The Fear In Yesterday's rings

Chapter Nine

We found Harper's purse in the trunk, and my cash and credit cards were still in my wallet. It was some relief.

We reached a main highway in twenty minutes. Except for the assumption that we had crossed into Nebraska, I had no idea where we were. I arbitrarily turned right. A few miles down the road there was a sign announcing that we were seventy miles from the town of Quigley. I came to a gas station just as the needle on the gas gauge settled on the E. The attendant who filled the tank kept glancing curiously at the broken windows of the Plymouth, but he didn't comment. I hoped he wouldn't call the police, but knew there was no sense wasting time and energy worrying about it. I paid for the gas, then went into the adjoining convenience store to buy a map, a couple of hero sandwiches and a six-pack of beer, and a bag of ice for Harper's arm. I kept harboring a notion of taking her to a hospital, but she kept insisting that the danger had long since passed, and that with a bag of ice to reduce the swelling she would be fine. In fact, she did look considerably better, and I decided that she was probably right; we would pass on the hospital. First, there was the danger of her being connected to the snakebitten corpses we had left behind; second, as long as there was a lobox hunting for her, I did not want to leave her alone in any situation I could not control.

There was a gun shop in Quigley. I stopped, bought ammunition for the handguns, and a shotgun and a box of shells. I also checked the map, found I had turned the wrong way. Stone-bridge was about eighty miles behind us, to the west. At the moment, that was just fine with me. We both needed some rest.

"These are for you," I said, handing Harper the shotgun and box of shells as I got back into the car. "We'll stop at the first motel we come to, eat our sandwiches, and rest up. I'll also show you how to use that thing at close range. If we play this right, there's a chance you may never see a lobox again, but in an emergency, that shotgun will be a lot more effective than a handgun."

She nodded, took the shotgun, and clasped it tightly across her laps. "When are you going there, Robby?"

"Tonight. I'd like to go there now, but I'm tired, and it's just too risky trying to do anything during the day. I figure I'll go in looking for Garth when they're putting on tonight's show-if there is going to be a show. By now, there are going to be a lot of nervous people in that operation, and they may be closing up shop fast. But I don't think they'll just go away without the two loboxes, and I have a strong hunch those animals are still on the prowl, hunting for us."

"Maybe you should go to the state police, Robby."

"I've given it a lot of thought. That option could lead to a lot of sticky complications. For one thing, what-and how much- can we tell them? And would they believe it? I don't want to risk having you arrested and charged with the murder of those two charmers back there."

"But those men were taking us out to be killed, Robby."

"Sure, but we can't prove it. There's no guarantee they'll believe us. I could be charged along with you, or held as a material witness."

"Robby, I'm more than willing to risk facing charges if it means your brother will be safe."

"There's no guarantee of that at all. If I get entangled with the law around here, Garth could be dead by the time I get untangled. Also, Zelezian almost certainly is being sponsored- protected-by some heavy-duty agency in Washington or very powerful individuals. It's possible local law enforcement people wouldn't be allowed to move on the circus until it was too late. I don't know if that's true, but I don't want to take the chance. There are just too many questions, too many uncertainties. It's why I have to go myself and hope that I get lucky. If it doesn't work out, and they nab me again, then you'll still be free to exercise the option of calling the troopers."

"Robby, they may be looking to nab you now, to trap you the same way they trapped Garth. And if they do, they may just kill you out of hand. Even if they do go ahead and put on a show tonight just to keep up appearances, they're certainly going to be on guard, watching for you."

She was probably right. "Maybe," I said. "Maybe not."

"Not only will they be looking for you, Robby, but you'll be going right back into the loboxes' sensory range."

"We don't know where they are, Harper. In any case, I don't feel I have any other choices."

"Okay," she said evenly. She paused, staring at the shotgun, then continued, "How did I do last night, Robby?"

"You did real good."

"Then there'll be no argument about my going to the circus with you tonight."

"Harper," I said with a sigh, "if I were to tell you that having you with me would be a distraction because I'd be worried about you, you'd call me a sexist, and then remind me that it was you who saved our asses last night. Right?"

"That's very good reasoning," she said, and smiled. "So thank you for not being a sexist, and thank you for not forcing me to remind you that it was me who saved our asses last night."

"I need you some place safe, Harper, so that you'll be able to call the police if I don't come back."

