Free Nick of Time by John Gilstrap Page B

sighed. It wasn’t yet seven-thirty, and her tour went till midnight. This one had a long-and-boring feel to it.
    Ahead and on the right, the sign for Surf’s Up Amusements stood sentry over a field of weeds, marking the entrance to the dilapidated park. It looked like one of those rickety fairs that they used to set up in supermarket parking lots when she was a kid—the ones with the cheesy freak shows, and rides whose only real thrill came from the fear that the ancient Tilt-A-Whirl might disintegrate under the strain. Last season, she’d put even money on whether the Ferris wheel would finally spin itself off its axle.
    Darla made a point of swinging through the closed park a couple of times every tour, recognizing it as an excellent place for criminals of every stripe to conduct business beyond the view of the public. Call her paranoid, but if there was one place in the world where she herself would be inclined to hide a body, the Surf’s Up was it.
    Darla stopped at the main gate long enough to pull the padlock off the chain that kept it closed, then climbed back into her cruiser. Weeds grew from cracks in the sidewalk, and the finish on the Go-Go-Go Carts sign was even dimmer and more chalky than last year. Flaking rust displayed the rot on every one of the metal rides, despite the owners’ valiant effort to conceal it with a thick coating of red paint.
    Darla drove slowly, weaving between the rides and behind the various buildings, doing everything she could to make as little noise as possible. What was the sense of going through this exercise, after all, if you were going to telegraph your every move to the bad guys?
    Movement to her left drew Darla’s eyes around to the Fun House. It was a flash of something, visible only for a fraction of an instant, but it registered as someone ducking quickly behind the corner. She coasted to a stop, then gently opened her door and walked in that direction, her hand instinctively resting on the grip of her Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Essex hadn’t yet made the switch to automatics as standard issue for their officers, and at $22K a year, she wasn’t in a position to buy one of her own. Not if she was still going to pay for rent and groceries.
    Merely being in the presence of the Fun House gave Darla the heebie-jeebies. She’d visited it once, shortly after she’d moved here, and what she saw still haunted her dreams: a two-headed fetus, floating in its amniotic formaldehyde. That, and a lamp shade supposedly made of human flesh from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, featuring the anchor-and-globe insignia from the United States Marine Corps.
    Darla could smell the marijuana in the air even before she turned the corner, and the giggling gave the perpetrators away as a couple of kids.
    They were trying to make themselves invisible behind some scrub pine, up against the eight-foot chain-link fence that eliminated any hope of bolting and getting away. Truth be told, if they had tried to run, she probably wouldn’t have worked all that hard to stop them. What the hell else did teenagers have to do in a town like this but get high from time to time?
    â€œAll right, boys, this is the sheriff’s department,” she said, thumbing the strap off of her weapon, just to be on the safe side. “Show me your hands first, and then show me the rest of you. Step on out and let’s not have any problems, okay?”
    There was more giggling as one set of hands showed themselves, followed a second later by another pair. “You’re gonna be sorry,” someone laughed. “This is not going to look good on your record.”
    The other voice said, “Shut up, Peter.”
    â€œSounds like good advice to me, Peter,” Darla said. “Both of you show yourselves.”
    The two boys couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old, and judging from the droopy, weepy look to their eyes, they’d been toking