to indicate how Whitnauer died.

“That makes a lot of noise.”

He smirked again. “Mr. Snap Malek, in that part of Uptown, nobody even pays attention to a gunshot.”

“So you used that,” I said, nodding toward the revolver.

“Oh no. Poor Sam, he killed himself. Last I saw, he was lying on his bed with the gun in his hand. He left a printed suicide note, confessing to his sins.”

“Printed, of course, so the handwriting couldn’t be checked.”

Rob shrugged. “That’s part of it. Also, Whitnauer could barely write his name, so I figured a guy like him, well, the best he could do would be to print. And I made plenty of spelling mistakes in the note.”

“So you killed a destitute illiterate and four others if you count the actor, all to avenge... who, your father? Do I have it right?”

“Don’t talk about my father,” he hissed, waving the pistol. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“What about Metzger? Where does he fit in?”

“You mean Uncle Fred, former last name Schneider? Oh, he knew what was going on the whole time. You might call him my accomplice in all of this, although he really hasn’t got much stomach for what I was doing. In fact, he’s cringing back in his office right now, waiting for me to come back and tell him how everything turned out.”

“I must say you two put on some pretty damned good acting jobs for me after a couple of the deaths.”

“Well, for me it was acting,” Rob said, “although in Uncle Fred’s case, he really did get shook up each time something happened. He didn’t even know I’d hired Whitnauer to put a live round in the rifle. But after that, he had to go along with everything else. Besides, he hated what the railroads did to my father—his brother—every bit as much as I did.”

“And of course you got the job at the fair through your uncle.”

“You might say that in a sense, he got the job at the fair through me. You remember the name Chester Rawlings?”

“The man who did public relations at the fair last year?”

“Yes. He had an unfortunate accident in a subway station.”

“An accident you had a hand in, no doubt.”

“No comment.”

“So the job at the fair was open, and Fred, who already had a public relations firm, applied for the position. What if he hadn’t gotten it?”

“Interesting you should ask, but then, you’re a skilled reporter. I like to think I’m a very good planner. After the fair ended last season, I went to visit Mr. Rawlings in his office, looking for a job. While there, I managed—it wasn’t hard—to filch a piece of his stationery and an envelope. The very day of his fatal accident, the Railroad Fair received a letter from him on his letterhead saying he had a serious heart condition, and if should anything happen to him, he highly recommended Fred Metzger for the position.”

“Incredible.”

“Thank you, I thought so,” Rob said smugly. “But lest you think I’m totally coldblooded, let me remind you about the sad state of life for our family after my father’s train hit those boys.”

“It had to be rough.”

“You can’t possibly know—nobody can. Now, Mr. Snap Malek, I am going to the tracks. Don’t try to stop me. I’ll take care of you later.” Rob skirted around me, keeping the gun trained on my stomach. Backing up, he went over to the fence to get the iron reinforcing bars I had thrown there.

He bent to pick up one of the bundles with his left hand, and his gun barrel briefly pointed down as he bent over. In that instant, I heaved my flashlight at him, and my years as a strong-armed outfielder with a neighborhood baseball team paid off. I scored a direct hit on his right temple. He groaned and the gun discharged as he put his other hand to his forehead.

His second groan was louder, more of a scream, really, and I realized he had shot himself in the leg. He keeled over and I got on him in an instant, picking up the revolver and pulling the last of the iron off of the rails as he lay beside the tracks writhing and moaning.

“My father was over forty when I was born,” Rob said through gritted teeth, “but he still should be alive today. He’d be only sixty-six, if only things hadn’t been…

“You couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like,” he went on, the words coming in gasps. “After the... accident, everybody... everybody hated my father. Called him names... painted swastikas on my parents’ sidewalk, or on their doors. Broke the windows with rocks. The neighbors asked us to move, said we brought violence to the block.

“We moved again... but we couldn’t hide, and the harassing went on. No railroad would hire him... he tried, tried again. They all said he had mental—”

Rob grimaced in pain and gripped his leg. I retrieved my flashlight, which surprisingly still worked, and played it on his pants, where blood had begun to soak through.

Rob’s next groan was accompanied by blinding pain—my pain! My face got raked by something sharp and hard. The revolver, I later figured out. Rob had picked it up off the ground, where I had carelessly set it down, and he slashed it across my forehead, opening a gash, sending blood spurting down into my eyes.

I must have yelled, although everything from that moment on for the next several minutes became a blur in more ways than one. Still groaning, Rob dropped the gun and crawled to where the bundles of metal lay, trying to drag them back onto the tracks.

I got up, felt the world spinning, then dropped to my knees, wiping blood out of my eyes. Now I crawled too, and we engaged in what might laughingly be called a wrestling match if it hadn’t been such a pathetic performance on both our parts.

I’m pretty sure I grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to let loose of the metal bars. He then drove a fleshy fist into my face. There wasn’t much force behind the punch, but it was enough to knock me back and start another eruption of blood, this time from my nose. As I struggled to right myself, the train’s whistle sounded from the south.

Rob heard it, too. The ground began to vibrate slightly, and he made one final effort to pick up the bars. Failing, he began to cry, his sobs sounding like hiccups. The ineffective headlight beam of the old locomotive materialized down the tracks and became larger.

He swung his fist one last time, a blow to my arm I barely felt, although he followed it with a shove that pushed me away from the track. Half-crawling, he scrambled past me and, too late, I realized what was happening.

As the locomotive pounded toward us, it loomed larger to me than it had seemed before, perhaps because it was night and I lay on the ground just an arm’s length from the tracks. Just before the coal-burning, smoke-and-steam spewing beast thundered past, Rob threw himself onto the rails. The only scream I heard was my own.