"In some motel nearly a hundred miles away? I want to be there, Robby. This time I promise I will wait in the car, but at least I'll be close by, close enough to actually hear or see- maybe-if anything goes wrong. You know I'm right. We're in this together. I'll be useless a hundred miles away, and you know it. I just might mean the difference between you and Garth living or dying."

"Harper, the loboxes … As you pointed out, we will be going back into their sensory range."

She wrapped her hands around the shotgun, hefted it. "I won't pee in my pants next time, Robby. If a lobox comes after me again, I'm going to have me a lobox rug. Let me watch your back. I really will feel safer if I'm with you."

I reached across the seat, took her hand, and squeezed it hard. "Thank you, Harper," I said simply. I didn't know what else to say. The fact of the matter was that she was right, and I was grateful to her for her resolve and courage.

I'd definitely had just about enough of dread and circuses, but this was a command performance. It was show time-both for World Circus and for me.

If the Zelezians were worried about anything-dead gunmen, missing multimillion-dollar assassin-beasts, or their cranky intended victims on the loose-it wasn't evident in the setup or atmosphere on the county fairgrounds outside the town of Stonebridge; lights blazed on the midway, where all the rides and games were in progress, and music blared from inside the Big Top, where the show had just begun. It could mean that they weren't at all concerned about what Harper and I might tell the authorities-or anything else we might do-and that tended to make me even more nervous.

As it was, I was soaked with sweat, although it was a relatively dry, cool night; walking around knowing that at any second horrible, clawed death may leap out from the shadows to rip out your throat and bowels can have that effect on a man.

We'd left the ruined Plymouth in an alley beside a supermarket and rented a station wagon, which was now parked, with Harper and her loaded shotgun inside it, at the edge of one of the three parking fields where there was enough radiated light for her to be able to see anything and anybody that might approach. With the Colt in my suit jacket pocket and the.45 automatic in my right hand, I was working my way through lines of parked cars and pickup trucks toward a roped-off area behind the Big Top. There I knew I would find the penning enclosures as well as the parking field containing the trailers and the enormous Mack semis that hauled the circus around the country.

There was a man in a gray suit standing in the moonlight near the roped-off area. He was holding a walkie-talkie near his mouth, and there was a pronounced bulge in his suit jacket, near his left armpit. He was definitely not a circus roustabout, and I strongly doubted that he was a plainclothes state trooper. Rather, the man's presence suggested to me that the Zelezians had appealed to their government or corporate sponsor for a little additional help in case of any emergency I might try to cause. As I watched, the man spoke into the walkie-talkie, in English, and there was a crackling response.

In the section of the field just beyond the gunman in the gray suit, a dozen semitrailers were parked in rows of four, virtually nose-to-nose, with one row flush to the rear of the Big Top. That was where I wanted to go. I had been kept inside an old circus wagon, but there were no more of those in evidence. Garth was too big and obstreperous to try to keep in any mobile home, so I figured they might have him locked up in an animal cage inside one of the semis. In any case, the rows of parked trucks seemed the logical place to start looking. He would, at least, be in a position to return a signal.

If he was conscious.

Trying not to think of what might be slinking toward me in the darkness of the parking lot, I angled to my right, away from the gunman in the suit. I stopped fifty yards away and waited for him to look in the opposite direction, then darted out from behind a car, ran across a narrow dirt track, and ducked under a rope into a dark area near where the semis were parked. I crouched down in the night, forcing myself to take deep breaths and try to relax as I looked around me in the darkness and wiped sweat away from my eyes.

I had to hope Garth hadn't been drugged into unconsciousness; I had to hope he could respond to a signal. I could only start worrying about how to get him out after I found out where he was.

It was time to get off the ground, where I was vulnerable to a lobox attack from all sides. I hustled on over to the trucks, climbed up on the running board of the first one in the first line, clambered up onto the roof of the cab. Then I put the.45 in my other suit jacket pocket, jumped up, and caught the edge of the roof of the box with my fingers. I hauled myself up and over the edge onto the corrugated steel roof, then lay down in the darkness and again forced myself to take a series of deep breaths, seeking release from the terror that had gripped me from the moment I had left the relative safety of the station wagon. I kept reminding myself that I was safe from the loboxes, at least for the time being. The suited gunman was still pacing back and forth on the dirt track, speaking into his walkie-talkie, which meant that I hadn't been seen. I was still in business.

I began to feel better.

I was even beginning to feel just a tad of optimism.

I worked my way across the length of the box on the first semi, softly tapping out a Morse SOS code on the metal with the barrel of the automatic as I went along. When I reached the rear of the box, I eased myself over the edge and dropped to the hood of the tractor parked behind it. I hauled myself up to the roof of the box of that truck, again started tapping out the SOS code as I worked my way down its length.

On the roof of the box of the third semi, I hit pay dirt. I was halfway down, tapping out my signal, when I heard Garth's voice.

"Mongo?! That damn well better be you, brother! I need rescuing!"

I rested my head against the cold metal and breathed a sigh of relief. My brother didn't sound drugged, only angry. I tapped again.

"Mongo?! Is that you, you little fucker? I want you to know that I'm seriously pissed at you! And Mary's pissed at you, too!"

His words filled me with a new fear. It had never occurred to me that Mary might have come along with Garth and been captured too. If she had, it would present a host of new problems.

My knowledge of Morse was limited at best, and I didn't know if Garth knew any of it at all. I screwed my eyes shut, trying to recall the pages of dots and dashes from my Cub Scout manual.

Tappety-tap. M-A-R-Y H-E-R-E.

"No! Just me!"

W-A-I-T.

"Mongo, when I find out what you've gotten yourself into this time, I'm likely to tear your fucking head off!"

S-H-U-T U-P W-A-I-T.

I crawled on my belly back toward the front edge of the box, where there was an air vent, gently tapping all the way so that Garth could follow my progress. I could only hope that Garth had all of the interior of the box to move around in. When I was near the edge I paused to look around, but I didn't see any guards or roustabouts. I leaned over the edge, put my mouth close to the air vent.

"Garth? Can you hear me?"

"Yeah." His voice sounded as if it was directly below me, which meant that he had not been locked in a cage inside a cage. Good. "Sorry about all that yelling I did. It was just my way of letting you know I was happy to hear from you. It's getting a little stuffy in here."

"Yeah, I know. You're forgiven."

"When I didn't hear from you again for two days after our last phone conversation, I knew you'd gone and stuck that big nose of yours into Arlen Zelezian's business-just like I'd warned you not to. Christ, I was afraid you were dead."

"Not yet."

"But you're working on it, right?"

"That isn't exactly the way I'd put it."

"What the hell's going on, Mongo?"

"You know about the loboxes?"

"What are loboxes? I don't know anything, except that you and your girlfriend are in deep shit. The police are looking for the two of you."

"Yeah, that figures."

"I take it they're missing something, but I could never make out just what it is. I only heard bits and pieces of conversation."

"They're missing something, all right: two things. Look, have you got any lights in there?"

"No. This truck's filled with spare equipment, from what I can make out. I almost broke my neck following you over here."

"Okay, you've got double doors that swing out at the rear of the box and in the middle, on your left as you're facing toward the cab-the way you're facing now. They're padlocked. I'm going to try to shoot the lock off the doors at the rear, because I have more cover there. The trucks are parked nose-to-ass, but there should be enough room there for you to squeeze out. The shot is going to attract some attention, so be prepared to move fast. I've got a friend waiting for us in a car, but we may have to shoot our way out through the parking lots. You ready?"

"And then some."

"Here I come."

I crawled back to the rear of the box, taking care not to let myself be silhouetted against the sky, lowered myself to the hood of the tractor parked just behind. The padlock on the double doors of the trailer box ahead was just about at waist level. I straddled the hood ornament, took the automatic out of my pocket.

"Hey, Mongo? You out there?"

I gently tapped the door in response, then aimed the gun with both hands at the padlock and waited. The gray-suited gunman and his colleagues were going to come running at the sound of the shot, and I needed something to at least partially mask the report. Inside the Big Top, the band was striking up the Triumphal March from Aida, signaling Luther's entrance on Mabel. The music was building up in a crescendo that would end in a blare of trumpets, a drumroll, and a cymbal crash. It might just be enough. I aimed the gun, waited for the right moment.

There was no sound of warning, no characteristic roar; as I began to squeeze the trigger, I caught a flash of tawny color and blurred movement out of the corner of my right eye. I yelled in sheer terror and went flat on my back, throwing my arms across my face and throat, in the process losing my grip on the gun, which clattered across the hood, fell to the ground on the other side. I felt the breeze generated by the lobox's flight through the air just over my body, felt a sharp tug as its claws caught the lapels of my suit jacket, shredding them.

"Mongo! What's the matter?! What's happening out there?!"

What was happening was that the lobox that had been primed to kill me was back on my case, and I really didn't have time to explain to Garth what that all meant. In fact, I might not have much time left for anything. When I reached for the Colt, I found my suit jacket pocket empty; when I had thrown myself back on the hood, the heavy gun had slipped out, fallen to the ground along with the automatic.

The lobox-which had hurtled across the tractor hood and landed on the ground to my left-leaped to its feet at the same time I did. The beast wheeled on the grass in the narrow alley between parked trucks, bunched its legs under it, and sprang up at me the same time as I sprang for the edge of the roof of the trailer box. My fingers caught the steel edge and I pulled, hauling my legs up just as I heard the snap of jaws below my feet. It was a motivating sound. Terror and adrenaline propelled me up the side of the box, and I rolled over onto the roof as I heard claws scratching at the steel in the spot where my body had been only a moment before.

There was a sharp crack of a gun, and a bullet bit into the steel at the side of the box. I glanced in the direction from which the shot had come, saw a gray-suited gunman running across the field in my direction.

It was just what I needed. Mongo the Fumble-fingered was being given the choice of having his throat torn away or his brains blown out.

Gunman or no, I wasn't about to hang around to see how many leaps it was going to take the lobox before it managed to get up on the roof; its body was repeatedly banging against the steel, claws desperately scraping at the metal, and each leap seemed to bring it closer to the roofs edge. Whatever killed me, human or animal, was going to leave me just as dead, and at the moment I was more worried about the animal than the human. I scrambled to my feet as another bullet whizzed over my head. Keeping as low as possible, I bounded three steps, leaped across the bridge of space separating the truck I was on from the one parked next to it. If I could make it across the roofs of two more rows of trucks, I thought, I just might be able to leap onto the Big Top's canvas and crawl up to where there was a hole at the top, around the great center pole that was the tent's main support. I didn't have the slightest idea what I was going to do when I got there, or what good it was going to do me in the long run, but it seemed an infinitely better spot than the one I was in.

My only other alternative was to jump down to the ground, where I estimated I would last about five seconds.

I might last only slightly longer than that where I was, I thought as I leaped through the air again and landed on the next truck. I could hear the lobox's claws clicking and scraping on the steel behind me. It had gotten up to the roofs, and it was gaining on me. Fast.

One more leap, and I was on the roof of a semi parked right next to the Big Top. I sprang out into the air, arms extended full length, and my fingers caught the hard edge where a support cable ran horizontally along the length of the tent, beneath the canvas. I pulled, feet scraping on the canvas, and managed to haul myself up and over the cable, onto the incline leading up to the top. Immediately, instinctively, I rolled to my left.

The lobox landed right next to me-and would have landed on me if I hadn't rolled away. The claws of both its front paws punctured the canvas, and I knew I was finished. I was like a novice rock climber in sneakers on an ice sheet trying to escape from an experienced, fully rigged mountaineer; there was no way I could scramble up the steeply inclined canvas fast enough to escape the lobox, which had built-in pitons on all its feet. I flinched, every muscle in my body knotting as I waited for it to pull itself up the rest of the way, get its hind feet under it, and then proceed to use me for a quickly disposable scratching pole. I was close enough to it to see that it had a new dark stripe on its coat, this one running vertically down off its left shoulder, perpendicular to the black stripes running down its back on either side of its spine. But the stripe on its shoulder wasn't natural; it was dried blood from the gunshot wound I had inflicted on it. Not that wounding it had done me any good; as far as I could tell, getting nicked by the bullet hadn't slowed the beast down one iota and had probably only served to make it more determined to get me. I stared back into the all-too-human golden eyes; they were only inches from mine, and they seemed alive with an all-too-human glow of triumph.

I'd been beginning to feel like the Road Runner, the big difference being that it looked like Wile E. Coyote now had me, and I would really bleed, hurt, and die.

Then there was the sound of ripping canvas. Incredibly, the head of the lobox began moving in the opposite direction, away from me. Its ruff, which had been folly expanded, slowly fell, and I let loose a burst of hysterical giggles as I realized what was happening; the creature's saber claws were so sharp that they couldn't hold their owner's weight in the fabric, as thick as it was, and they were slicing like razors through the canvas.

The triumphal glow in the golden eyes had changed to what I swore was a look of astonishment, chagrin, and frustration as the broad-ribbed torso inexorably slid backward toward the edge of the tent defined by the support cable.

"Take that, you fucking overachieving furball," I said, still giggling hysterically as I shifted my weight and kicked the animal in the side of the head.

The creature uttered a very unloboxlike yelp and, to the sound of ripping canvas and the click of claws on steel cable, disappeared over the edge of the canopy.

Of course, it wasn't that I didn't have other things to worry about: there was the crack of a gun, and a bullet tore into the canvas three feet to the right of my head. I glanced to my left, saw two gray-suited gunmen standing in an open area of the roped-off field, well out beyond the four rows of semis. One man, presumably the one who had already taken the potshot at me, was aiming again, using both hands.

The second man grabbed the first man's wrist, forcing the first man to lower the gun. Words were exchanged, and then they both broke into a run toward the main entrance to the tent and disappeared from sight. I presumed that it had occurred to at least one of the men that it might prove tacky, if not downright difficult to explain, if a patron of World Circus were killed by a stray bullet in the air, and so they were going to come at me in another way. They certainly had plenty of options; I wasn't about to jump to the ground and try to run away while there was a stray lobox down there licking its oversize chops at the thought of my doing precisely that.

The only direction I had to go was up. I rolled over on my hands and knees; gripping the hard edge of a guy cable running upward just beneath a fold in the canvas, I scrambled up to the very top of the tent, where the center mast, a wooden pole nearly a foot in diameter, thrust up through a steel-reinforced circle in the canvas, almost four feet in diameter, where dozens of guy wires and ropes were anchored to concentric steel rings attached to the center mast. I lay down on my belly and, gripping the uppermost steel ring, peered over the edge of the circle onto the layout and doings below me.

Directly beneath me was a maze of ropes crisscrossing one another, pulleys, trapeze rigging, and a number of platforms holding lighting and sound equipment. The position of the lights made it impossible for anyone on the ground inside the tent to see me, but I could see down well enough.

The ground was about a hundred and twenty feet below me, and I was almost directly above the great curtain separating the performing area from "backstage." The section where the lobox's claws and the bullet had torn through the canvas was well away from the audience seating area, and it seemed nobody inside the tent had noticed all the commotion outside. Far below, everything looked to be business as usual. The enormous, double-walled steel cage had been thrown up around the ring, awaiting the entrance of the tigers. Mabel, with Luther astride her head, was halfway through her star turn, going into one of her pachyderm pirouettes at the far end of the tent.

While I was pondering just what it was I planned to do next, I had the good fortune to glance behind me just in time to see one of the ubiquitous men in gray suits reach the top of a ladder that had been set up against the vertical drop of the tent. Our eyes met, and as he started to reach inside his suit jacket for his gun, I waved and blew him a kiss just before reversing my hand grip on the steel ring and rolling forward, down through the opening. If the man wanted to follow me, assuming he didn't mind shooting me in front of a few hundred spectators, I would see how he enjoyed doing his act a hundred feet above the ground. I ended up on the rear edge of a wide wooden platform, just behind a bank of spotlights.

I moved along the platform a bit further, away from the opening above me, then squatted down and again looked down at the audience below, the rigging that surrounded me. Deja vu. I was back in the Big Top, high up in the rigging, where I had so often performed as a young man so many years before. I was amazed at how comfortable I felt, still, so high above the ground.

There was a pleasant tension in my muscles, almost as if they anticipated hurling me through space once again.

Easy does it, I thought; those tingling muscles of mine no longer had the tone they once had when, nearly two decades before, I'd swung around the perimeter of the tent on trapezes and guy ropes. Still, to get out of this one, I was going to need a goodly amount of Mongo the Magnificent’s old circus skills. I could only hope that a few of those skills were left, still alive and kicking in my muscle memory.

There was trapeze rigging about twenty feet to my right, but to get to it I was going to have to negotiate a tangle of guy wires, ropes, and electrical cables.

I leaped for a taut rope above my head, caught it, then began swinging hand over hand toward the relatively secure platforms, bars, and ropes of the trapeze rigging.

Mabel was the first to notice my presence. I was about halfway through my hand-over-hand journey at the very top of the tent when she suddenly stopped in the middle of a pirouette, abruptly turned in my direction, lifted her trunk, and trumpeted. Even from as high up and far away as I was, I could see the look of consternation on Luther's face. Then he looked up, saw me, and his jaw fell open.

Next, the audience noticed me; hundreds of heads turned to look at me. There were a few startled gasps, then applause for the dwarf in a ruined suit dangling from a rope at the top of the tent with no net below. They liked it. Along with the applause came laughter. They thought I looked funny.

There was nothing funny about the appearance of the lobox, and the laughter and applause slowly died as the creature emerged from the shadows between two bleacher sections, padded to the center of the section of sawdust track directly below me, stopped. Its ruff suddenly expanded as it squatted on its haunches, raised its gaze to look at me, opened its jaws, and uttered its keening killing scream.

The audience didn't much care for that. Whatever it was they thought the lobox might be, they didn't like the fact that it wasn't in a cage, or at least on a leash. They sensed that it was dangerous, and it wasn't difficult to figure out that it was after me. No longer certain that this action was part of the show, the people in the tent fell silent. The music from the band tapered off. When the utter quiet was broken by another lobox scream, people began to mutter nervously. I continued along the rope until I reached the trapeze rigging. I sat down on the top platform to catch my breath and try to think.

Never in the history of the world, I thought, had an attempted escape been watched by so many people, the vast majority of whom didn't have the slightest notion of what was going on. I felt like a very small fugitive in a very large cage. For the time being, the fact that my progress was being monitored by a few hundred people as I moved around the top of the tent would-I hoped-guarantee my safety from snipers, but that situation couldn't last forever. Very soon now would come an announcement that the remainder of the show had been canceled due to an emergency, and the audience would be asked to leave. And then the firing would begin, with the corporate types in their gray suits lining up below me and vying to see who would be the first to pick me off.

In addition to those distractions, my concentration was being affected by an overriding fear for Harper. If this lobox was about, the one primed for Harper couldn't be far away-for Harper wasn't far away. I was certain that at that very moment Harper's lobox was crouched somewhere in the shadows of the parking area, its gaze locked on the station wagon, waiting. .

And, of course, there was also the problem, remaining, of having Garth locked inside the box of the semi parked outside the tent. It was a problem that was going to have to be solved, since I couldn't leave him behind; after this night's performance, the Zelezians would definitely be concentrating very hard on their own plans for escape, and they would want to erase all evidence, eliminate all witnesses. To leave Garth behind would be to condemn him to death.

The fact that World Circus used only its own people, or its sponsor's people, for security could, it seemed to me, be turned to my advantage under the right circumstances. There would certainly be no radio calls to the local police for assistance, and thus no roadblocks. It was simple, I thought: all I had to do was find a way to exit the Big Top without being shot, or torn up by a lobox, free Garth, and then go to where Harper was waiting, avoiding her lobox, so that we could all make our getaway.

All I really needed to bring this unfortunate episode to a satisfying conclusion, I thought, was a tank.

A tank, or something like a tank. Ah.

I got to my feet, crawled up even higher in the trapeze rigging where I couldn't be seen, then looked around me for something that would serve as a suitable replacement for a Louisville Slugger, Henry Aaron model. I finally settled on a bar from one of the three trapezes. I undid the safety releases on the bar, shoved the four-foot length of hickory through two belt loops. Then I glanced around to see where Mabel and Luther were; they seemed a long ways away, still down at the far end of the tent. To get to them, I would have to have a mode of transportation that would carry me to the other end of the tent and to the ground-or close to it. That would be the climbing ropes used by the aerialists, and all three of the ropes were tied up on the trapeze rigging on the opposite side of the tent. I figured I would probably be able to climb over to that section of rigging on guy wires and ropes, but it would take too long.

We do what we have to do.

Without giving myself a whole lot of time to think about the folly of what I planned to try, I grabbed a trapeze bar from its catch-rigging, gripped it, took a deep breath. Then I swung out into space, heading for the triple platform across the way. If there was any sound from the crowd below, I didn't hear it; I was conscious only of the wind whistling past my ears, the creak of the rigging, and then my own half-uttered, half-screamed "Shit!" when I realized that I was, in much more than just a manner of speaking, going to be short. The rigging, height, and distance between the platforms had simply not been designed for a flying dwarf.

I didn't much like the idea, or the image, of me swinging helplessly back and forth until I came to an ignominious stop, dangling in the air where it would be easy enough for anybody to climb up on top of the steel tiger cage and pluck me off the bar like a piece of ripe fruit.

There was only one other option, and I took it. Somehow, at the apogee of my swing, I kipped my hips up into the air and willed my fingers to release their grip on the trapeze bar. I soared up and out into space. There was nothing elegant about my flight; with a scream in my throat, I was all flailing arms and legs until I finally collided with a support rope. I grabbed the rope, swung around it, then finally managed to get my feet on a platform. I released the rope, stood up.

There was scattered, uncertain applause-which immediately tapered off as the lobox, which had trotted around the steel cage and positioned itself once more directly beneath me, raised its head and uttered another killing scream.

And now for my next trick.

I was dimly aware of pain in my lower back where the hickory bar I carried in my belt loops pressed against my spine, but I didn't have time to worry about that; the important thing was that I still had the bar. Once again I couldn't afford to give myself any time to think about what i was going to do, or I wouldn't do it. Mabel and Luther were still in the same position, with Mabel having turned to face me. I reached out, released one of the climbing ropes. I could only guess at what point I should grip it; if I guessed wrong, I could end up swinging rather ingloriously right into the ground, where I would smash every bone in my body, or-equally ingloriously, if considerably less painful in the short run-sailing right over my target. I arbitrarily pulled up four armlengths of the rope, checked to make sure that the hickory trapeze bar was still in my belt loops, then gripped the rope tightly and leaped into space.

I fell vertically, then was jerked hard when the slack of the rope was taken up. Even as I flew forward, I gauged that I was too far down on the rope. Desperately fighting gravity and the G-forces I was building up, I pulled myself hand over hand up the rope-one foot, two feet, three feet. It was enough. I lifted my legs as high as I could, and the ground swooped by barely an inch or two under me. Then I soared upward in an arc that turned out to be a near-perfect path of flight for my purposes; my apogee came when I was about five feet above Mabel's head. I released my grip on the rope, dropped lightly to my feet just behind the thoroughly startled Luther. He half turned, his glacial blue eyes filled with shock as he stared at me.

"Say good night, Luther," I snapped as I snatched the hickory bar from my belt loops and struck him on the side of his shaved head with what I fervently hoped was sufficient force to kill him.

The animal trainer had ducked away at the last moment, but the bar still hit him in the head with a most satisfying thunk. With a little help from my foot in his ribs, he slid off the side of Mabel's head and fell to the sawdust track below. I quickly moved forward and gave Mabel a sharp rap with the hickory bar just above her brow.

I had my tank, and now I had to see if I could make it go where I wanted.

My need for escape was made even more urgent by the muffled but distinct sound of a shotgun blast in the night outside the tent.

Mabel, obviously excited by all these strange doings and raring to go, lifted her trunk high and trumpeted. She was facing in the right direction, toward the main entrance, and so I once again used both hands to raise the hickory pole above my head, then brought it down as hard as I could on the front of her skull, hoping it would stir fond memories of the love taps administered by her former master with his Louisville Slugger, Henry Aaron model.

I needn't have worried. Mabel surged forward in what was the equivalent of an elephant sprint. I'd forgotten how difficult it can be to ride an elephant going at full tilt; I fell backward, and would have fallen off if I hadn't managed at the last moment to dig my heels into folds in the gray, wrinkled hide. I finally managed to get myself back up into a sitting position just in time to duck as we headed out through the entrance, taking pieces of canvas, ropes, and two support poles with us. Now she was heading straight for the ticket booth, and she showed no signs of wanting to veer away.

Arlen Zelezian suddenly emerged from a door in the rear of the booth. The Abraham Lincoln look-alike barely had time to throw his arms up over his face before the gray juggernaut I was riding ran over him and through the booth, leaving behind a bloody pulp and a pile of splintered rubble. African elephants on the run are most definitely things to steer clear of.

Another shotgun blast, this one much louder and closer.

I whacked Mabel on the left side of the head, just behind her great, flapping ear, and she immediately turned in that direction, rumbling along a dirt track on the perimeter of one of the areas used for parking. I raised myself up as much as I could in an effort to spot the station wagon at the far end of the furthest parking lot, but I couldn't. And I had to resist the temptation to immediately go to Harper's aid. I had to stick to my plan, hoping that Harper was able to defend herself with the shotgun, for this would be the only chance I had to rescue Garth.

There was no way to warn Garth of what was about to happen, so I could only hope that my brother wasn't standing around next to the side doors in the semi scratching himself. As we approached the trucks I swung Mabel out into a great arc in the field, and then homed her in on the side of the second truck from the right in the first row. She had never been more responsive to my strike-commands, and now I gave her two good thumps on the front of her forehead to indicate full speed ahead.

Mabel had surely missed me, or else she had mellowed a lot since she was a young lass, for I seriously doubted that in the past I could have gotten her to even consider ramming herself headlong into a truck. But now she rumbled right ahead, if anything increasing her speed. I thumped her again as a sign of encouragement, then dug my knees and heels into the wrinkles in her hide, leaned forward, and braced myself as the rambunctious Mabel collided at full speed with the side of the trailer box dead in the center, one steel-capped tusk hitting each of the doors, bursting the padlock that held them closed, collapsing them inward.

The impact was tremendous, and it was all I could do to keep from being thrown off my mount. The box of the trailer had been wrenched off its fittings to its tractor and was tilted on its side, apparently resting on the trailer box next to it. When I recovered my senses and my vision came into focus, I could see my startled, ashen-faced brother slumped where he had been thrown on the opposite side of the box, staring wide-eyed at the great elephant's head that now occupied the space where the double doors had been.

"Hey, brother!" I shouted, leaning over Mabel's brow and waving the hickory pole to get his attention. "Up here! Let's go! Time's a-wasting!"

I strongly doubted that Garth had ever been this close to an elephant, but he seemed to know exactly what he had to do, and-once his somewhat glassy gaze came into focus-never hesitated. He struggled to his feet, scrambled up the tilted floor of the trailer box, and leaped out onto Mabel's trunk, spreading his arms wide to catch her great, curved tusks. He landed and started to climb, but it wasn't necessary. Mabel, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself as she got the hang of this rescue business, curled her trunk and lifted him effortlessly, if just a bit too rapidly, into the air, and I had to duck as he sailed past my head and landed unceremoniously on his stomach a few feet behind me. He got up on his hands and knees, turned around, and sat down with his legs spread to the sides, bracing himself. He was laughing uproariously.

"What the hell are you laughing at?!" I shouted over my shoulder as, flailing away with my hickory bar, I backed Mabel up and turned her around.

"I love it, Mongo! I absolutely love it!"

"Is that supposed to be some smart-ass remark?!"

"No!"

"Well, I hope you're suitably impressed! Because if you're not, I'll have Mabel pluck you off and throw you back in the truck!"

"I'm impressed, I'm impressed! This is the most outrageous rescue you've ever engineered!"

"Save your congratulations until we're out of here! We've got one more stop!"

We'd reached the far edge of the first parking lot, and I turned Mabel right. A gray-suited gunman was standing directly in our path, starting to raise his gun; he thought better of trying to bring down Mabel with a hand gun and barely managed to dive out of the way as Mabel thundered past. Now I could see the station wagon up ahead; the front windshield had been blown away. The driver's door was open, the interior light on.

There was nobody inside the car.

I started to curse in rage and frustration, but then I saw the bloody, tawny shape lying still in the grass a few feet to the right of the station wagon's left front fender. Harper had killed her lobox.

A moment later Harper herself appeared, darting out from between two parked cars. She threw the shotgun to one side, sprinted toward us. For a moment I was afraid that Mabel would run her over, but Mabel certainly seemed to sense the proper drill. She slowed, and then laid out the length of her trunk like a welcoming mat. Harper jumped onto the trunk and Mabel lifted her up, depositing her on a spot behind me and just in front of Garth.

I found I didn't even have to thump Mabel any longer; a touch of the stick on her forehead, left or right ear, was enough to get her to go in the desired direction. She was obviously enjoying her newfound freedom, and having a grand old time. I touched her on the left ear. She turned. I tapped her on the forehead and she lumbered ahead through a wooden picket fence, across the highway, and on into a vast, darkness-shrouded corn field that seemed to stretch away to the horizon.

Somewhere in the night behind us, so close that it made me start and the hair rise on the back of my neck, a lobox screamed. It was not only human pursuers we were going to have to worry about.